Letter From America (About Facts)

Facts Not Always What They Seem

The factual basis of science is not necessarily as hard coded as we have been led to believe.  The following review on Samuel Arbesman’s The Half-Life of Facts appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

The Scientific Blind Spot

Knowledge is less a canon than a consensus.

  DAVID A. SHAYWITZ

In 1870, German chemist Erich von Wolf analyzed the iron content of green vegetables and accidentally misplaced a decimal point when transcribing data from his notebook. As a result, spinach was reported to contain a tremendous amount of iron—35 milligrams per serving, not 3.5 milligrams (the true measured value). While the error was eventually corrected in 1937, the legend of spinach’s nutritional power had already taken hold, one reason that studio executives chose it as the source of Popeye’s vaunted strength.

The point, according to Samuel Arbesman, an applied mathematician and the author of the delightfully nerdy “The Half-Life of Facts,” is that knowledge—the collection of “accepted facts”—is far less fixed than we assume.
In every discipline, facts change in predictable, quantifiable ways, Mr. Arbesman contends, and understanding these changes isn’t just interesting but also useful. For Mr. Arbesman, Wolf’s copying mistake says less about spinach than about the way scientific knowledge propagates.

Copying errors, it turns out, aren’t uncommon and fall into characteristic patterns, such as deletions and duplications—exactly the sorts of mistakes that geneticists have identified in DNA. Using approaches adapted from genetics, paleographers—scientists who study ancient writing—use these accumulated errors to trace the age and origins of a document, much in the same way biologists use the accumulation of genetic mutations to assess how similar two species are to each other. For example, by analyzing the oddities and duplicated errors in the 58 surviving versions of “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” from Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” researchers deduced the content of the original version.

Mr. Arbesman’s interest in the spread of knowledge also leads him to the story of Brontosaurus, the lovable, distinct herbivore we all grew up with—only it never existed. Originally described in 1879 by Othniel Marsh, the Brontosaurus was soon determined to be a type of dinosaur that Marsh had already discovered in 1877, the Apatosaurus. But since the original Apatosaurus was just “a tiny collection of bones,” while the Brontosaurus that Marsh named “went on to be supplemented with a complete skeleton, beautiful to behold,” the second discovery captured the public’s imagination and the name “Brontosaurus” stuck for nearly a century. Only recently has the name “Apatosaurus” started to gain traction.

Knowledge, then, is less a canon than a consensus in a state of constant disruption. Part of the disruption has to do with error and its correction, but another part with simple newness—outright discoveries or new modes of classification and analysis, often enabled by technology. A single chapter in “The Half-Life of Facts” looking at the velocity of knowledge growth starts with the author’s first long computer download—a document containing Plato’s “Republic”—journeys through the rapid rise of the “@” symbol, introduces Moore’s Law describing the growth rate of computing power, and discusses the relevance of Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation. Mr. Arbesman illustrates the speed of technological advancement with examples ranging from the magnetic properties of iron—it has become twice as magnetic every five years as purification techniques have improved—to the average distance of daily travel in France, which has exponentially increased over the past two centuries.

To cover so much ground in a scant 200 pages, Mr. Arbesman inevitably sacrifices detail and resolution. And to persuade us that facts change in mathematically predictable ways, he seems to overstate the predictive power of mathematical extrapolation. Still, he does show us convincingly that knowledge changes and that scientific facts are rarely as solid as they appear.

In some cases, the facts themselves are variable. For example, the height of Mount Everest changes from year to year, as colliding continental plates push up and erosion wears the mountain down. The mountain even moves laterally at a rate of about six centimeters a year, thus making both its height and location a “mesofact”—a slowly changing piece of knowledge.

More commonly, however, changes in scientific facts reflect the way that science is done. Mr. Arbesman describes the “Decline Effect”—the tendency of an original scientific publication to present results that seem far more compelling than those of later studies. Such a tendency has been documented in the medical literature over the past decade by John Ioannidis, a researcher at Stanford, in areas as diverse as HIV therapy, angioplasty and stroke treatment. The cause of the decline may well be a potent combination of random chance (generating an excessively impressive result) and publication bias (leading positive results to get preferentially published).

If shaky claims enter the realm of science too quickly, firmer ones often meet resistance. As Mr. Arbesman notes, scientists struggle to let go of long-held beliefs, something that Daniel Kahneman has described as “theory-induced blindness.” Had the Austrian medical community in the 1840s accepted the controversial conclusions of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis that physicians were responsible for the spread of childbed fever—and heeded his hand-washing recommendations—a devastating outbreak of the disease might have been averted.

Science, Mr. Arbesman observes, is a “terribly human endeavor.” Knowledge grows but carries with it uncertainty and error; today’s scientific doctrine may become tomorrow’s cautionary tale. What is to be done? The right response, according to Mr. Arbesman, is to embrace change rather than fight it. “Far better than learning facts is learning how to adapt to changing facts,” he says. “Stop memorizing things . . . memories can be outsourced to the cloud.” In other words: In a world of information flux, it isn’t what you know that counts—it is how efficiently you can refresh.

Dr. Shaywitz, a physician, is a strategist at a biopharmaceutical company in San Francisco and co-founder of the CATCH digital health initiative in Boston.

A Small Blow for a Free Society

Political Correctness Takes a Hit

A new Race Relations Commissioner has been appointed in New Zealand.  The position has gone to Dame Susan Devoy, one of our great sportswomen.  Some Maori have been up in arms.

The problem is that Dame Susan has had the temerity to express her frustration over Waitangi Day.  She also has particular views about women wearing burquas.

What is amusing and telling in the splenetic eruption are the arguments and reasons for objecting to Dame Susan’s appointment.  Firstly, the Maori brigade, as reported in the NZ Herald.

Maori groups in particular questioned enlisting someone who had been outspoken in her disdain for New Zealand’s national holiday. . . . In Parliament, Maori Party MP Te Ururoa Flavell queried the choice, noting that Dame Susan had “already courted controversy with her views”.
Mana Party president Annette Sykes went further, demanding that Dame Susan stand down because she was not fit for the role.  “It’s so disturbing that someone with a clearly expressed … viewpoint can be appointed to a job that’s about providing independent leadership and advice on race relations, including public education on the Treaty of Waitangi,” Ms Sykes said in a statement.

Then there is the Islamic response:

President of the Federation of Islamic Associations Dr Anwar Ghani said Dame Susan should tread carefully with her new responsibilities.  “She’s entitled to her opinions, and I hope she would not bring that into her new role as the race relations commissioner.  You have to realise that this is a very diverse country, and you have to respect every diversity,” he said.  Mr Ghani said he hopes Dame Susan has changed her view on burqas.

OK, so what are the views expressed by Susan Devoy that has folk in a tizzy?

Dame Susan wrote a column in the Bay of Plenty Times last year which criticised the way Waitangi Day had been “marred” by protest.  She expressed her frustration that New Zealand’s national holiday was not a day of celebration.

In a separate column, she described burqas as “disconcerting” after witnessing an Auckland bus driver refusing to let a woman board a bus because she would not remove her burqa to be identified.  “Muslim women need to respect the need to sometimes de-robe in order to allow identification while New Zealanders should respect the personal choice made by these women without being ignorant and abusive,” she said.  “I wouldn’t want to see us legislate the ban of the burqa, as much as I find them disconcerting.”

There is a view amongst some that good race relations means agreeing with and kowtowing to everything they (the minority) do and say.  Annette Sykes appears to hold this view: the Race Relations Commissioner is to her mind a public official who would mouth and support all her particular views on the Treaty of Waitangi and Maoritanga.  Mr Ghani also appears to be of this mindset, but in his case he wants the Commissioner to respect every diversity: that is, he wants the Commissioner to mouth and support all the views of himself and his associates.  Anything less would be a defalcation of her duties.  Any contrary opinions she has need to be kept strictly private.  In the public sphere, what we say goes.  You keep your views private and out of the public sphere.

We have presented here the sad and dangerous face of political correctness and the increasing attempt by many to restrict the free speech of others with whom they disagree.  For our money, we hope that Susan Devoy continues not just to hold her apparently reasonable views, but brings them to bear in her role.  If nothing else it should result in the dismissal of frivolous and time wasting complaints from self-perceived victims of racial discrimination.  Many of these have more to do with attempts to make political points than with genuine racial discrimination. 

Secondly, it is not appropriate for pressure groups and minorities to insist that public officials hold the same views and express the same concerns that they may hold.  If Devoy were to use her office and position to persecute those who disagreed with her, that would be one thing.  But to criticise an appointment just because the appointee has views with which you disagree is something entirely different. 

To our mind, Minister Judith Collins (who made the Devoy appointment) had it exactly right when she was quoted as follows:

Mrs Collins said it was not unreasonable to hold views that were not “politically sanitised”.

Unbelieving Distaste, Christian Joy

The Parting of the Ways

Christmas can have a certain sentimental pull for those who are perishing.  After all, only the most depraved cannot be moved at the sight and joy of a newborn baby.  Motherhood, fatherhood, birth, poverty, rejection–all of these pull at the sentiments of most men.  The world has an emotional attachment to Christmas.

Easter not so much.  Here is the divine commentary upon how non-Christians view Easter versus Christians:

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.  . . . For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.  (I Corinthians 1: 18-24)

Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.  We Christians know intuitively to what the apostle refers.  First, amongst many other aspects the Cross displays the wisdom of God.  Long we lived in sin and darkness, condemned by Adam’s sin, a condemnation ratified by our own daily transgressions and lack of conformity to God’s holy law.  God’s wisdom is manifested in sending a holy human substitute, not born of Adam and without sin.  Angels could not have conceived such a plan of redemption, let alone carried it out. 

The cross also displays the power of God.  The power of creating out of nothing, sustaining, keeping, empowering one who was tempted in all points such as we are and yet remaining steadfast, although born bearing the fruit of sin (disease, hunger, exhaustion, and temptations of all kinds).  And on that terrible cross, in the hours of darkness whilst the wrath and vengeance of God against us was poured forth upon our penal substitute, the power of God also sustained him so that he withstood the most acute temptation of all: the temptation to doubt, to despair, to distrust, and to deny his heavenly Father. 

Therefore God highly exalted him and bestowed upon him a name which is above very name that at the name of Jesus all creatures in heaven and upon the earth and under the earth should bow. 

The cross: the wisdom of God and the power of God.  About these things Unbelief can know nothing.  For Unbelief the Cross ever remains a stumbling block and folly.  But to those who are called it is a radically different story.  At this juncture the ways part.  Two peoples separate and can never come together. 

