Wednesday, October 27

Fate of the Nation

This was written in the Daily Record (Ellensburg's paper) on Wed. Oct. 6, 2004. It was written by Mathew (only one t) Manweller who is a Central Washington University political science professor. The title of the article was "Election determines fate of nation."

"In that this will be my last column before the presidential election there will be no sarcasm, no attempts at witty repartee. The topic is too serious, and the stakes are too high.

This November we will vote in the only election during our lifetime that will truly matter. Because America is at a once-in-a-generation crossroads, more than an election hangs in the balance. Down one path lies retreat, abdication and a reign of ambivalence. Down the other lies a nation that is aware of its past and accepts the daunting obligation its future demands. If we choose poorly, the consequences will echo through the next 50 years of history. If we, in a spasm of frustration, turn out the current occupant of the White House, the message to the world and ourselves will be twofold. First, we will reject the notion that America can do big things. Once a nation that tamed a frontier, stood down the Nazis and stood upon the moon, we will announce to the world that bringing democracy to the Middle East is too big of a task for us. But more significantly, we will signal to future presidents that as voters, we are unwilling to tackle difficult challenges, preferring caution to boldness, embracing the mediocrity that has characterized other civilizations.

The defeat of President Bush will send a chilling message to future presidents who may need to make difficult, yet unpopular decisions. America has always been a nation that rises to the demands of history regardless of the costs or appeal. If we turn away from that legacy, we turn away from who we are.

Second, we inform every terrorist organization on the globe that the lesson of Somalia was well learned. In Somalia we showed terrorists that you don't need to defeat America on the battlefield when you can defeat them in the newsroom. They learned that a wounded America can become a defeated America. Twenty-four-hour news stations and daily tracing polls will do the heavy lifting, turning a cut into a fatal blow. Except that Iraq is Somalia times 10. The election of John Kerrywill serve notice to every terrorist in every cave that the soft underbelly of American power is the timidity of American voters. Terrorists will know that a steady stream of grizzly photos for CNN is all you need to break the will of the American people. Our own self-doubt will take it from there. Bin Laden will recognize that he can topple any American administration without setting foot on the homeland.

It is said that America's W.W.II generation is its 'greatest generation.' But my greatest fear is that it will become known as America's 'last generation.' Born in the bleakness of the Great Depression and hardened in the fire of WW II, they may be the last American generation that understands the meaning of duty, honor and sacrifice. It is difficult to admit, but I know these terms are spoken with only hollow detachment by many (but not all) in my generation. Too many citizens today mistake 'living in America' as 'being an American.' But America has always been more of an idea than a place. When you sign on, you do more than buy real estate. You accept a set of values and responsibilities.

This November, my generation, which has been absent too long, must grasp the obligation that comes with being an American, or fade into the oblivion they may deserve. I believe that 100 years from now historians will look back at the election of 2004 and see it as the decisive election of our century. Depending on the outcome, they will describe it as the moment America joined the ranks of ordinary nations; or they will describe it as the moment the prodigal sons and daughters of the greatest generation accepted their burden as caretakers of the City on
the Hill."

Mathew Manweller

Friday, October 15

Religion is Reasonable

We have always had atheists among us,” the philosopher Edmund Burke wrote in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, “but now they have grown turbulent and seditious.”  It seems that in our own day some prominent atheists are agitating for greater political and social influence.   In this connection, leading atheist thinkers have been writing articles declaring that they should no longer be called “atheists.”  Rather, they want to be called “brights.”

Yes, “brights,” as in “I am a bright.”  In a recent article in the New York Times, philosopher Daniel Dennett defined a bright as “a person with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view.”  Dennett added that “we brights don’t believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter bunny or God.”  Dennett’s implication was clear: brights are the smart people who don’t fall for silly superstitions.

Writing in the British newspaper The Guardian, Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, a leading defender of Darwinism, also identified himself as a bright and called on other atheists and agnostics to embrace the term and to mobilize as a political movement.  Like Dennett, Dawkins defined a bright as one who espouses “a world view that is free of supernaturalism and mysticism.”  Dawkins couldn’t help mentioning that most scientists and intellectuals are brights.  Religious people, he implied, can be found among the ranks of the less intelligent.

Clearly Dennett and Dawkins, like many atheists, are confident that atheists are simply brighter—more rational—than religious believers.  Their assumption is: we nonbelievers employ critical reason while the theists rely on blind faith.  But Dennett and Dawkins, for all their credentials and learning, have been duped by a fallacy.  This may be called the Fallacy of the Enlightenment, and it was first pointed out by the philosopher Immanuel Kant.

The Fallacy of the Enlightenment is the glib assumption that there is only one limit to what human beings can know, and that limit is reality itself.  In this view, widely held by atheists, agnostics, and other self-styled rationalists, human beings can continually find out more and more until eventually there is nothing more to discover.  Advocates of the Enlightenment Fallacy insist that knowledge of reality can be obtained by reason alone, and that reason can science can, in principle, unmask the whole of reality.

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant showed that these assumptions are false.  In fact, he argued, there is a much greater limit to what human beings can know.  To understand what Kant is getting at, consider the example of a tape recorder.  A tape recorder, being the kind of instrument it is, can only capture one mode or representation of reality.  It can only capture sound.  Tape recorders can only “hear,” they cannot see or touch or smell.  Thus all aspects of reality that cannot be captured in sound are completely and forever beyond the reach of a tape recorder.

The same, Kant argued, is true of human beings.  The only way that we apprehend reality is through our five senses.  If a tape recorder represents reality in a single mode, human beings can perceive reality through five different modes: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.  But why should we believe, Kant asked, that our five-mode instrument for apprehending reality is sufficient for capturing all of reality?  What makes us think that there is no reality that goes beyond, that simply cannot be apprehended by, our five senses? 

Kant persuasively noted that there is no reason whatsoever for us to believe that we can know everything that exists.  Indeed what we do know, Kant said, we know only through the refracted filter of our experience.   Kant argued that we cannot even be sure that our experience of a thing is the same as the thing-in-itself.   After all, we see in pretty much the same way that a camera does, and yet who would argue that a picture of a boat is the same thing as a boat?


Kant isn’t arguing against the validity of perception or science or reason.  He is simply showing their significant limits.  These limits cannot be erased by the passage of time or by further investigation and experimentation.  Rather, the limits on reason are intrinsic to the kind of beings that humans are, and to the kind of apparatus that we possess for perceiving reality.  The implication of Kant’s argument is that reality as a whole is, in principle, inaccessible to human beings.   Put another way, there is a great deal that human beings will simply never know.  

Notice that Kant’s argument is entirely secular: it does not employ any religious vocabulary, nor does it rely on any kind of faith.  But in showing the limits of reason, Kant’s philosophy “opens the door to faith,” as the philosopher famously noted.

If Dawkins and Dennett have produced refutations of Kant that have eluded the philosophical community, they should share them with the rest of us.  But until then, they and other like-minded atheists should refrain from the ignorant boast that atheism operates on a higher intellectual plane than theism.  Rather, as Kant showed, reason must know its limits in order to be truly reasonable.  The atheist foolishly presumes that reason is in principle capable of figuring out all that there is, while the theist at least knows that there is a reality greater than, and beyond, that which our senses and our minds can ever apprehend. 


 
This article, in a slightly different form, appeared in the Wall Street Journal.  For comments, write Dinesh D’Souza at thedsouzas@aol.com.