In Praise of Prejudice, the latest volume from the superb essayist Theodore Dalrymple, is a delightful addition to his oeuvre. It's a quick read that makes an essential point in Dalrymple's inimitable prose: prejudice is necessary for humans.

This is hardly a popular position. As the author notes, "I very much doubt whether anyone, at least in polite company, would admit to a prejudice about anything." He then sardonically draws out the implications: To judge by self-report, we have never lived in such unprejudiced times, with so many people in complete control of their own opinions, which are, as a result, wholly sane, rational, and benevolent. Nobody judges anything, any person or any question, except by the light of the evidence and his own reason."

As we all know, this description is hardly accurate. People continue, as they have always done, to think and act on habit, desire, authority and other unexamined grounds. People are simply incapable of functioning in a fully rational manner, and given the finite nature of human knowledge and reason, most of what is "known" is, and always will be, accepted on authority for most people.

Why then is there such a hue and cry against prejudice itself, then? Why not simply declare that the old prejudices against, say, giving birth out of wedlock were bad, but that the new prejudice against smoking is good? The answer, Dalrymple believes, is found in the uses skepticism is put to today. It isn't used to strip away until we finally locate a firm first principle (a la Descartes). Rather, it is "to cast doubt on everything, and thereby increase the scope of personal license, by destroying in advance any philosophical basis for the limitation of our own appetites." People are not skeptics about electrical theory, or the arrangement of the solar system, but "a ferocious and insatiable spirit of inquiry overtakes them, however, the moment they perceive that their interests are at stake--their interests here being their freedom, of license, to act upon their whims."

The breakdown of old prejudices may ease the social pressures to conform to standards of behavior, but the consequences are grim. The small graces of life fall by the wayside, as say, commuters are no longer willing to give up seats to the elderly and pregnant women. Worse, entire lives are plunged into vicious circumstances; the rate of illegitimacy among Britain’s underclass is similar to that of America’s inner-city black population, with similar results. A telling example of the change in perception is presented by Dalrymple:

Not long ago I watched an old British comedy film from the 1950s, in which a young man of the upper-middle class had made a working-class girl pregnant. The girl’s indignant father demanded that the young man should marry his daughter, a demand whose justice he understood and at once agreed to. The audience howled with laughter at the primitive idea that the future birth of a child created an inescapable obligation on the part of the father.

Furthermore, the elimination of social prejudices necessarily leads to a more authoritarian state, as people refuse to recognize any authority between themselves and the law. The restraint that people formerly exercised because they had internalized the standards of community, family, church, and the like, must now be externally applied by government force.

Visiting my fiancé at her law school, I noticed an empty Miller Lite can sitting in the snow outside a nearby apartment. Considering it, I knew that I wouldn’t leave it around, not because of anti-littering laws, or reasoning about the economic or ecological impact of leaving empty beer cans about, but because I was raised to consider such tasteless, crude, and something that is just not done. And, if nothing else, if I were to leave the remnants of a celebratory drinking spree lying about, I’d be sure to want it to be something classier than Miller Lite. It’s pure prejudice, but it keeps me from throwing my trash about.

In this excellent book, Dalrymple demonstrates how such prejudices are essential to civilized life.

Party of Death author Ramesh Ponnuru graciously weighs in with an important clarification:

I agree with George and Smith about the definitional question, and with Bethell and those two about the ethical question.

You quote a passage from Gina Kolata's story in the New York Times, which does indeed sound alarming for those of us who believe in the sanctity of human life: Yamanaka "completed the ultimate test to show that the resulting stem cells could become any type of mouse cell. He used them to create new mice."

The wording here is a little tricky. My understanding is that what Yamananka did was to inject his mouse iPS [induced pluripotent stem] cells into a mouse embryo to see if they would end up playing a role in the formation of all of the various organs of the developed mouse. That's how he demonstrated that his cells were pluripotent, and that's the sense in which he "used them to create new mice." But he didn't use them to create a new embryo. Again, he injected them into an existing embryo.

Which completely answers my #1 argument vs. Smith and my #2 argument vs. George. Thank you, Mr. Ponnuru!

And it also shows the pluripotent stem cells acting more like body parts than like an organism or organisms, which behavior is illuminating -- and somewhat reassuring to me, though I'd still very much like to hear more about why we're sure that the still-living, brain-inclusive parts of disaggregated embryos (or their induced pluripotent stem cell equivalents) can't be be distorted organisms, rather than body parts.

Robert George, co-author of the forthcoming book, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, which we'll be offering in the Club in January, took time out of what sounds like an overwhelming schedule to give this preliminary answer -- and to offer more detail later. I very much hope he'll be able to respond to my continuing doubts!

