Sandefur on Satisfactory Explanations

In a recent post, Sandefur demonstrates his open-mindedness on the subject of the supernatural:

Magical explanations aren’t really explanations at all; they simply move the Mystery to a higher shelf. * * *
Richard Dawkins: “If you’re allowed just to postulate something complicated enough to design a universe intelligently…[y]ou’ve simply allowed yourself to assume the existence of exactly the thing which we’re trying to explain…. You’re simply not providing any kind of explanation at all.”

This argument is wrong. An example: John Smith is dead of a head wound in a cabin in the woods. Someone posits that some unknown person must have killed him. The response: "But that isn't an explanation at all, because now we just have the mystery of who the unknown person is and why that person would kill Smith. Therefore, an unknown person couldn't have been involved."

Wrong. You can explain one thing on one level, and still be left with a mystery on another level. If John Smith really was killed by some unknown person, then that is the explanation for his death. We might now need an explanation for the unknown person, but that is an entirely separate question.

Let's generalize: Suppose that we see the phenomenon Y happening. Someone says that X must be the cause. It is absolutely, totally, and completely beside the point to say, "But we don't have an explanation for X itself." So what? That's no basis for ignoring X. If X is the cause of Y, that's just the way things are. It would be nice to have an explanation for X too, but we can know that X caused Y even if we don't know (yet) that W caused X.

The same is true here. Assume that God really did heal someone. If that happened, then it might be a mystery why God exists, and why God would heal her and not someone else. But that doesn't change the fact that -- by the very assumption of this hypothetical-- God's healing is the proper explanation for why the person was healed. The fact that a mystery remains doesn't undermine the fact that there IS an explanation for her healing.

The source of the confusion is that Sandefur and Dawkins seem to rely on a principle akin to this: "Nothing can count as an explanation unless it explains everything, without pointing to anything that is currently unexplained." But there is no reason to think that this principle is true. Indeed, they wouldn't accept this principle if the explanations involved were naturalistic. No one would say, "You can't rely on the existence of dark matter to explain the movements of stars, because that just pushes the mystery to another level." No: If dark matter causes the motion of stars, then that's the way things are, whether or not we currently understand all there is to know about dark matter.

Or perhaps the confusion arises because the unstated principle is this: "Nothing outside the scope of my knowledge or understanding can possibly exist. Thus, if something is offered as an explanation but points to something I can't fully understand, it must be false." Again, there's no reason to think that this principle is true. No one is guaranteed that they will personally understand every explanation of everything that ever happens.

Now, one can think of many possible supernatural explanations that are absurd and untrue. Those whose mind runs to the absurd will respond with something like this: "Ah, but are you really saying that I can 'explain' the rain by saying that it was caused by invisible fairies?" No. Neither I nor anyone else has ever implied that every phenomenon should be slapped with a supernatural explanation willy-nilly. As it happens, the fairies-causing-rain explanation doesn't work. But why? Not because fairies themselves haven't been explained satisfactorily. The reason this explanation doesn't work because there's no evidence that there are fairies or that they caused the rain in the first place. There and there alone is where a supernatural explanation might fall short. And indeed, most or all explanations might happen to fall short there. But if there were evidence of fairies, no matter how slight, it would be silly to dismiss that evidence on the grounds that fairies can't cause anything unless their existence has been fully explained.

Chesterton on the Gospels

G.K. Chesterton, The Way of the Cross (1935).

If the Gospel description of the Passion of Jesus Christ is not the record of something real, then there was concealed somewhere in the provinces ruled by Tiberius a supremely powerful novelist who was also, among other things, a highly modern realist. I think this improbable. I think that if there had been such a uniquely realistic romancer, he would have written another romance, with the legitimate aim of money; instead of merely telling a lie, with no apparent aim but martyrdom.

Law Review Article by John Yoo

Here's an interesting law review article by John Yoo, who formerly worked at the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice, and who has returned to teaching in the face of ill-advised attacks. It concerns whether international law should allow preemptive war:

Using Force

JOHN C. YOO
University of California at Berkeley School of Law

UC Berkeley Public Law Research Paper No. 530022
University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 71, Summer 2004

Abstract:
This paper explores the international law governing the use of force in the wake of conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Developments since the conclusion of World War II, such as the emergence of international terrorism and rogue states and the easier availability of weapons of mass destruction, have placed enormous strain on the bright line rules of the UN Charter system. This paper argue that a more flexible standard should govern the use of force in self-defense, one that focuses less on temporal imminence and more on the magnitude of the potential harm and the probability of an attack. It further argues that the consensus academic view on self-defense - that force is justified only as a necessary response to an imminent attack - which was largely borrowed from the criminal law, makes little sense when transplanted to the international context. It concludes by questioning whether self-defense, grounded as it is in a vision of individual rights and liberties in relation to state action, is the proper lens through which to view the use of force in international politics. Rather than pursuing doctrinal or moral approaches, this paper addresses the rules governing the use of force from an instrumental perspective. It asks what goals the international system, and its most currently powerful actor - the United States - should seek to achieve with the use of force, and whether the current rules permit their pursuit. An approach that weighs costs and benefits to the stability of the international system, which could be seen as an international public good currently provided by the United States and its allies, might better explain recent conduct and provide a guide for future action.

