How many Richard Dawkins can dance on the head of a pin?

Andrew Klavan and Bill Whittle discuss whether an atheist can be a conservative.

Condoms, Human Flourishing and the Meaning of Life...

...or Houston, we have an existential problem:

Nor is it clear what this has to do with a government that occasionally lends a hand to deserving individuals in distress. For all those who need a condom to “keep them from falling,” as well as those whose “ability to succeed in modern America [is] imperiled” for want of a rubber, here’s my crude, heartless, I’ve-got-mine-Jack advice: pursue your dreams and buy one. We are not talking about paraplegic orphans. We are talking about Georgetown law students—the most privileged members of our society, who are training for their future calling (government, or hanging on to it) by haranguing us: you owe us.

I don’t suggest for a moment that Henry actually believes this claptrap. The point, which I think he underestimates, is that a country that doesn’t simply laugh the “free condoms” crowd out of town—without need of explanation—is in serious trouble. The very fact that clever pols can turn this no-brainer into a “wedge issue” makes you wonder about the reservoir of good sense out there.

Maybe conservatism has become disconnected from the thought that “the average person has a moral life that is worth leading and pursuing,” and maybe it neglects or slights the fact that government can at times foster that pursuit. But even if so, that ain’t the major problem. The contemporary transfer state is not about moral worth and aspirations. The administration’s “Julia” had no aspirations and no coherent plan of life, and the government in her story had no objective beyond assuring her that whichever way she might drift or be tossed, there’ll be a government program. To put the point in a sentence: while one can perhaps imagine a government that would help “average” people to realize their transcendent hopes and aspirations, our actual government is designed to wring any meaning out of life. The cheap, nasty free condom campaign encapsulates that agenda.

Henry Olsen is searching for a distinction between a hand up and a handout—between the uplifting and the tawdry, the compassionate and the grasping. But that’s hard to articulate even on paper, and harder still to observe in practice. And against it stands liberalism’s limitless, all-encompassing ethos: If I can’t have my condom, you might as well kill widows and orphans. If conservatism and the GOP often seem disconnected from “average persons” and their need, in distress, for government help, maybe that’s because they sense that before you can explain the needed distinctions, you have to explain that enough is enough and indeed, altogether too much. That strikes me as the right impulse. The hard question is whether even that much, or that little, can still be explained.//

What if, in the effort to make sure that Georgetown law students don't have to shell out a couple of bucks on a Friday night, the paraplegic orphans - who, lord knows, have less political pull than Georgetown law students - get lost in the taffy yank?

The Epistemic Closure of the Echo Chamber of the Left...

...in Academia.

Timothy Dalrymple writes about the Haidt study on how Conservatives understand Liberals but Liberals don't understand Conservatives:

Further, Haidt (a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, and a former liberal who became a centrist in the process of conducting this research) finds that liberals and conservatives alike form their political beliefs according to three values: caring for the weak, fairness, and liberty. Yet conservatives also hold to three other values: loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity. This accounts in part for the liberal failure to understand conservative viewpoints. As Chivers puts it, “Conservatives can understand the morality of liberals, but much of conservative morality is alien to their opponents.”

This corresponds exactly with my own observations of the educated liberals among whom I lived and worked in academia for many years. Precisely the social institution that is supposed to encourage Americans to understand both sides of the argument, and precisely those individuals who repeatedly teach that we should enter sympathetically into the worldviews of those who differ from us, have by and large failed to encourage a charitable understanding of conservative beliefs and motives and have conferred a flat, exaggerated sense of what conservatives think.

And:

By any measure–self-identification, voting patterns, campaign donations–American academia is overwhelmingly liberal. From 1999 to the present, 75% of campaign donation money from professors has gone to Democrats and 10% has gone to Republicans. In some fields, such as law and the humanities, the voting and giving often skews between 90% and 100% toward Democrats or other liberal parties like the Green Party.

The liberalization of the American educational establishment has been a colossal failure. Liberals overtook the universities because (reasonably) they saw them as the way to shape a more progressive society in the long term. They insisted that they could set aside their own partisan beliefs and teach in ways that are fair to both sides. It is abundantly clear, however, that a progressive political mindset prevails in the American university system, especially at the elite levels. It’s more difficult for conservative professors to be hired or receive tenure, it’s more difficult for conservative students to speak up without fear of the consequences, and liberal students emerge from the universities with a terrifically superficial understanding of the conservative mindset — and American society is the poorer for it.

When you look at the three values that conservatives (according to Haidt) honor but liberals do not — loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity — these are precisely the values that are flouted in the precincts of American academe. The result is a more impoverished moral imagination amongst students, a stubborn inability to understand the beliefs and the motives of conservatives, and thus the imputation of nefarious motives to those irrational conservatives who do not see things in the ways the illuminati do. If you don’t believe that this has contributed to the partisanship we’ve observed in recent years — particularly the exceedingly nasty way in which liberals in general have responded to the Tea Party movement, to social conservatives and generally to anyone who refers too much to moral sanctity and loyalty to American traditions and institutions, then I think you’re wearing exactly the kind of blinders Haidt talks about.

Why do liberals Leftists make such bad arguments?

According to Tom Chivers at the Telegraph:

Here's a distressing fact, for a liberal. Liberals, on one small but extremely important metric, are wrong far more often than conservatives.

Jonathan Haidt, the moral psychologist, shows as much in his book "The Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion", which I've mentioned before and which my colleague Ed West and I have been reading from our differing political perspectives. The measure is a simple one: how well do they understand their political opponents?