The key thing to see is that an embryonic stem cell is not an embryo. It is a cell that is removed from the inner cell mass of a blastocyst-stage (5-6 days) embryo (ordinarily causing its death) and then cultured in the lab to induce pluripotency. Even when made pluripotent, it is not an embryo. Although it can be used to produce many (perhaps all) the various cell types in the body, it lacks totipotency, that is, the active capacity and disposition (by virtue of its epigenetic constitution), to organize itself and by an internally directed process develop along the species-specific trajectory towards full maturity. Unlike an embryo (human or otherwise), a stem cell -- even an embryonic or other pluripotent stem cell—is not an organism. It is a part, rather than a whole. An embryo, unlike a stem cell, is a whole living individual of a particular species (human, mouse, what have you) at the earliest stage of its natural development.

What is exciting about the research published by Yamanaka and Thomson is that it shows that ordinary somatic cells can be "reprogrammed" to the pluripotent (not totipoent) state. These pluripotent cells are not produced by removing cells from embryos, and they are not embryos themselves. It is possible that they could be used in the production of embryos (just as ordinary somatic cells are used in the production of embryos by cloning), but that is a separate matter. Needless to say, I am opposed to producing embryos by cloning or any method for use in research in which they are destroyed. (As a matter of fact, I am opposed to the extracorporeal creation of embryos, even for reproductive purposes—though I do not view this as being on the same moral plane with creating embryos for research.)

All of which suggests a couple of points.

First of all, again, why are we so sure that pluripotent stem cells aren't human beings? What makes us certain that the capacity that they lack -- the "totipotency" that allows any embryo, whether from reproduction or from cloning, to go on organizing itself properly as it grows -- is the sine qua non of human being-hood? Or of organism-hood, I guess, which is the necessary condition for human being-hood and then person-hood?

Compare what the scientists do when they take pluripotent stem cells from embryos (which we know are human beings) to what some evil scientist might do to a fully grown human being. If some new Dr. Frankenstein -- or maybe a new Medea is more to the point -- took a living man, chopped him to bits and threw away some of them, stuck the undiscarded parts (including his brain) into a nutrient brew that kept them alive and even allowed them to multiply themselves unnaturally, would we be sure that the orginal man was gone?

It would be hard to argue that he was killed; something or other that used to be that man would still be alive. Would the original man certainly have been destroyed? I'd say, at least arguably, he would have been "destroyed" only in the sense of "maimed beyond repair," not in the sense of "obliterated" or "no longer existing."

Professor George defines the "totipotency" that organisms have and organs don't as "the active capacity and disposition (by virtue of its epigenetic constitution), to organize itself and by an internally directed process develop along the species-specific trajectory towards full maturity."

But there are obvious human beings who don't have the capacity to develop to full maturity -- infants with Tay-Sachs disease, for example.

How can we be sure that pluripotent stem cells aren't horribly maimed organisms, rather than things that aren't organisms at all?

Pluripotent stem cells do, after all, have some capacity to organize themselves and their development -- a capacity that the scientists who work with them are perpetually needing to thwart, in order to keep them pluripotent, or to steer them in the developmental direction the scientists prefer. One of the first articles I read about pluripotent stem cells, in 1999, included quotations from researchers complaining that the cells "behave as though they have a mind of their own" and that if you left them to their own devices, they form "little masses of cardiac cells that soon begin to beat in unison like a tiny heart."* I wondered whether under other conditions they might not form 'little masses of neurons that soon begin to think in unison like a tiny brain'!

Even if pluripotent stem cells never spontaneously produce a human brain, would a human brain that was deliberately grown from pluripotent stem cells by scientists certainly be so different from an ordinary brain that we can be sure it wouldn't have human thoughts?

Secondly, notice that the gold standard, the ultimate test of whether you've created pluripotent stem cells, is whether you can get them to grow into a whole organism. That's what Dr. Yamanaka did with his pluripotent mouse cells. He grew them into mice by some means short of cloning -- because we already know that ordinary somatic cells can be cloned, so turning induced pluripotent mouse cells into mice by cloning would not prove that the cells were in fact pluripotent.

If we’re sure pluripotent stem cells are not organisms already, then we should be able to isolate the precise point in the growing-organisms-from-pluripotent-stem-cells process at which the pluripotent cells, which are not an organism, become an organism. Just as in reproduction we can point to fertilization, and in cloning we point to the moment at which the egg’s cytoplasm reprograms the somatic cell’s DNA to act like a one-cell embryo.

In other words, on the theory that pluripotent stem cells are not organisms, there must now be a THIRD way, besides natural reproduction and cloning, to produce human beings (or at least mice). What is it?

*Here are a couple of similar articles.

Wesley J. Smith, author of Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World, has also generously taken the time to help answer my doubts:

Yes. Your biology is wrong. The embryo is indeed destroyed in ESCR [Embryonic Stem Cell Research]. The fact that parts taken from the embryo, the stem cells, can be maintained and grown in culture, is not the same thing as having a bunch of embryos growing in culture. If you implant the original embryo, a baby could result. Implant the embryonic stem cells derived and multiplied in culture from that embryo and no baby will ever result because stem cells are just cells, they are not organisms, they are not embryos.