Can Movies Teach Moral Philosophy?

That's the title of a New York Times article. I don't understand all of the author's thesis, but this paragraph seemed right on:

Mr. Cavell argues that in American comedies of the 1930's and 40's the genre changed. The couple begins by being married and then splits up -- or fails to recognize their affinity -- until they are properly reunited in marital friendship. These comedies tend to end in the country rather than the city, and authority tends to remain unacknowledged. Mr. Cavell calls these films 'remarriage comedies.'

Remarriage comedies. That's a perfect description for several films that the article doesn't mention. For example, Hitchcock's one comedy: Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Then there are Cary Grant's hilarious movies My Favorite Wife and The Awful Truth.

Iraq and Al Qaeda

Here's a useful summary of the evidence of ties between Iraq and 9/11. If that seems implausible, remember (or learn) that Bill Clinton and Richard Clarke once thought that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda. Yes, the same Richard Clarke who has lately posed as a critic of that very view:

Vernon Loeb, Embassy Attacks Thwarted, U.S. Says; Official Cites Gains Against Bin Laden; Clinton Seeks $10 Billion to Fight Terrorism, Washington Post, A02, January 23, 1999.

* * *
Clarke did provide new information in defense of Clinton's decision to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles at the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, in retaliation for bin Laden's role in the Aug. 7 embassy bombings.

While U.S. intelligence officials disclosed shortly after the missile attack that they had obtained a soil sample from the El Shifa site that contained a precursor of VX nerve gas, Clarke said that the U.S. government is "sure" that Iraqi nerve gas experts actually produced a powdered VX-like substance at the plant that, when mixed with bleach and water, would have become fully active VX nerve gas.

Clarke said U.S. intelligence does not know how much of the substance was produced at El Shifa or what happened to it. But he said that intelligence exists linking bin Laden to El Shifa's current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts and the National Islamic Front in Sudan.
* * *

It's also worth remembering (or learning) that Clinton's Justice Department and the FBI under Clinton filed an indictment in federal court against bin Laden, alleging (among other things) that al Qaeda had agreed to work on "weapons development" with Iraq:

"In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the Government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq," the indictment said.

Cable Unbundling

Many have argued recently that the federal government ought to issue more intrusive regulation of the cable industry. Specifically, people have said that cable companies should allow customers to choose which channels they want to purchase. If all you want to watch is the Home and Garden Channel, MTV, and C-Span, you should be able to buy those three channels and nothing else.

Glenn Reynolds has endorsed this idea, while John McCain has colorfully complained that cable consumers "have all the choice of a Soviet election ballot." Conservative pro-family groups like the idea of refusing to buy vulgar or distasteful programming. But it's not just conservatives: The idea is supported by a broad and bipartisan swath of people across the country.

The metaphor of the grocery store is common. Brent Bozell has said, "If you go to the 7-Eleven to buy a quart of milk, you are not forced to take a six pack of beer, too." Similarly, a New Jersey columnist pretended that groceries were bundled as well: "I want milk and bread; they offer a "basic" bundle of milk, bread, cola, pizza, artichokes, lima beans, tampons, and beer. I can't get milk and bread without getting all the rest."

I haven't studied this issue in any detail. Still, a key distinction occurs to me: Groceries and most industries involve products that impose a significant marginal cost. If you have twelve average-priced items in the cart and add 100 more at the average price, you've added a lot of cost to the grocery store. Or, if you buy only a pack of gum, you've imposed a lot less cost on the store than the person who fills a cart to the brim.

This doesn't apply to the cable company. The signal is already there in the wire, whether you watch nothing at all or whether you buy three TVs and leave them on 24 hours per day. Cable, like other communications industries, has high fixed costs (i.e., the cost of running cable into your house in the first place) and practically zero marginal cost (i.e., it costs nothing more if you watch an extra program or channel). That's why the grocery metaphor just doesn't work here.

* * *

Normally, economic theory would say that an industry should price at marginal cost. But here that would be zero, or next to it, and this would leave the fixed costs uncovered. It would be impossible to supply cable on those terms.