For the called, Easter is like birth pangs: we experience terrible pain and grief arising from what we were and who we are; but in the morning, shouts of great joy.  Christ: the wisdom of God and the power of God.  Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift. 

Letter From America (About Killing Europe)

The Euro Is Killing Europe

From Cyprus to Portugal, the common currency has been a disaster.

BY DANIEL ALTMAN | MARCH 25, 2013

FPForeign Policy 

Are the best days of the European Union already behind it? Just a few months ago, having won the Nobel Prize for Peace, it could boast of decades without a major war, the westward turn of the former Soviet satellites, and flourishing internal trade. But now its one big mistake — the euro — threatens to tear the union apart.

In 1999, the traditionally hard currencies of Europe’s north merged with the softer currencies of the south to form a new money that was somehow supposed to be stronger than any of the ones it replaced. Under the stewardship of the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt, the euro was meant to — and did — become a reserve currency to rival the dollar. Though the supposedly prudent northern countries didn’t always keep their budget deficits under control, they still managed to survive the worst of the global economic downturn. By contrast, the profligacy of the south, together with its flawed banking systems, has created a hotbed of crises that stretch 2,300 miles from Lisbon to Nicosia.

These crises would have been a lot shorter if the countries involved — Greece, Portugal, Spain, now Cyprus, soon Slovenia, and perhaps Italy for a second time — had possessed their own currencies. But all of them use the euro, so their monetary policy is set in Frankfurt at the ECB. Instead of devaluing their currencies in order to spur exports and ease the repayment of debts, all of these countries have had to undergo some combination of fiscal austerity, deflation, and, most notably in Cyprus’s case, loss of assets.

The people of Europe’s south are understandably unhappy. Indeed, the daily indignities of their economic Calvary would be bad enough if they were of completely domestic origin. But southerners also have the irksome feeling that bureaucrats and politicians in Frankfurt, Brussels, and other northern capitals are forcing these troubles upon them. Not long ago, some of the same bureaucrats and politicians were the ones luring the southern countries into the euro, often paying scant attention to their questionable fiscal situations.

Savvy operators in the south have not hesitated to exploit this volatile brew of economic hardship and hypocrisy, mixed with a generous dash of historical resonance. Parties at the extremes of the political spectrum have been gaining adherents, with nationalism a strong current on both sides. And so, in most of the southern countries, the balances of political power have been starting to fragment.

One way to measure this fragmentation is the Herfindahl Index, which economists use to measure the degree of market power held by companies in an industry. Applied to a parliament, the index adds up the squared shares of the seats held by the parties; higher values indicate more concentration of power. Here is how the index evolved in southern countries that imposed austerity after the global financial crisis began in the fall of 2008 (where applicable, the lower house of parliament is measured):

In all four countries, the concentration of power fell following cuts to the public sector and other belt-tightening measures. Fringe parties gained power on the left and the right, from the racist, ultra-nationalist Golden Dawn party in Greece to the leftist Basque separatist Amaiur party in Spain. Naturally, the ruling centrist parties have responded to the threats from the fringes. In Spain, for example, the People’s Party is reinstating bullfightingacross the country, aggravating Catalans and Canarians who had outlawed the practice.

The political fallout of the euro’s shortcomings is not limited to Europe’s south. In Britain, the Conservative Party has been dialing up its euro-skeptic rhetoric in response to the growing power of parties that oppose the country’s membership in the European Union. Even in Germany, linchpin of the eurozone, a new party has proposed scrapping the common currency but remaining in the political union.

Last week Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a German member of the European parliament who is of Greek extraction, warned that Brussels and Frankfurt had already awoken Europe’s “nationalist demons.” To save the euro and the union, he suggested replacing austerity with “solidarity” via a grand redistribution to the crisis countries. Yet the northern countries, some of which already subsidize the south through the European Union’s internal budgeting, have little appetite for this kind of gesture, especially since they see the problems as entirely of the south’s making.

In the long term, these problems will only worsen. The southern countries have built up heavy pension obligations to future retirees, and their economies tend to do a relatively poor job encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation. In general, they face bigger risks and smaller opportunities than their neighbors to the north. Even if the euro survives the current crises, its prospects will continue to dim.

As I have written herebefore, the euro was supposed to bring the countries of the European Union closer together, facilitating commerce and synchronizing business cycles. But because the euro also lengthens and deepens economic crises, it creates an opportunity for those who oppose the EU’s founding principles of egalitarianism and mutual respect. 

One of my old academic advisers, Martin Feldstein, predicted in 1997 that the euro would “change the political character of Europe in ways that could lead to conflicts.” He added: “War within Europe itself would be abhorrent but not impossible. The conflicts over economic policies and interference with national sovereignty could reinforce long-standing animosities based on history, nationality, and religion.” Though war is not on the immediate horizon, paring down the eurozone now may be preferable to picking up the pieces later.
 

Wonders of the Modern World

Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines

A couple of months ago a dear friend handed me QF32 by Richard De Crespigny (Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2012).  It is the account of the ill-fated A380 Qantas flight out of Singapore in November 2010. 

Most of us have more than a passing interest in commercial aircraft, since we all use them from time to time.  For the period of time we are up in the skies most of us are conscious somewhere in our minds that our lives are entirely dependant upon a machine that ought not to be sustained in the air, apart from natural laws and engineering design.  There is so much that could go wrong.  There is, thus, a sense in which our lives are suspended until we return again in safety to terra firma.  Consequently, most of us have a deep respect for those professionals flying and working in aircraft. 

Four minutes out of Singapore on the 4th November, 2010 QF32 hit big trouble.
  An engine, a Rolls Royce Trent, exploded.  Engine 2 caught on fire.  Shrapnel ripped through the plane, mercifully missing all living 469 souls on board.  But the airplane was terribly compromised.  Vital flight systems and back ups were lost or destroyed. 

Captain De Crespigny matter of factly catalogues after the event what had happened:

The 1-metre diameter, 160 kilogram turbine fractured into many pieces that punctured their way through the engine housing, exiting the engine faster than 1.5 times the speed of sound. These pieces then impacted with the engine cowl, fragmenting into smaller pieces, creating a wall of shapnel–a “cluster bomb” that cut through the ing like it was butter and sprayed the fuselage with pieces of steel, alloy and carbon fibre.  Shapnel even hit the top of the 24 metre-high (eight story) tail section. 

One large chunk pierced straight up through the top of the wing, ripping out flight controls and obliterating every wire [by which the plane is controlled and aviated] in the leading edge.  Another large piece flew horizontally across the underside of the fuselage, slitting through the plane’s belly and cutting at least 400 wires and numerous services.  The third significant piece travelled back, splintering into five pieces that holed the forward wing spar, creating devastating shockwaves and carnage within the fuel tanks.  (Ibid., p. 321f)

Of course this was no known at the time.  In the meantime the pilots had to continue to fly the plane and try to land it safely.

No doubt this event and its aftermath will be studied and lectured upon for decades.  No doubt what eventuated is finding its way into pilot training regimes and airline safety practices.  No doubt aviation will become even safer than it already is.  But in the meantime, here are some personal observations from reading this riveting account.

The first is the glory of modern aircraft and aeroplane design.  The elephant in the room which must not be overlooked is that despite such trauma, this largest commercial aircraft continued to fly.  It did not disintegrate.  It kept going.  If the Lord wills, we look forward to flying in one of these remarkable machines some time soon.

Second–and this is the adverse of the first observation–tiny small things malfunctioning can cause  horrendous problems.  There is no room whatsoever for sloppy or sub-standard engineering.  It appears that a stub pipe supplying cooling and lubricating oil within the Rolls Royce engine fractured three minutes after take off.  This is a tiny piece of equipment.  It was found subsequently to be slightly out of tolerance; it fractured, leading to a sequence of effects which ultimately resulted in the engine exploding.

Thirdly, the skill, training, and professionalism of the pilots is a wonder to behold.  As they were flying this crippled aircraft the electronic alerts were so numerous and so frequent they could not be apprehended and appropriately actioned.  Nothing in their training in simulators had prepared the flight crew for such a circumstance.  They had to, as de Crespigny puts it, rebuild the plane by working through the fundamental aviating components and functions to determine what still worked, even though degraded, and then decide how to fly and ultimately land again in Singapore.  It is a demonstration of focused professionalism at its best. 

Everything was a trade off.  They had to keep flying the plane to burn off fuel.  But the fuel pumps which keep the fuel weight in balance in the plane had failed.  So the more fuel they burned the harder it would be to land.  Catch 22–or, as de Crespigny admits,–it was like treading the eye of the needle. 

Such had been the calmness of the flight crew (together with a deliberate decision not to engage too much with the control tower at Changi airport so as not to be distracted) that the Singapore Tower had little idea of what was about to attempt to land on their watch.  The approach controller, Tony Tang later recalled that day:

Tony later spoke of his curiosity after hearing relays of our calls requesting fire services to meet us at the end of the runway, and now he watched to see the plane come into view on its approach.  And then the horrible reality appeared before him.  The terrifying silhouette of our aircraft filled Tony’s binoculars and the cold reality of what we faced set it: “I could clearly see the QF32 on finals.  Fuel was streaming from the wing.  I have never seen that before in my twenty-six year career.”  (Ibid., p. 248f)

Try landing such an aircraft with on three sub-par engines, most flight controls gone, and malfunctioning brakes–as fuel streamed out on to the ground. 

They did it.  In style.  Like it was something they did every other day.  A truly amazing story. 

If you doubt the safety of commercial air travel–read this book.  It is utterly convincing on that point.  It also raises other, broader questions that continue to be debated in aviation circles today, the most important of which is the debate between computer controlled, fly-by-wire avionics and human controlled avionics.  De Crespigny’s perspective is salutary and helpful.  No doubt his voice, along with many others, will be heard on this matter. 

Finally, a big thumbs up to Qantas which has never lost a passenger in all its long history.  One of the reasons is pilot training and professionalism.  It proved up on the 4th of November, 2010 just out of Singapore. 

Letter From the UK (To British Expats in Europe)

Ukip urges Brits to withdraw their money from Spanish banks

Nigel Farage has urged British expatriates in Spain to pull their money out of the country’s banks. 

By Robert Watts, Deputy Political Editor

4:57PM GMT 23 Mar 201
The Telegraph

The UK Independence Party leader said that the European Union had “crossed a line” by trying to extract funds from savers under the terms of the abandoned Cypriot bail-out.Mr Farage said: “Even I didn’t think that they would stoop to actually stealing money from people’s bank accounts.

