For reasons I don’t really understand, Steve Pinker gets piled on when he claims, correctly, that humanity has made both material and moral progress in the last eight centuries or so.  But there seems to be a group of miscreants who think that they’d be better off in the 13th century and were devout Christians, obeying religious dicta. This is not only wrong but stupid. If they returned to the times they tout, they’d most likely be living in filth, ridden with maladies, not be able to read or write, and, finally, would die at about 30 from a tooth abscess.

But they were religious! The absence of faith is the latest argument for the failure of modernity.  Material progress and improvements in health, so it’s said, have left humanity only with that damn “god-shaped hole”. Despite our higher well being, it’s said, we are still bereft, yearning for a god.  Although you can have your modernity and gods too, somehow these advocates of material regression think that the benefits of modernity have in fact produced that god-shaped hole by distorting our values, and we need to get back to Christianity (they never mention the other religions).

One of the biggest advocates of the god-shaped-hole (henceforth GSH) hypothesis is Paul Kingsnorth, an English writer who penned a dreadful article in the Free Press along the lines above, called “How the West lost its soul“. Kingsnorth argued that only religion (preferably Christianity, though he mentions others) can save us from the malaise caused by the lack of religion. The Enlightenment, he says, has failed, and so, lacking a morality that cannot exist without religion, we tack our way through life without spiritual mooring.

This is nonsense, as I argued here on October 13 (see also here).  And now Steve Pinker and Marian L. Tupy (the latter described as “the founder and editor of Human​Progress​.org, and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity“) have taken Kingsnorth’s thesis apart, showing both the benefits of progress that came from the Enlightenment as well as the failure of religion to forge a workable morality. The resurgence of “Christian nationalism” in America, they argue, has only brought back the old morality that impeded progress.

You can read their piece by clicking below (if you subscribe, for it isn’t archived):

First, though, look how the Free Press‘s author Freya Sanders introduces the piece by Pinker and Tupy (henceforth P&T). The bolding is mine:

We write about this a lot here at The Free Press—about how phones have robbed kids of their childhoods and how young people think corporate jobs are pointless. Paul Kingsnorth argued earlier this year that when people in the West stopped going to church, “the vacuum was filled by the poison gas of consumer capitalism.” TikTok is warping our moral codes, and porn has ruined our sex lives. People are depressed, nihilistic, and increasingly illiterate.

What’s the answer? God, according to a lot of people. There has been a boom in religiosity across the West. We’ve published a lot about that, too—about how Americans are flocking to podcasts and apps that teach them about scripture; how young people are getting baptized in record numbers, or traveling to France to go on a pilgrimage; and how female Catholics are bringing back chapel veils because they want to connect to a “lost type of Catholicism.”

But in certain corners of the intellectual right, the idea that life was better in the good old days has intensified into a longing for—of all social orders—medieval Christendom. There are calls to replace American democracy with a monarchy. To make our laws and lawmakers more Christian. When Tucker Carlson says feudalism sounds good, you know things have gone too far!

So we’re glad to present the opposing view today, in the form of an essay by Steven Pinker and Marian L. Tupy—who believe that we are alive at the best possible time to be human: right now. And we don’t need the Bible to have a moral code, because we have a secular one that is the reason for all human flourishing: the set of ideas we refer to as Enlightenment ideals. They are the ideas America is built on. And they are written into the Constitution, right next to God.

America has always been a negotiation between reason and faith. Right now, the negotiation is fierce. We’re proud to publish arguments on both sides of it—including this thought-provoking essay. Don’t miss it.

This is disingenuous. Note that Sander says, “we’ve published a lot” about the “boom in religiosity” and the need for God.  Indeed they have, but the P&T piece is really the only humanistic attack on religion that I’ve seen on the site. The fact is that the Free Press is always banging on about religion and its virtues (Bari Weiss is, a Jew who, I think, believes in a higher power), and I think they published this just to show that the venue does indeed publish a variety of opinions, thus being “objective”.  (It also has some well known and eloquent authors) But so far it’s been about ten pro-religion articles to this single dissent, so I call that ratio slanted journalism.