This is a rough analogy: If we killed you for your heart and maintained it through technology, your heart would still be beating but you would be dead.

It isn't the use of the embryonic stem cells that is problematic, it is how they are derived, e.g. destroying embryos. In the case of human therapeutic cloning, the problem is that scientists want to create human embryos to be destroyed.

The induced pluripotent stem cells are not embryos. They too are merely cells, skin cells in this case, that through genetic manipulation were changed into pluripotent stem cells. Moreover, they are not embryonic stem cells. Other tissues may also produce pluripotent stem cells, such as bone marrow and umbilical cord blood. Surely, you wouldn’t say those are embryos, would you? Similarly, neither are the iPS cells.

A stem cell is just a cell, it is not an organism. It is not an embryo. It doesnt have any more intrinsic moral value than the cells you destroyed today when you brushed your teeth.

I think it is the term embryonic that has some people confused. Use pluripotent (the capacity to change into every tissue type) and it becomes easier to understand.

Hope this helps.

After this explanation, I still seem to be left with the problem: Why is everyone so sure that the pluripotent stem cells (whether induced or from embryos) are just organs, not organisms?

There seem to be a couple of flaws -- or maybe just skipped steps that need to be fleshed out for those of us without the scientific background -- in these two parts of Smith's argument:

#1: According to Smith

Implant the embryonic stem cells derived and multiplied in culture from that embryo and no baby will ever result because stem cells are just cells, they are not organisms, they are not embryos.

But what about the fact that Dr. Yamanaka "completed the ultimate test to show that the resulting stem cells could become any type of mouse cell. He used them to create new mice."

Yamanaka had to do more than just put the pluripotent cells into a mouse womb (as he could have done with a clone) but presumably less than he would have had to do with a skin cell (or else this "ultimate test" would have proven nothing at all). Clearly, reprogramming the skin cell into a pluripotent stem cell took it some distance toward becoming an embryo. It still seems to me difficult to understand why critics of embryonic stem cell research aren't at all concerned that maybe that reprogramming took it far enough to be, at least arguably, an embryo.

#2. According to Smith

This is a rough analogy: If we killed you for your heart and maintained it through technology, your heart would still be beating but you would be dead.

But isn't this at least as true an analogy: If we cut off my head and maintained it alive through technology, my brain might still be thinking -- and how would we be sure that I wasn't (in some sense) still alive and still deserving of human rights?

After all, when the embryos are disaggregated to get the pluripotent stem cells, the part of the embryo that the scientists keep alive and growing (and now call "stem cells" instead of "the embryo") still has in it the very cells that would have (if left unmolested) gone on to form the human brain, just as clearly as it contains the cells that would have gone on to form the heart.

Several of our Club authors have generously responded to last week's stem cell post. Here are Politically Incorrect Guide to Science author Tom Bethell's thoughts on the news:

One has lost count of the stem-cell "breakthroughs" reported over the last decade. Some have turned out to be fraudulent, and all of them incapable of delivering any medical benefit. We should always bear in mind that the earliest report of stem cells, on the front page of the New York, claimed that stem cells were "immortal." We were therefore led to suppose that stem cells would deliver us from the perils of aging. Those claims have long since been abandoned, but the hype persisted in other forms -- stem cells could be used to treat Alzheimer's, for example, or diabetes, or Parkinson's disease.

The latest breakthrough, reported last week by Science and Cell, has been called "direct reprogramming." The claim is that with the addition of a mere four genes, an ordinary skin cell can be transformed into a pluripotent cell capable of achieving any desired specialization. (It is said that there are 220 types of cell but that number keeps changing and is a guess.)

The point about the latest claim is that it involves no recourse to egg or embryo. According to the hype, we can now directly convert cells of one type into any other type by this new method.

If so, this is all to the good, because if the claims are true the medical benefits of stem cell manipulation will be achievable without having to create or destroy embryos.

It is predictable, however, that nothing will come of the latest claims.

If you examine the fine print, you find that the new, allegedly pluripotent creations are by no means the same as embryonic stem cells. According to Dr. M. William Lensch, a senior scientist in the stem cell program of Harvard's Children's Hospital in Boston, they are "actually not identical." He said:

"For example, one paper showed that a few thousand genes (of more than 32,000 analyzed) in the skin based stem cells were not activated to the same degree that they are in embryonic stem cells."

Oh. So they differ in only a "few thousand genes." Yet Gina Kolata had reported in the New York Times that the addition of four genes to skin cells turned them into "what appear to be embryonic stem cells."

Nonetheless, I welcome the latest claim. It seems to me that it is ethically uncontroversial and it will therefore allow us to focus without distraction on the science alone (as I did in my Politically Incorrect Guide to Science.) Remember this: After ten years, researchers have not been able to achieve any of the medical promises, despite efforts in biotech labs all over the world, and in countries (such as Britain, Japan, Korea, Israel, Singapore and others) where the research was not only unrestricted but government subsidized. And despite the U.S. restrictions, research has continued here, too, with private money or with taxes from a handful of states.