“There is going to be a big flight of money and that flight of money won’t just be from Cyprus, it will be from the other eurozone countries, too. There are 750,000 British people who own properties, or who live, many of them in retirement, down in Spain.  Now that we see the EU are prepared to resort to anything to keep alive their failing euro project, our advice to expats living down in the Mediterranean must be, ‘Get your money out of there while you’ve still got a chance’.”

Mr Farage urged George Osborne, the Chancellor, to rule out any such levy on British savers.

In a wide-ranging speech yesterday, Mr Farage also said that no immigrant should be able to claim benefits until they have lived, obeyed the law, worked and paid taxes in the UK for five years.He also said that Ukip would not form a pact with the Conservative Party under Mr Cameron’s leadership.

Mr Farage added that his party was drawing in support from all voters, not just Conservative supporters.
“Please don’t just think that it is just tired Conservatives that are coming to Ukip,” he said.  Ukip has enjoyed a surge in popularity after coming second in the Eastleigh by-election ahead of the Conservative Party.

He admitted that some of the party’s new voters were eager to “stick two fingers up to the establishment”. But he added that a vote for Ukip is “far more powerful than a protest vote”.  Mr Farage insisted his party could win votes from across the political spectrum as their success in Eastleigh had been about more than protest votes. He added there has been a “wholesale rejection of the career political class”.

Lenten Meditations

Words of Significance

As we approach Easter, we would refer readers to a series of meditations we published five or so years ago.  They amount to a consideration of the Seven Words uttered by our Lord from the Cross.  These seven words are, of course, timeless and eternal. 

You can find them as follows:

The first word: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
The second word: “This day you will be with me in Paradise“
The third word: “Woman, behold your son”
The fourth word: “My God, my God why has thou forsaken me”
The fifth word: “I thirst”
The sixth word: “It is finished”
The seventh word: “Into Thy hands I commit my spirit”

Each of these words uttered by our Lord are public utterances–meant for His people not only to be heard, but meditated upon and puzzled over.  All seven are intrinsic to His work of atonement and the Passion. 

They may provide helpful material for meditation in the coming days of this season. 

Milestones

 Emerging From Dark Dreams

In the fight for lives on the unborn we can all identify milestones.  Below is one such.  May the language of North Dakota statute SCR4009 make its way into the statute books of every nation in the world.

North Dakota Lawmakers: Life Begins at Conception

by Dr. Susan Berry
23 Mar 2013
 Breitbart TV

On Friday the North Dakota state House passed the first personhood amendment in the United States, marking the first time in U.S. history that a legislative body has approved a personhood amendment in both the House and the Senate. The historic vote, 57-35, allows the amendment to be referred to North Dakota citizens for a vote.

According to SCR 4009, “the inalienable right to life of every human being at any stage of development must be recognized and protected.” Heraldonline.com reports that the amendment was written to ensure that both mother and baby are treated as medical patients, that medical care is not inhibited, and that fertility treatments are not banned.

LifeSiteNews.com reports that every major pro-life organization in North Dakota has supported SCR 4009. “The North Dakota legislature has taken historic strides to protect every human being in the state, paving the way for human rights nationwide,” said Keith Mason, president of Personhood USA.
Mason added:

This amendment strikes the balance of accomplishing more for the unborn than any other amendment the nation has ever seen, while protecting pregnant women and their right to true medical care. We applaud the North Dakota House and Senate for their willingness to protect all of the people in their state.

“The North Dakota personhood amendment takes the pro-life plank of the GOP platform and puts it into practice,” said Gualberto Garcia Jones, J.D., legal analyst for Personhood USA. “Furthermore, it allows the legislature the needed flexibility to implement the specific protections of the right to life through future legislation.”
 
The state House also passed two other pro-life bills, one that demands that abortion doctors have admitting privileges to hospitals (SB 2305), and another that places a ban on abortions past 20 weeks and also bans taxpayer funding from going to organizations that provide abortions (SB 2368). 
 
Last week, the state legislature also passed a “heartbeat bill,” which could ban abortions as early as six weeks, and a ban on abortions for genetic conditions such as Down’s Syndrome. 
 
The bills will now go to Gov. Jack Dalrymple (R) for his signature. Paul Maloney, executive director of North Dakota Right to Life told LifeSiteNews.com that his group has “always had faith” in Dalrymple and expects him to sign the bills.  “I’m extremely proud of my state for the statement that they’ve made to the country,” Maloney said. “I guess it’s in the hands of the courts.” Maloney’s statement referenced the reality that the bills will almost certainly be subject to legal challenges. 
 
“We applaud North Dakota for defending life,” said Concerned Women for America CEO and President Penny Nance. “The bills in North Dakota protect the lives of the most innocent Americans, those without a voice, in the womb.”  Nance added, “Hopefully these bills will start a national discussion about what life is and our duty as a civil society to protect it. It starts in the states.”

Cutting Costs

Governance in the National Parks

The largest landowner in New Zealand by far is the government.  Nearly thirty percent of land area in the country is administered by the Department of Conservation (“DOC”).  To be fair, a large proportion of this land is rugged, beautiful mountain ranges which are virtually inhabitable.  National parks are open to the public, provided they keep the rules, most of which are eminently sensible and life protecting. 

Lying behind DOC are the environmental advocacy groups, the most powerful and influential of which is the NZ Forest and Bird Society.  For a number of years DOC operational policies in the national parks has effectively been written and sometimes executed by NZ Forest and Bird.  The influence of perverse environmentalist extremism has too often apparent.  One example is the use of 1080 poison to control, if not eradicate, possums–an introduced species lacking natural predators.
  Possums multiply rapidly and consume lots of greenery, threatening forests.  Aerial drops of 1080 are carried out by central and local government with the strong support of NZ Forest and Bird.  Sadly, it seems that birds are all that matter to this organization and the devastation wrought upon other species is regarded as acceptable collateral damage. 

Another example of foolish extremism is antipathy to human beings.  Human beings are seen as environmentally destructive simply by virtue of being in, or traversing across, wilderness areas.  To these folk the mere presence of humans means environmental degradation and destruction of one sort or other.  We have hunted deer over the years in the Tararua Ranges, north of Wellington.  DOC has been systematically removing wood burning stoves and heaters from huts on the grounds that burning wood is environmentally destructive.  Better to have the occupants of the huts freeze to death.  In recent years this asinine policy seems to have been ameoliorated.  DOC now transports firewood into some huts. 

Like most government departments in New Zealand, DOC is under budget constraints.  It is laying off staff.  NZ Forest and Bird is not happy. 

More than 100 staff at the Department of Conservation are expected to lose their jobs this week.  The department will discuss its latest restructuring plan with staff tomorrow.  Restructuring last year led to the loss of about 120 staff.  Forest & Bird advocacy manager Kevin Hackwell said the latest cuts are expected to be significant, with frontline conservation staff to be laid off in favour of recruiting volunteers.

There are plenty of potential volunteers available with lots of energy and a genuine love for the back country and its preservation.  Tramping clubs, fishing clubs, and hunting groups spring to mind–but these are not the kind of volunteers which NZ Forest and Bird appreciate.  Often times they are seen as part of the problem, part of the threat to maintaining a wilderness–the real environmental nirvana for the extremists.  

Co-operative co-management with interested private groups seems a much better approach.  Also it will be less costly to the tax payer.  It is great to see some examples of government retrenchment and a substitution of its overreach by a range of interest groups and volunteers who are even more committed to reasonable and rational preservation of national parks.

Villainous Hero

How the Mighty Have Fallen

When Hugo Chavez died, the chattering classes and the Commentariat went into official mourning.  A saint had departed from the earth.  A true hero of the people, the poor, the underprivileged had shuffled off this mortal coil.  A political giant had left us.  But his legacy remained–an inspiration to all.

Pieces written by professional mourners appeared throughout the Western press and electronic media.  Chavez proudly announced himself to be a socialist and that socialism was the only way forward.  All of this was a bit too much from the more substantial outlets.  This from his obit in The Guardian:

During his 1998 presidential campaign, Chávez had insisted that he was “neither of the left nor the right”. But by 2006, he felt sufficiently secure to declare that socialism was the only way forward. Specifically, it was “21st-century socialism” – a vaguely defined hotchpotch of ideas filched from a variety of sources, whose only consistent ingredient was an ever greater concentration of power in the hands of one man.

Twenty first century socialism turned out like all other socialisms–in the end it devolved into a governing clique centred around Chavez using the cause of the poor to take control of the levers of government to exploit the very poor he championed.  He has also also a big time favourite of criminal gangs, whose “enterprise” has expanded significantly under his reign.

The Guardian obit continues:

The debate continued as to whether Chávez could fairly be described as a dictator, but a democrat he most certainly was not. A hero to many, especially among the poor, for his populist social programmes, he assiduously fomented class hatred and used his control of the judiciary to persecute and jail his political opponents, many of whom were forced into exile.

Contemptuous of private property, he seized millions of hectares of farmland and scores of businesses large and small, often with little or no compensation. The result was an even more oil-dependent economy, which in place of the “endogenous development” promised by the revolution, relied on imports for basic foodstuffs once produced domestically.

Larceny was the prime hallmark of his reign.  Illegality was its culture.  Power was its deity.

Our own Prime Minister was roundly criticised because he was travelling in South America at the time and refused to break his schedule to attend the funeral of Chavez.

John Key was in no hurry to rejig his South American foray to join 30 other foreign leaders at the funeral of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. He did note that Venezuela bought lots of milk powder, but one wonders how closely he looked at the export figures. Last year Venezuela was our fifth biggest market for milk powder, butter and cheese – $454.2 million worth. It is also one of the fastest-growing markets; those sales have risen 420 per cent in a decade. Successive governments have stressed that New Zealand’s foreign policy is governed by trade considerations, so Key might have thought it worthwhile to doff his hat to the late President Chavez, even if Washington disapproved.

Fortunately, Key knew better.  Anyone not blinded by Marxist dogma could see that Venezuela is a nation that was crippled by Chavez.

Chavez used his country’s vast oil wealth to launch social programs that include state-run food markets, new public housing, free health clinics and education programs.  Poverty declined during Chavez’s presidency amid a historic boom in oil earnings, but critics said he failed to use the windfall of hundreds of billions of dollars to develop the country’s economy.  Inflation soared and the homicide rate rose to among the highest in the world.

