Enchantment and Morality

Atheism advocates a disenchanted world, but morality itself is a kind of enchantment. For instance, atheistic materialism disenchants humanity itself, saying that humas are just matter, like rocks or bacteria—there is no spirit, God, or divinity setting us apart from anything else (living or non-living) in the universe. But does the atheist say that rocks or bacteria should “work together for the good of all other rocks or bacteria” as a matter of morality? If not, then why should humans, whom the atheist insists, are mere matter themselves, do so? If the atheist says that humans are different than rocks or bacteria because they have free will, then he’s just re-enchanted the world and violated his own materialism, since free will is decidedly non-material (and not detectable scientifically). They dismiss spirit, God, miracles, and other products of religion as “superstition” and claim to be hard-nosed realists willing to confront the harsh reality of a disenchanted world, until the moment they realize that this would lead them straight where Nietzsche went—to a transvaluation of all values—at which point they pull back and re-enchant the world with talk of “moral duties” “human rights” and “the golden rule,” all of which goes against their entire materialist/disenchantment project. This, as I see it, is the ultimate problem of trying to ground morality in atheism.

Disrupting Higher Education with Assessment

As someone who believes there is quite a bit of corruption, sclerosis, and waste in higher education, I welcome the announcement of the creation of Austin University—a new institution dedicated to the pursuit of truth—but I also think it’s not going to be the disruptive force that higher education needs. The main reason colleges and universities (particularly the Ivies and their equivalents) have had such staying power, despite their well-documented dogmatism and decline in quality, is their signaling function. Currently, we have nothing comparable to a college degree that adequately communicates intelligence, conscientiousness, the ability to work with others, and flexibility across a wide range of dimensions (academic fields and modes of activity). So the disruption will come from an alternative signaling system that communicates what university degrees currently do. The ideal institution, then, would not be just another university with a mission statement that most of the others already have (Harvard’s motto is “veritas”), but one that assesses, measures, and communicates what a bachelor’s degree currently communicates, but at much lower cost in both time and money. I can foresee, for instance, a six month (rather than four year) “boot camp” for young people in which they are constantly evaluated on a range of exams and activities that, for six months, test what it currently takes colleges four years to test. Young people might brag someday about “tier 1 at boot camp” the same way they currently brag about a bachelor’s from Yale. I’d say the place to start, then, is to take standardized testing, use that as a core, and build from there.

The Virgin Birth, the Male Birth

Yet more evidence that the New Woke Orthodoxy is a religion that replaced the old Christian orthodoxy: they both require belief in immaculate conception miracles. Christianity had as one of its founding doctrines the idea that a virgin miraculously gave birth; the New Orthodoxy has as one of its central doctrines the idea that a man can miraculously give birth. Five centuries ago, if you had asked an independent observer who had never encountered Christianity which would be more miraculous, a virgin giving birth or a man giving birth, she likely would say the latter. The “rational optimists” who encourage us to abandon the old orthodoxy and embrace “rationality” are not themselves being rational. Those who took the Pinker/Dawkins/Ridley advice and “progressed beyond” Christianity only embraced a new irrationality that requires just as much faith to accept, but employs medieval methods of enforcement. A thousand years ago you could lose your job for refusing to believe in a virgin birth, now you can lose your job for failing to believe in a man birth. Is there any doubt that this is a regress to barbarism?

Hard writing means easy reading

The easier something is to read the harder it was to write. This is counterintuitive. We assume easy reading means easy writing, but the opposite is the case. Authors need to get in this mindset of doing the work of cutting the clutter, making clear, and rendering intelligible their sentences so that their readers don’t have to. From a utilitarian point of view, this is ethically preferable since sentences are generally read more times than they are written.

Smoking and Socialism

The arguments for socialism are like arguments for smoking—they depend on anecdotes. There’s the person who just started smoking who is nonetheless healthy, leading many to proclaim the virtues of smoking until the moment the person falls deathly ill (like Venezuelan socialism). There’s the person who smoked heavily, got really sick, and so cut back to a pack a month and now is seen as the model of a healthy smoker (like Swedish socialism). And then, of course, there are all the people who just smoked and died (like Soviet socialism), to which we can always say, “They just weren’t smoking the right way.” As with socialism, the best way to know the effect of smoking is to run a regression analysis. When we do, we find that—controlling for other variables—the more smoking the less healthy the body, and the more socialism the less healthy the economy. Until we can find a correlation between socialism and positive economic outcomes, I’ll be considering smoking and socialism in the same light.

The New Orthodoxy summarized in two slogans

“Latest is greatest,” and “Might makes wrong.”

The Boy Who Wolf Cried

We are all aware of the “crying wolf” phenomenon: past lies destroy credibility when real threats arise. But isn’t there a related and opposite phenomenon that past truths can create credibility for false threats? Just because there was no wolf twice in the past, that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t a wolf the third time; but just because there were wolves twice in the past, that doesn’t mean there is a wolf this time. People cried racism in the past and there was racism, but the “Boy Who Wolf Cried” principle means that, because of past racism, we are far more likely to have a lower threshold of evidence when people cry racism in the present (even accusing those who ask for evidence of themselves being “Racist”). The Boy Cried Wolf when it came to Covid suppression (don’t wear masks! Masks can end the pandemic! Lockdown for two weeks! Lockdown indefinitely to reach zero COVID) and now people don’t believe public health officials when they are telling the truth about vaccination. Similarly, The Boy Wolf Cried when there was slavery and Jim Crow, but that shouldn’t lead us to throw out standards of evidence about racism in the present and often times claims of “systemic racism” simply use the word “systemic” as a stand-in for “invisible” (i.e., lack of evidence). Take claims of racism seriously but demand regular standards of evidence lest we become like the Boy Who Wolf Cried.