The Problem with “Predictive” Theories of Economics

From David Gordon on Mises.org (Sept. 17, 2020):

Kay and King are not Austrians, but in this important book, they lend aid and comfort to several key points of Austrian economics. Kay teaches economics at Oxford, and King, who was formerly governor of the Bank of England, teaches at NYU. (King in an earlier book, The End of Alchemy, that I had occasion to review warns against the dangers of fractional reserve banking in a way that will delight admirers of Murray Rothbard.)

Austrians hold that the dynamics of the market depend on profit-seeking entrepreneurs, whose judgments of appraisement are of necessity subjective, irreducible to monetary calculation. As Joseph Salerno explains,

Mises presents a penetrating critique of the Walrasian view that, in the plans of producers, prices substitute for knowledge of the economic data or, rather, for entrepreneurial understanding and appraisement of future variations of these data. Mises’s critique is grounded on the incontrovertible fact that “The prices of the market are historical facts expressive of a state of affairs that prevailed at a definite instant of irreversible historical time.” As such, realized prices can never serve as an unambiguous guide to production; which is always aimed at supplying a market of the more or less remote future involving a different configuration of the eco­nomic data.

Mises’s argument depends on the distinction, made famous by Frank Knight, between risk and uncertainty. In a situation of risk, the actor knows the possible outcomes and can apply the probability calculus to them. In a situation of uncertainty, he cannot do so, either because he cannot use the probability calculus or because he does not know all the possible outcomes. He must rely on his judgment about the particular case. Mises calls this the distinction between class and case probability. He says in Human Action about case probability: “Case probability means: We know, with regard to a particular event, some of the factors which determine its outcome; but there are other determining factors about which we know nothing. Case probability has nothing in common with class probability but the incompleteness of our knowledge. In every other regard the two are entirely different.”

Mainstream neoclassicals do not accept this distinction. Milton Friedman says, “[I]n his seminal work, Frank Knight drew a sharp distinction between risk, as referring to events subject to a known or knowable probability distribution, and uncertainty, as referring to events for which it was not possible to specify numerical probabilities. I’ve not referred to this distinction because I do not believe it is valid….We may treat people as if they assigned numerical probabilities to every conceivable event.” If Friedman is correct, a key tenet of Austrian economics is wrong; entrepreneurial appraisement must exit the scene.

Mises acknowledges that you can say things like “I think there is a 50 percent chance the Republicans will win the coming election.” But this is just an expression of how confident you feel about this, and it is meaningless to use probability calculus here. He says,

On the eve of the 1944 presidential election people could have said:…(c) I estimate Roosevelt’s chances as 9 to 1….This is a proposition about the expected outcome couched in arithmetical terms. It certainly does not mean that out of ten cases of the same type nine are favorable for Roosevelt and one unfavorable. It cannot have any reference to class probability. But what else can it mean? It is a metaphorical expression….For the comparison is based on a conception which is in itself faulty in the very frame of the calculus of probability, namely the gambler’s fallacy. In asserting that Roosevelt’s chances are 9:1, the idea is that Roosevelt is in regard to the impending election in the position of a man who owns 90 per cent of all tickets of a lottery in regard to the first prize. It is implied that this ratio 9:1 tells us something substantial about the outcome of the unique case in which we are interested. There is no need to repeat that this is a mistaken idea.

Knight has an amusing comment on this issue. He says, “The saying often quoted from Lord Kelvin…that where you cannot measure, your knowledge is meagre and unsatisfactory; as applied in mental and social science is misleading and pernicious…the Kelvin dictum very largely mean[s] in practice, if you cannot measure, measure anyhow!”

Friedman has an answer to this objection. It does not matter, he says, whether people actually do assign probabilities to every conceivable event. This is just an assumption economists make, and what counts for a good theory is not the realism of its assumptions. Rather, a good theory is one that generates good predictions.

Kay and King reject this view, and here they again render Austrian economics a service, though, to reiterate, they themselves aren’t Austrians. The method of Austrian praxeology is deductive, and unless your premises are true, you have no guarantee that the conclusions you deduce from them are also true. Thus, Austrians must reject Friedman’s position.

Kay and King reject Friedman’s methodology because there is almost never clear evidence that the predictions of a theory are false. You can always adjust something in the theory to make it come out true, and that is what all too many economists do:

Friedman’s article [on methodology] appeared in a brief period of intellectual history in which a version of Popperian falsificationism—the idea that a hypothesis acquires scientific status only if there is a possibility that it might be refuted was in fashion….The decisive rejection of this falsificationist view is encapsulated in what philosophers know today as the Duhem-Quine hypothesis: such refutation is rarely definitive, because any test requires a range of auxiliary assumptions, and it is always possible to argue that these assumptions have not been fulfilled.

There is an additional point that strengthens the argument against Friedman. It isn’t clear that his claim about probability estimates generates any predictions at all. If you make a series of bets that don’t conform to the principles he sets forward, he can show through what is called a “Dutch-book” argument that you will lose money. But that is hardly a prediction that anyone will in fact make a series of bets of this kind. [read more]

Human Diversity and Individual Instruction

From Mises.org (Sept. 5, 2020):

One of the most important facts about human nature is the great diversity among individuals. Of course, there are certain broad characteristics, physical and mental, which are common to all human beings.1 But more than any other species, individual men are distinct and separate individuals. Not only is each fingerprint unique, each personality is unique as well. Each person is unique in his tastes, interests, abilities, and chosen activities. Animal activities, routine and guided by instinct, tend to be uniform and alike. But human individuals, despite similarities in ends and values, despite mutual influences, tend to express the unique imprint of the individual’s own personality. The development of individual variety tends to be both the cause and the effect of the progress of civilization. As civilization progresses, there is more opportunity for the development of a person’s reasoning and tastes in a growing variety of fields. And from such opportunities come the advancement of knowledge and progress which in turn add to the society’s civilization. Furthermore, it is the variety of individual interests and talents that permits the growth of specialization and division of labor, on which civilized economies depend. As the Reverend George Harris expressed it:

Savagery is uniformity. The principal distinctions are sex, age, size, and strength. Savages…think alike or not at all, and converse therefore in monosyllables. There is scarcely any variety, only a horde of men, women, and children. The next higher stage, which is called barbarism, is marked by increased variety of functions. There is some division of labor, some interchange of thought, better leadership, more intellectual and aesthetic cultivation. The highest stage, which is called civilization, shows the greatest degree of specialization. Distinct functions become more numerous. Mechanical,—commercial, educational, scientific, political, and artistic occupations multiply. The rudimentary societies are characterized by the likeness of equality; the developed societies are marked by the unlikeness of inequality or variety. As we go down, monotony; as we go up, variety. As we go down, persons are more alike; as we go up, persons are more unlike, it certainly seems…as though [the] approach to equality is decline towards the conditions of savagery, and as though variety is an advance towards higher civilization….

Certainly, then, if progress is to be made by added satisfactions, there must be even more variety of functions, new and finer differentiations of training and pursuits. Every step of progress means the addition of a human factor that is in some way unlike all existing factors. The progress of civilization, then…must be an increasing diversification of the individuals that compose society….There must be articulation of each new invention and art, of fresh knowledge, and of broader application of moral principles.2

With the development of civilization and individual diversity, there is less and less area of identical uniformity, and therefore less “equality.” Only robots on the assembly line or blades of grass can be considered as completely equal, as being identical with respect to all of their attributes. The fewer attributes that two organisms have in common, the less they are “equal” and the more they are unequal. Civilized human beings, therefore, are unequal in most of their personalities. This fact of inequality, in tastes, and in ability and character, is not necessarily an invidious distinction. It simply reflects the scope of human diversity.

It is evident that the common enthusiasm for equality is, in the fundamental sense, anti-human. It tends to repress the flowering of individual personality and diversity, and civilization itself; it is a drive toward savage uniformity. Since abilities and interests are naturally diverse, a drive toward making people equal in all or most respects is necessarily a leveling downward. It is a drive against development of talent, genius, variety, and reasoning power. Since it negates the very principles of human life and human growth, the creed of equality and uniformity is a creed of death and destruction.

There is a sense, however, in which equality among men is sensible and beneficial. Each individual should have the freest possible scope for the development of his faculties and his personality. In order to have this scope, he must have freedom from violence against himself. Violence can only repress and destroy human growth and endeavor, and neither can reason and creativity function under an atmosphere of coercion. If each person has equal defense against violence, this “equality before the law” will permit him to maximize his potentialities.

