Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

The Bush Legacy

(Reprinted from the issue of February 17, 2005)

The Washington Post headline, February 9, top of page one: “Blueprint Calls for Bigger, More Powerful Government” (Subhead: “Some Conservatives Express Concern at Agenda”). Right next to that was another headline: “Medicare Drug Benefit May Cost $1.2 Trillion” (Subhead: “Estimate Dwarfs Bush’s Original Price Tag”).

Why read on? There, in a nutshell, is the real story of the Bush era. When the Iraq war is forgotten, the huge apparatus of the expanded welfare state, with all its consequences, will remain as the Bush legacy.

“Big-government conservatism” is achieving what Bill Clinton failed to achieve. It’s also likely to leave more lasting destruction. Bush, who says freedom is every child’s birthright, is ensuring that every American child henceforth will be born deep in debt.

This in itself is nothing new. What is new is a Republican president, calling himself conservative, aggravating the problem so severely. Bush and Karl Rove (who has just been elevated to his deputy chief of staff) hope to establish a Republican dynasty as durable as Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic one.

In fact, Clinton, like Jimmy Carter a liberal in his day, may be remembered, like Carter, as relatively conservative. He did balance budgets and managed to finish in the black. No wonder he felt entitled to take some furniture with him when he left the White House.

Of course Clinton had some help from his opposition, a Republican Congress that wouldn’t give him everything he wanted. Spending is out of control now because George W. Bush is working with, not against, the Republicans. They fought for their principles when facing a Democratic president, but with a Republican in the White House those principles are no longer needed.

Bush is an able politician and an audacious one. Defying the wisdom of the ages, he’s even willing to try to reform Social Security, thereby daring the Democrats to do what they do best: scare old people. But he knows the dynamics of American politics are changing, and he means to take advantage of that fact.

The question is whether he’s biting off more than he, and the political system, can chew. He proposes to cut spending for 150 federal programs, but even if he gets all he asks for, he won’t save enough to pay for the new Medicare benefits he’s already committed us to.
 
Thoughts on Evolution

To my amazement, The New York Times has published an op-ed piece challenging Darwinism. I never thought I’d see the day.

The author is Michael Behe, a biologist who argues that the universe manifests “intelligent design.” Even a single cell, he contends, is an enormously complex “machine” that couldn’t have come about by blind chance. It’s the old argument that a clock argues a clockmaker. The fact that design is obvious, says Behe, is no reason to ignore it.

Behe’s thesis, I gather, is not “creationism” — the belief that God created every species separately. That’s another matter, and as a scientist he doesn’t rely on Revelation. But of course the argument from design has been one of the traditional arguments for God’s existence, which Darwinism has sought to undermine.

I know next to nothing about the structure of the cell (I have only faint memories of high school biology), but I’ve always had a simple, naive objection to the Darwinian theory. If we humans came about by mere chance, there ought to be abundant evidence of chance’s operations.

Let me put it this way. If a monkey typed forever, it’s said, he (or she) would eventually produce a perfect copy of Hamlet. But probably not on the first try. In fact, it’s safe to say that there would be a lot of rough drafts. Perhaps trillions of trillions.

Moreover, when our simian friend had finally arrived at that perfect copy, he wouldn’t stop. He wouldn’t realize he’d written a classic. He’d keep typing more nonsense.

So if blind evolution produced us by chance, there ought to be traces of a staggering number of “rough drafts.” We should be climbing over mountains of bones of Nature’s “failed” (from our point of view) experiments. In such a process of trial and error, the “errors” should vastly predominate. Why isn’t such evidence of evolution all around us? Why does the discovery of a few ancient fossil remains always cause such excitement?

As with the monkey, furthermore, Nature wouldn’t stop when she had (from our point of view) succeeded. She would keep producing new and useless mutations, many of which would presumably be visible to us. Where are they? (Outside New York City, that is.)

Religious questions aside, the Darwinian thesis seems to me pretty desperate on its own grounds. It seems to smuggle in a theory of progress, or purposeful improvement, that’s incompatible with the idea of an immensely long and mindless process.

In fact, popular science articles often speak of the “evolutionary purpose” of some organ or instinct, forgetting that the very premise of the theory is that Nature has no purpose. How, then, can she be assigned such providential wisdom?

I suppose this illustrates the irresistible tendency to see design in Nature, and to infer some intelligence behind it. But that turns Nature into a permissive (if somewhat whimsical) goddess, who makes no moral demands on us. Maybe that’s the real impulse behind Darwinism.
 
Islam and the Future

I recently tried here to imagine how Muslims see the modern West (especially the United States) and why they fear it. I suggested that they may regard us as we once regarded the Soviet Union.

Is there any reason why we should also fear Islam? Stereotypes aside, I think there is. As Hilaire Belloc pointed out, the Muslim world is especially resistant to Christian evangelism. Christian missionaries are banned in some Muslim countries and have been murdered in others. Few Muslims convert to Christianity, and those who do so, even in the West, risk death at the hands of other Muslims, who regard them as apostates. The Koran damns those who believe in the Trinity.

All this makes our duty of preaching the Gospel to every creature problematic in the Muslim world. Our work there has hardly begun; the job is so forbidding that it’s tempting not even to think of it. Today, as Belloc predicted, Islam is a fighting faith; but where is Christianity advancing?

Christians are now said to be fleeing from Iraq, where democracy will probably mean the imposition of fierce Islamic law. In matters of religion, at least, Saddam Hussein was relatively tolerant; Islam isn’t. What can we expect as Muslims keep migrating to Europe and establishing demographic strongholds there?

Maybe the Iraqi Christians can give us a hint. Unfortunately, we are hearing almost nothing of them. The U.S. government and the media are exclusively concerned with Shi’ites, Sunnis, and Kurds — all Muslims.

Even American Christians don’t appear interested in the coming collision of the world’s two largest religions.


SOBRAN’S, my monthly newsletter, hunts down current fallacies (Darwinism is only one of many) and seeks to refute them with as much good humor as is still permissible. If you have not seen it yet, give my office a call at 800-513-5053 and request a free sample, or better yet, subscribe for two years for just $85. New subscribers get two gifts with their subscription. More details can be found at the Subscription page of my website.

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Joseph Sobran