A friend of mine who runs a small biotech company in San Francisco and has type 1 diabetes has closely monitored stem cell research, because in juvenile diabetics the disease wipes out the insulin producing beta cells of the pancreas. It is life-threatening condition, even if tractable with insulin injections. But it also focuses the mind, and he does pay close attention. He tells me that no stem cell work anywhere has yet been able to generate a single insulin-producing cell, and he doesn't believe the new method will, either.

My guess it will take about three years before researchers decide that the new "direct reprogramming" technique is not working after all. By that time the labs engaged in this work will have been flooded with government subsidies. In my view, this has all along been a principal goal of stem cell researchers. Science is a high risk enterprise, but once you are on the government payroll it becomes a Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five routine. It's so much more comfortable that way.

To which all I can say is that I find myself sort of hoping that Bethell's right to be skeptical about the importance of this discovery and about the utility of the new induced pluripotent stem cells.

If there's any at all chance that these stem cells may be maimed human beings, rather than souped-up human body parts, then the less importance and usefulness they have in the long run, the better; scientists will eventually quit manufacturing them.

Even better, though, would be if I turned out to be 100% wrong in my fears that pluripotent stem cells are tiny mangled members of the human race. That's what Wesley Smith, coming up next, thinks.

Happy Thanksgiving to anyone who's still there after my long illness-inspired hiatus from blogging.

This Thanksgiving I'm very thankful to be on antibiotics, on the road to good health, and in sight of catching up on Book Club business and being able to blog a little, again.

But I'm not (yet, anyway) thankful for something that other pro-lifers are happy about today. I'm talking about the stem cell breakthrough: Scientists are now able to create pluripotent stem cells -- until now available only via research with human embryos -- from human skin cells.

Today's New York Times reports on the science and suggests that it should make the current debate over the ethics of stem cell research moot. Opponents of embryonic stem cell research seem to agree -- this morning's Washington Post quotes Richard Doerflinger reporting that a group of Catholic scientists and ethicists "had no moral problem with it at all." And impressive numbers of embryonic stem cell critics, of impressive stature, are celebrating the new science on NRO today. The Times reports that President Bush is "very pleased."

Nobody seems to be bothered by this question: How can we be sure that these new "induced pluripotent stem cells" are morally different from human embryos?

Pro-lifers have been deeply concerned (some would say obsessed) with the question of when a new human life begins in the process of natural reproduction.

Why aren't more of us concerned about the question of exactly when a new human life begins in the process of skin cell "reprogramming"?

We know that skin cells can be reprogrammed to become embryos, with the use of an egg. That's cloning -- take the DNA out of a skin cell, put that DNA into an egg that's had the DNA removed from it, and watch it grow.

As the new process for stem cell-creation is described in the Times, it's a similar kind of reprogramming without the need to use human eggs:

With cloning, researchers put an adult cell’s chromosomes into an unfertilized egg whose genetic material was removed. The egg, by some mysterious process, then does all the work. It reprograms the adult cell’s chromosomes, bringing them back to the state they were in just after the egg was fertilized. A few days later, a ball of stem cells emerges in the embryo, and every cell of the embryo, including its stem cells, is an exact genetic match of the adult.

The abiding questions, though, were: How did the egg reprogram the adult cell's chromosomes? Would it be possible to reprogram an adult cell without using an egg?

The scientists responsible for the breakthrough that's being reported today figured it out. They found genes that reprogrammed the skin cell DNA into pluripotent stem cells, that is, into cells that can grow into any kind of cell in the human body -- hair and brain and blood and skin and every other part of us. These cells that they've derived from reprogramming are, as far as the scientists can tell, the same kind of pluripotent cells as we've previously gotten from human embryos.

And how have we been getting pluripotent stem cells from embryos? Well, you can read the official National Institutes of Health description here. Basically scientists take the "inner cell mass" -- as best I can tell, the part that's going to grow into the baby -- out of its fluid-filled cavity in the "trophoblast" -- as best I can tell, the part that's going to grow into the placenta -- and put it into a petri dish with nutrients that keep it alive but don't keep it focused into growing into one organized human being. What used to be the embryo is still alive and growing, but it's now a disorganized mess. From which, scientists have been hoping they could learn how to grow useful body parts, for example, healthy brain tissue with which they might treat Parkinson's or Alzheimer's patients.

What I've never understood is why that disaggregation of the embryo (taking the inner cell mass out of the trophoblast and culturing it) into pluripotent cells is said to "destroy" -- rather than to maim and distort -- the embryo.

The embryo isn't killed, or at least it isn't dead; what's left of it after the disaggregation is still alive and growing. And the part of the original embryo that still is alive contains the parts that would have become its vital organs, including its brain -- and that can still turn into all those body parts.

Pro-lifers recognize that human embryos are human beings with human rights.