Since each person is a unique individual, it is clear that the best type of formal instruction is that type which is suited to his own particular individuality. Each child has different intelligence, aptitudes, and interests. Therefore, the best choice of pace, timing, variety, and manner, and of the courses of instruction will differ widely from one child to another. One child is best suited, in interests and ability, for an intensive course in arithmetic three times a week, followed six months later by a similar course in reading; another may require a brief period of several courses; a third may need a lengthy period of instruction in reading, etc. Given the formal, systematic courses of instruction, there is an infinite variety of pace and combination which may be most suitable for each particular child.

It is obvious, therefore, that the best type of instruction is individual instruction. A course where one teacher instructs one pupil is clearly by far the best type of course. It is only under such conditions that human potentialities can develop to their greatest degree. It is clear that the formal school, characterized by classes in which one teacher instructs many children, is an immensely inferior system. Since each child differs from the other in interest and ability, and the teacher can only teach one thing at a time, it is evident that every school class must cast all the instruction into one uniform mold. Regardless how the teacher instructs, at what pace, timing, or variety, he is doing violence to each and every one of the children. Any schooling involves misfitting each child into a Procrustean bed of unsuitable uniformity.

What then shall we say of laws imposing compulsory schooling on every child? These laws are endemic in the Western world. In those places where private schools are allowed, they must all meet standards of instruction imposed by the government. Yet the injustice of imposing any standards of instruction should be clear. Some children are duller and should be instructed at a slower pace; the bright children require a rapid pace to develop their faculties. Furthermore, many children are very apt in one subject and very dull in another. They should certainly be permitted to develop themselves in their best subjects and to drop the poor ones. Whatever the standards that the government imposes for instruction, injustice is done to all—to the dullards who cannot absorb any instruction, to those with different sets of aptitudes in different subjects, to the bright children whose minds would like to be off and winging in more advanced courses but who must wait until the dullards are hounded once again. Similarly, any pace that the teacher sets in class wreaks an injustice on almost all; on the dull who cannot keep up, and on the bright who lose interest and precious chances to develop their great potential.

Obviously, the worst injustice is the prevention of parental teaching of their own children. Parental instruction conforms to the ideal arrangement. It is, first of all, individualized instruction, the teacher dealing directly with the unique child, and addressing himself to his capabilities and interests. Second, what people can know the aptitudes and personality of the child better than his own parents? The parents’ daily familiarity with, and love for, their children, renders them uniquely qualified to give the child the formal instruction necessary. Here the child receives individual attention for his own personality. No one is as qualified as the parent to know how much or at what pace he should teach the child, what the child’s requirements are for freedom or guidance, etc. [read more]

The Art of Virtue and the Virtue of Art

From Margarita Mooney Clayton on The Public Discourse.com (Sept. 18, 2023):

The idea that art is related to moral virtue will strike many as odd. Art, understood as self-expression or enjoyment, is a spontaneous realm apart from the calculating, choosing, and sacrificing of virtue. Art as self-expression or enjoyment must therefore allow for total freedom to explore one’s desires. By contrast, the hard-won perfection of moral virtue requires restraint and discipline. Moral virtue, in contrast to pure subjective expression, is a means of human perfection. Moral virtue is doing good; it requires effort, perhaps sacrificing something short-term for a greater material or spiritual benefit. But how does this relate to art?

Modern Romantic notions of art have emphasized the subjectivity of human creativity, purportedly to free human instincts in order to reach their fulfillment. But by separating art from reason, Romanticism opened the way for what we see today: much of the art produced today is kitsch (excessively sentimental) or transgressive (seeking to shock or produce outrage).

But in his book The Shape of the Artistic Mind, Father Brad Elliott provides a crucial philosophical grounding that will connect art to moral virtue. Rethinking the relationship between art and virtue leads to very different answers to the questions: What is art for? and What is moral virtue for?

Through a thorough review of Thomistic principles, Elliott moves from considerations about art as an imitation of God’s creation to art as a virtuous participation in God’s governance. For Elliott, both art and moral virtue are ways that humans imitate God; by imitating God, we therefore participate in his governance, as he draws all things back to himself. To some finite degree, all creation, from small living organisms like molecules to inanimate things like stones, participates in God’s being. But Elliott emphasizes that only the rational human person participates in God’s governance through the activity of acting and making.

By bringing new things into being, humans co-create with God. Yet apart from virtue, the power to bring new creations into being will be disordered. As Elliott writes, “art and morality are merely two aspects of man’s participation in the reason and creativity of God.” Hence, art seen as a practical virtue extends God’s governance over creation. Humans move toward their proper ends and contribute to their own governance through co-creation with God.

Elliott contrasts this view with that of Plato, for whom human creativity could only ever represent a shadow of the ultimate reality. For Plato, no human advancement in knowledge or art could ever get us out of the cave—we are forever seeing only shadows of reality. Elliott, on the other hand, contends that our rationality is not purely speculative or abstract. Rather, the human person has the unique capacity to take an idea and impress it upon the external world, making what we create something that shares in the spark of God’s reason. As he explains, building on St. Thomas Aquinas, Etienne Gilson, and other Catholic thinkers, “by learning to imitate nature and her laws through skill or craft, the human intellect is also learning to imitate the Divine creator. . . . Simply put; God, nature, human intellect, and art all relate by a mysterious pattern of imitation spanning the whole range of the cosmos.”

By emphasizing the intellect as a commonality between art and moral virtue, Elliott does not disregard human enjoyment or self-expression. The problem is that not all things that humans create, think, or do are good. If we are fallen and wounded creatures, why would we expect all art to be morally good? And why do so many people seem to think that there is no objectivity in what we enjoy or how we express ourselves?

Elliott’s Christian anthropology underlies his argument. Human beings are a unity of body and soul; we have the capacity to make things and to contemplate. Elliott brilliantly describes how humans imitate God in a finite manner by bringing the outside world into the mind through contemplation and then turning outward through art. As he writes:

This bringing the outside world into the inside world terminating in the perfection of the inside, the intellect’s perfection of knowing, is the intrinsic operation of which St. Thomas speaks. By this action, the created intellect imitates God-as-artist in an unprecedented way, by imitating, in a finite manner, the oneness and unity of its creator. . . . Art or craft is the mode by which the perfection of the inside world (the act of knowledge) impresses its likeness on the outside world; perfective action moving from the inside out.

If moral virtue is imitating God’s goodness, and artistic creation is imitating God’s creation, then co-creating through art is one of the ways we participate in God’s governance. Art understood as a practical virtue makes visible the invisible inner world of the human person and the goodness of God. By participating in God’s governance, art understood as a practical virtue contributes to the right ordering of creation.

In spite of our woundedness as evidenced by laziness, idle curiosity, and self-centeredness, we can grow in virtue through art. Elliott provocatively states that “it is the virtue of art that emerges as the supreme master coordinator between man’s internal and external worlds.” The very act of writing this short essay is an expression of art as a practical virtue: I’ve fought many distractions as I read and pondered Elliott’s words and crafted my own thoughts into words to share with readers.

Art is not moral; it is not a command about how to act. Rather, art can “indirectly influence morals by providing an ‘aptness’ to act well.” Like books and articles that encapsulate ideas into form, music, paintings, and other forms of human creation invite us to contemplate God’s goodness, form our inner lives, and grow in moral virtue. By co-creating with God, we imitate his goodness, participate in his governance, and bring more of creation into the divine unity. [source]

Amen. The Good, the True, the Beautiful. Art should show the Beautiful.

Why the State Seeks to Abolish Both Tradition and History

From Mises.org (Sept. 1, 2020):

In the opening monologue of the much-beloved musical Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye the milkman compares life for the Jewish inhabitants of the village Anatevka to the balancing act required of a fiddler scratching out a tune on a rooftop. According to Tevya’s famous allegory, the people of Anatevka are able to keep their balance thanks to their traditions. Yet as the story progresses, we see that even with tradition in place, keeping that balance is no easy task—especially when faced with rapid and unprecedented change.

Over the past century, tradition’s imperfections have led to its fade from our collective consciousness. It’s no longer viewed as a useful tool to help keep one’s balance on the roof of life, but rather is seen as a roadblock that must be removed from the path to progress. Thanks to a highly rationalist strain of Enlightenment thought beginning with thinkers such as Hobbes and Descartes, who held that all knowledge should be discovered by conscious reasoning, and culminating with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the French Revolution, the importance of tradition has been greatly undermined. Thomas Paine summed up the antitraditionalist creed quite nicely when he declared that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Guided by the power of reason, and liberated from the chains of the past, these Enlightenment rationalists promised progress and increased human happiness.

