A man in the arena

Instapundit, The Corner, and Michelle Malkin are all blogging the election. But the left wing American Prospect is silent. I checked their history and they have blogged on Sundays past.

Let us hope they stay that way.

Even the BBC is reporting the election as a success. Prudence calls for us to wait for the numbers before we break out the bubbly. But the BBC is not on the side of democracy on this one, so hope is strengthened.

John Kerry on Iraq's elction:

"It is hard to say that something is legitimate when whole portions of the country can't vote and doesn't vote," Kerry said.

This is our disloyal opposition. Add this to Senator Kennedy's Vietnam comparisons and the sum is a public diplomacy campaign against the election. There is nothing constructive in these comments. They are ignorant, partisan, and dangerous.

The media has not come close to emphasizing the importance of today's election in Iraq. If it fails, we fail. This line from the BBC (via The Belmont Club) gives hope.

"A lot of women turned out and their numbers dwarf those of the men. I have seen very old people unable to walk, I have seen blind people being led to the polling stations."

Peggy Noonan had a negative reaction to the President's speech. She is worried that his attempt to rid the world of tyranny is overly ambitious because "Again, this is not heaven, it's earth. . . ."

Her words are a rephrasing of an old school conservative saying coined by the Political Philosopher Eric Voegelin. Voegelin believed utopians made the error of trying to force utopia, or the glory of heaven foretold in the Book of Revelations, onto our imperfect world. He believed that only tragedy could follow this attempt at the obviously impossible. Subsequently, I have spent the last few years trying to work these words into an argument:

Don't immanentize the eschaton.

Jonah Goldberg' National Review column today has his usual, and entertaining, style of tying together an important idea with trivial pop culture references. The pop culture reference is a comparison of the college movies Old School and Animal House. I will ignore that important debate.

His philosophic idea is a short discussion of technology, change, and conservatism. Conservatism is a project in which the traditional persuasions are challenged by the love of freedom. At least that is the dichotomy of the American strain of the movement. Goldberg never seems to delineate the fact that American conservatism is far different from European conservatism. He may find that this would challenge his love of Edmund Burke or he may just not feel that it is an unimportant point.

But the difference is important because American conservatism is a project that defends the ideas of the Constitution, which strictly speaking are an early variant of what is now known as classical liberalism. By protecting our freedoms, natural society will develop, well naturally. So American conservatism is a political project. And as a political project it should not use the government to oppose the development of the vast majority of technologies and the social change they create (birth control), but that it should oppose social change by government fiat (i.e. gay marriage legalized by judges and not be legislatures.) The conservative tactically accepts Hayek's point (Dough! A European.) that society will evolve spontaneously when not coerced.

Which leads to Goldberg's examples of technologies that have damaged our social fabric: Cars, the birth control pill, the Internet, and television. While there is a lot of truth in his point, his example sows the seeds of his argument's destruction. The newest technology with the biggest impact is the Internet. But the Internet is not destroying the fabric of society as much as it is mending it. Thousands of people online have reached out and found friendships and interests through their computers. Yahoo! Groups, The Dean campaign, MoveOn.org, the blogosphere, EBay, and countless personalized homepages have created connections between people who may never have met. And these connections are the basic building blocks of communities that will develop in ways that the older, and better, Sociologists would recognize.

The dominance of the Internet is greatly exaggerated. But it is a tool. It is a small tool, but an effective one that will help our social fabric. And the conservative point here is that the best thing the government ever did regarding the Internet was deciding to do nothing regarding the Internet. Surely, we can agree on that.

Allow me to add a small note to my post below. All three speakers that I saw played straight to type. Brooks was good natured and optimistic. He seemed a quintessential suburban dad in America. Sommers was earnest and driven by facts. She must be an intense and difficult professor of philosophy. And Derb was Derb. Just the sort of guy a kid does not want on his paper root. Of course if I had a daughter about to become a teenager, I would not only be mean, I would carry a gun.

Explain this to me. The first reports regarding a threat on my fair city of Boston indicated that there were six people involved. Now the number has jumped to ten "as a result of the ongoing investigation." The FBI is still calling the information “uncorroborated and from a source of unknown reliability and motive.” Huh?

If we know that the information has changed then there has to be a second source. The “ongoing investigation” must have found something, or the FBI gave us half the information in the first place. Something is missing.

This is not a conspiracy theory post. I do not think the FBI is hiding important information from us. If they need to hide classified information, they would not leave that fact laying around in public. I think the press is doing a hack job reporting it to us.