But onward and upward, for this piece is a good palliative for all the Free Press‘s god-touting. P&T begin by describing how conservatism has brought us back longing for the good old days when Christianity ruled the West. They explicitly single out Kingsnorth’s article, for these two men have written a long rebuttal. In the introduction, they obliquely criticize the Free Press, too:

Of course, humanity has already tried monarchy and theocracy—during the Middle Ages—and sure enough, some of the new reactionaries are saying that those times were not so bad after all. Dreher writes admiringly: “In the mind of medieval Christendom, the spirit world and the material world penetrated each other. . . . Men construed reality in a way that empowered them to harmonize everything conceptually and find meaning amid the chaos.”

Other influential conservatives go further in justifying medieval hierarchies. On his eponymous show, Tucker Carlson recently declared: “Feudalism is so much better than what we have now. Because at least in feudalism, the leader is vested in the prosperity of the people he rules.”

And The Free Press recently showcased a full-strength expression of pre-Enlightenment nostalgia in an essay by Paul Kingsnorth called “How the West Lost Its Soul” (an excerpt of his book Against the Machine).

According to Kingsnorth, Western civilization has lost the sacred story that sustained it for 1,500 years: Christianity. The story begins with the Garden of Eden, where humanity chose knowledge over communion with God, which led to exile and suffering, though with a path to salvation through belief in a grisly human sacrifice and a miraculous resurrection. For centuries, “the mythic vision of medieval Christendom” offered people meaning and morality, writes Kingsnorth. But starting with the Enlightenment, and accelerating in the 1960s, it gave way to a “partial, empty, and over-rational humanism,” leaving societies spiritually adrift. With sustaining myths gone and no shared higher purpose, Westerners now live amid “ruins.”

The Free Press introduction captures the contrast starkly: “Conventional wisdom insists that technology has made life better,” whereas the abandonment of the religious story has left us with “a complete lack of meaning.”

I don’t want to reproduce huge portions of the article here, and since it’s not archived, you won’t be able to read it if you don’t subscribe (I suggest you do, if only for Nellie Bowle’s weekly “TGIF” column. Or perhaps judicious inquiry will yield a copy. But I am excerpting more than normal for those who can’t access the piece.

Here are the areas that P&T consider, with excerpts (indented) and perhaps a few words (mine flush left) on each.

Well being and morality. In a section called “knowledge is more meaningful than ignorance and superstition,” P&T argue that religion did not improve people’s well being in the old days, but simply justified bad stuff. They argue that humanism provides a better grounding for morality than does religion, and who would argue otherwise? After all, even religious people pick and choose their Biblical morality, implicitly assuming that things are good because God approves only of what is good, implying that the “good” pre-dates the pronouncements of God. Quotes (all indented):

It’s said that the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory, and the historical amnesia of the romanticizers of medieval Christendom is near-complete. Among the blessings of modernity is an Everest of data about life in the past, painstakingly collected by economic historians from original sources over many decades. This quantitative scholarship circumvents fruitless back-and-forth about whether the Dark Ages were really all that dark: We can go to the numbers.

In this essay we will show how the reaction against modernity has it backward. Before the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the resulting “Great Enrichment,” life in the West was characterized for most people not by meaning and morality but by ignorance, cruelty, and squalor. Today we are blessed not just with prosperity and its underappreciated gifts, but with a robust moral mission—one that is grounded in our best understanding of reality, and the indisputable goal of reducing suffering and improving flourishing. Meaning comes from reason and well-being, not scripture and salvation; from governance with the consent of the governed, not rule by kings and clergymen.