Yet, discarding tradition has not led us to the realm of happiness, as promised by the prophets of progress. Between 1999 and 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports, the suicide rate in the US increased 24 percent. In 2017 the US saw the highest suicide rate in fifty years. Such tragic numbers are the exact opposite of what progressives, radical feminists, and neoconservatives, all the latter-day children of the Enlightenment rationalists, led us to believe would happen if only we cast off the binds of backwards tradition and were made free to pursue our individual self-actualization. By its very nature, tradition is extremely difficult to fully erase in practice, but there is no doubt that its decline has coincided with a decline in the conceptual understanding of tradition in favor of a belief in “progress.” It is no coincidence that the weakening of the mediating institutions of civil society, the transformation of the family, an acceptance of divorce and promiscuity, all have come about during a period in which tradition and custom have come to be viewed as useless chains from the past. Understanding the role of tradition in human life may help to explain why its decline has led to so much human alienation and suffering.

Before we truly may evaluate tradition, we must first rightly define it. To many, tradition is synonymous with backwardness or an inability to embrace change. This view is rooted in the heavy societal influence of French Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who held that society and its institutions perverted man’s natural goodness. Only through liberation from these institutions could man’s innate goodness be emancipated. Yet a proper understanding of tradition is quite different.

Tradition, rightly understood, isn’t an effort to freeze the world in place. Indeed, Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century British statesman and political thinker widely considered the father of Anglo conservatism, even said that “a state without the means of some change, is without the means of its own conservation.” Similarly, Oxford philologist and traditionalist author J.R.R. Tolkien attacked this static view of the world in Lord of the Rings in the form of his character Denethor. When asked in the midst of a crisis what he wants, Denethor replies, “I would have things as they were in all the days of my life…as in the days of my longfathers before me….But if doom denies this to me, then I will have naught: neither life diminished, nor love halved, nor honour abated.” In the end, Denethor burns himself alive rather than accepting change—hardly a ringing endorsement of the static mentality so often ascribed to tradition. Professor Claes Ryn at the Catholic University of America continues the Burkean tradition, warning of the danger posed by stagnant, unchanging tradition that turns into “a kind of fetish, which has little relevance to a world that will not conform and will not stand still.” Rather, Ryn says, continuing tradition “cannot be the mere imitation or repetition of old patterns. It must be a fresh, vital force in the present.”

So if tradition is not merely a blind clinging to the past in an attempt to stop the future, what is it? A respect for tradition, properly understood, is simply an acknowledgment of the fact, as explained by conservative author Russell Kirk, “that modern people are dwarves on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time.” In other words, tradition recognizes that knowledge and wisdom are accumulated through time, and not—in contrast to popular belief—able to be purely rationally derived and developed by one person or generation in time. Society itself, in all its complexity, is the result of this historical process, not the result of a single generation constructing itself on a blank slate.

The best way to think about tradition is to view it like capital accumulation in economics. The contemporary world enjoys unprecedented wealth, because, in the past, our ancestors chose to accumulate capital—or goods used to produce other goods. As the capital stock has grown, so too has the productive capacity of our economy.

Similarly, knowledge and wisdom are accumulated through countless centuries of trial and error. Rejecting the wisdom of the past is just as foolish as each new generation seeking to start industrial society over again from scratch. This analogy is not original, but comes straight from Burke himself, who wrote that “we are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.”

Friedrich Hayek argued that there are two views about the nature of society. There are the rationalist constructivists, who contend “that all the useful human institutions were, and ought to be, deliberate creations of conscious reason.” To them, tradition is irrelevant, since man is capable of structuring all of life without past experience and wisdom. Every generation, then, is capable of formulating and acting on all knowledge independently. In contrast, there are those nonconstructivist rationalists, whom Hayek identifies as “more modest and less ambitious.” This school, in the words of Professor Paul Cliteur at Leiden University, “assumes that, in all our thinking, we are guided by rules of which we are not aware, and that, therefore, our conscious reason can always take account of only some of the circumstances which determine our actions.” Because the power of human understanding is limited, it is impossible for us to account for all of the relevant knowledge when making a decision.

However, Hayek points out that we are not left to wallow completely in ignorance. Rather, our ancestors have passed down abstract rules and guides that “embody the experience of many more trials and errors than any individual mind could acquire.” Hayek, drawing upon Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, speaks of the benefit derived from a social order in which members obey abstract rules “even without understanding their significance.” This is in contrast to one in which such rules that represent the accumulated experience of the past are discarded in favor of seeking to base conduct on the information only immediately available to a single person or even a group.

It is quite easy to see that—for at least the past century—the rationalist constructivists, or the New Jacobins, as Claes Ryn calls them (after the original Jacobins in the French Revolution, who attempted to replace traditional institutions with their rationally planned society), have been culturally ascendant. The past, if it is considered at all, is often viewed as anachronistic and unenlightened, as something to be forgotten or even purged. But the negative consequences of this Jacobin mentality range from the merely inconvenient to the disastrous.

As Tevye wisely said in Fiddler on the Roof, tradition is a tool that helps people maintain their balance in life. By trying to rely solely on a constructivist form of reason, individuals have abandoned and weakened many traditional institutions, such as family, religion, and community that are an important ingredient to a stable and happy life. In his work The Quest for Community, sociologist Robert Nisbet chronicled the decline of community and the resulting alienation and decay of the social fabric. He directly attributes this loss to the rationalist constructivist perspective. In Nisbet’s words, “the modern release of the individual from traditional ties of class, religion, and kinship has made him free; but on the testimony of innumerable works in our age, this freedom is accompanied not by the sense of creative release but by the sense of disenchantment and alienation.”

The facts validate this claim. A Heritage Foundation report that compiled data from dozens of studies correlated religious practice with numerous positive outcomes. Religious practitioners experienced greater marital and familial stability, a lower risk of suicide, less likelihood of committing crimes, and longer life expectancy. Similarly, as Professor Lauren Hall at the Rochester Institute of Technology documents in her book Family and the Politics of Moderation, the family unit plays an important balancing role in society. It does this by restraining and moderating extreme collectivism and individualism, and by integrating the individual into a community. According to Hall, “a family consisting of a monogamous couple and two or more children” is best able to carry out the social functions of the family that promote both the well-being of the individual and the broader community. However, the Pew Research Center shockingly reports that “if current trends continue, 25 percent of young adults in the most recent cohort (ages 25 to 34 in 2010) will have never married by 2030. That would be the highest share in modern history.”

On a larger scale, a respect for tradition and the limits of human reason precludes attempts at “wiping the slate clean” and building the perfect planned society from scratch. One need only look at the horrifying results of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Mao’s Great Leap Forward to see what can happen when tradition and humble rationalism are abandoned.

Even if some libertarians are skeptical of the benefits of tradition on a personal level, they should be greatly concerned with its consequences on a societal level. When institutions that provide existential meaning are undermined, such as the family, atomized individuals often turn to the state and totalizing political movements for meaning. Similarly, the extermination of tradition is necessary for the triumph of totalitarian regimes. As Michael Federici of Middle Tennessee State University has argued concerning George Orwell’s 1984, “Oceania is a society governed by a totalitarian authority that aims to create complete obedience to the state. To accomplish this objective, it is necessary to destroy historical consciousness and old ways of life. Most everyone in Oceania has lost memory of historical life.” Winston Smith is able to recognize and resist the tyrannical regime, because he still maintains a shred of historical memory, and with that connection is able to see through the lies and propaganda. “He remembers a time when life was different, when social life was not controlled by the state.”

Today our society is wracked by germinal totalitarians eager to destroy history. Ostensibly this is in the name of justice, but this destruction and historical desecration are little more than a tactic for securing power for themselves. America is supposedly infected on the genetic level with unforgivable sins of racism and oppression and those seeking to destroy history conveniently have the solution: hand over power to them to facilitate our collective reeducation and penance. By failing to recognize the important role that tradition serves by preserving historical consciousness we aid and abet the rise of the forces currently seeking the complete overthrow of our society and the complete annihilation of our traditional rights and liberties.

Again, tradition is not mere stasis. The wisdom and knowledge it hands down to us is not fixed for all times and all places. Like all of society, it adapts and changes over time. According to Ryn, “tradition has to come alive in the here and now through the creativity of individuals who recognize both humanity’s dependence on the best of the past and the needs and opportunities offered by changed circumstances.”