Crime is now endemic.  The country will likely descend into chaos and become another South American pseudo-state controlled by criminal gangs.  

But there are many in the West who view these things as mere peccadilloes.  Chavez was a class champion.  He loved the poor.  Or so the story line runs.  All minor blemishes have been forgiven.

In truth, however, Chavez was nothing more than a modern day Ozymandius.  He has now passed from the sight of mortal man to await judgement before the Throne of God.  His works will follow him.  

 

A Brouhaha of Brahmins

Thomas Nagel and Self-Contradictory Materialism

Below is a precis of an article about the materialist establishment’s conniptions over perceived heretic Thomas Nagel.  It is very well written and well worth perusing. 

The Heretic

Who is Thomas Nagel and why are so many of his fellow academics condemning him?

Mar 25, 2013, Vol. 18, No. 27 • By ANDREW FERGUSON

The Weekly Standard

Last fall, a few days before Halloween and about a month after the publication of Mind and Cosmos, the controversial new book by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, several of the world’s leading philosophers gathered with a group of cutting-edge scientists in the conference room of a charming inn in the Berkshires. They faced one another around a big table set with pitchers of iced water and trays of hard candies wrapped in cellophane and talked and talked, as public intellectuals do. PowerPoint was often brought into play. 

The title of the “interdisciplinary workshop” was “Moving Naturalism Forward.” For those of us who like to kill time sitting around pondering the nature of reality—personhood, God, moral judgment, free will, what have you—this was the Concert for Bangladesh.
The biologist Richard Dawkins was there, author of The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene, and other bestselling books of popular science, and so was Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts and author of Consciousness Explained and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. So were the authors of Why Evolution is True, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World, Everything Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, and The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions—all of them books that to one degree or another bring to a larger audience the world as scientists have discovered it to be. 

Contemporary philosophers have a name for the way you and I see the world, a world filled with other people, with colors and sounds, sights and sensations, things that are good and things that are bad and things that are very good indeed: ourselves, who are able, more or less, to make our own way through life, by our own lights. Philosophers call this common view the “manifest image.” Daniel Dennett pointed out at the conference that modern science, at least since the revelations of Darwin, has been piling up proof that the manifest image is not really accurate in any scientific sense. Rather science—this vast interlocking combine of genetics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, particle physics—tells us that the components of the manifest image are illusory. 

Color, for instance: That azalea outside the window may look red to you, but in reality it has no color at all. The red comes from certain properties of the azalea that absorb some kinds of light and reflect other kinds of light, which are then received by the eye and transformed in our brains into a subjective experience of red. 

And sounds, too: Complex vibrations in the air are soundless in reality, but our ears are able to turn the vibrations into a car alarm or a cat’s meow or, worse, the voice of Mariah Carey. These capacities of the human organism are evolutionary adaptations. Everything about human beings, by definition, is an evolutionary adaptation. Our sense that the colors and sounds exist “out there” and not merely in our brain is a convenient illusion that long ago increased the survival chances of our species. Powered by Darwin, modern science proceeds, in Dennett’s phrase, as a “universal corrosive,” destroying illusions all the way up and all the way down, dismantling our feelings of freedom and separate selfhood, our morals and beliefs, a mother’s love and a patient’s prayer: All in reality are just “molecules in motion.” 

The most famous, most succinct, and most pitiless summary of the manifest image’s fraudulence was written nearly 20 years ago by the geneticist Francis Crick: “ ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.” 

This view is the “naturalism” that the workshoppers in the Berkshires were trying to move forward. Naturalism is also called “materialism,” the view that only matter exists; or “reductionism,” the view that all life, from tables to daydreams, is ultimately reducible to pure physics; or “determinism,” the view that every phenomenon, including our own actions, is determined by a preexisting cause, which was itself determined by another cause, and so on back to the Big Bang. The naturalistic project has been greatly aided by neo-Darwinism, the application of Darwin’s theory of natural selection to human behavior, including areas of life once assumed to be nonmaterial: emotions and thoughts and habits and perceptions. . . . 

Thomas Nagel may be the most famous philosopher in the United States—a bit like being the best power forward in the Lullaby League, but still. His paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” was recognized as a classic when it was published in 1974 . . . . Nagel occupies an endowed chair at NYU as a University Professor, a rare and exalted position that frees him to teach whatever course he wants. . . . For all this and more, Thomas Nagel is a prominent and heretofore respected member of the country’s intellectual elite. And such men are not supposed to write books with subtitles like the one he tacked onto Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.

The Guardian awarded Mind and Cosmos its prize for the Most Despised Science Book of 2012. The reviews were numerous and overwhelmingly negative; one of the kindest, in the British magazine Prospect, carried the defensive headline “Thomas Nagel is not crazy.” (Really, he’s not!) Most other reviewers weren’t so sure about that. . . .

“Thomas Nagel is of absolutely no importance on this subject,” wrote one. “He’s a self-contradictory idiot,” opined another. Some made simple appeals to authority and left it at that: “Haven’t these guys ever heard of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett?” The hearts of still others were broken at seeing a man of Nagel’s eminence sink so low. “It is sad that Nagel, whom my friends and I thought back in the 1960’s could leap over tall buildings with a single bound, has tripped over the Bible and fallen on his face. Very sad.” . . . .

“Evolutionists,” one reviewer huffily wrote, “will feel they’ve been ravaged by a sheep.” Many reviewers attacked the book on cultural as well as philosophical or scientific grounds, wondering aloud how a distinguished house like Oxford University Press could allow such a book to be published. The Philosophers’ Magazine described it with the curious word “irresponsible.” . . . 

But what about fans of apostasy? You don’t have to be a biblical fundamentalist or a young-earth creationist or an intelligent design enthusiast—I’m none of the above, for what it’s worth—to find Mind and Cosmos exhilarating. “For a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe,” Nagel writes. “It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.” The prima facie impression, reinforced by common sense, should carry more weight than the clerisy gives it. “I would like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life.”  

The incredulity is not simply a matter of scientific ignorance, as the materialists would have it. It arises from something more fundamental and intimate. The neo-Darwinian materialist account offers a picture of the world that is unrecognizable to us—a world without color or sound, and also a world without free will or consciousness or good and evil or selves or, when it comes to that, selflessness. “It flies in the face of common sense,” he says. Materialism is an explanation for a world we don’t live in.

Nagel’s tone is measured and tentative, but there’s no disguising the book’s renegade quality. There are flashes of exasperation and dismissive impatience. What’s exhilarating is that the source of Nagel’s exasperation is, so to speak, his own tribe: the “secular theoretical establishment and the contemporary enlightened culture which it dominates.” The establishment today, he says, is devoted beyond all reason to a “dominant scientific naturalism, heavily dependent on Darwinian explanations of practically everything, and armed to the teeth against attacks from religion.” . . .

Nagel follows the materialist chain of reasoning all the way into the cul de sac where it inevitably winds up. Nagel’s touchier critics have accused him of launching an assault on science, when really it is an assault on the nonscientific uses to which materialism has been put. . . . Materialism, then, is fine as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go as far as materialists want it to. It is a premise of science, not a finding. Scientists do their work by assuming that every phenomenon can be reduced to a material, mechanistic cause and by excluding any possibility of nonmaterial explanations. And the materialist assumption works really, really well—in detecting and quantifying things that have a material or mechanistic explanation. Materialism has allowed us to predict and control what happens in nature with astonishing success. The jaw-dropping edifice of modern science, from space probes to nanosurgery, is the result.

But the success has gone to the materialists’ heads. From a fruitful method, materialism becomes an axiom: If science can’t quantify something, it doesn’t exist, and so the subjective, unquantifiable, immaterial “manifest image” of our mental life is proved to be an illusion.

Here materialism bumps up against itself. Nagel insists that we know some things to exist even if materialism omits or ignores or is oblivious to them. Reductive materialism doesn’t account for the “brute facts” of existence—it doesn’t explain, for example, why the world exists at all, or how life arose from non-life. Closer to home, it doesn’t plausibly explain the fundamental beliefs we rely on as we go about our everyday business: the truth of our subjective experience, our ability to reason, our capacity to recognize that some acts are virtuous and others aren’t. These failures, Nagel says, aren’t just temporary gaps in our knowledge, waiting to be filled in by new discoveries in science. On its own terms, materialism cannot account for brute facts. Brute facts are irreducible, and materialism, which operates by breaking things down to their physical components, stands useless before them. “There is little or no possibility,” he writes, “that these facts depend on nothing but the laws of physics.”  

In a dazzling six-part tour de force rebutting Nagel’s critics, the philosopher Edward Feser provided a good analogy to describe the basic materialist error—the attempt to stretch materialism from a working assumption into a comprehensive explanation of the world. Feser suggests a parody of materialist reasoning: “1. Metal detectors have had far greater success in finding coins and other metallic objects in more places than any other method has. 2. Therefore we have good reason to think that metal detectors can reveal to us everything that can be revealed” about metallic objects.

But of course a metal detector only detects the metallic content of an object; it tells us nothing about its color, size, weight, or shape. In the same way, Feser writes, the methods of “mechanistic science are as successful as they are in predicting and controlling natural phenomena precisely because they focus on only those aspects of nature susceptible to prediction and control.”

Meanwhile, they ignore everything else. But this is a fatal weakness for a theory that aspires to be a comprehensive picture of the world. With magnetic resonance imaging, science can tell us which parts of my brain light up when, for example, I glimpse my daughter’s face in a crowd; the bouncing neurons can be observed and measured. Science cannot quantify or describe the feelings I experience when I see my daughter. Yet the feelings are no less real than the neurons.

The point sounds more sentimental than it is. My bouncing neurons and my feelings of love and obligation are unquestionably bound together. But the difference between the neurons and the feelings, the material and the mental, is a qualitative difference, a difference in kind. And of the two, reductive materialism can capture only one.

“The world is an astonishing place,” Nagel writes. “That it has produced you, and me, and the rest of us is the most astonishing thing about it.” Materialists are in the business of banishing astonishment; they want to demystify the world and human beings along with it, to show that everything we see as a mystery is reducible to components that aren’t mysterious at all. And they cling to this ambition even in cases where doing so is obviously fruitless. Neo-Darwinism insists that every phenomenon, every species, every trait of every species, is the consequence of random chance, as natural selection requires. And yet, Nagel says, “certain things are so remarkable that they have to be explained as non-accidental if we are to pretend to a real understanding of the world.” (The italics are mine.)

