I had an interesting exchange a few days ago in a political discussion group, with a self-identified liberal who took issue with an off-the-cuff characterization I made about “rabid” and irrational Bush-haters.  The context of the conversation was about the nature of the lies and inaccuracies of politicians.

My gentle interlocutor seems a bright enough fellow, with more understanding of the principles of critical reasoning than most I’ve encountered in my online travels.  That credit ascribed, however, he insisted that I had committed an ad hominem, and that a “generous debater” would engage the substance of the argument assuming the best of intent on the part of the other.

Well, OK.  On a technical level, he is right that I dismissed out-of-hand the claims of what I’ll call, for the sake of this entry, the “Rabid Left.”  But it’s not clear that the Rabid Left actually presents an argument of intellectual substance worthy of reasonable engagement.

We all know that there are a number of smart, informed, passionate people who inhabit all parts of the ideological spectrum.  We also know that the spectrum contains people who are, to put it bluntly, dumb as rocks but don’t quite realize it.

Any reasonable person is worthy of civil discourse, conducted in a spirit of good-faith inquiry.  Unreasonable people aren’t, by virtue of their dismissal of sound thinking.

Consider the case of the Rabid Left.  Many of these people hate George W. Bush with passion.  They repeat the same claims as if they’re engaging in heroic truth-tellilng:  Bush is an idiot, Bush is a liar, Bush is a war criminal, Bush is a monkey, Bush is a puppet of the Evil Overlord Dick Cheney.

Do these people provide anything other than vitriol?  Rarely.  When they do defend their points, they often resort to assertions ungrounded in fact (e.g., “Bush lied about WMD”) or based on a most unkind character assassination (e.g., “Bush only attacked Iraq because Saddam tried to kill his daddy”).

How is a reasonable person to respond, short of dismissal?  Debate requires conformance to the basic principles of logic.  Things like the law of non-contradiction, the law of the excluded middle, syllogisms, the principles of valid inference — each of those things, employed in the analysis of objective fact, contribute to a coherent conversation.  A sequence of wild assertions does not.

It is both a strength and a weakness of contemporary liberalism that it remains committed to some sense of process fairness.  A strength, insofar as multiple perspectives are welcomed.  A weakness, insofar as most ideas are considered inherently equal and therefore equally entitled to consideration.  It is this weakness — this tendency to drawing moral equivalence — that has so confused much of the post-9/11 discourse in the West.

I have yet to decide whether I will attempt to rationally engage the Rabid Left in the future, or to just steer them a wide berth.  In the meantime, I can only pray that we move ever closer to a day when reason and not vitriol becomes the trump card in ideological disputes.

What would you do to save a life?

Would you leap into a burning building to rescue a child?  Jump into the river to grab a man who can’t swim?  Dive on a grenade to save your squad?  Wade into a group of rioters to pull an elderly woman to safety?

We like to think that we would perform these heroic acts — at the least, in service to family or friends.  Many say they’d even do them for strangers.  And a survey of the newspapers suggests that such things happen with heart-warming regularity.

In the language of duty ethics, philosophers call these types of actions supererogatory acts.  That is, they are things done which are morally praiseworthy but not morally required.  We have no duty to expose our own lives to real danger just to attempt the rescue of another; we all applaud the bystander who dives in front of a bus to knock the foreign tourist to safety, but no one seriously suggests that the bystander had an obligation to do so.

But what if you could save a life by doing something trivial?  Would you do it?  Or, more pointedly, would you refuse to do it?

Hospital errors are believed to be the fifth most frequent cause of death in the United States.  We are aware, no doubt, of the horror stories of people having the wrong limb amputated, or the wrong surgery performed.  These things happen, but relatively rarely.  More frequent are medication errors.  It’s been suggested by healthcare quality experts that patients have a 10 percent chance of having prescribed medications fail to be transcribed and administered, and there is upwards of a 25 percent chance that at some point during an inpatient stay, there will be a medication error of some sort for any given patient in any given hospital — most frequently, because the bedside nurse failed to double-check the dosage or to verify the patient’s identity.

Not only that, but people can die from nosocomial infections (infections acquired in a hospital, unrelated to the reason for the patient’s admission).  The single most effective method of preventing nosocomial infections is diligent hand-washing, yet time and again, clinical staff fail to follow the basic universal precautions.  In fact, a physician of my acquaintance counted the number of times he observed hand-washing one day while sitting with his dying father:  Of more than 25 individual encounters, not once did clinical staff wash their hands.

The irony is that many healthcare workers actually would engage in heroic acts to save the life of a stranger, even though most don’t do the routine things that, statistically speaking, would be more effective at saving more lives in the long run.