There are several possible solutions: Ramsey pricing, in which the people who are going to demand the product regardless are charged proportionally more. Or, price discrimination, as airlines do when charging more for business travelers than for families on vacation or funeral-goers. Or, fully distributed cost pricing, in which each product or service contributes on some proportional basis to the fixed costs.

But cable companies have trouble following any of those schemes. Ramsey pricing is notoriously difficult without closely-tailored knowledge of price elasticities of demand. Price discrimination is also difficult, because the cable company might have difficulty pinpointing those customers who have a higher willingness to pay than anyone else. Plus, like most industries, they have trouble preventing sharing (unlike airlines, which require ID for that very reason). Fully distributed cost pricing is incoherent, because there is no agreed-on way to specify which services actually "imposed" the fixed costs in the first place, much less in what proportion.

So cable companies have settled on bundling as an option. You can buy two or three tiers of service, each with a distinct price and each with a distinct package of services.

Interestingly, newspapers have chosen essentially the same approach as well. They have high fixed costs (i.e., the costs of hiring reporters and editors, paying the bills, etc.), but very low marginal costs (i.e., the cost of printing an extra copy of the paper). So they bundle together an entire package of every type of news story that someone might want to read in a given day -- politics, human interest, local stories, sports, comics, TV schedules, classifieds, etc. Anyone who wants some piece of that package enough will pay the newspaper's subscription price.

But you can't expect the newspaper to satisfy each individual reader's idiosyncracies. Take the fact that I never read the sports section, and that I would be happy to have a newspaper without it. If I demanded that the newspaper carrier actually remove the sports section from the paper every day, I would be causing an extra cost to the newspaper. Thus, I should have to pay more, not less.

The same is probably true here. It would create a higher cost each time that a customer wants to block a channel, because the cable company has to go to extra trouble. It is as if it literally cost the grocery store more for you to leave 20 items behind rather than buying a full cart.

Again, I haven't studied this issue at all, but my instinct is to say that unbundling here is a very bad idea.

UPDATE: Read Arnold Kling's excellent essay on this topic.

Chesteron on Spiritualist Critics

The Well and the Shallows (1935):

At the moment I only wish to wallow in sheer shameless enjoyment of the way in which the Psychic News attacks the Catholic Church and attacks me. I admit that this is mere self-indulgence on my part. I know that numbers of judicious friends will tell me that I ought not to take any notice of such an article. But nothing that can be called human is uninteresting, and this involves, to begin with, one puzzle which always interests me very much. And that is why people who fly into a rage with the Catholic Church always use an extraordinary diction, or verbal style, in which all sorts of incommensurate things are jumbled up together, so that the very order of the words is a joke.

"Spiritualism depends only on the evidence which people receive in their own homes. It does not require priests. Neither do enquirers have to buy rosaries or beads, or crucifixes, or pay for candles or masses." It must be a dreadful moment of indecision for the enquirers, when they have to make up their minds whether they will buy rosaries or beads. But the last term is the best; and here the order of words is especially significant. Apparently the first object of a Catholic is to get a candle. If once he can get hold of a candle, and walk about everywhere clasping his candle, he is all right. But if he cannot get a candle, he has the alternative of purchasing a mass; an instrument that is a sort of substitute for a candle.

Chesterton on Puns

A little vignette from Chesterton's career:

The Well and the Shallows, chap. 1 (1935):

When I was a Pauline, an assistant master received a testimonial on leaving the school for a fellowship at Peterhouse. A solemn upper master made on this occasion the first and last joke of his life by observing in a deep voice, "We are robbing Paul to pay Peter." An old schoolfellow of mine, now a journalist but cynical even at that early age, declared that the older master must have engineered the whole career of the younger, and made him a teacher at that particular school and then a don at that particular College, solely in order to enjoy one moment of supreme triumph in making that single pun.

Chesterton on Science and Miracles

Chesterton gets it exactly right:

The Thing: Why I am a Catholic, chap. 28 (1929):

That Manichean horror of matter is the only intelligent reason for any such sweeping refusal of supernatural and sacramental wonders. The rest is all cant and repetition and arguing in a circle; all the baseless dogmatism about science forbidding men to believe in miracles; as if science could forbid men to believe in something which science does not profess to investigate. Science is the study of the admitted laws of existence; it cannot prove a universal negative about whether those laws could ever be suspended by something admittedly above them. It is as if we were to say that a lawyer was so deeply learned in the American Constitution that he knew there could never be a revolution in America. Or it is as if a man were to say he was so close a student of the text of Hamlet that he was authorised to deny that an actor had dropped the skull and bolted when the theatre caught fire. The constitution follows a certain course, so long as it is there to follow it; the play follows a certain course, so long as it is being played; the visible order of nature follows a certain course if there is nothing behind it to stop it. But that fact throws no sort of light on whether there is anything behind it to stop it. That is a question of philosophy or metaphysics and not of material science.