, , ,the popular canard among theoconservatives is that religion is the only conceivable source of morality, and so a secular society must be mired in selfishness, relativism, and nihilism. Kingsnorth, for example, favorably cites the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s diagnosis that the Enlightenment left us with a morality that, “loosed from theology,” consists of “nothing more than [an] individual’s personal judgment.”

The dismissal is breathtaking.

The Enlightenment project of grounding morality in reason and well-being left us with a coherent fabric of arguments against the brutality and injustice that had been ubiquitous in human history. These arguments became the foundation of civilized society

Barbarism and immorality.  P&T show that “premodern Christianism was not moral, but barbaric.” Again, what rational person could doubt that?

In contrast to the Enlightenment’s exaltation of universal well-being, the morality of holy scriptures was dubious at best. The God of the Old Testament prescribed the death penalty for blasphemy, idolatry, homosexuality, adultery, disobedience, and working on the Sabbath, while finding nothing particularly wrong with slavery, rape, torture, mutilation, and genocide. Indeed, he commanded the Israelites to commit all of these against their enemies.

Whatever humane advances we might attribute to Jesus, his followers did not adopt them for an awfully long time. For some 1,400 years that separated Constantine’s embrace of Christianity in the early 4th century to the rise of the Enlightenment in the 18th, most Christians remained untroubled by slavery, the persecution of heretics, and brutal colonial conquest.

The point about the delay in adopting “Christian humane advances” is a good one. If Christianity causes moral improvement, why did it take millennia for this to get going?

“Health and prosperity are more meaningful than starvation and squalor”.  Steve has argued this clearly in two books (Better Angels and Enlightenment Now), and surely Tupy—whose work I don’t know—has made similar claims.  I’d love to ask people like Kingsnorth if they’d rather live in medieval Europe or in modern Scandinavia. If they accepted Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” and had to be embodied in a random person, they’d surely choose the latter.

Westerners have been complaining about how wealth causes moral decline for millennia. Few of the complainants have reflected on how it was wealth that gave them the luxury to complain about that wealth. Their contemporaries who died in childbirth, or whose lives were wracked with hunger, pain, and disease, were not as lucky. The vanquishing of early death, propelled not by prayer but knowledge, may be humanity’s greatest moral triumph.

Some numbers can shake us out of this spoiled complacency. (For sources, see our respective books Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know and Enlightenment Now.) In 1800, the European life expectancy was 33 years; today, it is 79 years—which means that we have been granted not just extra life, but an extra life. Much of that gift came from leaps in prosperity that spared the lives of children. Before the turn of the 20th century, a third to a half of European children perished before their 5th birthday. Today that fate befalls three-tenths of one percent. Even the poorest countries today lose a fraction of the children that Europe did until recently. If being spared the agony of losing a child is not “meaningful,” what is?

Children who survived often faced orphanhood, hunger, parasites, workhouses, and beatings. Famines, which could kill a quarter of the population, recurred around once a decade. Today, starvation in much of the world has given way to obesity. It is easy to condemn gluttony, but searching for life’s meaning is surely easier on a full stomach.

Christianity comes with antisemitism.  P&T argue that the hegemony of Christianity both in older times and now is inevitably accompanied by a rise in antisemitism, for if you embrace “Christian values”, you perforce see Jews, who supposedly killed Christ and cannot get to heaven by accepting Jesus, as being “anti-moral.” This, too, appears to be the sentiments of modern Christian nationalists, but is dispelled by secular humanism:

[Yoram] Hazony said: “All the classical questions of: Why is the Old Testament in the Christian Bible? What are we supposed to get out of it? Do the Jews have any role in history at all, or was it just supposed to have ended?—all of those questions are on the table.” It’s notable that Kingsnorth, in his essay railing against modernity, consistently cites the Christian, never the “Judeo-Christian,” tradition.

America was founded on the secular Enlightenment principles of equality, rights, flourishing, and democratic governance. It’s no coincidence that Jews thrived here. Nor can it be a coincidence that a movement founded on parochial Christian theocracy would be accompanied by a recrudescence of the world’s oldest hatred.