Our task going forward is to both revitalize the decaying and forgotten stock of reason that has been passed down to us, and to forge ahead into the future. Tradition is by no means a perfect tool, and understanding and adapting it is no easy task, but properly understood, it is the best tool we have to face and weather the constantly changing circumstances of life and to preserve our hard-won liberties. [source]

Tradition is the anchor of society. Without it society drifts aimlessly. The collectivists want to replace tradition with their own, but the replacement is far, far worse because they don’t understand how to create another correctly.

Humanity Isn't a Problem to Solve: Technology Needs a Telos

From Breakpoint.org (Sept. 21, 2023):

Pixar’s Wall-E has proven to be among the most profound and prophetic films of the last 20 years. After hopelessly polluting the Earth and leaving an army of robots to clean up the planet, humans now live aboard a giant ship built by a company that promises to take care of all its passengers’ needs. Thus, humans are left with nothing to do but amuse themselves and eat a lot.

Many Christians wrote off the Pixar classic because of its hyper-environmentalist message. However, the film’s commentary on human exceptionalism and vocation, specifically the inability of our machines to do our most important work for us, was spot-on. In the world of Wall-E, human beings have a purpose, or a telos that cannot be reduced to maximizing comfort, safety, and convenience.

In the biblical account of reality, humans exist to glorify and love God, and to serve as His special representatives and co-rulers in creation. Human inventions should help towards achieving those ends, extending our abilities, and mitigating the effects of the Fall. Wanting to replace ourselves with our devices assumes that humanity is the central problem of the world that needs to be solved.

Recently in First Things, Matthew Crawford argued that an anti-human worldview like the one parodied in Wall-E now dominates our tech and governing classes. Those who are behind everything from smartphone apps to pandemic policy share a basic belief that human beings are inferior to machines. We are, as he puts it, “stupid,” “obsolete,” “fragile,” and “hateful.”

Crawford opens his essay with an example of a driverless car created by Google that froze at a four-way stop. Apparently, the drivers around the car didn’t behave as it had been programmed to expect. However, rather than admit the limits of the car’s “artificial intelligence,” one Google engineer remarked that what he’d learned from the incident is that humans need to be “less idiotic.” The premise is that humans are not the crown of creation but problems to be solved.

Of course, it is quite possible that, once they’ve worked out all the bugs, driverless cars will lead to less accidents and road deaths. However, one of the bugs to be worked out are the programmers who hate humans, which makes the point of this essay ring true. So much of our high-tech culture, from the social media algorithms that tell us what we want to the transhumanist fantasies about uploading our consciousness to computers, assumes that humanity is an obstacle to be overcome.

Much of our public life also assumes the basic idiocy and inadequacy of humans: take health officials more concerned with controlling people than limiting the spread of a virus or legislation quashing parental rights in order to “affirm” gender-confused minors.

C.S. Lewis saw this impulse decades ago and recognized how it would grant growing power to certain people over and above others. In his masterpiece The Abolition of Man, Lewis warned of those he called “conditioners,” who considered themselves above such common human frailties. Of course, as Lewis pointed out, the conditioners are also human, but in denial that they too are vulnerable to the same frailties as everyone else. Their danger lies in the fact that they are oblivious about their frailties, especially their moral frailties.

It is good that humans have bodies that limit us to one location and the need for food, sleep, and friendship. These limits are part of our design. Because we are designed, we must be guided by values and not merely algorithms. It is good that we take time to learn, to appreciate beauty, to feel wonder, and to have burning questions about what is behind all that we see. God made us this way, so that, eventually, our seeking would lead back to Him. Though He intends to redeem us from the ravages of sin, He never intends to optimize us into efficient machines. Apparently, He considers being human as something “good,” even “very good.” So much so, in fact, He took on flesh Himself.

Wall-E got it (mostly) right. Technology is good but needs a telos—a purpose for existing. That purpose cannot be to replace, transcend, or circumvent God’s good design for human beings.

In short, technology and public policy should be human-shaped, not the other way around. [source]

Amen.

Would the Discovery of Alien Life Disprove Christianity?

From Breakpoint.org (Jan. 18, 2024):

Among the unexpected stories of 2023 was a renewed interest in all things extraterrestrial: from images of alien corpses; to retired high-ranking military officials claiming secret government programs launched to capture UFOs; to a strange encounter with Las Vegas police officers. The public interest in whether there’s anything out there is as high as ever. But what would the existence of alien life mean for Christianity?

That’s the question tackled in a brand new video, part of the What Would You Say? series, called “What Does the Bible Say About Aliens?”

Many people assume that if any evidence were to be discovered for extraterrestrial life, it would be devastating to the Christian worldview. However, according to my colleague, Shane Morris, that’s not necessarily the case. In fact, according to Shane, “There’s nothing in the Christian view of the world that excludes the possibility that God created life on other planets.” In this video, Shane offers three things to keep in mind. First, that “despite the hype of science fiction and decades of searching, there is currently no evidence for life on other planets.”

[A]fter decades of looking and listening and exploring the heavens for that life, we’ve come up empty-handed. So much so, in fact, that physicists and astronomers have named the emptiness the Fermi Paradox, which refers to “the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence.” In other words, if life happens easily, “Where is everybody?”

[Peter] Ward and his co-author, Donald Brownlee, argue in Rare Earth that life doesn’t happen that easily, and assuming that it does is the real mistake. At least a dozen special conditions found on our planet are probably necessary for the existence of intelligent life, including a precise orbital distance from our star, heavy elements, liquid water, a moon, a magnetic field, not too much gravity, a nearby gas giant, and having a star like our Sun, which, as it turns out, is anything but “ordinary.”

Shane’s second point is that “even if intelligent life were found elsewhere in the universe, it wouldn’t necessarily present a problem for Christianity.”

Before Star Trek or Star Wars existed, C.S. Lewis wrote his Space Trilogy. In it, he famously imagined alien races that never fell into sin. And in a few essays, Lewis wrestled with whether the existence of real-life extraterrestrials would threaten Christianity. According to Lewis, the Bible never says God created the vast cosmos only for humans. …

For Lewis, intelligent aliens created and loved by God posed no problem, nor would they contradict the Bible. In the same essay, he cautioned that the Bible was not intended to satisfy our curiosity about such things but as an instruction manual for salvation. But he also warned that humans are in no position to tell God what He can and cannot do with His vast universe.

And finally, Shane states that “the Bible teaches that there are other beings in the universe, but they’re not what materialists expect, and they do not always come in peace.”

Some biblical scholars, like the late Dr. Michael Heiser, have suggested that some alleged alien encounters may be the result of demonic activity and possession. After all, in 2 Corinthians 11:14 Paul warned that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.

This means that Christians need not believe every story of alien abductions or close encounters, but we need not immediately dismiss them as jokes or conspiracy theories. Christianity teaches that we are not alone in the universe, that it is full of intelligent entities, both good and evil, and that all were created by and remain under the power of God.

The existence of extraterrestrial life is still speculation, but the Christian worldview has more room for mysteries than our secular, materialist age does. It offers a bigger, more thorough, and more satisfying explanation for the universe.

That was Shane Morris answering the question, “What Does the Bible Say About Aliens?”

To see the whole video and to share it with others, go to whatwouldyousay.org. Or, you can look up the What Would You Say? channel on YouTube. Be sure to subscribe to be notified each time a new video is released. [source]

Food for thought. Alien life is always a possibility.

My truth, your truth, or the truth? How wokeness undermines the concept of truth itself

From Breakpoint.org (Jan. 19, 2024):

In an interview with The Harvard Crimson, the disgraced plagiarist and ex-president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, used some interesting language about “truth” — language that should make any Christian’s eyebrows pop up.

She said, “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged …Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth.”

But the use of the phrase “my truth” isn’t only found among the progressive left these days. In one of the Republican presidential primary debates, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and United Nations ambassador, outlined her (rather weak) position on abortion and claimed to be pro-life. Later, when facing criticism for not being pro-life enough at a candidates forum in Iowa, she said “What you heard me say at the debate was very much my truth.”

This raises a serious question: Since when did truth become something that needs to be modified with a personal possessive pronoun?

Christian apologist Frank Turek, perhaps having witnessed these strange personal modifications to the concept of truth, recently asked on X (formerly Twitter), “What do you say to people when they talk about ‘their truth?’”

Ryan Helfenbein, Executive Director of the Standing for Freedom Center, gave an excellent answer:

“There is no ‘your’ truth or ‘my’ truth. There is only ever one universal and absolute truth. The language of postmodernity and indeed Wokism, is a total affront and assault on truth.

Jesus said, ‘I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ John 14:6. Appreciate this question from @DrFrankTurek.”