Another Chesterton Quote

Here's another:

The Thing: Why I am a Catholic, chap. 26 (1929):

It is the remark, "We need a restatement of religion"; and though it has been said thirty thousand times, it is quite true.

It is also true that those who say it often mean the very opposite of what they say. As I have remarked elsewhere, they very often intend not to restate anything, but to state something else, introducing as many of the old words as possible. . . . [T]hey do not really mean that we should give freshness and a new aspect to religion by calling it roly-poly or rumpti-foo. On the contrary, they mean that we should take something totally different and agree to call it religion. I mention, with some sadness, that I have said this before; because I have found it quite difficult to get them to see a fact of almost heart-breaking simplicity. It seems to strike them as being merely a fine shade of distinction; but it strikes me as a rather grotesque and staggering reversal. There would be the same fine shade of difference, if somebody of a sartorial sort came to me protesting that my aged father was waiting in rags on my door-step, and urgently needing a new hat and coat, and indeed a complete equipment; if he made the most animated preparations for the reclothing of my parent, and the whole episode ended by his introducing me to a total stranger begging for my father's old hat.

More Chesterton Quotes

Another Chesterton quote:

The Thing: Why I am a Catholic, chap. 27 (1929):

I HAVE chosen the subject of the slavery of the mind because I believe many worthy people imagine I am myself a slave. The nature of my supposed slavery I need not name and do not propose specially to discuss. It is shared by every sane man when he looks up a train in Bradshaw. That is, it consists in thinking a certain authority reliable; wich is entirely reasonable. Indeed it would be rather difficult to travel in every train to find out where it went. It would be still more difficult to go to the destination in order to discover whether it was safe to begin the journey.

Washington Post Column

As is so often the case, the most interesting thing to read on Sundays is the Washington Post column titled "Unconventional Wisdom." Today's edition theorizes that smarter people are more likely to be good-looking, shows that ex-homeless people are less likely to pity the currently-homeless, and suggests that Bush should think about going on Letterman or Leno within two weeks of the election.

Spam Poetry

I just got a spam email that featured this lovely little modern poem right after an ad for a mortgage quote:

When tomato beyond is lovely, chain saw near confess taxidermist near. Now and then, cloud formation living with throw at spider around. If dahlia over cashier reach an understanding with hand for bullfrog, then guardian angel related to beams with joy. Albert, although somewhat soothed by pocket related to and curse toward recliner. occident craven reportorial intuit documentary

A few thoughts occur:

1) "Dahlia over cashier" is a striking phrase. Not to mention "hand for bullfrog."

2) One can only imagine the travails of poor Albert, who was so forlorn that he was comforted by a mere pocket. Perhaps future poems will reveal the source of his unease.

3) Haven't we all cursed towards recliners? No wonder the imagery is so powerful at this moment. That said, sofas and chandeliers are clearly even more exasperating, and they should be added to the list here.

4) Some might suggest that the momentum of the first four sentences should be continued into a swirling climax, not dissipated in a phrase of 5 seemingly unrelated words. This is wrong. The true genius of the poet is shining through here: He refuses to be bound by trifling rules of grammar and syntax. Instead, he casts all caution to the wind in warning us of avoiding Michael Moore's pseudo-documentaries, which depend more on intuition than on reportorial honesty, and are presented to an occidental society that craves something that appeals to their partisan prejudices.

A Gas Tax

Daniel Gross of Slate has an interesting article on the growing number of conservatives who support a higher gas tax. The problem is that a gas tax is regressive: It hits poorer people harder.

So what to do? The article has this curious passage:

Both Easterbrook and Krauthammer say the cash raised from a gas tax could be used to reduce payroll or income taxes. But if you're not really raising taxes in the aggregate, then it's less likely to have an immediate impact on consumers. Many of the extra dollars you'd get in your paycheck would get spent at the pump.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The author doesn't understand the revenue recycling effect. The idea of "recycling revenue" is that you tax something that you think is harmful in some way -- carbon, pollution generally, gasoline, whatever. Then you use the proceeds to lower some pre-existing tax that is distortionary, or that taxes something that ought to be encouraged -- income, for example, or capital. It makes no sense to complain that this process is "not really raising taxes in the aggregate." So what? The point is that you should be raising revenue, to the extent possible, from taxing harmful things rather than beneficial things.