If you vivisected a human being at any other stage of its growth and then kept some of its parts alive, even if in a mangled and distorted state, you'd figure that at least the part that had the living human brain might still be a human being, right? A horribly maimed one, but the same person you started with.

If you experimented on a human being at any other stage of its growth, removing part of it but popping the remainder, including all the vital organs, into a nutrient solution that allowed it to multiply tissue and organs, perhaps even to multiply into more than one human being, wouldn't you at least wonder whether the resulting mess contained human lives that ought to be respected?

But now that we can get the same sort of disorganized living mess out of a kind of almost-human-cloning process, no one seems to have a problem with it.

As the Times reports, "The new cells [created in the new process that's being reported about today] in theory might be turned into an embryo, but not by simply implanting them in a womb." In fact one of the scientists responsible for this breakthrough, Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, has already taken pluripotent mouse stem cells created in just this way and made them grow into adult mice:

The new discovery was preceded by work in mice. Last year, Dr. Yamanaka published a paper showing that he could add four genes to mouse cells and turn them into mouse embryonic stem cells.

He even completed the ultimate test to show that the resulting stem cells could become any type of mouse cell. He used them to create new mice.

What did Dr. Yamanaka do to the pluripotent mouse stem cells to turn them into mouse embryos? Maybe that step (whatever it was) brought the new mice into being. But then again, maybe there were already disorganized mice growing away in his pluripotent stem cell culture, and he just arranged for suitable conditions in which they could grow more normally.

Now I can see an argument that the organizing principle that the embryo loses when it's disaggregated is its soul or something like it -- something without which it's not an individual, just a mess of living, growing body parts. And that that organizing principle -- the soul, or whatever it is -- is brought into being by the cloning process, but not by this reprogramming process that stops short of cloning.

But how can we be sure?

Hasn't it been our rule to give the benefit of the doubt where the life of a human being might be at stake?

You don't fire a shotgun into a house when you don't know if anyone's home. You don't take the morning-after pill if you might be pregnant. So why do you almost-clone something that almost exactly resembles the living remains of a human embryo after it's been vivisected -- so that you can use it for experiments?

Maybe some stem cell-savvy Conservative Book Club author can help with this question. I'm sending out a kind of All Points Bulletin to several of them, hoping for enlightenment:

Robert George, author of Embryo, not yet published but due to be offered in the Club in January

Wesley Smith, author of Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World

Leon Kass, author of Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity

Tom Bethell, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science

Ramesh Ponnuru, author of The Party of Death.

Can any of you guys explain how we can be sure that pluripotent embryonic stem cells -- whether created in this new nearly-cloning process, or if derived, as previously, from the disaggregation of embryos -- are, not, in fact, tiny mangled living human beings, rather than simply live body parts?

We'd be more than delighted to post your answer here, or to link to anything you've written on the subject that's already available online.

This is kind of exciting.

Of course EveningSun will accuse us believers of being the sort of people who mistake evidence for the existence of Missouri in the 19th century for evidence that Huckleberry Finn is a true story. But the really interesting question is why hostile critics of the Bible protest too much.

Why don't they stop at reasonable skepticism -- doubting the miraculous bits in the New Testament, or pointing out apparent conflicts with other historical evidence?. Why do they seem inevitably drawn to the most extreme and even absurd positions -- that Jesus (and King David, and Pontius Pilate) never existed, for example? That the Israelites were never slaves in Egypt? (I can't say much for the current state of criticism among the students of American literature, but at least they don't feel it necessary to deny the existence of well-attested features of 19th-century life in Missouri in order to undermine the influence of Mark Twain.) If EveningSun doesn't know about these wild claims (which are continually being contradicted by new archaeological evidence), he hasn't read The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible.

Some nasty flu-like disease -- in combination with my ordinary time-consuming duties as Conservative Book Club editor -- is likely to keep me from expending much creativity on posts here this week.

While I'm more or less out of commission, perhaps you all may enjoy reading from these selections:

America Alone author Mark Steyn weighs in on the problematic "War on Terror" label -- and on Norman Podhoretz's attempt to redefine it as World War IV.

Religion of Peace? author Robert Spencer keeps an eye on the explosive situation in Pakistan.

The ever-popular Ann Coulter refuses to be shut up about Jews and Christians -- and manages to pull Muslims into the discussion, as well.

And What's So Great about Christianity author Dinesh D'Souza considers whether Christians are "poor, ignorant, and violent."

The action around here this week has all been in the comments to the post below -- thanks, Nathanael, for taking up the slack while I caught up on Book Club business after my trip to the Pope Center Conference (and in my off hours dealt with Halloween, the end of middle school football season, and other mother-of-a-12-year-old-boy sorts of things).