Of course, the phenomenon is not limited to healthcare; negligence seems to be a universal human trait.  Yet for all the obsessing we do about the value of human life, the cavalier attitude so many of us take to minimizing unnecessary occasions of potential harm is truly distressing.

We may or may not have the fortitude to pull an infant from an auto wreck, but surely we can all wash our hands and fasten our seat belts.  It may not be heroic, but it reduces the need for heroism, which isn’t a bad place to be.

Two phenomena dominating U.S. politics are intertwined in a manner that few seem willing to appreciate.

The first is the reality of extremist Islamism, and its culture of jihad waged through means that include suicide bombing as an acceptable, even routine, tactic. The second is the moral collapse of the Left in the Western world. The wellspring, in both cases, is the same — radical nihilism, and the socially appropriate methods of finding existential meaning in a nihilist culture.

In the West, nihilism is essentially philosophical and has its roots in the logic of the Enlightenment. In reaction to the political role played by organized religion in Europe in the later Middle Ages (itself the result of social collapse whose defining moment can be sourced to the sack of Rome in 476), the trend among European elites was to move increasing far from the Church. Thus, scientism became supreme, and with it, a toleration for difference that culminated in today’s diversity movement.

The assumption underlying classical liberalism is that only through objectivity of fact and relativism of belief could a free society advance. The only truths to which the Left can admit, then, are those it holds (as a matter of faith, ironically) to be absolutely scientific; religion must be limited exclusively to the private sphere, if it is even to be permitted at all, and any other system of belief must not make claim to objective truth.

Of course, this is a problematic position. To claim that scientism is the only approach to truth is to ignore the intellectual problems wrought in areas where scientific rationality simply cannot hold court. And, there is a logical contradiction at the core of relativism — to wit, that all things are relative except for the one absolute that all things are relative.

This leaves today’s Left with … not much in its toolbox. Its scientism, being largely triumphant, is no longer capable of rallying the troops (despite the occasional jeremiad against “the theocons” in Washington). Its relativism, barring it from rendering definitive value judgments, leaves it incapable of responding forcefully to strategic shifts among civilizations that may imperil the very viability of Western civilization. With no core belief system that it can hold to be true (apart from scientism and relativism themselves), the Left cannot articulate a coherent defense of the West or even of liberalism. Hence the inanity of debate in Europe about Islamic immigration. Thus denuded of both sword and shield, all that remains for the Left is mere spit and bile.

This phenomenon is tellingly demonstrated in the behaviors of far-Left politicians in the United States and their cohorts abroad. They are capable, for example, of denouncing President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair in the strongest of terms, but those terms are almost always ad hominems. Bush is stupid; Bush is evil; Bush is a monkey; Bush is a war criminal. Each claim is patently false, but for the Left, just making the claim is considered a heroic act of sophisticated truth-telling. Without core beliefs and an openness to non-scientific truths, the Left’s politics is little more than stone-throwing.

Of course, not all denizens of the Left are irrational hate-mongers, but even so, the response across the spectrum of Left-wing civility has been to rely increasingly on asserted value claims and not on reasoned arguments, and whether your source is the Daily Kos or the New York Times editorial board, too much of the Left’s political commentary is torn by its desire to assert value-laden truth-claims about non-objective subjects while attempting (usually inadequately) to preserve its scientific, relativistic orthodoxy. I am reminded of the trope used by a priest at my church, long ago, who punctuated an especially animated homily with the statement: “God cannot sin against Himself.” Neither can the Left betray its own basic assumptions without a fair amount of long-term psychological damage.

In the Islamic world, by contrast, the nihilism is more recent and is locused in demography. Because Islamic philosophy embraced a fundamentally Platonic worldview, it was more comfortable with authoritative pronouncements about the world than the Aristotelean West ever was. In an intellectual milieu wherein Koranic philosophy contains the definitive delineation of metaphysics, there is less need for experimentation or even a spirit of inquisitiveness. Thus, the Islamic world fell behind as the West’s technological lead widened — and with that gap came socioeconomic disability that is fundamentally incompatible with Islamic self-perception. Nihilism is a rational response to dealing with the divergence between the ontological claims of one’s faith tradition and the oh-so-obvious reality in which that tradition is lived. In other words: If the logical validity of a person’s scripture is undermined by the discrepancy between the world and what the scripture says about the world, then either a person must abandon (or at least, re-interpret) the scripture, or abandon the world. Radical Islamists have chosen the latter path.