Among these remarkable, nonaccidental things are many of the features of the manifest image. Consciousness itself, for example: You can’t explain consciousness in evolutionary terms, Nagel says, without undermining the explanation itself. Evolution easily accounts for rudimentary kinds of awareness. Hundreds of thousands of years ago on the African savannah, where the earliest humans evolved the unique characteristics of our species, the ability to sense danger or to read signals from a potential mate would clearly help an organism survive.

So far, so good. But the human brain can do much more than this. It can perform calculus, hypothesize metaphysics, compose music—even develop a theory of evolution. None of these higher capacities has any evident survival value, certainly not hundreds of thousands of years ago when the chief aim of mental life was to avoid getting eaten. Could our brain have developed and sustained such nonadaptive abilities by the trial and error of natural selection, as neo-Darwinism insists? It’s possible, but the odds, Nagel says, are “vanishingly small.” If Nagel is right, the materialist is in a pickle. The conscious brain that is able to come up with neo-Darwinism as a universal explanation simultaneously makes neo-Darwinism, as a universal explanation, exceedingly unlikely.

A similar argument holds for our other cognitive capacities. “The evolution story leaves the authority of reason in a much weaker position,” he writes. Neo-Darwinism tells us that we have the power of reason because reason was adaptive; it must have helped us survive, back in the day. Yet reason often conflicts with our intuition or our emotion—capacities that must also have been adaptive and essential for survival. Why should we “privilege” one capacity over another when reason and intuition conflict? On its own terms, the scheme of neo-Darwinism gives us no standard by which we should choose one adaptive capacity over the other. And yet neo-Darwinists insist we embrace neo-Darwinism because it conforms to our reason, even though it runs against our intuition. Their defense of reason is unreasonable.

So too our moral sense. We all of us have confidence, to one degree or another, that “our moral judgments are objectively valid”—that is, while our individual judgments might be right or wrong, what makes them right or wrong is real, not simply fantasy or opinion. Two and two really do make four. Why is this confidence inherent in our species? How was it adaptive? Neo-Darwinian materialists tell us that morality evolved as a survival mechanism (like everything else): We developed an instinct for behavior that would help us survive, and we called this behavior good as a means of reinforcing it. We did the reverse for behavior that would hurt our chances for survival: We called it bad. Neither type of behavior was good or bad in reality; such moral judgments are just useful tricks human beings have learned to play on ourselves.

Yet Nagel points out that our moral sense, even at the most basic level, developed a complexity far beyond anything needed for survival, even on the savannah—even in Manhattan. We are, as Nagel writes, “beings capable of thinking successfully about good and bad, right and wrong, and discovering moral and evaluative truths that do not depend on [our] own beliefs.” And we behave accordingly, or try to. The odds that such a multilayered but nonadaptive capacity should become a characteristic of the species through natural selection are, again, implausibly long. . . .

In this sense too Nagel is a throwback, daring not only to interpret science but to contradict scientists. He admits it’s “strange” when he relies “on a philosophical claim to refute a scientific theory supported by empirical evidence.” But he knows that when it comes to cosmology, scientists are just as likely to make an error of philosophy as philosophers are to make an error of science. And Nagel is accused of making large errors indeed. According to Leiter and Weisberg and the others, he is ignorant of how science is actually done these days.

Nagel, say Leiter and Weisberg, overestimates the importance of materialism, even as a scientific method. He’s attacking a straw man. He writes as though “reductive materialism really were driving the scientific community.” In truth, they say, most scientists reject theoretical reductionism. Fifty years ago, many philosophers and scientists might have believed that all the sciences were ultimately reducible to physics, but modern science doesn’t work that way. Psychologists, for example, aren’t trying to reduce psychology to biology; and biologists don’t want to boil biology down to chemistry; and chemists don’t want to reduce chemistry to physics. Indeed, an evolutionary biologist—even one who’s a good materialist—won’t refer to physics at all in the course of his work!

And this point is true, as Nagel himself writes in his book: Theoretical materialism, he says, “is not a necessary condition of the practice of any of those sciences.” Researchers can believe in materialism or not, as they wish, and still make scientific progress. (This is another reason why it’s unconvincing to cite scientific progress as evidence for the truth of materialism.) But the critics’ point is also disingenuous. If materialism is true as an explanation of everything—and they insist it is—then psychological facts, for example, must be reducible to biology, and then down to chemistry, and finally down to physics. If they weren’t reducible in this way, they would (ta-da!) be irreducible. And any fact that’s irreducible would, by definition, be uncaused and undetermined; meaning it wouldn’t be material. It might even be spooky stuff.

On this point Leiter and Weisberg were gently chided by the prominent biologist Jerry Coyne, who was also a workshopper in the Berkshires. He was delighted by their roasting of Nagel in the Nation, but he accused them of going wobbly on materialism—of shying away from the hard conclusions that reductive materialism demands. It’s not surprising that scientists in various disciplines aren’t actively trying to reduce all science to physics; that would be a theoretical problem that is only solvable in the distant future. However: “The view that all sciences are in principle reducible to the laws of physics,” he wrote, “must be true unless you’re religious.” Either we’re molecules in motion or we’re not.

You can sympathize with Leiter and Weisberg for fudging on materialism. As a philosophy of everything it is an undeniable drag. As a way of life it would be even worse. Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it’s lived. As colleagues and friends, husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense. A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath. Say what you will about Leiter and Weisberg and the workshoppers in the Berkshires. From what I can tell, none of them is a psychopath. Not even close.

Applied beyond its own usefulness as a scientific methodology, materialism is, as Nagel suggests, self-evidently absurd. Mind and Cosmos can be read as an extended paraphrase of Orwell’s famous insult: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Materialism can only be taken seriously as a philosophy through a heroic feat of cognitive dissonance; pretending, in our abstract, intellectual life, that values like truth and goodness have no objective content even as, in our private life, we try to learn what’s really true and behave in a way we know to be good. Nagel has sealed his ostracism from the intelligentsia by idly speculating why his fellow intellectuals would undertake such a feat.

“The priority given to evolutionary naturalism in the face of its implausible conclusions,” he writes, “is due, I think, to the secular consensus that this is the only form of external understanding of ourselves that provides an alternative to theism.”

In a recent review in the New York Review of Books of Where the Conflict Really Lies, by the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, Nagel told how instinctively he recoils from theism, and how hungry he is for a reasonable alternative. “If I ever found myself flooded with the conviction that what the Nicene Creed says is true,” he wrote, “the most likely explanation would be that I was losing my mind, not that I was being granted the gift of faith.” He admits that he finds the evident failure of materialism as a worldview alarming—precisely because the alternative is, for a secular intellectual, unthinkable. He calls this intellectual tic “fear of religion.” 

“I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear,” he wrote not long ago in an essay called “Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion.” “I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”

Nagel believes this “cosmic authority problem” is widely shared among intellectuals, and I believe him. It accounts for the stubbornness with which they cling to materialism—and for the hostility that greets an intellectual who starts to wander off from the herd. Materialism must be true because it “liberates us from religion.” The positive mission Nagel undertakes in Mind and Cosmos is to outline, cautiously, a possible Third Way between theism and materialism, given that the first is unacceptable—emotionally, if not intellectually—and the second is untenable. Perhaps matter itself has a bias toward producing conscious creatures. Nature in that case would be “teleological”—not random, not fully subject to chance, but tending toward a particular end. Our mental life would be accounted for—phew!—without reference to God.

I don’t think Nagel succeeds in finding his Third Way, and I doubt he or his successors ever will, but then I have biases of my own. There’s no doubting the honesty and intellectual courage—the free thinking and ennobling good faith—that shine through his attempt.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

Riddled with Corruption

 China Inc.

China is a corrupt country.  The ordinary Chinese citizen knows it.  Over the past five years the internet has been used as a vehicle to expose the corruption of Chinese government officials and functionaries.  The word is out.  The response of the Chinese government has been to attempt more stringent censorship of its own citizens.  A government that will not allow its citizens to speak freely is a government riddled with fear.  It fears the truth. 

To be fair, the Chinese government has attempted to crack down on the corrupt activities of government functionaries and officials.  But one suspects that the crackdown is more driven out of political opportunism: it presents an easy way to get rid of a political opponent, rather than a consistent fundamental drive for universal ethical standards.  China is a country where virtually everyone can be considered a lawbreaker at the whim of the state.
  It is only the state turning a blind eye which allows individuals to go into business to make profits and increase their wealth.  Should the individual fall foul of the state, there is a raft of laws, rules, and regulations which can be quoted from the statute books to indict the individual.  Permits to be in business can be revoked.  Property can be confiscated whimsically.  Consequently, prosecutions and indictments can be politically motivated.  

Therefore, anyone going into China to conduct business needs to be careful and wary.  When the melamine scandal eructated Fonterra found out that Chinese business partners and employees can be corrupt.  But Fonterra was in favour at court, so it was able to work through the problems and escape prosecution.  But smaller businesses cannot.  There are accounts out of Australia that Australian companies doing business in China have had staff indicted for corruption and subsequently imprisoned.  The charges and indictments had all the hallmarks of vindictive action from local officials and competitors, who were demanding bribes and commercial secrets and protection money. 

We have a recent account of a New Zealander who was involved in business in China, where businesses in that country were manufacturing components for his products in New Zealand.  On a business trip he got into a scuffle in a restaurant which turned into a nasty fight.  One of his assailants died and he was put into prison for five years for manslaughter.  This, from Stuff:

A Kapiti businessman locked up for four years in a Chinese jail has told of the “cruel” conditions he endured, including torture, beatings and forced labour.  Danny Cancian, now 46, was sentenced to five years’ jail for manslaughter after fatally kicking a man during a restaurant fight in 2008. He served four years of that sentence, most of it in Dongguan prison in the Guangdong province in southern China. 

The conditions he endured in jail tell us a great deal about China.  The way a country treats its prisoners and its criminals tells you a good deal about its culture and predominant philosophies and its dominant religion.
For all that time, he says he was unable to exercise, was kept in a cell with at least 18 other prisoners and subjected to violent discipline and solitary confinement.

He learnt quickly the horrors of isolation after a scuffle with a guard early in his sentence. “All the police came running in. They Tasered me and they beat me. Then I was put in isolation for two weeks.” Isolation was a three-by-one-metre cell with a hole in the floor for a toilet. From seven in the morning, he would sit there, arms and legs folded, unable to move.