I'll just add one note to our resident gadflies (esp. SurfCity7, in this particular case): If you're going to make it your hobby to come here and fight with us conservatives, you should familiarize yourself with some distinctions among conservatives. Nathanael's professor belongs to a large class of conservatives who are not Johnny-come-lately critics of our war in Iraq -- blaming neoconservatives for their own folly only after its dire consequences became obvious to everyone. The Conservative Book Club offered a number of books by early conservative (or paleoconservative) critics of the war. I'm pro-Iraq war myself, as I've said on numerous occasions, but there have been numerous principled critcs of the war on the Right from very early on. Besides Professor Ryn, here are two more.

Nathanael: I share your impatience with what looks like hubris -- and cluelessness about fallen human nature -- on the extreme neocon end of the conservative spectrum. (Though I think your predictions about Iraq are more pessimistic than current events warrant, and I don't class our invasion as an act of hubris; I'm still proud that we overthrew Saddam and hope that we are doing, both now and in the long run, more good than ill there.)

But I am also frustrated with what seem to me to be blind spots in some of the thinking toward the other (paleocon) end of the spectrum.

I read only a part of America the Virtuous about four years ago, and I haven't time to review it today. So I hope you (or Professor Ryn) will set me straight if I misrepresent his argument.

But as I remember my (partial) reading of the book, I was intrigued by Ryn's enthusiasm for casuistry -- the careful case-by-case parsing of exactly how moral principles apply in different situations. (Though I wonder whether the easiest example that springs to mind, to show the importance of casuistry, is one on which Ryn would agree: It seems to me that the question of exactly where harsh treatment of our prisoners of war verges into morally impermissible mistreatment requires careful moral analysis and calculus, not just kneejerk moral indignation.)

But when Ryn (as I recall) began comparing the stoics' cosmopolitan, one-size-fits-everybody, it-works-anywhere-in-the-world style of morality unfavorably with a morality grounded in our obligations to our family and the others closest to us, I lost my patience.

'Where does he think stoic morality came from?' I wondered. (I was on the bus, at the time, or I would have been saying it out loud.) 'Doesn't he know that Epictetus was a crippled slave?'

According to Origen (not all authorities agree on the cause, though they do on the disability), the stoic philosopher Epictetus was maimed for life by his master. He likely was separated from his parents at a tender age, and he wasn't even called by a real name -- Epictetus means "Acquired." In other words, at least one stoic philosopher was a man entirely without familial or other close relationships capable of bestowing special requirements of gratitude or mutual obligation on him. He needed a morality that would work for a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world -- for anyone, in any circumstances, no matter how alien or extreme those circumstances were. It's hard to see how any other kind of morality would apply to him.

Now Epictetus is an extreme case, but it's no accident that stoic philosophy arose in the Hellenistic period, when the close familial, neighborly, and cultural ties that Ryn wants to ground morality in were being destroyed right and left in the dislocations of a globalization exponentially more violent than the one we're experiencing today. In one of the most moving stories in the Anabasis, Xenophon tells how one man traveling with the Greek army suddenly realizes that he can understand what the hostile locals are saying in their foreign language -- he must've been kidnapped or taken as a prize of war as a child, and then forgotten all about his native country until he found himself passing through it as part of a mercenary army. (And after Xenophon's day, things only got more complicated and disruptive -- as Alexander conquered the world, his empire splintered, and Rome began picking up the pieces.)

It's reasonable to resist creeping Wilsonianism and over-ambitious do-gooding in American foreign policy (though I don't know if even the author of An End to Evil quite merits the "neo-Jacobin" label). But it's not reasonable to blame the stoics for not basing their morality in cultural conditions that they weren’t lucky enough to share.

The fact is, our lives are being atomized, too. We are not enmeshed in the web of family and hometown and local culture that many of our grandparents lived in. Those relationships have been loosened or broken -- not by slave-raiders and invading armies, but more gently, by improvements in technology: by advances in transportation and the mass production of goods, and by the ubiquity of the mass media. We, too, need a morality that works for citizens of the world just as well as it works in families and local cultures.

For an answer to Nathanael, which I'm aiming to put up tomorrow morning.

A website full of My Grandfather's Son links. (Hat tip to Deb.)

Update: Whoops! I've now hooked up the actual link.

In Praise of Prejudice author Theodore Dalrymple reviews the rash of "new atheism" (a.k.a. "village atheist") books that have been published in the last couple of years .

The curious thing about these books is that the authors often appear to think that they are saying something new and brave. They imagine themselves to be like the intrepid explorer Sir Richard Burton, who in 1853 disguised himself as a Muslim merchant, went to Mecca, and then wrote a book about his unprecedented feat. The public appears to agree, for the neo-atheist books have sold by the hundred thousand. Yet with the possible exception of Dennett's, they advance no argument that I, the village atheist, could not have made by the age of 14 (Saint Anselm’s ontological argument for God's existence gave me the greatest difficulty, but I had taken Hume to heart on the weakness of the argument from design).

. . . .

Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens’s drumbeat in God Is Not Great: "Religion spoils everything."