The demographic problem of the Middle East, then, is fueling the radical Islamist assault. If the Koran says that God blesses Muslims with happiness and prosperity in this world, but you live in backward squalor, then the Koran must be false. But for idealistic youths who have no other socially acceptable outlet for their natural, biological aggression, there is a second option — to assume that Muslim civilization is under assault by the Other (Christians, for example) and that therefore it is the will of God that the oppressors of Islam be brought to earthly justice. Hence the attractiveness of suicide bombing. And given the number of young males, and the high birthrates in the Arab world, the nihilism of the contemporary Islamic intellectual position is explosively aligned with a burgeoning youth culture that grasps for meaning, recognition and tribal solidarity … and finds it in radicalized religion.

The twin gorillas of contemporary American politics are the moral vacuousness of the Left in response to a civilizational assault, and the proper response to militant Islamism per se.

The Democratic Party, the standard-bearer for the American Left, simply denies that radical Islamism actually constitutes a coherent threat. Against all the objective evidence presented over the last few decades (not to mention the assertions of radical imams across the globe), the Left rationalizes its inability to respond to the the threat by denying that the threat actually exists.

The Republican Party, for its part, has responded to the threat of Islamist demography but not to the ethos that feeds it. Invading Afghanistan or Iraq (or Saudi Arabia, or Iran) won’t solve the problem. True, it will mitigate it; Bush may be right that the best we can do is take the fight to the enemy on the enemy’s own soil. But the definitive resolution to radical Islamism can originate only from within Islam; Muslims need to reform from within. Until that happens, the best the West can do is simply to police the borders.

The confict in the West between the desire to respond militarily to provocation, and the desire to ignore the basic problem by treating terrorism as a legal problem, has created a less-than-robust reaction to militant Islamofascism. This weakness, in turn, is incorrectly perceived by radicals as a sign of (a) the emasculation of the West and (b) the favor of God. Both justify the tactics and beliefs of radical Islamism.  The circle becomes vicious, and the body bags pile up.
We are left, then, with a clash of nihilisms. The politically potent and aggressive manifestation of Islamic demographic nihilism is clashing with the morally vacuous and passive manifestation of Western philosophical nihilism. Whether a shift in demography or in political reality will affect the interplay of these nihilisms remains to be seen, but the outlook if things continue as they are is not encouraging — for Islam, or for the West. Perhaps the West will rediscover its faith in its own beliefs and institutions. Perhaps moderate Muslim leaders will stem the worst of radical behavior. Or perhaps the struggle will continue for generations.

Or perhaps one side will learn the wisdom of repudiating its own nihilism, thus freeing it to respond more effectively to the other. Some of us still dare to hope.

My church, a Roman Catholic parish of more than 1,500 families, is officially big on the concept of stewardship. You know the drill — you give your “time, talent and treasure” to the church and in return you will get various blessings and happiness. Fork over 10 percent of your gross income, and somehow God will give you even more in return (often in vague and undetectable ways). Something like the “Prayer of Jabez” with a distinctly Catholic spin. It’s a wonder Wall Street hasn’t been more bullish on the concept.

Anyway, we are subjected to relentless preaching about the virtues of stewardship. We are unceasingly exhorted to give, give, give in order to improve our faith lives. Whether one accepts the hidden premises here is irrelevant; what is interesting, from a philosophy-of-religion perspective, is the sequencing of stewardship.

If we concede the religious principle, that acts of mercy or acts of charity are morally good and spiritually beneficial, we must ask: Which comes first? The faith or the act?

Stewardship as an organized program presupposes that good stewards are already good Catholics of strong faith. Yet everyone is encouraged to be a steward. It’s trivially true that not every Catholic is a good, practicing Catholic with strong faith. So what gives? Is this a form of Pascal’s Wager, wherein a life of faith is to be cultivated through habituation? You act like you believe in order to gain faith?

The role of the church is to work to ensure the salvation of souls. Although the parable of the good steward is a great metaphor, the metaphor cannot substitute for reality. Nor can a metaphor, no matter how applicable it might be to some aspects of our lives, serve as a guiding principle for the totality of our existence.

There is more to being a good Catholic than merely following the formal precepts of stewardship, but many of the parishes aren’t teaching these other aspects to the same degree. It’s as if “stewardship” is the one-size-fits-all method for living an authentically Catholic existence.

I have no objection to occasional reminders to give more. But if the link between faith and practice is as strong and as logically necessary as that presupposed by the theory of stewardship, then instead of incessant exhortations, perhaps the church should focus, as I once told a former pastor, on helping the faithful to center their lives on Christ. If, after all, the faith is there, then the act should follow. If the faith is lacking, then no amount of nagging will achieve the desired outcome.