“At nine o’clock they let you sleep, but then they wake you every 20 minutes.” When not in solitary confinement, he spent his days forced to work in a factory, making earphones for airlines.”Every morning at 5am they would march us all to the factory and at 7pm we would come back. If you don’t work you’ll get beaten, Tasered and pepper-sprayed and put in isolation. It gives me a lot of nightmares just thinking about what I went through.”. . . .

He has since told his story on YouTube, using handwritten placards that tell a tale of what he calls the real China. The placards include the words forced labour, long hours, beatings, Tasering, hunger, torture, sleep deprivation, pepper spray, no religion, little contact with family, chemical testing on prisoners, no human rights, suicide and death.

 The real China.  Not so, according to the Chinese Embassy, which issued this anodyne statement in response:

A spokeswoman for the Chinese embassy in Wellington said: “The issue of basic rights for inmates is an important component of overall human rights in China. China has joined international human rights conventions that require signatory nations to fulfil relevant obligations that include the protection of rights for inmates.”

In the light of those requirements to which China has officially bound itself, will the Chinese government be investigating  Dongguan prison in the Guangdong province in southern China?  Will heads roll?  Or will bribes be exchanged?  Or will putting signatures on human rights conventions be as meaningful as all Chinese official signatures on agreements and pieces of paper: compliance is discretionary?  Now if a senior Chinese government official were to have it it in for some petty officials in Guangdong and wanted to make a point, then we may see an investigation and compliance.  But until then, not so much.

It’s the difference between a government above the law, or subject to the law.  It’s the difference between implicit totalitarianism and limited government.  It’s the difference between a people believing that the law is king versus the king above the law.  It’s the difference between a nation believing itself to be under the Living God versus a nation believing the nation itself is a god.  That, above all else, is why the Chinese government and Chinese governance is riddled with corruption.  That is why, increasingly, the same patterns are emerging in the West. 

Gosnell’s House of Horrors

 Gosnell Should be Given a Medal, Right?

The trial of Dr Kermit Gosnell is now making headlines around the world.  Consider, for example, the article below, which today appeared in the NZ Herald in New Zealand.  The piece makes for difficult reading.  The first response is to extend compassion towards the medical assistants who are now facing up to what they did.  They know they have murdered children.  For at least some of them their grief will be inconsolable and their guilt will be unable to be expiated.  May God have mercy upon them and draw them to the Lord Jesus Christ. 

But this trial and all its horrors is important for other reasons.  There are plenty of effete liberals who propound all kinds of abstract ratiocinations to justify the evil of abortion (the child is not a human being until it has been born; the child has no legal rights; the pregnant female’s rights to control their own body trump any other human rights, and so forth.)  To them we would simply ask them once again to get on their soap boxes and justify why they believe what was taking place in the Philadelphia’s House of Horrors was perfectly acceptable, moral, and right.  For in principle they all do.  Most, however, are afraid to face up to the position they hold.  That is why we call them effete liberals.
 

The fact that the law was being broken in this case is irrelevant, for these effete liberals ought to go on to argue that the law in this case is an ass.  When a tumour is growing in the body, society does not codify rules which declare that once the tumour has passed a certain age or size it is illegal to operate upon the tumour and kill its cells off.  That would be absurd.  If the unborn child is nothing more than a tumour growing in the body (which, since it is declared by our liberal protagonists to be non-human, there are no other categories or options) Gosnell and his assistants have done nothing morally wrong.  It is the law, therefore, which is immoral. 

We are aware that there is a certain class of libertarians who propound a dichotomy between potentiality and actuality.  The unborn child is potentially a human being, but not actually.  Therefore, until its potential becomes actual, the unborn thing is not a human being and has no rights as such.  This precious piece of Aristotelian rationalising, of course, proves too much, lumping the argument with far too much weight to bear.  Since all human beings consist of a mixture of actuality and potentiality at what point does the actual trump the potential, so that human rights and protections–in particular, the right to life–apply?  Does a two day old baby after birth have more actuality than potentiality?  Does a three month old baby?  How about a 75 year old?  How about a child born with Downs Syndrome?  However these libertarians answer that question the answer will always be with prejudice and answer will be nothing more than a artificial, arid ratiocination. 

The Gosnell trial is important.  We are glad it is getting headlines and exposure.  For far too long we have tolerated the most cowardly form of murder imaginable.  We have industrialised it.  We have created national killing floors.  And it is acceptable in polite circles.  We have even had the audacity and the chutzpah to declare this industrialised slaughter a fundamental human right. 

But come, one and all, you who would defend this horror.  We challenge you to stand in solidarity with Dr Gosnell.  Don’t be cowardly in his hour of need.  Get out on the streets, get on the net, get into the media and defend the man and his clinic.  No doubt you view him as one of the great heroes of our generation.  Let’s hear from you.  Let’s hear why snipping baby’s spines and cutting their necks is a great, moral, ethical, and righteous deed.  Let’s hear about the implicit racism in his prosecution.  Let’s hear about solidarity with the poor.  Let’s hear the calls for Gosnell to be given a medal–maybe the Medal of Freedom.  That would be apt.

Worker admits cutting 10 babies at abortion clinic

7:17 AM Wednesday Mar 20, 2013

 

Dr. Kermit Gosnell

A medical assistant told a jury Tuesday that she snipped the spines of at least 10 babies during unorthodox abortions at a West Philadelphia clinic. And she said Dr. Kermit Gosnell and another employee did the same to terminate pregnancies.

Adrienne Moton’s testimony came in the capital murder trial of Gosnell, the clinic owner, who is on trial in the deaths of a patient and seven babies. Prosecutors accuse him of killing late-term, viable babies after they were delivered alive, in violation of state abortion laws.

Gosnell’s lawyer denies the murder charge and disputes that any babies were born alive. He also challenges the gestational age of the aborted fetuses, calling them inexact estimates.

Moton, the first employee to testify, sobbed as she recalled taking a cellphone photograph of one baby left in her work area. She thought he could have survived, given his size and pinkish color. She had measured him at nearly 30 weeks.  “The aunt felt it was just best for her (the mother’s) future,” Moton testified.

Jurors saw Moton’s photograph on a large screen in the courtroom, which took on a bizarre look Tuesday as she testified near a hospital bed with stirrups and other aging obstetric equipment. Denied the chance to bring jurors to the shuttered inner-city clinic, prosecutors are instead recreating a patient room in court.

Moton, 35, sobbed as she described her work at the clinic. Because of problems at home, she had moved in with Gosnell and his third wife during high school, and she went to work for him from 2005 to 2008. She earned about $10 an hour, off the books, to administer drugs, perform sonograms, help with abortions and dispose of fetal remains. Workers got $20 bonuses for second-term abortions on Saturdays, when a half-dozen were sometimes performed.

She once had to kill a baby delivered in a toilet, cutting its neck with scissors, she said. Asked if she knew that was wrong, she said, “At first I didn’t.”

Abortions are typically performed in utero. In Pennsylvania, abortions cannot legally be performed after the 24th week of pregnancy.  Moton has pleaded guilty to third-degree murder, which carries a 20- to 40-year term, as well as conspiracy and other charges. She has been in prison since early 2011, when Philadelphia prosecutors released the harrowing grand jury report on Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Center and arrested the doctor, wife Pearl and eight current or former employees. Most of them are expected to testify.

Women and teens came from across the mid-Atlantic, often seeking late-term abortions, Moton said. She recalled one young woman from Puerto Rico who did not speak English and appeared to be 27 weeks pregnant.

One patient, a 41-year-old refugee, died after an overdose of drugs allegedly given to her during a 2009 abortion.

Defense lawyer Jack McMahon told jurors in opening statements Monday that Gosnell, now 72, returned to the impoverished neighborhood after medical school when he could have struck it rich in the suburbs. He called the prosecution of his client, who is black, “a lynching.”

But prosecutors believe Gosnell made plenty of money over a 30-year career using cheap, untrained staff, outdated medicines and barbaric techniques to perform abortions on desperate, low-income women.  And they say he made even more on the side running a “pill mill,” where addicts and drug dealers could get prescriptions for potent painkillers. Authorities found $250,000 in cash at his home when they searched it in 2010.

Of Train Wrecks and Car Crashes, Part III

Sins of Identity

At one point in her Augustinianesque “Confessions” about her conversion Rosaria Butterfield has this to say:

Slowly but steadily, my feelings did start to change–feelings about myself as a woman and feelings about what sexuality really is and what it really isn’t.  I–like most everyone who identified as gay or lesbian–felt really comfortable, very at home in my body, in my lesbianism.  One doesn’t repent for a sin of identity in one session.  Sins of identity have multiple dimensions, and throughout this journey, I have come to my pastor and his wife, friends in the Lord, and always to the Lord himself with different facets of sin–how pride, for example, informed my decision-making, or how my unwillingness to forgive others had landlocked my heart in bitterness.  I have walking this journey with help.  There is no other way to do it.  I still walk this journey with help.  [Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith (Pittsburg: Crown and Covenant Publications, 2012), p.23.]

One of the implicit challenges in Butterfield’s book is for the church is to learn to walk with saints converting out of what she calls “sins of identity”.  These are conditions where a sinner has told himself that he is a certain kind of person and has built a lifestyle accordingly.  The sins have become institutionalised within and without.  Sexual sins, when translated into full throated expressions of self-identity, are always like this. Involvement in false religions, when it has touched and conformed the heart and soul of a sinner, is also like this.  

We marvel at the power and grace of God to deliver people from such sins of identity.  There is no power upon earth that can do this.  Only God can so reconstruct such a human being thus wound up in sin and error.  But, and here is the challenge, as Butterfield says, such a person can only walk this journey with help. Are we, as God’s people, willing to do this?  We have to be.  It is our calling.  We dare not be, lest we provoke our great King to anger. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Amen to the Seventeenth Power 

Money, Love, Desire – Wealth and the Christian
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, 18 March 2013

We have gotten to the point where raw power has become the foundational principle of governance — the ruling class does whatever they can get away with, which is quite a bit. A picture of a monster stack of all the Obamacare regulations was recently circulating on the Internet, and I think it was Jonah Goldberg who made the observation that such rule is indistinguishable from lawlessness. I have trouble expressing my level of agreement here, but I think it would be something like amen to the seventeenth power.

Then the Cyprus debacle happened. The European Union demanded that bank accounts in Cyprus take “a haircut” in exchange for the next bailout, though they are now signaling “flexibility” on the issue because their stealing appeared to be stealing to too many people. We shall see what happens. I suspect that flexibility simply means slippery. Now bank accounts used to be private property, pure and simple, but not any more — whatever happens.