What? The Saint Matthew Passion? The Cathedral of Chartres? The emblematic religious person in these books seems to be a Glasgow Airport bomber—a type unrepresentative of Muslims, let alone communicants of the poor old Church of England. It is surely not news, except to someone so ignorant that he probably wouldn’t be interested in these books in the first place, that religious conflict has often been murderous and that religious people have committed hideous atrocities. But so have secularists and atheists, and though they have had less time to prove their mettle in this area, they have proved it amply. If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior, neither is absence of belief, to put it mildly.

In my last post I mentioned Dr. Ryn, one of my professors and the author of (among other works), America the Virtuous, an intellectual examination of neo-Jacobinism and the neoconservatives who exemplify it. This sets him against ideologues like David Frum and Richard Perle, whose grandiosely titled An End to Evil demonstrates the insane vision they have of a virtuous America waging worldwide war for democratic capitalism until evil is finally trounced once and for all. Ryn notes that evil is an intrinsic part of the human condition, and is best combated not with tanks and politics, but with personal moral struggle.

In my view, Ryn's thesis has been thoroughly demonstrated in Iraq, where America may, if we are lucky, just eke out a victory, albeit on much-reduced terms. The visions of spreading democracy and freedom through the middle east have crumbled to dust in the sands of Iraq; now we'll be happy just to kill the terrorists and keep them from ruling Iraq when we leave.

Elizabeth, however, has some quarrels to pick with Dr. Ryn, and I look forward to seeing what she brings against him.

Well it has been, already all week, as I've scrambled to take care of Conservative Book Club business, so that I could afford to leave the office and travel to North Carolina tomorrow for the Pope Center's "Building Excellence into American Higher Education" conference, where I'll be talking about, among other things touching on excellence in literary education, The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature.

Meanwhile, on the subject of academic excellence, let me recommend this very useful bit of advice from Thomas Sowell, author of several fine Club selections.

One of the most persistent of our commenters is doing less commenting here and more answering me at his own blog, lately. If you'd like to see EveningSun's latest on the moral absolutism issue, click here.

The heart of his argument:

In at least one of its forms, moral relativism does not mean "there are no moral values" or "anything goes." It means moral values exist, but are always relative to something else. Moral absolutism says Don't do X because X is wrong, period, whereas moral relativism says Don't do X because we want result Y, and doing X prevents Y. X is wrong relative to our agreed-upon desire for Y. If we want to live in a society where we don't have to worry about getting murdered every time we step outside the house, we should embrace a moral rule that says murder is wrong. If we want to live in a society where we don't get cheated, we should embrace a moral rule that says promise-breaking is wrong, and so on. As long as we can all agree upon the ends we want, we can agree that murder and promise breaking are wrong relative to those ends. We simply don't need for them to be wrong in some larger, more objective, non-relative sense.

. . . .

Obviously, anyone who lives in a society that has determined lynching to be wrong can say "Lynching is wrong." True, the moral relativist can't say "Lynching is objectively wrong, in and of itself, because that's just the way the universe is." But the moral relativist can still say, "Lynching is wrong." Consider this analogy. Is it objectively, in and of itself, wrong to turn left at the intersection of State Street and Main Street? Of course not. But if one is driving west from Fort Garland with the goal of reaching Monte Vista, then turning left at that intersection would indeed be wrong. Just because the wrongness of an action is relative to something else (in this case, one's desire to get to Monte Vista) does not mean we cannot call the action "wrong." We use the word "wrong" all the time to describe actions that are wrong only in relation to something else, so why can't we do the same when talking about morality?

Well, for starters, because murder is wrong in quite a different sense from taking a wrong turn and getting lost in traffic. Wouldn't you say?

And also because, as you'll notice, EveningSun's argument makes lynching morally right in a society in which we agree on maintaining racial purity at almost any cost. Which is absurd. Right?

Not to mention the logical problem with leaping from 1) "we all want X" to 2) "Y, which is necessary for X, is right." The premise you have to add to this argument to make it hold water is surely beyond anything even EveningSun can swallow: "Anything necessary to get what we want is right." And notice, this is supposed to be a basis for morality.

If you want to see a similar discussion, but on a more sophisticated (and entertaining) level, check out this debate between Christopher Hitchens vs. Dinesh D'Souza, author of What's So Great about Christianity.

Mr. Hutchinson, thank you so much for agreeing to answer a few questions for us. Your Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible is looking like it's going to be a Conservative Book Club bestseller. I know our members will be fascinated by what you have to say.

I think many people have been dismayed by the sudden explosion in books that attack the Bible as not merely historically or scientifically inaccurate but actually malevolent, as a source of intolerance and hatred. Sometimes we focus so much on denominational disagreements or disputes over the interpretation of particular biblical passages that we overlook the big picture. I argue in my book that, rather than being a source of intolerance and hatred, the Bible paved the way for most of what we cherish in the modern world, including the recognition of human rights, limited government, even experimental science.