Focusing on the act to build the faith seems backward, but it’s the central (if unspoken) conceit of stewardship. Although this is may be excusable in the periphery, to elevate this concept to a position of centrality in parochial catechesis seems detrimental to the long-term spiritual health of the faithful.

The conservative press has been targeting academia with greater diligence in recent years. Part of this is, I think, the “low-hanging fruit” phenomenon — it’s easy to attack the defenseless. Another part is the perception of some that America’s classrooms are becoming places where correct thinking is more important than thinking correctly.

For my part, I’m happy to occasionally dabble in bromides against the academic Left, but I’ve never believed in a vast conspiracy. I have occasionally been worried about professors being too lenient toward their students, but I never really feared that our academic disciplines are sliding into intellectual incoherence.

Until recently, that is.

I’ve written earlier about articles in “Quality Progress” and the “American Political Science Quarterly.” But the trend continues — another recent publication of the American Political Science Association featured an “analysis” of the voting patterns of the Catholic cardinals who selected Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to be Pope Benedict XVI.

Without question, an analysis of the politics and procedures surrounding the election of a Supreme Pontiff would be a welcome opportunity for discussion and debate. But the attempt at analysis published in the APSA journal was laughable.

My issue wasn’t with the theories presented by the two professors who wrote the article. I have a BA in political science, not a doctorate, and I will not presume to elevate mere disagreement on my part to the level of an indictment of their competence.

No, what was troubling was the assumptions to which the authors quite freely admitted. They clearly predicated their analysis on the belief that regional blocs among the cardinals would be a major factor in the decision-making process; the theory rested on an assumption that the cardinals in each bloc wanted to see one of their own elevated to the Throne of St. Peter — which might be an interesting approach, had the authors bothered to learn anything about Cardinal Ratzinger’s tenure as Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.

It is a methodological error of the first rank to assume whatever you wish in order to make your analysis work, even if you have to assume facts that are (a) not in evidence or (b) are too inconvenient to research before publishing. The authors made so many assumptions about Church politics that even an amateur Vatican watcher must cringe to see it. Analogously, the work of these professors would be no different from the work of Chinese political scientists analyzing FDR’s four presidential wins without knowing anything about the Great Depression or the Progressive movement. When you supply hypothesis and assume it to be a fact, any theory that would result is simply meaningless. Hell, if I can assume what I wish, then with little effort I can construct a theory of physics that will permit the transmutation of lead into gold with nothing more than a toothpick and a piece of cork. But such assumptions don’t necessarily compel reality to fall into strict conformance.

So, OK. APSA has once again published something that someone with even a limited degree of specialization in the field of study (i.e., the Vatican) could spot as flawed. Does this mean anything?

I think it does. I think there is something significant that ought to be said about junior academics operating on a “publish or perish” tenure track, or senior academics jockeying for greater prestige. And that something is: Quantity is not quality, and any theory is not as good as the right theory.

Political scientists (and philosophers, for that matter) do not serve their disciplines well when they toss out theories uninformed by facts not directly related to the theory. In the case of the Vatican analysis, it makes a very big difference, when accounting for the balloting results for Ratzinger, that in the 1980s the Iron Cardinal had almost by himself destroyed the philosophical bedrock upon which stood so-called liberation theology. It makes a difference that the other leading contenders for the papacy shared liturgical beliefs that stood at odds with many African bishops.

The social sciences are turning into silos, generating theories and texts that make sense from within (provided you don’t ask too many questions about the theories), but which tend to be increasingly uninformed by facts from without. The inevitable conclusion is an growing inability to differentiate between wheat and chaff — and given the climate of academic politics, this may well mean that nonsense will be given carte blanche on our nation’s campuses. To the detriment of future students.

The problem on our college campuses isn’t that the faculty is overwhelmingly Leftist. The problem is that the intellectual rigor of the disciplines — especially in the social sciences — has “gone wobbly,” and there has not yet been a correction. As long as the liberal arts continue to operate on assumption and posturing, students and faculty alike will continue to play the game by the rules in effect at the roll of the dice. We should not be surprised by an all-encompassing relativism that motivates the academic Left, since relativism is the one virtue that protects the status quo from the sorely needed correction. Quite the vicious circle, eh?

Alas, too many opportunists on the Right (save, perhaps, the sainted Harvey Mansfield of Harvard) don’t see the forest for the trees. The would-be slayers of Campus Liberals are focusing on the effects of intellectual decline, and not the causes, so their efforts are unlikely to amount to much.

Long story short … I guess I’m going to read a lot of things in social-science journals that will make me want to cry.

Better buy stock in Kleenex.