And you probably don’t need to be reminded that the money that was going to be used to bail out Cyprus was money that was stolen from somebody else, oh, weeks ago, and so we will not let that detain us. So the Cypriots wanted this bailout, see, paid for by some German sap or other, and they had a bunch of plump bank accounts of their own just sitting there. What did you expect?

When you attempt to govern a society of thieves with an elite corps of thieves trying to manage the whole affair, sooner or later a fight is going to break out over the swag. We are probably past the point of no return, and Europe most certainly is.

And so what we are seeing are the finishing touches being put on all the preconditions of a robust underground economy. There are two elements of this that should concern us — the first is the establishment of the economic incentives for a strong underground economy, and the second is for the lawlessness of the ruling class to become so apparent that even evangelical Christians start to participate in that underground economy, with Romans 13 remaining in their Bibles.

By underground economy, I mean things like undeclared income mysteriously not showing up on tax forms, paying contractors in cash, barter systems developing, and so forth. With the new Obamatax registering in paychecks over the last few months, look for the expected revenues to (unexpectedly) drop. It may take a little bit for the adjustments to be made, but they most assuredly will be made. It used to be that it was only to the advantage of a recipient to be paid under the table, with a much higher risk being taken by the one who paid him. But now it can easily be to the clear advantage of the one who pays him as well. It used to be that a business owner would put his whole business at risk if he made illegal payments. But now his business is at a much greater risk if he doesn’t. Under such circumstances, what could possibly happen? Put on your thinking caps, children.

Someone might say that this will be countered by robust law enforcement, with IRS agents fanning out over the country, auditing as they go. But in the new order auditing will be for political enemies and for settling scores, not for those who simply break the law.

This is because when a nation descends into Third World levels of corruption, it descends all the way into that kind of corruption. The society grows into a new shape, one that needs the corruption in order to survive. The rulers who make this nickel and that dime illegal know that they need large numbers of people to disregard them in order for them even to survive. But because their public discourse is now so riddled with envy, they cannot afford to say so. So they denounce the wealthy as a sop to their public constituency, and they wink at those running the illegal economy — the one that is keeping them all afloat.

And so it was that Hugo Chavez, champion of the downtrodden, died with two billion dollars in his pockets. That was quite a surprise for the nurse who had to go through his things. What a shock. No idea.

Leviathan Stirs

Tithing in the West

There is no such thing as private property  in the West any longer.  Not really.  There is only property given to you by society for a time, which may be expropriated at will now, or some time in the future.  In the secular Marxian west the State is the fundamental owner, the real owner of everything.  All private property, so called, is only owned in a form of leasehold, via the condescension of the State. 

Of course it has to be this way.  The reason the state’s power to expropriate, seize, and control the property of its citizens is that it has replaced God Himself.  In the biblical world-view, only God is the ultimate owner of all property.  He is the creator and sustainer of everything.  The cattle on a thousand hills belong to Him.  Men only possess property as a leaseholder in God’s estate.  But–and here is the point–what God has granted to a man, his family, a business corporation, or to a charitable trust let no man (or government) expropriate or steal.  The wrath of the eternal, ultimate Owner will be kindled.  In the Christian worldview, then, private property rights are sacred and real.  What God has granted, let not another man or human institution expropriate.

But when a society comes to believe that God to be a figment of ignorant superstition no such constraints exist upon the state.  Consequently, the state has reached out to take what it regards as its own–all property–when it has a need for it.  The protections against an overreaching, thieving state exist in most Western countries, but they are plastic and pliable, provided the “emergency” be real enough.      

This is what the people of Cyprus have just found out.  That country is in financial trouble–it has caught a very bad case of the European disease.  To keep going, having run out of its own money, the government of Cyprus needs to plunder the treasuries of other European countries.  But, as always, the borrower becomes enslaved to the lender–in this case the EU in general and Germany in particular.  They are prepared to stump up with the money, but have demanded a 10 percent money grab upon all private Cypriot bank accounts.  This, from Reuters:

In a radical departure from previous aid packages, euro zone finance ministers want Cyprus savers to forfeit a portion of their deposits in return for a 10 billion euro ($13 billion) bailout for the island, which has been financially crippled by its exposure to neighboring Greece.  The decision, announced on Saturday morning, stunned Cypriots and caused a run on cash points, most of which were depleted within hours. Electronic transfers were stopped.

The nation of Cyprus, deeply in debt due to national folly, speculation, waste, fraud, graft, and corruption has finally run out of money.  Like all socialist countries its next move is to look for a bigger fool to borrow from.  As a result, Cypriots woke up one morning to find that their government had agreed in principle to a forced expropriation of 10 percent of the assets in all private bank accounts. 

When governments start going into debt to fund the demands of socialized programmes spending other people’s money on health, education, welfare and endless social programmes, calamity lurks around the corner.  Eventually, the money will run out.  The people will suffer massive losses, whether through forced expropriation of their property (as in Cyprus) or in some other way, such as the collapse of jobs, businesses, and government services.  The ownership prerogatives of government trump and override all else.  Government is the new deity–the secular Unbelief’s version of religion.  Its demands and appetites are relentless.  You and all you possess exist only at its pleasure. 

Welcome to the West’s modern version of Leviathan. 

Letter From the UK (About Pope Francis)

Pope Francis, the radical from Flores who will ‘reshape’ Catholic church

Former colleagues and parishioners say disciplined and divine Jesuit will reform power structure, strictly control finances, and check Vatican pomp

The Guardian

Jonathan Watts and Uki Goni in Buenos Aires
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 16 March 2013

The ascension of Pope Francis is likely to usher in the most radical change in the Catholic church in more than 50 years, claim those who know the Argentinian Jesuit from the barrio of Buenos Aires where he was born and cut his political teeth.  Zero tolerance of sexual abuse, stricter control of church finances, a shift away from Eurocentrism, more emphasis on poverty, and a ruthless purge of high-ranking opponents in the Vatican can be expected in the years ahead, according to priests and laymen who have spent decades watching the career of the first Latin American pope.

 Jorge Bergoglio, as he was known until last week, was born to an Italian migrant family in 1957 in Flores, a down-to-earth and socially divided barrio just outside the centre of the Argentinian capital.  Domingo Bresci, a priest who studied with Bergoglio in the 50s and later worked with him in Flores, said the new pope was not a person to take half measures.  Holding up a copy of Fridays’ La Nación newspaper with the headline “The Revolution of Francisco: Humility and Austerity”, Bresci said the world should brace for a transformation of one of its oldest and most conservative religions. . . .

As a Jesuit – an order founded by a general and organised on military lines – Bergoglio demands discipline. When he was made vicar general of Flores in 1992, he insisted that church authorities reveal the properties they owned. The senior padre in charge of episcopal finances, Jose Luis Mollaghan, tried to block the initiative. Bergoglio did not forgive or forget. When he became archbishop, he shuffled Molaghan out of his post, along with another cleric who opposed him, Hector Aguer.

Those who know him said Pope Francis is likely to do the same in the Vatican by clearing out the powerful old guard of cardinals, such as Tarcisco Bertoni and Angelo Sodano, who have been accused of dragging their feet over the church’s finance and sexual abuse scandals, as well as his long-term Argentinian rival, Cardinal Leonardo Sandri.

“Slowly and strategically, he will introduce changes as he becomes more powerful and others become weaker. Until now, no pope has been able to do that,” said Bresci, who predicts the transformation to be the biggest in half a century or more.  “He will be strict on finance. There will be zero tolerance of sexual abuse and homosexual liaisons by priests. This is his style. It comes from Flores.”

We will see what transpires, mindful of the view of Doug Wilson that a reforming pope will need to have something like Dirty Harry about him.  Maybe Bergoglio’s mien and career to date reflect exactly those required qualities.  

Of Train Wrecks and Car Crashes, Part II

 Faith and Haste Are Usually Like Oil and Water

Conversion for the Apostle Paul appears to have been like a fatal car crash.  The old was smashed.  But out of the wreckage, something new, something wonderful was born.  The Scriptures do not give many details, but it seems that some time after Paul’s dramatic Damascus road experience, when the shards of his former identity lay scattered on the ground, he retired to obscurity and privacy.  It would appear that he needed time to be reconstructed, rebuilt by the Spirit to equip him for the ministry ahead.

Paul tells us that after his initial conversion, he went away into Arabia (a desolate and relatively uninhabited place); then he returned to Damascus and then after three years he “came out”, going up to Jerusalem to visit with the apostles.  Then, subsequently, he went to Syria and Cilicia  (Galatians 1: 11-24)  All up, it appears that there was a period of about fifteen years between his initial conversion and before his public call to the work of apostleship. 

The breaking of an old identity–particularly one very strongly etched and inscribed–takes time.
  In Rosaria Butterfield’s confessions or “Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert”  there are many passages detailing doubts, questions, struggles, pain, and suffering as she moved from darkness into the light.  The idea, fable really, of people painlessly and without friction instantly transforming from the old man to the new is never real. 

At one point she describes it this way:

Two incommensurable worldviews clashed together: the reality of my lived experience and the truth of the world of God.  In continental philosophy, we talk about the difference between the true and the real.  Had my life become real, but not true?  The Bible told me to repent, but I didn’t feel like repenting.  Do you have to feel like repenting in order to repent?  Was I a sinner, or was I, in my drag queen friend’s words, sick? How do you repent for a sin that doesn’t feel like a sin?  How could the thing that I had studied and become be sinful?  How could I be tenured in a field that is sin?  How could I and everyone that I knew and loved be in sin?

In this crucible of confusion, I learned something important.  I learned this first rule of repentance: that repentance requires greater intimacy with God than with our sin.  How much greater?  About the size of a mustard seed.  Repentance requires that we draw near to Jesus, no matter what.  And sometimes we all have to crawl there on our hands and knees.  Repentance is an intimate affair.  And for many of us, intimacy with anything is a terrifying prospect.  [Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith (Pittsburg: Crown and Covenant Publications, 2012), p.21.]

We fear that in our belief in an instant, gratifying creation we expect that conversion will be a relatively quick and instant affair, like Nescafe.  The conversion of Paul fits into this paradigm.  We see him on the road to Damascus.  We see the great light.  We hear the voice of Christ from heaven.  We observe him rising from his blind bed and going straight to the synagogue to confront the Jewish people with Jesus as the Son of God.  That’s the kind of conversion we look for in our Nescafe world.  Right.  Paul is now one of us.  He is arraigned in the ranks.  Let’s go after the next convert.