In the end, I am both amazed and amused at people like Kingsnorth who long for the good old days when people embraced Christianity and thus were both moral and fulfilled. There were no god-shaped holes then.  But, given a choice of living then and now, I’m sure that all the Christian luddites would choose to live now. As for the god-shaped hole, all I can say is that many people, including me, don’t have one.  Our lives get meaning not from embracing Jesus, but from whatever we find fulfilling: friends, loved ones, and family, work, hobbies, and so on. True, some people will always glom onto faith because it’s so easy: all you have to do is go to a church and you get a preexisting set of beliefs, friends and supporters.  But people like me simply can’t believe in god if there’s no evidence for god.

In their last section, called “Modernity is not a ruin”, P&T reprise their argument, and I’ll give a longer bit:

the 21st century, with all its woes, is a better time to live than any time before. Extreme poverty, child and maternal mortality, illiteracy, tyranny, violent crime, and war deaths are lower than in any previous century. The wealth that theoconservatives find so corrosive funds the education and leisure that allow individuals to contemplate meaning, whether it be in work, family, community, nature, science, sport, art, or yes, religion. Another gift of modernity is that people are not burned alive for their beliefs but allowed to hold whichever ones they find meaningful.

It’s sometimes claimed that for all these opportunities, people today are suffering from a new “crisis of meaning.” Here again we shouldn’t confuse nostalgia with fact. Illiterate medieval peasants left us with no records of how meaningful they thought their lives were. As the historian Eleanor Janega points out, they themselves thought they were living in a time of decline, and “they were rebelling constantly.”

When we ask people about their lives today, their own judgments belie any narrative of decadence and decay. Global surveys find that it’s the richest and freest countries, not the backward theocracies, in which people express the greatest satisfaction with their lives. Pathologies like homicide, incarceration, child mortality, educational mediocrity, and premature death are more common in the more religious countries and American states than the more secular ones.

People also express their conception of a better life by voting with their feet. In 2020, of the 281 million who moved to another country, 232 million of them sought a better life in high-income, increasingly secular countries, particularly in Europe and North America. Today’s reactionaries can’t have it both ways, asserting that the affluent secular West is a decadent ruin while fending off the millions of people from poorer and more religious countries who risk their lives to get in.

And if people voted with their hands and had a time machine, they’d surely set it for now instead of 1350.

Here we have the Triggernometry duo (Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster) questioning astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson about his views on gender (the full interview is here).  Tyson seems quite agitated, loud, and even patronizing, but largely misses the points that gender-critical people are making. For example, he begins with his infamous argument that sex (or gender; he conflates them by bringing up sex chromosomes) is really a spectrum because people decide on a daily basis how male or how female they feel.  Well, I’m not sure how many people do that (I don’t), but Tyson seems to be arguing that people consider this supposed daily switch of gender is a subject of deep concern.

It isn’t.  Tyson doesn’t understand that what people are concerned with is not transitory fluctuations of “maleness or femaleness,” but the claim that people claim to be members of a sex that doesn’t correspond to their non-natal sex, and thus demand that they have the same privileges as members of that non-natal sex. That includes the “right,” if you’re a trans-identified male, for example, to inhabit “women’s spaces.”  Some people are also concerned with requirements that they use special pronouns or address people in specific ways according to their gender (I don’t care much about this when addressing people directly, but it becomes problematic in other situations).

Why do people care? Not because of what Tyson says. They care about male versus female natal (“biological”) sex because of sports participation, changing rooms, jails, rape counseling or battered women’s shelters, and for some, restrooms.  The only one of these issues Tyson mentions is the most inconsequential of all: restrooms. He says he’s speaking of “gender expression,” but since that includes trans people, he has to take them into account, too.  And if you do that, then, yes, some sanctions are in order. In fact, the International Olympic Committee is poised to ban people from competing in sports reserved for members of their non-natal sex.