For example, I found one paper titled Environmental Taxes and Economic Welfare: The Welfare Cost of Gasoline Taxation in the U.S. 1959-99, by a post-doc at Princeton named Seung-Rae Kim. Here's a quote from the summary:

Moreover, in most years of the sample period, the measures of marginal deadweight cost of gasoline taxation (sample average 0.1882) are relatively small compared to those of labor taxation (sample average 0.2175). This implies a larger efficiency gain in the case of labor taxation in shifting from the existing distortionary taxation to lump sum taxation. These empirical results might suggest the modest possibility of social welfare gains from tax reforms that shift some of the burden of taxation off labor onto energy (e.g. gasoline).

Exactly. As the Pew Center says:

If permits are auctioned, this gives considerable sums of money to be recycled back into the economy, either through a lump sum payment of offsetting other taxes. If the existing taxes that are correspondingly reduced were very inefficient, this allows the possibility of both environmental and economic benefits from the trading system, commonly called the 'double dividend.'

There are many other papers that discuss this effect. Here's just a sampling of citations:

• Roberto Roson, Dynamic and Distributional Effects of Environmental Revenue Recycling Schemes (finding that a carbon tax, if used to lower taxes on capital, would have "mild positive effects on growth and welfare, with progressivity properties on income distribution").
  
  
• Ian Parry, Revenue Recycling and the Costs of Reducing Carbon Emissions.
  
  
• W.H. Parry, Roberton C. Williams III, & Lawrence H. Goulder, When Can Carbon Abatement Policies Increase Welfare? The Fundamental Role of Distorted Factor Markets, at 2 (Dec. 1996) ("Pollution taxes and other environmental policies that raise revenue allow that revenue to be recycled through cuts in the marginal rates of pre-existing distortionary taxes. The lower marginal rates reduce the distortionary costs associated with these taxes, thus providing an efficiency gain. This is the revenue-recycling effect. . . . [A] five percent reduction in carbon emissions is almost six times as costly under a quota than a carbon tax.).
  
  
• Dale W. Jorgenson & Peter J. Wilcoxen, The Economic Effects of a Carbon Tax, in SHAPING NATIONAL RESPONSES TO CLIMATE CHANGE: A POST-RIO GUIDE 237, 237 (Henry Lee ed., 1995) (noting that GNP could increase if the revenue from a carbon tax were used to “reduce taxes on capital”).

This is not to say that the double dividend from revenue recycling is a sure thing, and much is disputed over what form a pollution tax should take, what base it should reach, which tax or taxes should be lowered in response, etc. But the idea itself isn't a mystery.

Movie Previews

Just as I always thought: It is the same guy talking on all those movie previews:

The question of narration is a tricky one, thanks to Don LaFontaine, who is lovingly referred to in trailer circles as the 'Voice of God.' You've heard him. A veteran of 40 years and more than 4,000 trailers, his rumbling basso has enticed millions with dramatic intonations like 'In a world where . . .'

My Sister

I've posted about my sister Sarah LaFon's debut album before. Just a reminder that you can check it out here or here.

Crosses

Via Howard Bashman: The ACLU has threatened to sue Los Angeles to force it to remove a tiny cross from a tiny segment of the county seal. I don't mean to plant ideas in anyone's head, but I don't know why they're worried about a miniscule cross in a county seal that no one pays any attention to, when they could be suing over the very name of "Los Angeles." After all, it means "The Angels," and it comes from the name of a Catholic chapel called "Saint Mary of the Angels at the Little Portion."

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh and Tom Smith make the exact same point.

People for the American Way

The People for the American Way has issued a 60-page paper (here in PDF format) titled, "Courting Disaster 2004: How a Scalia-Thomas Court Would Endanger Our Rights and Freedoms." In it, PFAW makes the stunning find that Scalia and Thomas are generally conservatives, and that they have the gall to vote as such. I don't know how this has escaped public notice for so long, and surely PFAW will notify all the experts who previously thought that Scalia/Thomas composed the most liberal wing of the Court. Yet despite the valuable and ground-breaking nature of that assessment, PFAW misinterprets their record in several instances.

For example, on pages 9-10, PFAW says that a Scalia-Thomas Court could "threaten Americans' privacy rights" by reversing a Fourth Amendment case: "Reversal of City of Indianapolis v. Edmond (2000) would authorize police to set up highway roadblocks and randomly stop motorists, without suspicion, to look for drugs." PFAW later says this on page 18:

It would require only two more votes like Scalia and Thomas to overturn Court rulings and . . . permit the police to set up highway checkpoints to conduct suspicionless stops of random motorists to look for drugs (City of Indianapolis v. Edmond, 2000). It is no exaggeration to say that a Supreme Court led by Justices Scalia and Thomas would radically undermine privacy rights, including rights protecting some of the most deeply personal decisions people make.