But it took years to prepare Paul thoroughly for what was ahead of Him.  The Lord is never in a hurry.  His work is most often slow and gradual and far too often Christians and churches don’t have the patience to work with people slowly and gradually.  We think the real and the divine always produces instant and spectacular change: the more spectacular and the more instant the more evidently divine.  In this we are gravely and sadly mistaken.  It ultimately makes us impatient with God and frustrated with the Church and with fellow Christians. 

There are many reasons we don’t have patience, either with God or with man.  One is our own sinful hearts.  Impatience, after all, is a demanding, arrogant attitude towards God and man.  “I want it, and I want it now”, and the reason is I am important in my own eyes.

Rosaria Butterfield talks about learning to obey God one step at a time, slowly, gingerly, painfully.  When she first started attending church she felt awkward and uncomfortable–despite the warmth and welcome of the congregation.  In one sermon she heard of Jesus’ dictum that if men obey Him they would find out soon enough whether His word was from God (John 7:17).  She learned, as she puts it, that obedience comes before understanding.  Then she says:

I started to obey God in my heart one step at a time.  I broke up with my girlfriend.  My heart really wasn’t in the break-up, but I hoped that God would regard my obedience even in its double-mindedness.  I started to go to the [Presbyterian Reformed] church fully, in my heart, for the whole purpose of worshiping God.  I stopped caring if I looked like a freak there.  I started to receive the friendship that the church members offered to me.  I learned that we must obey in faith before we feel better or different.  (Ibid. p.22)

It takes time for the new person to grow out of the fatal car crash of repentance.  And, let us never forget this: in more Christian times, when the truths of the Gospel and the law of God were institutionalised and socialised into the warp and woof of the culture, many folk would become Christians and would end up doing and behaving in their new Christian life as they had been raised.  They, like the Prodigal, would return to the household culture of their youth. This is no longer generally the case.  Sin and its fruits have so perverted the West that the average person is self-identified, socialised and institutionalised  into unbelief and sin.  These generations of unbelief and rebellion has born consistent fruits.  Conversion now requires transformation, not a returning home.  Most people today have never been in the home in the first place.  It is a totally foreign place to them.

Today, as not seen in the generations of our forbears, ministry to the lost and the dying requires much care, much patience, and much faith.  Above all, we must be willing and prepared to work and serve at God’s pace, not our own.  One day with Him is as a thousand years.  This means that the little things of daily life are to be counted as vitally significant and important.  He who believes will not be in haste.  

Letter From America (About the Roman Catholic Church)

Why Protestants Should Be Interested in Rome 

Justin Taylor

Carl Trueman offers some reflections on George Weigel’s new book, Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church.

He writes, “Some may wonder what the point of reflecting on Rome is for a Protestant.” He offers three points by way of response:

First, Protestants benefit from a conservative papacy: on public square issues such as abortion, marriage and religious freedom, the RCC has a higher profile and more power—financial, legal, institutional—than any Protestant group. We all benefit from the cultural and legal power of the RCC in these areas.

Second, your neighbours probably do not distinguish between Christian groups. A sleazy, morally corrupt RCC is like a sleazy, morally corrupt televangelist ministry: we are all marked with the same brush in the public eye and our task of evangelism becomes that much harder.
Third, RC authors often offer more penetrating insights into secular culture than their evangelical equivalents. Comparing George Weigel to Rob Bell in such circumstances is akin to comparing Michelangelo to Thomas Kinkade.
Therefore, while I have very serious theological disagreements with Catholic authors, I would suggest that they by and large offer well-argued, well-written and insightful commentaries on the state of the world in a way that is rare in evangelical circles. One can learn a lot from watching a great mind wrestle with a problem, even when one deems the conclusion erroneous; there seems little to be gained from watching a mediocre mind playing ping-pong with the same.

Here’s one more excerpt from later in the piece:

Of course, I am in fundamental disagreement with Weigel’s positive proposals on a large number of fronts. Yet he is addressing the same basic problem we face as Protestants: the abolition of human nature and the self-creation of the person, with all of the moral anarchy that implies. Weigel’s answer, simply summarized, is that the RC Church needs to be the RC Church, to have its agenda set not by the culture around but by the gospel as she understands it. I disagree with Weigel on what the gospel is; and I find his uncritical adulation of the previous two pontiffs to verge on naïve sentimentalism; but I also find his hearty disregard for the cool and the trendy and the superficially relevant, from the intellectual to the aesthetic, to be something with which I sympathise. Would that more Protestants were less concerned with the young and the cool and more willing to have, in the words of David Wells, the courage to be Protestant.

You can read the whole thing here.

Honesty and Political Integrity

Sustainable Democracies

Politics and integrity are two words not often found in the same sentence.  In fact, “political integrity” is usually considered an oxymoron.  The current New Zealand prime minister, John Key has his own particular version of political integrity which he has practised more or less consistently since he was first became prime minister in 2008.  His version is that resepective policies on the big, controversial issues should be put before the electorate by all parties.  When a party achieves a majority vote and can coalesce with minor parties to achieve a governing majority, it has an electoral mandate to carry out the policies which were deemed controversial, and over which the election was fought.  It is a case of what the electorate decided by majority vote, so we will do. 

The opposite has also been practised in New Zealand.
  This version is, say anything you like to the voter to gain his support; once in government, however, you can forget election promises and do as you wish.  This latter approach has generated over the years enormous cynicism and loathing of politicians.  It has reasonably led to the widespread belief that politicians are venal, self-serving, and implicitly corrupt. 

We much prefer Key’s version of political integrity, despite its implicit weaknesses and flaws.  If democracy is to survive it must have governments run by people with publicly evident integrity and honesty.  In other words, the same ethics that govern human activity in the neighbourhood, business, employment relations, families and the community in general must apply to governments and politicians.  If they do not, over time democracy will produce successively corrupt governments, the country will eventually become ungovernable, and the resulting breakdown will mean an end to democratic rule.  Winston Churchill’s dictum that democracy was by far and above the best of all other alternative forms of government has a suppressed premise: democracy can only survive if it operates in an atmosphere of political integrity. Without it a nation ends up where Greece and Italy are today. 

Key’s version of political integrity requires that elections be regarded as contractually binding between successful parties and the people.  Election commitments are not just empty promises, but contractual obligations. 

Some examples of Key’s ethical frame in this regard include his electoral commitment that whilst he remained prime minister he would not alter the terms and conditions of New Zealand Superannuation (a stupid commitment, but maintained consistently by him).  Another was his commitment to the electorate that the government would not sell any state assets during its first term and seek a mandate to do so at the next election, and only upon achieving that mandate would proceed to divest state assets to reduce debt.  Once again, he has carried this through faithfully and with integrity–even though it has been fiscally expensive. 

Just how important such commitments are to his modus operandi as prime minister were revealed recently by NZ Herald columnist, Fran O’Sullivan.  The issue in point was Key’s dealings with the board of the government’s coal company, Solid Energy.  The board wanted to grow the company and were looking to invest in other commercial energy opportunities.  But it needed new equity in order to do so.  The government, being fiscally restrained and paying down debt as fast as it could, refused to participate.  Whereupon Solid Energy’s chairman, John Palmer canvassed investment from other international energy companies. 

Key went on to say Palmer’s private view was that the Government should sell Solid Energy or allow substantial individual companies to take stakes.  “The problem with that, as I explained to him on numerous occasions, is that we campaigned on not selling SOEs unless we had a mandate. “As explained in 2011, we weren’t going to have trade sales and foreign partners and, as I explained to him on numerous occasions, when we decided to do any capital injection it will be through the mixed ownership model in which we will be putting New Zealanders first.

“He had a view they would partner up with individual companies. And in a purely commercial world that may be a logical thing to do. But we don’t live in that world, we live in a world where we make political guarantees to the New Zealand public and we honour them.”

There is Key’s doctrine of political integrity at work.  But it comes at a cost.  At the same time, the Key Government was pressuring Solid Energy and all other SOE’s to increase their dividend flow to the government (due to the need for the more revenue to reduce debt, or at least stop it from ballooning out worse than it had), Solid Energy was provoked into borrowing to expand business.  Eventually the world coal price collapsed, leading to Solid Energy being on the hook for $380 million dollars to its bankers and facing bankruptcy.  The Crown will now have to bail them out, although Key is insisting that the bankers take a haircut as well (which seems right, since SOE’s are not crown guaranteed).

Everyone of Key’s contractual electoral commitments has come at a cost–which is to say that nothing is costless in the real world.  But given that, we believe that his style of political integrity has much to commend it.  It no doubt contributes to his current high popularity and the grudging respect that a good deal of the electorate has for him, even whilst disagreeing with him over particular issues and policies. 

The alternative is too odious to contemplate.  But notorious exponents of electoral dishonesty remain.  Here are two alternatives, both expounding their particular version of electoral “integrity”.  The issue is what opposition parties would do if elected, since they oppose the current sale of another SOE–Mighty River Power.  Here is Winston Peters, a thoroughly disreputable, dishonest politician:

Mr Peters said he would be happy for a Government of which he was a part to borrow or to use the superannuation fund to buy back shares at no more than cost.  Mr Peters said his NZ First party was renowned for going into negotiations “knowing what we want and getting what we want”.

“Borrowing money would make economic sense because the returns would make that totally feasible, but there are other resources,” he said.  “You’ve got the superannuation fund, KiwiSaver or a number of avenues or options you could exercise.”

Out of one side of his mouth he says, we would do such and such, but out of the other we can recite a  long track record of proving that anything is up for grabs in coalition negotiations and firm commitments made during an election can be wiped out once negotiations start, without a second thought.  Remember, this is the man who emphatically announced to the electorate during a political campaign that he was not interested in the “baubles of office” only to enter into coalition negotiations with the Labour Party and to accept the post of Foreign Minister.  Needless to say, Peters ended up that particular episode with the whiffs of scandal and corruption swirling around him. 

Another version is Labour Party leader, David Shearer.  With respect to renationalising Mighty River Power, we read his vacuous position:

Mr Shearer said, “We won’t rule it out but we won’t rule it in either.” Labour would not be able to make any commitment on it before an election.

This is the Shearer version of political integrity: trust us.  We will know what we are doing.  Of course the electorate will not buy that, so in the next election campaign he will likely have to make a “firm” commitment one way or the other but his commitment will not be binding were he to lead a new government. 

We will see whether Key’s version of political integrity will become a long standing fixture in democratic government in New Zealand or it will be an aberration amidst a long legacy of dishonesty and political legerdemain.