They asked two thousand Americans to describe their political leanings (liberal, moderate, conservative) and fill out a questionnaire about morality, one-third of the time as themselves, one-third of the time as a "typical liberal", and one-third of the time as a "typical conservative". The clear answer was: self-described conservatives and moderates were much better at predicting what other people would believe. Liberals, especially the "very liberal", were by far the worst at guessing what people would say, and especially bad at guessing what conservatives would say about issues of care or fairness. For example, most thought that conservatives would disagree with statements like "One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenceless animal" or "Justice is the most important requirement for a society".

Where does this come from? Why do a significant number of liberals think that conservatives are animal-torturing thugs who don't care about anyone but themselves? (Admittedly a number of conservatives think that liberals are crypto-Stalinists bent on world domination, or something, but according to Haidt that's not the majority position.) For Haidt, it's because our morality is not based on reason, as we fondly imagine, but on intuition – an instant, unreasoned response more akin to our taste in food than to our rational thoughts. He argues convincingly that our reasoned arguments are post-hoc justifications for gut reactions; our ability to construct such arguments does not exist to get us to the truth, "truth" rather than usefulness being of limited survival value, but instead to justify to others why we act the way we do, like an on-board press secretary. We're social creatures, and have evolved extraordinarily good systems for making ourselves look good to other members of society.

The trouble is that liberals, in general, base their morality almost exclusively on three "flavours" – care for others, liberty from oppression, and fairness – whereas conservatives use those three plus another three: loyalty to one's group, sanctity and sacredness, and respect for authority. So conservatives can understand the morality of liberals, but much of conservative morality is alien to their opponents.

Another, simpler explanation is that liberals are able to live in an insular, parochial world where they are never exposed to anything but the caricature of conservatives; conservatives, on the other hand, who watch the news or television or go to movies or go to school or college, can't help but be exposed to liberals.

This may be worth getting.

‘Lilyhammer’ Review: Anti-Leftist Catnip for Liberty-Loving Conservatives.

Arriving on Kindle any second now....

....David Mamet's "The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture."

Because I love conversion stories.

The Apostate.

It looks like David Mamet is not going to be invited to all the right Hollywood parties:

With all the talk of Hollywood liberalism — the endless leftist blather from Sean Penn and Tim Robbins, the cozying up to Castro and Chavez by Oliver Stone and Danny Glover, the jejune Iranian peace-making by Annette Bening and Alfre Woodard, etc., etc — it’s fascinating that the two leading playwrights in the English language (the smart guys) — Tom Stoppard and David Mamet — identify as conservative/libertarians.


For Stoppard — born in Communist Czechoslovakia — this was natural, but for Mamet — a Chicago Jewish child of the sixties — it was a considerably longer slog. As he relates in his superb new book The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, “I had never knowingly talked with nor read the works of a Conservative before moving to Los Angeles, some eight years ago.”

Mamet certainly made up for lost time. Barely ten pages into his book, you know this man has read, and thoroughly digested, the major conservative works of our and recent times, from Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman and on to Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele. And he is able to explicate and elaborate on them as well as anybody.

Not that the playwright’s political transformation is such a surprise. In 2008, he wrote an op-ed for The Village Voice (of all confrontational places), “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead’ Liberal.” That article was somewhat more tentative than its title, which may have been added for dramatic effect by the newspaper’s editors.

Not so The Secret Knowledge. Mamet has come a ways in three years from a chrysalis bewildered and astonished by his new found views to an author writing in white heat. The new book is a full-throated intellectual attack on liberalism in almost all its aspects from someone who was there, a former leftwing intellectual of prominence, a Pulitzer Prize winner even (and one who deserved it, unlike the New York Times’ Walter Duranty).

Mamet's reason for "converting" could read from a thread I recently was involved with on Facebook:

We were self-taught in the sixties to award ourselves merit for membership in a superior group–irrespective of our group’s accomplishments. We continue to do so, irrespective of accomplishments, individual or communal, having told each other we were special. We learned that all one need do is refrain from trusting anybody over thirty; that all people are alike, and to judge their behavior was “judgmental”; that property is theft. As we did not investigate these assertions or their implications, we could not act upon them and felt no need to do so. For we were the culmination of history, superior to all those misguided who had come before, which is to say all humanity.

I pray that, sometime in my lifetime, the self-satisfied '60s will finally end.

Dogs living with cats - Conservatives against the War.

Jonathon Aitken's recent column begins:

When a respected conservative magazine becomes an anti-war magazine its readers and writers should sit up, take notice, and examine their consciences.

That's for sure.

The column is a worthwhile examination of "just war" issues as applied to Afghanistan.  And to make it even more bizarre, Joe Biden comes off as the only person in Washington asking the right questions.

A theory of moral sentiments

Freedom is not for everyone. It is for those who have the habits that make living free possible. As Daniel Heninger observes:

What really went missing through the subprime mortgage years were the three Rs: responsibility, restraint and remorse. They are the ballast that stabilizes two better-known Rs from the world of free markets: risk and reward.

Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down. And so we come back to the disappearance of "Merry Christmas."

It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.

The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines.

Feel free: Banish Merry Christmas. Get ready for Mad Max.

Still a Conservative

William Vallicelli offers some very useful thoughts in this time of confusion on what it means from a philosophical standpoint to claim to be a conservative.

Good stuff.

Draining the Fever Swamp.

William F. Buckley's last lesson to Americans about how to deal with kooks.