There is no “your” truth or “my” truth. There is only ever one universal and absolute truth. The language of postmodernity and indeed Wokism, is a total affront and assault on truth.

Jesus said, “I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through… https://t.co/kCNfgAluj9

— Ryan Helfenbein (@RHelfenbein) January 3, 2024

Ryan is right. There is only “one universal and absolute truth.” And there is only one being in the universe who has a right to make a personal claim on that truth — the Triune Creator God.

But in today’s increasingly secular world, the concept of truth has become blurred. The rise of postmodernism and its offspring, wokeness, have contributed significantly to this confusion. As Christians, it is essential to understand the implications of these ideologies and how they impact our understanding of truth. Let’s explore the concept of this sort of subjective truth from a Christian worldview and examine how wokeness undermines the very idea of objective truth.

The Christian understanding of truth

The Bible, as the foundation of the Christian faith, provides a clear understanding of truth. In John 14:6, as Ryan referenced, Jesus declares, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” This statement reveals that Jesus is the embodiment of truth and that truth is not a concept or an abstract idea but a fixed reality determined by God and miraculously embodied in Jesus Christ through the incarnation.

Moreover, the Bible teaches that truth is not relative but absolute. In John 8:32, Jesus says,

“And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

This statement teaches us in no uncertain terms that there is a single, objective truth that can be known and that this truth has the power to liberate us from the chaos and confusion of the world — and, more importantly, from our sin and rebellion against the God of truth. [read more]

Wokeness like Marxism (which wokeness is a variation actually) is a mental virus which needs to be eliminated.

Why Young Americans Are Not Taught About Evil

From Real Clear Politics.com (August 29, 2023):

Most of our schools teach almost nothing of importance, and nothing is more important than the study of good and evil. In the United States today, nearly all schools, from elementary through graduate, concentrate on teaching about racism, sexism, preferred pronouns, homophobia, transphobia, LGBTQIA+, climate change, diversity, equity, inclusiveness and white guilt. In other words, most of our educational institutions, including the most prestigious, do not educate.

Here are a few proofs.

It is almost certain that the great majority of American high school and college students (with the obvious exceptions of Christian students) could not name the Four Gospels (presuming they even know what they are); five of the Ten Commandments (presuming they know what those are); or the names of two Shakespeare plays. Most American students know little about the American Revolution, let alone about the French or Russian Revolutions. The same holds true for the Constitution and every other American founding document. It is doubtful that, other than Washington and Jefferson having owned slaves, American students know anything about these men or could name two other Founders.

When it comes to evil, the ignorance is enormous, often almost total. For example, according to Pew, about half of Americans ages 18-39 cannot identify Auschwitz or any other Nazi death camp. And there is every reason to assume that much fewer than half could identify the Gulag Archipelago (20 million-plus murdered); the Ukrainian forced famine (5 to 6 million murdered in a little over a year); Mao's Great Leap Forward (about 60 million murdered); or Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (about one in every four Cambodians murdered).

As noted, almost no one outside of Russia has ever heard of the Russian Civil War, let alone knows anything about it. One reason is that the winners, the communists, had no desire that people know about it. Yet, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, about 10 million people, the great majority noncombatants, were killed.

Why don't students know about evil?

The first reason is that nearly all the genocides of the 20th century were committed by communists, and the Left, which runs virtually all educational institutions, has always had a soft spot for communism. If people were to recognize that communism has been the greatest source of evil in the modern age in terms of numbers murdered, number of lives destroyed, liberty stolen, and the sheer amount of human suffering inflicted (greater by those metrics than those of the Nazis before they were forcibly stopped), the Left would lose much of its appeal.

Another reason is the foolish notion that people are basically good. This has been a left-wing belief since the French Enlightenment leader Jean-Jacques Rousseau came up with the idea. As he wrote in his book, "On Philosophy, Morality, and Religion," "Man is a naturally good being, loving justice and order; there is no natural perversity in the human heart... All the vices imputed to the human heart are not natural to it."

This nonsense had been foreign to the Western mind. Its view of humanity was rooted in the Bible, and neither Bible-based religion -- Judaism or Christianity -- affirmed the goodness of the human heart. As Genesis states, "The will of man's heart is evil from his youth," and the rest of the Bible repeatedly warns us against following our hearts.

However, as the West began to abandon the Bible, including belief in the God of the Bible, Westerners began to believe in man. As Marx put it, "Man is God." People had no choice. For if there is no God to believe in, one must believe in man -- or one has literally nothing to believe in. Therefore, belief in man's inherent goodness became both psychologically and philosophically necessary.

A third reason follows from the second. With the exception of the mass murder of the Armenians (which was committed by Muslim Turks), the genocides and the other horrors of the 20th century were committed by secular regimes. Given the centrality of secularism to leftism, this fact has been kept from young people. Likewise, the fact that all these genocides were committed by big governments is not taught to young people because big government is also central to left-wing ideology. In other words, a true depiction of the evils of the 20th century would mean the end of the two pillars of left-wing ideology: secularism and big government.

If you want to make a more moral world, you must begin with the study of evil. But, for the reasons enumerated here, the Left is not -- and cannot be -- interested in fighting real evil. So, the Left fights made-up evils: American systemic racism, transphobia, capitalism, carbon emissions, sexism and former President Donald Trump, to name a few.

This is why young people know almost nothing about evil. The Left doesn't want them to know about it. Because knowledge of evil inevitably leads directly to rejection of the Left. [source]

Great points. Dennis Prager's last comment sums his essay up quite nicely: "This is why young people know almost nothing about evil. The Left doesn't want them to know about it. Because knowledge of evil inevitably leads directly to rejection of the Left."

AI and Smart Wisdom

From John Stonestreet on Breakpoint.org (Apr. 27):

Recently, Jensen Huang, CEO and co-founder of  NVIDIA, was asked to name the smartest person he knew. He replied by suggesting that the meaning of“smart” has been made obsolete by machines. He then offered an updated definition:

I think long term the definition of smart is someone who sits at that intersection of being technically astute, but human empathy and having the ability to infer the unspoken, around the corners, the unknowables.

Recently, my Colson Center colleague Dr. Glenn Sunshine suggested that if a scholar from hundreds of years ago was shown what AI can do, he’d be both impressed and disappointed. “You know a lot,” he might observe, “but you understand nothing.” As much as our machines can do, more is not always better. Having all the information and data from history, science, literature, art, philosophy, and medicine constantly accessible at our fingertips is hardly making us wiser.

Last month, a quote from the novel Dune went viral on X. It read, “Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” Of course, Frank Herbert, who wrote the sci-fi series, was basically repeating an earlier observation from C.S. Lewis.

In a recent controversial essay entitled “Something Big is Happening,” Matt Shumer, CEO of OthersideAI, sparked an intense and wide-ranging conversation with this stark admission:

I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just . . . appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.

Shumer is not bragging. He’s alarmed about the future of work and the need for humans to do it in the world he is helping to create. You might say that he is concerned that AI will replace human work. We should also consider how our technologies have replaced human wisdom.

Nearly a century ago, in his “Choruses from ‘The Rock,’” TS Elliot foresaw this confusion:

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,

All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.

Or, as C.S. Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man,

For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.

What has been lost in the uncritical embrace of technological advancement are the insights of ancient wisdom. Lost in the consistent pursuit of ease and pleasure are the habits that cultivate virtue. It’s not fundamentally a question of being for or against specific technologies. It’s that it is not sufficient to be technically “smart” if we are not also morally wise. What matters most for our collective futures are not which capacities and tools we can develop, it is what sort of people we are.

Knowledge can be dangerous when in the hands of the foolish, the immoral, or the wicked. Wisdom is not just the ability to “see around the corners of life.” Rather, it is the ability to live in light of what is true and good. It is about knowing the realities of the world, seen and unseen, and bowing to the One who created it this way. [source]

Don’t think AI will ever have smart wisdom that’s why people can’t lose it and should cherish it.

The Insanity of Denying Free Will

From Breakpoint.org (Nov. 20, 2023):

In his book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton observed that even insane explanations for the world can have a perverse consistency. A madman who thinks he’s the king of England has a ready explanation for anyone who denies his claim: They’re conspirators trying to keep him from his throne. “His mind,” wrote Chesterton, “moves in a perfect but narrow circle.”