True, in that case the Supreme Court did say that it was unconstitutional to allow random checkpoints for drugs. And Thomas did write a dissent saying that the program should be upheld if the Court had correctly decided two previous cases (Sitz and Martinez-Fuerte) that allowed random checkpoints to catch drunk drivers or illegal immigrants. But Thomas added a key point:

I am not convinced that Sitz and Martinez-Fuerte were correctly decided. Indeed, I rather doubt that the Framers of the Fourth Amendment would have considered “reasonable” a program of indiscriminate stops of individuals not suspected of wrongdoing.

In other words, if the "Thomas" view held sway, no random checkpoints would be allowed for any cause -- not for drunk driving, not for illegal immigrants, and not for drug users. This would be an expansion of liberty, exactly the opposite of what PFAW says.

Then there's this, on page 9:

Reversal of Hill v. Colorado (2000) would prevent states from enacting specific laws to protect people approaching health care facilities from harassment.

Yes, but reversing that decision would also protect the free speech rights of protestors to speak peacefully on public sidewalks. Rights conflict with each other all the time: If one person has a right not to listen, someone else necessarily loses the right to free speech. But acknowledging this obvious point would undermine PFAW's overall claim that a Scalia/Thomas Court would "endanger our rights." Instead, where Scalia/Thomas vote to protect constitutional rights, PFAW ignores that fact and recasts the decision as a constriction of some conflicting right.

For example, PFAW later faults Scalia/Thomas precisely for their failure to vote for free speech in each and every case that they have ever heard. For example, on pages 32-34, PFAW lists various cases where Scalia/Thomas have voted to give less protection to computerized child pornography, illegally-intercepted cell phone calls, or government-funded speech. Here Scalia/Thomas are criticized without any mention that there might be conflicting rights: The right of society not to be victimized by child pornography, or the right to conduct cell phone calls in privacy, or the right of voters to decide which speech to fund.

Moreover, PFAW goes on to say (pages 42-44) that Scalia/Thomas are at fault for their votes in campaign finance cases. When it comes to that type of free speech, PFAW's emphasis changes from "protecting rights" to "preventing corruption." Preventing corruption may be a good thing, but it definitely conflicts with the right to freedom of political speech, just as much as a restriction on newspaper spending would threaten the freedom of the press. Whether or not federal law has struck the correct balance, it is undeniable that Scalia and Thomas have sided with free speech here.¹ But PFAW ignores their protection of rights, and instead changes the subject.

In just the same way, PFAW condemns Scalia/Thomas for their votes in a couple of cases that struck down congressional legislation under the Commerce Clause (see pages 42-44), one where Congress had penalized the mere possession of a gun within 100 feet of a school, and one where Congress had tried to order state officials to conduct background checks. Here too, PFAW ignores the palpable fact that Congress's legislation under the Commerce Clause might often threaten rights -- the right to bear arms, or the right to due process, or the right of state officials not to be commandeered. PFAW may dislike these rights, but they are still "rights" that Scalia/Thomas's votes would protect.

Another thing I noticed was that the report, which purports to be fairly thorough, in fact ignores the subject of criminal procedure. Probably a wise decision, because it would be difficult even for PFAW to misinterpret or ignore the fact that Scalia and Thomas have sometimes taken positions that are more "liberal" than anyone else on the Court. (Examples: Apprendi v. New Jersey, or United States v. Bajakajian, or United States v. Hubbell.)

In short, if the PFAW report were accurately titled, it would look something like this: "Courting Disaster 2004: How a Scalia/Thomas Court Would Protect Rights That We Prefer to Infringe or Ignore, While Failing to Protect Other Rights As Often As We Would Like."


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

¹ Thomas has often pointedly criticized the opposite wing of the Court for using the Free Speech Clause to protect frivolous activities while ignoring political speech. For example, his separate opinion in McConnell v. FEC said:

Yet today the fundamental principle that "the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market," is cast aside in the purported service of preventing "corruption," or the mere "appearance of corruption." Apparently, the marketplace of ideas is to be fully open only to defamers, . . . nude dancers, . . . pornographers, . . . flag burners, . . . and cross
burners . . . .

And his dissent in FEC v. Colorado Republican Campaign Finance Committee stated, "I remain baffled that this Court has extended the most generous First Amendment safeguards to filing lawsuits, wearing profane jackets, and exhibiting drive-in movies with nudity, but has offered only tepid protection to the core speech and associational rights that our Founders sought to defend."

Bach

Two awesome Bach pages:

1. Via Father Jim Tucker, here's a page where you can listen to recordings of all of Bach's organ works. By comparison, the box set from Marie-Claire Alain takes up 14 CDs.

