Defense of Truth

Excuse me a little bold language here, without meaning to be harsh, but firm: I have serious doubts as to the qualifications of the historians cited in the PBS special "the Mormons". The same guy who claimed that there was no archeological evidence either for the story of the Exodus or for the Book of Mormon (topic I dealt with here ), made the fantastic claim that the 1830s in America were a time of crisis for the nuclear family. After an hour on various Google searches, I can find no evidence to substantiate that claim. Gold rushes around that time period DID cause a number of families in the East to be more or less temporarily broken, but I don't believe census records on the number of households containing nuclear families reduced so drastically as to support the idea that Joseph Smith's insistence on the sealing of families could be reasonably seen as a reaction to it. And the other female historian makes the nonsensical claim that the question of the celestial s...

Part of my creed as a faithful member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (nicknamed the Mormons ) came as a response of founding prophet Joseph Smith to a journalist who was essentially asking what made us different. The text goes as follows: "We claim the privilege of worshipping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men [sic] the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may." I've had this eleventh verse in a series now known as the thirteen Articles of Faith memorized since I was about 10 years old, and still regard it as a profound and profoundly tolerant moral code for how I should regard the deeply held beliefs of others. This does not mean that I should not use all the persuasive powers I can muster to bring those with false beliefs into a knowledge of a true basis for judgment--this was the essence of my reason for volunteering to serve a two-year mission in the Côte d'Ivoire as I did--bu...

Image from: http://www.theatricalcombat.com/Image%20Files/gallery/stickysituation/sticky3.jpg Intellectuals often feel a certain affiliation to cosmopolitanism. They are by and large concentrated in cities (and even there within universities), and are products of the modern refinement and departmentalization of knowledge and inquiry. Their thoughts, concerns and communications span the globe, but are generally so focused at an elite audience that between their cloistered mental departments and the smallness of their community they must formulate and nourish defensive attitudes and stances against the various localisms they must participate in but see beyond. In a quintessentially postmodern way (which is still quite modern nevertheless), they often choose to defend against localisms by celebrating the rootlessness of their modern condition--by celebrating ALL localisms. This is the elite sort of cosmopolitanism Friedman describes in his insightful article which I referenced weeks ago. ...

(Sarko photo from www.smh.com.au/.../2007/04/23/1177180510779.html ) So I guess I'm a little late getting with the times on the technology behind a good traffic generating blog, but in fairness to myself I'm doing this with my own particular goals in mind. My goal is to craft my points enough not to feel ashamed posting them for the grand general public at large, and through that crafting process, think through an issue for my own benefit. To that end, longer posts may be more advisable, but traffic is still desirable since the third part of the goal of making my arguments public is for the comments, and the honing and refining that can come with them. So here's the tripartite plea: If you read something you like, COMMENT, and point out specifically what that was. If you read something you don't like, COMMENT, and point out specifically what that was. If you didn't see something you think I should have included, COMMENT, and point out specifically what that was. An...

I have plenty of material to get to on the topic of global climate change, but for now let me respond to a caller who caused Rush Limbaugh to rant for nearly a half hour on his nationally syndicated radio show yesterday (full transcript here , but will be archived by 6M next Wednesday). While I wish he would change his terminology sometimes, Limbaugh's analysis of this issue is founded in correct principles. First, let individuals and groups be responsible in their decisions as to how they are affecting the environment around them. As a former Chief Scout (the Canadian equivalent of the Eagle), I believe firmly in the majesty of nature and of God's creation, and my default attitude toward such beauty is to take only pictures from it and to leave only footprints on it. With that basic conservationist philosophy explained, I also believe that we were put on this earth to be stewards of the resources it contains, animal, vegetable, and mineral. This means that we will be held acc...

In a brilliant critique of the postcolonial concept of "hybridity" as a cosmopolitan goal for the mixing of humanity, Jonathan Friedman defines racism and essentialism in a surprisingly clear way before explaining how the implications of these concepts ensure that hybridity is a self-defeating philosophy. First, there are two separate arguments that are made in conjunction with racism: "All X are bearers of a set of traits, physical or cultural" Cultural traits are reducible to physical ones Point 1 above is racism proper (eg. all blacks have small brains but athletic physiques, or all blacks are naturally animist), and point 2 is merely essentialism--the idea that beings have an essence from which their traits and practices can be derived (eg. Blacks are naturally animist because their brains are too small to understand reason and empirical evidence) Which seems the more insidious to you: racism or essentialism? My reflexive answer would be essentialism of course, ...