Chesterton’s asylum example also applies to a recent article published at Phys.org about a scientist who has written a book to convince everyone that humans don’t have free will. Neuroendocrinologist and MacArthur “genius grant” winner Robert Sapolsky has studied people and primates for over 40 years. In his book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, Dr. Sapolsky argues that humans are molecular machines, wholly determined by our genes, our environments, and our past. Thus, our behavior, even when condemned as criminal or evil, is no more a choice than “the convulsions of a seizure, the division of cells or the beating of our hearts.”

Of course, the implications if this were true would be incredible. As a Los Angeles Times reporter memorably put it:

This means accepting that a man who shoots into a crowd has no more control over his fate than the victims who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It means treating drunk drivers who barrel into pedestrians just like drivers who suffer a sudden heart attack and veer out of their lane.

However, rather than justifying or enabling acts of violence, Sapolsky believes his deterministic view of human choices could actually make society better:

The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over. We’ve got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn’t there.

Sapolsky’s argument isn’t new. It is, in fact, the standard, reductive version of metaphysical naturalism, which teaches that all phenomena have material causes. Since these causes are themselves materially caused, nature is a closed system of dominoes. In this theory, an observer with perfect knowledge of the initial conditions of the universe could accurately predict every event that followed, right down to the choices individuals make about what to eat, where to live, who to love, what to believe, and even whether to kill.

The problem, which philosophers and writers over the years have pointed out, is that if everything is determined and humans do not have a free will, that would include the belief in metaphysical naturalism and every part of the thought process that led to it. Assuming this view, the reason Sapolsky believes what he does has nothing to do with what he has learned in his research or whether it’s true. Instead, it is the predetermined result of a long process of material causes stretching back to the Big Bang. His book, his arguments, and his belief that they’ll somehow make the world a better place are not meaningful. They’re just the latest dominoes to have fallen, and it could never have been otherwise.

In his book Miracles, C.S. Lewis critiqued this brand of reductive naturalism:

[N]o account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight. A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished.

To his credit, Sapolsky seems aware of this absurdity but just accepts it: “It is logically indefensible, ludicrous, meaningless to believe that something ‘good’ can happen to a machine,” he admits. “Nonetheless, I am certain that it is good if people feel less pain and more happiness.”

But why is it good for people to be happier or have less pain if everything is determined? Why is it preferable to live in a society marked by peace and safety, instead of chaos and violence? And why appeal to people to make a meaningful choice between these options when their choice is already determined and meaningless? 

Chesterton’s answer to such small, reductive worldviews was to confront them with the immensity of the real world and human experience, and to notice how they do more explaining away than explaining.

We know our choices are not mere results of physical processes, and that they have a deep moral significance. We know it so deeply that even those trying to convince us we’re mere machines must contradict themselves by treating some choices, such as their choice to write books to convince readers, as if they mean something.

In the very act of denying our moral responsibility in a moral universe, we must, in some sense, act as if meaning exists. It’s a crazy effort to deny meaning, but that doesn’t stop even geniuses from trying it. All the more evidence of our profound freedom, and of our ability to abuse it. [source]

Information Warfare: An Interview With Dr. Robert Malone

From Zachary Emmanuel on Countere.com (June 16, 2022):

There are many moments one could call the definitive end of the 60s—the resignation of Nixon, the Manson murders, Altamont—but one last leprous gasp was heard from the decade’s corpse in February of 2022, when 76-year-old Canadian citizen Neil Young removed his music from Spotify in protest over The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Rogan’s transgression? Interviewing Dr. Robert Malone, a renowned pioneer in mRNA vaccine technology and horse farmer, about his concerns over mRNA vaccine technology. The hippie movement is diseased and dead.

……

What sources or institutions can we trust?

As a scientist, I'm trained not to trust anything.

In the medical world, my intellectual home is pathology. Pathology is essentially the quality control discipline for the entire medical care system. That's the nature of an autopsy—not just to ascertain the truth of an individual and their death, but to provide quality assurance for hospitals in the entire medical system. We're trained in pattern recognition, we detect and discern signal from noise, we’re trained to do this in the medical world.

As a scientist, I was rigorously trained to question everything, including myself. [I use] the intellectual structure called The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses [pdf]. The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses was originally published in Science Magazine in the late 1800s. So these are fundamental philosophies of medicine and clinical research that I'm speaking of.

The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses addresses the problem that exists for scientists, which is that we have a tendency to use a system of scientific questioning that we call hypothesis-driven research. The problem with hypothesis-driven research as a tool to discern truth is that it suffers from what's called “strong inference”—the tendency of a scientist to say, “I know the answer, I have a hypothesis, it’s my hypothesis, and I take ownership of it.”

What happens when you do that is that you will bend truth and reality and information to conform with your hypothesis. I don't normally discuss The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses. I'm speaking about this because I know that your magazine [Countere] thinks about these kinds of underlying philosophical issues.

I've been trained to approach the world as a cluster of information. That information is divided into three compartments. One is, there's the Known, the things that we can all agree on: the Earth is generally round, it orbits the sun, gravity exists. These have been divisive at various times in human history, but now we're pretty convinced those are solid truths.

Then, there’s the world of Knowable but Unknown. If we apply the Scientific Method—which is increasingly a new priesthood, but that's another problem—if we rigorously apply the Scientific Method to this world of Knowable but Unknown things, we can gradually pull truth out of that information cloud and place it into the world of the Known.

Then, there's a third compartment of information. This is the Unknown Unknowable. And that's basically the world of faith. That's the intellectual space of things which we are not able to directly perceive or measure, which may or may not exist. And we can't really apply the Scientific Method to this thought space. We can't get data to test hypotheses. This is the world of philosophers and theologians.

I've been trained on the first compartment, the Known. Then there’s this middle compartment of stuff that’s Knowable but Unknown, and that’s the world I’ve always lived in, first as a young academic and then as a scientist and pathologist.

I had thought that I didn't have to apply that kind of intellectual rigor to the world of politics or public policy or economics. I thought that that was all being adequately handled by other experts that were similarly objective. Now we learned that absolutely not the case, and all of us are forced into becoming citizen-scientists-philosophers, whether or not we're trained.

I didn't choose to be one of the “Leaders of the Resistance,” to use a Star Wars metaphor. But having been placed in that position through circumstance—because I was early in speaking out about certain things, and I had a background that enabled me to legitimately question what was going on—I now find myself with the burden of responsibility of that leadership, and it's one that I don't take lightly. Feeling that responsibility results in some self-editing, some self-censorship. There are things that I observed, for instance, about the World Economic Forum that are so far beyond what average people can accept that I have to self-censor. Otherwise, I'll be labeled as a crazy person. [read more]

Cultural Spectacles and the Eternity in Human Hearts

From Breakpoint.org (Feb. 10):

This past weekend, a pair of events drew global audiences. The Opening Ceremonies of the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics and Super Bowl LX in San Francisco are the most recent installments of events that have become contemporary cultural flashpoints and feature the clash of worldviews.

Thankfully, this year’s Opening Ceremonies were tame compared to recent Olympics, especially the debauched 2024 Paris debacle. This time, Grammy-winner Mariah Carey performed the Italian classic “Volare,” invoking much online discussion centered about whether she was lip-syncing. With that as the biggest controversy, parents could breathe a sigh of relief and say to themselves, “Well, at least it wasn’t Paris.”

And it’s a good lesson for future host nations: avoid overt desecration of things much of the world considers holy. Instead, as the iconic Olympic rings came together in the arena, NBC announcers noted how these games focused on “harmony between seemingly dueling ideals,” symbolizing an emerging global unity.

Seattle fans are happy, but the pre- and post-game buzz of the Super Bowl had far more to do with the dueling halftime shows than the game itself. The NFL’s official halftime show was headlined by Bad Bunny while an alternative show, produced by Turning Point USA, was described as entertainment “without parents having to worry about shielding their children’s eyes.” That’s been a very real concern since the infamous 2004 “wardrobe malfunction” and several provocative performances since. Many also noted the irony of Kid Rock being the family-friendly alternative, but he was. The Bad Bunny performance featured homoeroticism and, for those who understand Spanish, sexually charged lyrics.

As expressions of worldviews, both the Opening Ceremonies and the Super Bowl, in distinct ways, demonstrate a reality of the human condition. God made people to yearn for something larger than themselves. This longing, which can take the form of athletic struggle and triumph, national pride, or an idealized vision of global harmony, is embedded in humanity’s created nature. As C.S. Lewis observed in Mere Christianity:

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. . . If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

The Olympic ceremonies reflected this human longing specifically. The theme of peace and the joining of the rings presented a dream for harmony and unity that recalled the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, in which John Lennon’s “Imagine” served as a theme song of the Opening Ceremonies:

Imagine there’s no countries

It isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

The song, which is often played at nostalgic cultural moments, captures the utopian vision of progressivism: a world without borders, conflict, or transcendent authority, in which humanity is perfectible and human nature is inherently good. Of course, the dissonance between the song and the reality of the human condition, especially given the nation hosting those Olympics, was palpable. At the time, Beijing was actively persecuting Uighur Muslims, clamping down on churches, and violating the 50-year agreement about Hong Kong.