I know: old news.

Yesterday, an Army recruiter was forced out of a Seattle Community College by a mob. I am sure these self-righteous lefties are mighty proud of their accomplishment. But what it boils down to is that they will not allow one person to talk to another. Free Speech is vital, unless it is a Soldier talking positively about the Army to a civilian.

Note one thing: there will not be any Dan Rather special reports on the suppression of speech, Ted Kennedy will not decry the assault on freedom, and the liberal political commentators will remain silent. Maybe they do not want to anger their base, maybe they think the Army is an evil brainwashing institution, but for whatever reason, they will ignore a man silenced by the threat of violence. The Left is intellectually bankrupt.

A few days ago I had the pleasure of attending a discussion on Tom Wolfe’s latest opus “I Am Charlotte Simmons.” The Independent Women’s Forum sponsored the event which was titled “Who’s Afraid of Tom Wolfe?” Two distinct views on the book were explicated. While I had to duck out early due to a prior commitment, it was well worth attending.

After the customary introductions there were 4 speakers, of which I heard the first three. David Brooks of the New York Times went first. Probably our most famous living pop sociologist, he had a positive view of the book with the exception of the books one glaring omission. He described it as very well written and unfairly treated. But he also stated that it missed the fact that the modern ivy-league student lived a highly regimented life. They race through each day passing through all the appropriate checkpoints, in order to run the next race and pass through all the appropriate checkpoints in Corporate America. Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute said much the same thing with statistics. She referenced a multitude of sociological studies that demonstrate that today’s college student is less promiscuous, less drunken, and more goal oriented that his predecessors.

The National Review’s John Derbyshire (pronounced Dar-byshire) took a different tact. Derb is the curmudgeon of the Right, Russell Kirk with a hangover. He didn’t fail to elicit a few chuckles and a few awkward moments. A mathematician by training he was more interested in the relationship between modern science and man’s view of himself. Wolfe really dug into this theme in both the classroom scenes in “I Am Charlotte Simmons” and in his collection of essays “Hooking Up.” Derb made an interesting ontological point using homosexuality as an example. Homosexuality was once considered an action, something someone does, now it is a state of being, something someone is. Obviously Derb chooses an example that causes an anxious reaction. But the question is how can a person be held responsible for something that is embedded in his nature, if he cannot choose to be different? And how if this choosing is impossible can anyone choose to be good?

While I cannot do justice to the entire evening in this space, allow me to make a few comments. Sommers and Brooks miss the mark. Brooks has got to realize that he is talking about a sub-species of the college student much like Wolfe does in his book. Except Wolfe writes about multiple sub-species that inhabit the college universe, and Brooks speaks of one. Brooks sees diligent driven decent Americans in the classroom, indeed Brooks looks at the classroom battlefields and lo and behold the enemy is himself. As like is attracted to like, he misses the broader picture that Wolfe describes.

Sommers went empirical The average college student will be very ignorant of college life as it was lived even two years before he arrives on campus. The trend that she sees in the numbers while possibly true may not tell us how the student sees himself. If a college student is having less sex now than in 1990 that may not mean that his self-image is any less tied to his ability to bed co-eds. Where Wolfe’s aim is true is defining the idea of masculinity in the life of young Americans. To be fair Sommers threw out a large amount of information that should be given a more serious treatment than I am giving it here.

Derb makes an unoriginal point, but a very important one. In the light of modern science how can we see a moral framework for human life? Defining these issues in this context will always lead us back to Nietzsche. But Nietzche looked into the abyss of nihilism and went mad. The lesson would seem to be that we should find another path. But events are forcing us in this direction.

This discussion did nothing to take away from Wolfe’s book. And as you can see the discussion ranged quite far. This is evidence of Wolfe’s greatness as a writer. He does not answer questions he forces us to ask them.

If you wonder why I joined the Air Force Reserve, read this article.

In the same article noted below psychologist, Nicholas Humphrey replied:

“I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-importance - so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others' lives.

How does “natural selection” have a “purpose”? Purpose demands intention, and intention implies consciousness. Aristotle would not have seen the difference between this and a God.

The smug self assurance of our scientist-priest class may be less annoying if it was not grounded in such obviously fallacious reasoning.

Richard Dawkins said the following in response to the question “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"

“I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all "design" anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.”

Is this not the idea that underlies all of his atheistic beliefs? He wants atheists to call themselves “brights” because they accept an evolutionary explanation that he cannot prove. Forgive me, but for a scientist who claims to have the rational argument that is not very bright.