2. Via Crooked Timber, here's a page where you can listen to recordings of the entire Das Wohltemperierte Klavier. What's more, a running graphic follows along with the score, while an even more elaborate graphic actually maps out the various themes and sections as they appear. You can also read a detailed textual analysis of each piece. Just fascinating. One of my favorites has always been the Fugue in F-minor, which features a theme that is highly chromatic and, indeed, is almost a tone-row.

Proving Belief

From C. Stephen Layman, "Faith Has Its Reasons," in God and the Philosophers (Thomas Morris, ed.):

People often think it significant to assert that "God's existence can't be proved." A proof, I suppose, is something that will convince anyone who is intelligent enough to understand it. If so, very little of interest regarding major philosophical issues can be proved. This goes for issues in metaphysics, morality, political philosophy, and aesthetics. All or nearly all of the major positions under these headings are highly controversial. There are brilliant people on either side of the interesting fences. So, if we demand proofs in philosophy, we will wind up as skeptics on all or nearly all of the important issues. Surely that is not the way of wisdom. I often ask my students to imagine themselves giving an antislavery speech to a group of slave owners. What are the chances of convincing the audience? Slim to none. Surely, then, it is possible to have good arguments for a view even though these arguments are not recognized as such by groups of people who do not share our convictions.

James Weldon Johnson

A notable argument from a passage in James Weldon Johnson's book, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912):

[I]f the Negro is so distinctly inferior, it is a strange thing to me that it takes such tremendous effort on the part of the white man to make him realize it, and to keep him in the same place into which inferior men naturally fall. However, let us grant for sake of argument that the Negro is inferior in every respect to the white man; that fact only increases our moral responsibility in regard to our actions toward him. Inequalities of numbers, wealth and power, even of intelligence and morals, should make no difference in the essential rights of men.

Black Flight to Private Schools Is Growing

Via Tim Sandefur, a fascinating New York Times article on the fact that some black parents are fleeing the public school system:

Like the Catholic schools favored by many black parents, the Whitfield School has stuck to instruction in basic skills. The other day, the blackboard in Louise Browne-Jackson's first-grade classroom was equally divided into sections about phonics (sh, en), grammar (contractions) and mathematics (place value in three-digit numbers). Classes routinely recite aloud. Every pupil in pre-kindergarten is required to learn to read.

Such methods defy the favored approaches of many public school systems, including New York's, which downplay or altogether omit drilling and memorization. The traditional style appeals strongly, however, to A. B. Whitfield, who taught in public schools for 17 years before founding Trey Whitfield (named for his late son) in 1983. And the curriculum has helped him attract a corps of experienced immigrant teachers, many of them products of the British-style schools in the Caribbean basin, for salaries one-third lower than those in public schools.

Nobody can argue with the results. On fourth-grade math and reading tests, more than 90 percent of Trey Whitfield students meet state standards, while barely one-third do so in the nearby public schools.

Granted, there might some selection effect, in that the parents who choose this school are precisely those who care deeply about and are involved in their children's education. But still, these educational methodologies seem to produce strikingly different results. What's stopping the public schools from trying an approach that just might work?

New Look

If you haven't noticed, I'm trying out a new look for this blog. Like it? If so, leave a comment. (By the way, I figured out to accept comments from non-Blogger users.)

Historians and Bush

A lengthy article states that an "unscientific" survey shows that academic historians hate Bush, and many think that he is the worst President of all time. I am no Bush apologist, and there are many areas where I disagree with his policies or choices. But I could charge most Presidents with being the worst in history, if I too were cavalier towards the facts, prone to hyperbole and exaggeration, and consumed with partisan prejudice. I only hope that these historians are more restrained by accuracy in their academic work.

Take a look, for example, at what some of them have said:

Indeed, Bush puts Nixon into a more favorable light. He has trashed the image and reputation of the United States throughout the world; he has offended many of our previously close allies; he has burdened future generations with incredible debt; he has created an unnecessary war to further his domestic political objectives; he has suborned the civil rights of our citizens; he has destroyed previous environmental efforts by government in favor of his coterie of exploiters; he has surrounded himself with a cabal ideological adventurers . . . .

Without the tediousness of disputing every item on that list, consider the idea that he "created an unnecessary war to further his domestic political objectives." Given that Bush's own father lost an election after winning a war against the same country, what could have conceivably made Bush think that there was any political advantage to be gained here? And what evidence is there, outside of conspiracy theories, that this was Bush's motivation?

"Suborned the civil rights of our citizens." It is a remarkable lack of perspective that could even begin to compare Bush's administration to Roosevelt's or Lincoln's in this regard, let alone suggest that Bush has somehow been worse.

"Surrounded himself with a cabal of ideological adventurers" -- as opposed to what? How is this a fault? Do other Presidents surround themselves with dissenters, say, members of the opposite party?