Kisin simply dismisses Tyson’s argument by saying he doesn’t know anybody who wants to prevent people from dressing as they want, behaving as they want, or using the names they want. Kisin then makes the point I made above: the issue of sex-restricted spaces and the issues of fairness that mandates their creation.  Kisin then adds another area of sex-restricted spaces, at least in the UK: positions that are restricted for one sex or another, like positions in Parliament.  I didn’t know that, or whether it’s still true, but if there are female-only positions in Parliament (or diversity targests elsewhere), presumably those would be restricted to biological women. Kisin later says he’s not in favor of  sex “quotas”, but given that they exist, how are we supposed to deal with trans people?

Instead of taking this on board, Tyson is determined to say that all these problems are fixable. For bathrooms, for example, he says that the solution is single-person bathrooms or multi-gender bathrooms that members of both sexes can use at the same time.  The former solution is okay by me, but not by everyone. The latter one, however, comes with problems, as many women simply don’t want to use multi-gender or multi-sex bathrooms for reasons they’ve given in detail. (Tyson seems to think, for example, that urinals with partitions between them is one solution for a multi-sex bathroom, but I, for one, wouldn’t want to use those.)

As for sports, Tyson says that there are solutions, and these involve not dividing sports by sex but by things like hormone ratios.  That, of course, would lead to more than two classes of sports, and is useless anyway because anybody who’s gone through male puberty could adjust his testosterone ratio down so that it would fall into the female range (I’m not sure how easy this is).  More important, once you’ve gone through male puberty, you are on average stronger, larger, and faster than natal women regardless of your hormone titer. So that is not a fix. (I’ve suggested another fix, like an “other” class, but that doesn’t seem acceptable.)

Kisin points this out the persistence of sex differences even with hormones, but Tyson’s solution is simply “find ways to slice the population in ways so that whatever the event is. . . is interestingly contested.” Tyson’s example is weight classes in wrestling. But Kisin points out that this is not a solution because matching men and women by weight alone would result in unfair victories for men. And of course men’s and women’s wrestling are still kept separate.

By taking up this issue, it’s clear that Tyson is indeed addressibg trans issues and not just temporal fluctuations in one’s gender identity. He’s sufficiently optimistic to think that creative solutions will solve all of these problems. Perhaps, but the problems exist now, and we have to find solutions for them that can work now. 

Tyson takes up the questions of quotas, and says, properly, that if we want equity, then we have to determine why underrepresentation of certain groups exists. My claim is that yes, we need to know that before we do anything to create equity, because different groups may have different abilities and preferences that lead to differences in representation not caused by bigotry. Kisin responds, properly, “The question is: Female shortlists exist. Should biological males be able to enter those female shortlists?”  Again, Tyson avoids answering that question, which is one we need to deal with now. Tyson’s only answer is “We’re in a transitional period. So we have to figure that out.”  “Figuring these things out,” apparently means that we will find a solution that gets rid of men’s versus women’s sports, or male cersus female jails. (The jail issue doesn’t arise.)  The IOC has solved the problem with blanket bans, and that seems like a good solution to me.

Tyson doesn’t seem to realize the extent of the problem, asserting that all playing fields can be “fixed,” and fixed in a way different than anything we can imagine now. But for things like jails, sports, and changing rooms, the “progressive” (yes, he uses that word) fix may be the fix that many of us have already hit on.  Keeping male versus female sports separate, for example, doesn’t seem to me to be “regressive” as opposed to Tyson’s solution based on hormone ratios, which is not “progressive” but bonkers.

The story of “Room 8,” which was the name of a cat, is really too long to tell (see the Wikipedia article and many other pieces as well). He was perhaps the most beloved of all “viral” moggies because he not only lived a long time, but inhabited an elementary-school class for many years. Here’s the Wikipedia summary:

Room 8 (c. 1947 – August 13, 1968) was a cat who became a celebrity for attending Elysian Heights Elementary School in Echo Park, California, United States. He wandered in through a window in 1952 and quickly made himself at home in Room 8, where he joined class for the next 16 years. Room 8 vanished each summer and reappeared in the fall when students returned, a routine he kept up until the mid-1960s.