Dinesh D'Souza, fellow at the Hoover Institute and frequent columnist on conservative and religious topics, posts a recent article on Townhall.com in which he praises Stanley Fish, the widely cited literary critic, for taking atheists to task via deconstructionism. Fish tells the story of a man who seemingly abandons all (family, friends, who are beckoning him to return to more reasonable/knowable pursuits) to pursue a light which claims to be able to grant him eternal bliss. The deconstructive argument then shows how the atheist position is part of that narrative and depends on it, rather than standing outside it as it claims to be. I will give you one comment from an atheist and my reply: Atheist Comment: Dinesh writes "Fish comments, 'What this shows is that the objections Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens make to religious thinking are themselves part of religious thinking.'" Same old same old, Christians framing atheism in theistic terms that assumes the very con...

At the base of the Statue of Liberty, symbol of arrival on the shores of freedom for immigrants from Europe for more than a century now, is inscribed a sonnet describing the statue and its symbolic function penned by Emma Lazarus, a Jew from a prominent long-established American family, entitled The New Colossus. In Lazarus's immortalized words, the statue beckons: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore; Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" (read the whole sonnet here ) In the close of John Ashcroft's speech, he referenced this poem in connection with his own feeling of pride as a youth in the superiority of the US in almost all areas of human activity. Why are we so much better than every other country out there, he thought? The arrogance of the very question is striking to those who presuppose American hubris. Is it not hypocritical for a...

Former US Attorney General , US senator and Governor from Missouri, John Ashcroft , really got me thinking this week. Near the end of a 40 minute speech he made to the Young America Foundation, which was dated 19 Apr 2007 in the podcast on which I listened to it, he made two points about liberty in the US that I found to have profound implications. The first now, the second later… On the idea of a balance between liberty and security: First of all, as Michele Malkin rightly notes in her insightful post here , the Ben Franklin quote so often cited linking these two ideas is often cited wrong: Here's the paraphrase the left uses: Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither Here's the actual Ben Franklin Quote: Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Did you note that Franklin conceived of some liberties as non-essential? I suppose it is a God-given human right to button your shirts fr...

More literary theory today from a paper I'm proud of. I may comment on Thiong'o's equation of culture with language later, but for now you need an intro… How humans determine what is self is a topic of much theoretical debate. However many of these theories of self-identification highlight the twin fundamental notions of culture and language as unavoidably instrumental in the construction of identity. The most germane of these to our discussion derives from the French neo-Freudian psychologist Jacques Lacan's extrapolations on Ferdinand de Saussure's principles of semiotics. Mainstream linguistic thought from its inception as a separate discipline in Saussure's time, has pointed out the arbitrary nature of the link between the signification of any given (linguistic) symbol and its associated signifying form (whether graphic or phonic). Dividing a sign into signifiant and signifié is a powerful way to theorize language, since it emphasizes its social nature. I...

It's been enlightening for me reflect upon some of the different types of marital relationships that I observed in such a multicultural tapestry as the Côte d'Ivoire. I say multicultural because there are over 60 different languages spoken by the different peoples within the nation's borders, and though many of their traditions are similar if not analogous, there are also competing varieties of modern European and Eastern traditional types of marital arrangements there also. There was an amazing complexity compared with what I had always assumed was the almost binary choice of cohabitating couples in Western cultures (marry, or live together, with few other socially sanctioned arrangements possible), and yet there seemed to be no confusion. If there was any confusion, it didn't come from the culture, but rather from recent successive changes in the state's legal definition of marriage. As with many African nations there existed a long history of traditional marriage...

Please excuse me the incredible hubris of deigning to disagree with René Descartes: the heart of science is NOT doubt, it is doubt's opposite--faith. The scientific method describes the process of learning any empirical truth as beginning with enough curiosity to ask a question, then to doubt your own intuitions or the established "truth" enough to force yourself to experiment and prove whether your hypothesis is correct or incorrect. It's the self-doubt, or doubt of intuition, or even previous explanations (doubt of which leads to curiosity) that is meant when scientists talk about scientific skepticism. The problem, for me, is that I think it is falsely labeling the desire to find out for certain if something is true as a doubt, rather than as a form of faith. Is faith not the evidence of things not seen, the substance of things hoped for? If you hope to know something, and invest thought and effort into designing an experiment that would reveal your hypothesis as e...

My advisor recommended a book to me by a comparative lit theorist by the name of Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, called Theory in an Uneven World . Like the bulk of literary theorists, he is an unashamed Marxist, but I've been reading that type since I arrived here at grad school. It's proved to be an enlightening intellectual exercise to try to read this kind of theorist, holding their false premises in suspension in my mind and thinking through only their internally justified and internally logical merits until it becomes appropriate to remember the false premises and sweep away the entire theory. It's a sort of coping strategy I've developed that I think actually helps me engage with theories I'll have to deal with as an academic, while maintaining my core conservative values and principles. In a way, it's a bit of a Sun Tzu "know your enemy" kind of way of studying, but I find it fruitful. Anyway, Radhakrishnan is concerned with making Marxist theory wo...