In fact, from the Tower of Babel onward, history is full of the futility and dangers of seeking unity above everything else. Often, it is sought by replacing God with government. Scripture describes how God “put eternity into man’s heart,” and how creation “groans” waiting for Christ’s redemption to be complete. So, what humanity actually longs for is not a utopia, but for our Creator. When that longing is sought outside of Christ, it manifests in what is profane, idolatrous, and futile.

Unity and cooperation are high ideals but remain fleeting and incomplete when pursued apart from God. Christians have the opportunity to bring clarity and meaning to these human longings. As Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 5, “Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.” Christians who are anchored in the truth of what Christ has accomplished and the assurance that He is making all things new are empowered for faithful engagement in this world.

Lewis captured well the paradox that intentional and continual looking to the eternal “does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history,” he continued, “you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.”

Humans always hunger for more meaning, purpose, and transcendence than fleeting spectacles such as the Olympics or the Super Bowl can provide. Today, in addition to the deep-seated longing etched into every human heart are the failed utopian visions that promised what they could not deliver. Thus, Christians have both the opportunity and responsibility to respond with courage and clarity to point people to the true Reconciler, the Prince of Peace. Only Jesus Christ can fully satisfy the eternity God has placed within us. [source]

Amen.

Democracy Can Be Trusted Because Citizens Can Be Trusted

From The Public Discourse.com (Mar. 7, 2023):

In the wake of disappointment that the “red wave” never materialized after the 2022 midterm elections, some prominent conservatives expressed skepticism about democracy, citing historical failures to end slavery and abortion, suggesting that the culture war has been lost due to the electorate’s embrace of the tenets of the left, and even attacking universal suffrage.

Frustration at the midterm results is understandable, but critiques of democracy tend to be shortsighted. After all, the alternative to democracy is always some form of elitism—which hardly has an unblemished historical record. Furthermore, I doubt that the midterm results really mean that the average American now believes in the values of the hard left (abortion on demand, open borders, CRT, gender ideology, queer theory, anti-Americanism and all the rest). For example, Alexandra DeSanctis has persuasively argued in these pages that pro-life legislation fared poorly in the states not because voters are actually pro-choice, but because conservative leaders have failed to articulate a clear, coherent, commonsensical pro-life program that they could get behind. I suspect that a similar case can be made for the other issues mentioned above. So the problem isn’t that voters have pernicious views and can’t be trusted; rather, elected officials have offered them poor choices.

Therefore, it would be foolhardy to discard democracy for elitism. In fact, democracy is superior to elitism, however bad the results of any given election may seem. Democracy, construed properly, safeguards against tyranny, and it recognizes the fact that most voters’ moral sense can be trusted.

Wallace Mendelson, a late friend and mentor, was fond of saying that “no man is really fit to govern another.” Every human being is endowed with reason, and knows his circumstances and needs better than anyone else does—and most people tend to have sound moral judgment (more on that later). Mendelson’s simple statement contains the moral basis of democracy: people ought to have a say in the decisions that shape their lives. In a similar spirit, Abraham Kuyper declared: “No man has the right to rule over another man, otherwise such a right necessarily, and immediately, becomes the right of the strongest. … Authority over men cannot arise from men.” Democracy, when it’s working properly, allows men to rule themselves.

Our democracy in particular—which perhaps is more accurately called a constitutional republic—keeps total power from falling into any one person’s hands. And Lord Acton told us why when declaring that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Fallen human nature ensures that those who wield power will almost always succumb to pride. Democracy helps keep a check on the pride that elite rule fosters in people.

Elites have always argued that ordinary people are incapable of governing themselves. But this argument about capability misses the moral basis for democracy mentioned above: however much of a mess ordinary people may make of self-government, the fact remains that “entitlement to rule cannot be taken from one on the basis of the IQ, experience, knowledge or expertise of another.” Again, every person is rational by nature and should have a say in the laws and rules that govern his life.

Epistemic Democracy and Condorcet’s Jury Theorem

One political thinker, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet, offers a compelling defense of democracy that can instruct those today who are becoming increasingly disillusioned with democracy. Condorcet was a distinguished mathematician, inspector general of the Paris Mint under Louis XVI, member of the Legislative Assembly and National Convention, and leading critic of the French Constitution of 1793—for which he was branded a traitor and lost his life. In 1785, he published his Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions. The Essay put forward the “Jury Theorem,” which examines how increasing electorate (“jury”) sizes affects democratic decision making.

Condorcet was an “epistemic democrat.” That is, he believed that democracy cannot be justified on purely procedural grounds. Epistemic democracy presupposes that there are truths in politics, and that social rules are justified based on the likelihood that their application can be trusted to produce good (“true”) policies or outcomes. Another way of putting it is to say that democratic rules are not (and cannot be) neutral with respect to competing conceptions of the good, as contemporary liberal ideology holds. For Condorcet, both moral relativism and proceduralism are unworkable.

In a nutshell, the Condorcet Jury Theorem states that the probability of a group of voters reaching a decision that is in accord with the truth (the “right” decision) is derived from the probability that each voter in that group reaches the right decision. So if the probability of each voter reaching the right decision is greater than 1/2, then increasing the size of the group will increase the probability that the group will choose rightly. The more the group grows, the larger this probability becomes. On the other hand, if the odds of each voter picking the right decision are smaller than 1/2,  then the larger the electorate becomes, the lower the chances the group will decide rightly.

Recently, Condorcet’s result has been generalized beyond majority rule to plurality voting and to situations in which most—not necessarily all—voters are likely to choose “true” policies. So it is not necessary that every voter’s individual probability of choosing rightly be greater than 1/2, only that the average voter’s is. The math still works. The probability of a correct choice increases dramatically as the size of the electorate increases. [read more]

Losing Our Religion: Blue Laws Decline While Deaths of Despair Do Not

From Breakpoint.org (Sept. 23, 2022):

A mortal affliction affects much of America’s heartland. Known as “deaths of despair,” both the Rust Belt and Appalachia have seen incredible spikes in rates of addiction, overdoses, violence, and suicide. In addition to the thousands who die each year by various forms of self-harm, thousands more live Gollum-like, trapped by their chemical chains and in loneliness.

It is a complex situation. While we must not diminish anyone’s moral agency, the downward paths we are on are paved, lined, and greased by a number of contributing factors. For example, Beth Macy, the author of the book Dope Sick, has documented the lethal partnership of doctors and drug companies, not to mention the co-option of government oversight agencies, which inflicted a plague of highly addictive opioids on some of America’s poorest areas of the country.

A new recent study, however, points to an additional complexity, an oft-ignored element of this cultural disease: the decline of religion. According to the study’s authors, there is some correlation between the end of so-called “Blue Laws” and the opioid epidemic. In certain parts of the country, Blue Laws have long limited the range of activities allowed on Sundays. Certain businesses were not allowed to be open, and certain things (especially alcohol) could not be sold. Though these laws continue in certain areas, particularly in Europe, they began to disappear in parts of the United States as the 20th century wore on, to the point that now they are few and far between.

Of course, a significant, culture-wide phenomenon like the opioid crisis cannot be reduced to something as simplistic as whether or not people can shop on Sunday. To do that would be to mistake causation for correlation, kind of like saying murders go up with ice cream sales. And this is something the study’s authors readily admit.

Rather than claiming that the end of Blue Laws created the opioid crisis, they use the end of Blue Laws as a marker to track the decline in American religiosity. The diminishing connections to faith in communities across the country, especially in those areas where they were once so strong, are among the factors that contributed to our nation’s chemical plague. In other words, Blue Laws are a kind of canary in the coal mine, marking when we’ve crossed a dangerous line.

In light of these diminishing religious commitments, reinstating Blue Laws likely will not lead to a reversal in rates of addictions or other deaths of despair. Even if they were an important part of our cultural life of faith at one time, too much has changed for such an easy fix. However, what these laws represented and what has been lost as they disappear points to the underlying causes, not only of the opioid crisis but many of our parallel pains as well.

What we need to ask is, in a mix of Friedrich Nietzsche and REM, what is the cost of losing our religion?