. . . and the Facebook story, with a picture of the unpatriotic tabby sleeping while the Pledge of Allegiance is recited (I added the arrow pointing to Room 8; click to go to original post):

Also read the school’s memorial page at the Explore Historic California,

There’s also a 50-minute documentary film called “Room 8”, which you can see for free, and in its entirety, below. There are a lot of photos of Room 8, and all ailurophiles need to know who he was.  Pay special attention to the designated Official Cat Feeder, a great honor conferred on a lucky sixth grader.  The Official Feeder got the privilege of holding Room 8 in the official class photo.  I love this film!

Below is Room 8’s gravestone from Facebook, adorned with the cat’s photo and a poem of homage:

As Wikipedia notes, “Leo Kottke wrote an instrumental called ‘Room 8’ that was included in his 1971 album, Mudlark.  Here’s Kotke’s “Room 8”:

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This is a sweet story from Laughing Squid about an insecure cat who was given back to a shelter twice before she finally found a loving home. Click on the screenshot to read the piece.

An excerpt:

A very talkative cat named Bella Bellarda, who had been returned to the shelter twice, keeps hugging her newfound humans to seemingly reassure herself that she’s found an incredibly loving home with two best friends who are roommates. One is the “father”, the one who adopted her, and the other is the “godfather”, the one who moved in.

As soon as I get in and I drop my bag, she jumps to the kitchen counter, then hops on top of me or like climbs with the two paws. …she had been already adopted twice. He was the third one to adopt her was because Bella was a very nervous cat …but since she got here she has never left and there’s no plan on her leaving.

Bella is very intelligent and can respond to a variety of different languages.

Her dad speaks to her in French or a mix between like, she’s a polyglot. She understands English, Italian, French, Arabic, English, everything.

Bella is quite the long jumper and her humans are training her to break the Guinness World Record.

Current Record Holder: Waffle The Warrior Cat who jumped 213.36 cm (7feet) Bella’s jumps range between 240 cm – 260 cm! Waiting for our application to be process.

A video of Bella demanding attention: very un-cat-like!

Bella has her own Instagram page; here are two entries (click on “click on Instagram” if you can’t see the video:

View this post on Instagram

View this post on Instagram

I’m glad she has found her forever home.

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And from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, we have a scary story of a cat riding out a hailstorm by hiding up in a tree. Click below to read it:

An excerpt:

A cat in Texas might just have nine lives after surviving one of nature’s most dangerous elements: hail. “We received a call late today from a concerned Kerr County resident about a cat who was stranded 35 ft up in a tree at the Camp Verde store and restaurant in Center Point” Kerrville Pets Alive said in a Oct. 25 Facebook post.

Heavy rains, wind and hail swept through South-Central Texas Oct. 24 throughout the evening. The National Weather Service even confirmed a tornado touched down in the area, KENS5 reported.

“The cat rode out a violent hail storm overnight in the tree. Neither law enforcement, the area fire department or animal control were available to assist,” the shelter said.

Enter an unlikely hero.

Video posted on Facebook shows a tree service worker leaning an extremely tall ladder up to an enormous tree in order to rescue a very talkative — and thankful — black cat.

“We reached out to our tree climbing cat hero John with John Goodman Tree Service and once again, he stepped up to help! This kitty was four paws down on safe ground in no time,” the shelter said.

Kerrville is about a 100-mile drive southwest from Austin.

Here’s a short video of the rescue. (I will never show a cat in trouble if it’s not rescued!).  Listen to that moggie howl!