One of the most interesting things you point out in the book is that the anti-Bible arguments of the "village atheists" such as Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), and Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation; The End of Faith) are not really new at all. Some of those attacks on the Bible were being made by pagans in the Roman Empire as early as the second century A.D. And Christians had answers for them back then. Can you give us an example?

That's right. It just galls me when people like Hitchens and Harris are allowed to get away with a kind of historical illiteracy. They will say that Moses didn't really write the Torah and then sit back, with a look of triumph on their faces, as though such a declaration will shock anyone. The trouble is, the Roman philosopher Porphyry said the same thing only he said it 1,700 years ago. For most questions like these, Christians have had ready answers over the millennia -- some convincing, others less convincing -- but neither the skeptics nor the media bother to check what those might be. Regarding Moses, the Bible doesn't say he wrote the entire Torah only that he wrote down "all the Lord's instructions (Exodus 24:4)." If there was an historical figure of Moses, and I think there was, the adopted son of the Egyptian pharaoh, there is no reason not to believe that he would have been highly educated and quite capable of writing things down. Even many liberal scholars believe that the Biblical writers made use of very ancient sources (the Bible actually mentions some) and it is not inherently implausible that some of those sources probably date back to the Exodus itself.

Modern Bible scholars take a radically skeptical attitude toward the events of the Old Testament. Some of them go so far as to say that King David didnt even exist, and that the Hebrews were never slaves in Egypt. What does the archaeological evidence say?

Skeptics continually make what are called "arguments from silence." They can't say that archaeological evidence contradicts something in the Bible, so, instead, they say that there is no proof that a particular person existed or a particular event occurred. The problem is, over the decades whenever skeptics have made these "arguments from silence" they have continually been proven wrong by subsequent discoveries. For example, skeptics said there was no archaeological proof that Pontius Pilate ever even existed -- and then, in 1962, an inscription was discovered in the ruins of the Roman government seat of Caesaria, south of Haifa, that mentioned Pilate by name. Lately, so-called "minimalist" scholars have claimed that there never was a King David -- and then, in 1993, archaeologists working at Tel Dan, in northern Israel, discovered the House of David inscription that mentions King David by name. Around the year 2000, a popular book was released that claimed the Exodus was a complete fraud because there is no evidence of the Israelites wandering in the Sinai desert for 40 years -- a place, by the way, that has been the scene of fierce battles between Israeli and Arab forces and crisscrossed by thousands of tanks.

Okay, but did Noah's flood really cover the face of the whole earth?

Wow, you don't pull any punches, do you? Christians and Jews disagree amongst themselves about this issue. As I said, I try to sidestep these divisive exegetical questions so people will focus on how the Bible shaped western civilization and, I believe, the modern world. Personally, I take the middle-of-the-road position of most mainstream Christian denominations that there probably was an enormous regional flood mentioned in many extra-Biblical Near Eastern sources. When Genesis says "all" the highest mountains were covered with water, the Hebrew word used is kol, which is frequently used in Biblical Hebrew in a non-absolute sense. For example, 2 Samuel 18:8 says that "the battle was spread over the whole (kol) earth (erets)," meaning the entire region around Mahanaim, not the entire planet. As a result, the Bible's description of water covering "all" the highest mountains could just mean that all the highest mountains in the area of the flood were covered, not every mountain on the entire planet.

You compare the famous passages (in the Book of Joshua, for example) in which God commands the Israelites to destroy their enemies with Jewish leaders' requests to the Allies to bomb Auschwitz during World War II. Can you explain?

This is a very controversial position to take because we're not entirely sure what the Canaanites were actually like historically. My more scholarly friends tell me that it's unfair to indict the Canaanites as being sort of proto-Nazis, but it's clear (at least to me) that this is how the Bible views them. It is because of the "abominations" of the seven Canaanite tribes that, the Bible says, God commands the Israelites to drive them out of the land. In fact, Deuteronomy 9:5 makes it clear that "it is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land, but on account of the wickedness of these nations." 2 Kings also describes, in detail, how the reforming King Josiah "did away with the Moabite horror" (23:13) and "the Sidonian horror," so that "there would no longer be any immolation of sons or daughters by fire in honor of Moloch." I make the comparison in the book with Jewish leaders' requests to Allied leaders to bomb Auschwitz during World War II even though it would mean the death of innocent Jewish lives. The horror of what was happening in the death camps was so great that it had to be stopped. That is something of what I interpret was going on with the campaign against the Canaanite nations.

You claim that the Bible -- and particularly the creation account in Genesis -- has been "a victim of its own success." How so?

This is complicated. On the one hand, we're living in a radically secular age, at least in the West. The Bible no longer dominates our culture the way it once did. Many people find the Bible boring and irrelevant to their lives. But the irony is that many of the key ideas and underlying philosophical presuppositions of our entire society are, I argue, based on the Bible -- such as the notion that nature is inanimate and not imbued with "mind" or spirit -- but we can't see that because we are so totally shaped by the entire Biblical