Then this:

Among the many offenses they enumerate in their indictment of Bush is that he is, as one of them put it, “well on his way to destroying the entire (and entirely successful) structures of international cooperation and regulated, humane capitalism and social welfare that have been built up since the early 1930s.” “Bush is now in a position,” Another historian said, “to ‘roll back the New Deal,’ guided by Tom DeLay.”

Right. Bush is going to roll back the New Deal. Why, he is so ideologically opposed to entitlements in any form that he pushed through a bill that raised Medicare coverage for prescription drugs. He's "well on his way" to destroying the entire welfare system; he may have left it untouched, mind you, but he's somehow at fault for Clinton's decision to sign welfare reform in 1996.

Then this:

“George W. Bush's presidency is the pernicious enemy of American freedom, compassion, and community; of world peace; and of life itself as it has evolved for millennia on large sections of the planet. The worst president ever? Let history judge him.”

What to say about someone who thinks that a mere political opponent is an "enemy" of "life itself."

Then this:

My own answer to the question was based on astonishment that so many people still support a president who has:

Presided over the loss of approximately three million American jobs in his first two-and-a-half years in office, the worst record since Herbert Hoover.

Overseen an economy in which the stock market suffered its worst decline in the first two years of any administration since Hoover’s.

My astonishment arises from the fact that a historian never seems to have heard of cyclical recessions, who really seems to think that the economy is the entire responsibility of whatever President is in office, and who thinks that Bush's policies caused an economic downturn that began long before he had put those policies into effect.

Or this:

Severely curtailed the very American freedoms that our military people are supposed to be fighting to defend. (“The Patriot Act,” one of the historians noted, “is the worst since the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams.”)

There's no evidence that any freedoms have been "severely curtailed" (as opposed to "slightly restricted"), and whoever said this has probably never read the Patriot Act.

* * *

In short, I'd hate to see what this bunch would say about Bush if inflation was as high as it was under Carter, if he rounded up an entire ethnicity and put them in prison camps (Roosevelt), if he just barely avoided nuclear war (Kennedy), if he suspended habeas corpus (Lincoln), if he owned slaves (Jefferson), if our economy was in a Great Depression (Hoover), if it turned out that our federal government was experimenting on black people with syphilis (every President between 1932 and 1972), if he presided over a massive theft of land from an Indian tribe and appointed a Supreme Court Justice who approved of slavery (Andrew Jackson), etc.

If I were going to warn students about the faults that they should especially avoid in their own work, I could do little better than to point to this article. Almost every possible academic fault outside of plagiarism is presented here: Lack of evidence, lack of nuance, lack of perspective, dishonesty, ignorance of historical facts, disguising partisan views as neutral expertise. There is much to criticize in Bush's performance and policies, but not in this fashion.

Sandefur on Chesterton

Tim Sandefur criticizes one of my Chesterton quotes below. I think his criticism is misguided:

The point Chesterton is trying to make is that science cannot tell us whether the soul survives death, therefore scientists shouldn’t express certainty on the subject. This argument is nonsense, as has been shown many times, but Chesterton conveys it with enough stuff to cover that fact.

No, Chesterton's argument doesn't have anything to do with certainty or uncertainty. Rather, it's about authority. If a doctor doesn't believe in the soul, it's not for medical reasons within his area of expertise. It's not that someone can disavow the soul if they have made a careful study of arthritis or heart disease or vascular conditions. Rather, the doctor's belief is for the same philosophical reasons that anyone might accept (or reject, as the case may be). When it comes to those reasons, the doctor might speak with as much certainty as anyone else.

In the absence of such a showing, it’s as irrational to believe that the soul survives death as it would be to believe that there is a teacup orbiting Pluto. No, you can’t prove that it isn’t so, but you can never prove a negative, and no person seriously interested in the truth will suggest that you do so. Rather than confront these epistemological problems, Chesterton simply characterizes this position as insufficiently imaginative: “there is nothing to make a medical man a materialist, except what might make any man a materialist.”

This point is mystifying. Chesterton said nothing about imagination, and he wasn't even trying to confront any "epistemological problems," for the simple reason that he wasn't trying to prove the existence of a soul in the first place. Rather, as stated above, his point was purely concerned whether science can claim any special authority on the subject. Thus, if a "medical man" is a materialist, it's for philosophical reasons that are open to anyone, not because of any specialized scientific expertise. His humorous examples -- about the surveyor and the fourth dimension, or the laborer and the solidity of matter -- make this clear. I.e., when it comes to the philosophical question whether matter is illusory, you can't resolve the issue by bringing in an "expert" laborer who has dealt with a lot of matter.

An Op-Ed

I have an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News here. You might have to register.