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Lagniappe from Merilee: the truth about staffing cats, showing that they’re completely parasitie:

h/t: Michael, Susan, Merilee

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “joy2,” is a “resurrection from 2009.”  Mo, quaffing his usual Guinness, clarifies what the “god-shaped” hole really is:

I also discovered that there is a Jesus and Mo entry in Wikipedia, and this year is its twentieth anniversary! From the entry:

Jesus and Mo share a flat (and a bed), and occasionally venture outside, principally to a public house, The Cock and Bull, where they drink Guinness and engage in conversation and debate with an atheist female bartender known simply as Barmaid, who is never drawn but is characterised only as an out-of-frame speech bubble. The barmaid functions as the voice of reason when criticising the Abrahamic religions or religion in general. Other times, Jesus or Mo may act as the voice of reason depending on which religion a particular comic aims to criticise. Jesus will act as the author’s mouthpiece if the comic aims to criticise Islam while the character Mo will be used to criticise Christianity. They also converse with each other on a park bench.

This may be the last post of the day as I’m a total wreck from insomnia (about two hours of sleep last night). But, as always, I do my best.

Today Lou Jost, an ecologist and evolutionist who works at a conservation-based field station in Ecuador, sent some photos of fluorescent frogs, something recently mentioned by another reader. Lou’s text is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Fluorescent frogs

A couple of days ago Ephraim Heller made an interesting Readers’ Wildlife Photos submission about his Brazilian Pantanal experiences, including what scientists have described as the first fluorescent frog in the world. Fluorescence  occurs when light hits a molecule and excites it to a higher energy level. This is unstable and a photon (generally of a longer wavelength than the exciting wavelength) is emitted when the molecule drops back to its ground state.  The discovery of a fluorescent frog was published in 2017 in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and got lots of press and media attention. The article and the press gave the impression that fluorescence is unusual among frogs. The article’s main photo (Fig 1a) shows the fluorescent frog glowing bright green when illuminated by a deep blue or near-ultraviolet lamp, and this is the photo that all the popular media republished:

Fig. 1A:

I didn’t know any of this but I do a lot of fluorescence photography, so when I had the opportunity in 2021 to photograph a rare glass frog (Nymphargus anomalus) from one of our reserves, I wanted to see its fluorescence. Almost everything fluoresces, and I was not surprised to see that this frog had a beautiful aqua fluorescence, especially its bones. The normally green mosses and liverworts beneath it fluoresced red, green, yellow, and blue. Because this was a randomly chosen frog species out of the hundreds that exist here, by the Copernican Principle I assumed that this was not unusual.

“Normal” photos (by Lou)

Same frog fluorescing (this and one at bottom also by Lou):

So when I read Ephraim’s RWP and his helpful response to my comments there, I was surprised to learn of all the hype about the first fluorescent frog, Boana punctata, formerly named Hypsiboas punctatus. It seems the authors did not bother to check for themselves  whether that frog was really unusual in its fluorescence. Today, checking the internet, I see that 100% of the 150+ South American frog species tested in 2024 by researcher Courtney Witcher were fluorescent!!!  The Copernican Principle works (usually)!

Well, maybe there was still something special about the original frog, whose photos show a bright green fluorescence instead of the aqua fluorescence I had observed. Unfortunately the authors of the original PNAS article took that green photo through a filter that only lets green or longer wavelengths pass through it. They filtered out the blue fluorescence. In reality their frog fluoresces with exactly the same aqua blue color as my frog, as can be seen  in their Fig. 1C, center photo. They had mistakenly labeled that photo as having been taken through a filter that only passes wavelengths greater than 516nm (green, yellow, orange, red). If their figure legend were correct, there would be no blue in the photo, but the frog in that photo is completely blue.

Fig 1C (caption from paper):

This conclusion is confirmed by a photo of the same species taken under UV light in 2024.

Anyway there may still be an interesting story to reveal about the biological significance of frog fluorescence. But caveat emptor…

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) was founded in 1915 to defend freed0m of speech and academic freedom of faculty after a series of incidents resulted in faculty being fired for unpalatable political views. Up to the last five years, the AAUP had done a pretty good job fulfilling its mission.