As much as we prize our individualism, particularly here in America, human beings aren’t just dust motes of consciousness, floating on the air currents of life. We’re connected, not just to one another, but to a host of other elements through relationships that give us meaning, identity, direction, and hope. To be healthy, as individuals and as communities, these relationships (upward, inward, outward, and downward) must be strong.

Human beings need a connection to something beyond ourselves, something higher and transcendent in order to find ourselves, to know who and what we are, to be sure of our identity. We need connections with one another, especially the links of family and friendship, in order to be accountable, supported, and complete. And, we need proper connection to the physical world around us, so to be tethered to reality through things like meaningful labor, a place to call home, and some part of the world to call “mine.”

Marx got it wrong. Religion isn’t the opiate of the masses, but instead a part of life most needed, irreplaceable by technological convenience or scientific mastery. The loss of religion has been a bad idea wherever it has been tried, and those suffering across Appalachia and the Rust Belt are some of its most obvious victims. By abandoning religion, specifically the Christianity which once provided meaning to these now missing relationships, the essential connection between individuals and communities and a higher purpose has been lost.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said all the way back in 1983, “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Blue Laws didn’t hold off the effects of substance abuse, but the religious impulse that such laws represented were part of a way of seeing life and the world, one in which we weren’t just reduced to being cogs or animals or sexual expressions. The Christianity that the world has rejected offers the hope that the world so desperately needs. [source]

Is AI Just Another Tool, or Something Else?

From Breakpoint.org (Jan. 8, 2024):

It’s not uncommon to hear artificial intelligence described as a new “tool” that extends and expands our technological capabilities. Already there are thousands of ways people are utilizing artificial intelligence. All tools help accomplish a task more easily or efficiently. Some tools, however, have the potential to change the task at a fundamental level. 

This is among the challenges presented by AI. If in the end it is not clear what AI is helping us to achieve more efficiently, this emerging technology will be easily abused. AI’s potential impact on education is a prime example.

Since the days of Socrates, the goal of education was not only for students to gain knowledge but also the wisdom and experience to use that knowledge well. Whether the class texts appeared on scrolls or screens mattered little. Learning remained the goal, regardless of the tools used.

In a recent article at The Hill, English professor Mark Massaro described a “wave” of chatbot cheating now making it nearly impossible to grade assignments or to know whether students even complete them. He has received essays written entirely by AI, complete with fake citations and statistics but meticulously formatted to appear legitimate. In addition to hurting the dishonest students who aren’t learning anything, attempts to flag AI-generated assignments, a process often powered by AI, have the potential to yield false positives that bring honest students under suspicion.

Some professors are attempting to make peace with the technology, encouraging students to use AI-generated “scaffolding” to construct their essays. However, this is kind of like legalizing drugs: There’s little evidence it will cut down on abuse. 

Consider also the recent flood of fake news produced by AI. In an article in The Washington Post, Pranshu Verma reported that “since May, websites hosting AI-created false articles have increased by more than 1,000 percent.” According to one AI researcher, “Some of these sites are generating hundreds if not thousands of articles a day. … This is why we call it the next great misinformation superspreader.”

Sometimes, this faux journalism appears among otherwise legitimate articles. Often, the technology is used by publications to cut corners and feed the content machine. However, it can have sinister consequences.

A recent AI-generated story alleged that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s psychiatrist had committed suicide. The fact that this psychiatrist never existed didn’t stop the story from circulating on TV, news sites, and social media in several languages. When confronted, the owners of the site said they republished a story that was “satire,” but the incident demonstrates that the volume of this kind of fake content would be nearly impossible to police.

Of course, there’s no sense in trying to put the AI genie back in a bottle. For better or worse, the technology is here to stay. We must develop an ability to evaluate its legitimate uses from its illegitimate uses. In other words, we must know what AI is for, before experimenting with what it can do.

That will require first knowing what human beings are for. For example, Genesis is clear (and research confirms) that human beings were made to work. After the fall, toil “by the sweat of your brow” is a part of work. The best human inventions throughout history are the tools that reduce needless toil, blunt the effects of the curse, and restore some dignity to those who work.

We should ask whether a given application of AI helps achieve worthy human goals—for instance, teaching students or accurately reporting news—or if it offers shady shortcuts and clickbait instead. Does it restore dignity to human work, or will it leave us like the squashy passengers of the ship in Pixar’s Wall-E—coddled, fed, entertained, and utterly useless?

Perhaps most importantly, we must govern what AI is doing to our relationships. Already, our most impressive human inventions—such as the printing press, the telephone, and the internet—facilitated more rapid and accurate human communication, but they also left us more isolated and disconnected from those closest to us. Obviously, artificial intelligence carries an even greater capacity to replace human communication and relationships (for example, chatbots and AI girlfriends).

In a sense, the most important questions as we enter the age of AI are not new. We must ask, what are humans for? And, how can we love one another well? These questions won’t easily untangle every ethical dilemma, but they can help distinguish between tools designed to fulfill the creation mandate and technologies designed to rewrite it. [source]

AI should be used a tool. Using it any other way, can lead you into precarious territory. So, be cautious. We are living in interesting times.

The Insanity of Denying Free Will

From Breakpoint.org (Nov. 20, 2023):

In his book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton observed that even insane explanations for the world can have a perverse consistency. A madman who thinks he’s the king of England has a ready explanation for anyone who denies his claim: They’re conspirators trying to keep him from his throne. “His mind,” wrote Chesterton, “moves in a perfect but narrow circle.”

Chesterton’s asylum example also applies to a recent article published at Phys.org about a scientist who has written a book to convince everyone that humans don’t have free will. Neuroendocrinologist and MacArthur “genius grant” winner Robert Sapolsky has studied people and primates for over 40 years. In his book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, Dr. Sapolsky argues that humans are molecular machines, wholly determined by our genes, our environments, and our past. Thus, our behavior, even when condemned as criminal or evil, is no more a choice than “the convulsions of a seizure, the division of cells or the beating of our hearts.”

Of course, the implications if this were true would be incredible. As a Los Angeles Times reporter memorably put it:

This means accepting that a man who shoots into a crowd has no more control over his fate than the victims who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It means treating drunk drivers who barrel into pedestrians just like drivers who suffer a sudden heart attack and veer out of their lane.

However, rather than justifying or enabling acts of violence, Sapolsky believes his deterministic view of human choices could actually make society better:

The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over. We’ve got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn’t there.

Sapolsky’s argument isn’t new. It is, in fact, the standard, reductive version of metaphysical naturalism, which teaches that all phenomena have material causes. Since these causes are themselves materially caused, nature is a closed system of dominoes. In this theory, an observer with perfect knowledge of the initial conditions of the universe could accurately predict every event that followed, right down to the choices individuals make about what to eat, where to live, who to love, what to believe, and even whether to kill.

The problem, which philosophers and writers over the years have pointed out, is that if everything is determined and humans do not have a free will, that would include the belief in metaphysical naturalism and every part of the thought process that led to it. Assuming this view, the reason Sapolsky believes what he does has nothing to do with what he has learned in his research or whether it’s true. Instead, it is the predetermined result of a long process of material causes stretching back to the Big Bang. His book, his arguments, and his belief that they’ll somehow make the world a better place are not meaningful. They’re just the latest dominoes to have fallen, and it could never have been otherwise.

In his book Miracles, C.S. Lewis critiqued this brand of reductive naturalism:

[N]o account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight. A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished.

To his credit, Sapolsky seems aware of this absurdity but just accepts it: “It is logically indefensible, ludicrous, meaningless to believe that something ‘good’ can happen to a machine,” he admits. “Nonetheless, I am certain that it is good if people feel less pain and more happiness.”

But why is it good for people to be happier or have less pain if everything is determined? Why is it preferable to live in a society marked by peace and safety, instead of chaos and violence? And why appeal to people to make a meaningful choice between these options when their choice is already determined and meaningless? 

Chesterton’s answer to such small, reductive worldviews was to confront them with the immensity of the real world and human experience, and to notice how they do more explaining away than explaining.

We know our choices are not mere results of physical processes, and that they have a deep moral significance. We know it so deeply that even those trying to convince us we’re mere machines must contradict themselves by treating some choices, such as their choice to write books to convince readers, as if they mean something.

In the very act of denying our moral responsibility in a moral universe, we must, in some sense, act as if meaning exists. It’s a crazy effort to deny meaning, but that doesn’t stop even geniuses from trying it. All the more evidence of our profound freedom, and of our ability to abuse it. [source]

It is insane to deny freewill.