But now things have changed—big time. The AAUP has taken a number of steps that are inimical to its mission.  First, it defended DEI statements as an important tool for hiring and promoting professors, even though those statements constitute compelled speech, which the AAUP previously opposed.  Then, though it was previously opposed to academic boycotts, the AAUP did a 180° and declared that such boycotts could be okay.  It’s not coincidental that this, occurring in the summer of 2024, coincided with a number of academics favoring boycotts of Israel and the implementation of the BDS program. I can’t believe that any rational person would think that the AAUP’s complete change of position was not motivated by one thing: the desire to allow opprobrium to be directed at Israel.

But wait! There’s more! In January of this year, as my colleague Tom Ginsberg reported, the AAUP decided that institutional neutrality, as embodied in the University of Chicago’s Kalven report, wasn’t important. Ginsburg wrote about this, and the general decline of the AAUP, in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Now comes a third statement, this one adopted in January: “On Institutional Neutrality.” Committee A unhelpfully declares that institutional neutrality is “neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it.” The main feature of its analysis is a rejection of the policies of the University of Chicago. But the statement contains several mischaracterizations, including a grave misunderstanding of academic freedom itself.

Institutional neutrality is important in ensuring that the speech of university members is not chilled by the school or its departments taking official positions on moral, ideological, or political issues. Ignoring it means that you don’t mind speech being chilled.

But wait! There’s STILL more, and it’s not a set of Ginsu Knives. Now the AAUP has published an article in its flagship magazine (Academe) arguing that a diversity of opinion in universities is not only something we don’t need, but could be positively inimical. The piece is called “Seven theses against viewpoint diversity“, with the subtitle “The problems with arguments for intellectual pluralism.” WHAAAAAAT?  Isn’t intellectual pluralism one of the foundations of a university, necessary—along with empirical investigation guaranteed by academic freedom—for finding truth?  More than that: intellectual pluralism among faculty guarantees that students get to hear different sides of an issue, which helps them hone their ability to form informed opinions.

The Academe article was written by Lisa Siraganian, identified as “the J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities and professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University and the president of the JHU-AAUP chapter.” I think one can take this as a semi-official position of the AAUP itself, since it justifies the continued dismantling of the AAUP’s mission by giving left-wing views intellectual priority. (Remember, the vast majority of American faculty are left-wing, and there’s little viewpoint diversity. This has led many students and faculty to censor themselves.)

In an article in The Eternally Radical Idea, a website apparently run by Greg Lukianoff, the estimable president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), three authors, two of them from FIRE, join with a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College (Samuel Abrams), to take apart the AAUP’s article.  They are not recommending an affirmative action plan for professors, so that hiring and promotion priority should be given to conservatives, but they do think that we need a greater diversity of viewpoints on campus, and are hoping that campuses will reform themselves without government pressure or blackmail.

Click the article’s headline to read it:

Lukianoff et al. begin in a defensive posture, saying that they have taken action against the Trump administration on several fronts, so they’re not simply shilling for Trump when they ask for more viewpoint diversity. A bit of their justification, which seems to me a little excessive, although some of it may be necessary. Here’s a small snippet:

When the State Department threatened to revoke students’ visas and deport them for protected speech, we sued to defend the right to campus expression.

And when the White House announced its “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” we called it out as an attempt to impose government-funded orthodoxy.

In other words, we’ve spent the better part of this year defending higher education from a White House intent on micromanaging its politics.

Those are the roses proffered to liberal academics. But then come the brickbats:

But we think those with the biggest vested interest in campus — professors and administrators — often don’t seem to have gotten the memo. At the faculty level, particularly in the humanities, the reflex too often remains obstructive.

No institution better embodies that reflex than the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Under its current leadership — President Todd Wolfson, who frames criticism of academia as part of “right-wing forces… striving to dismantle our institutions” — the AAUP has responded to legitimate calls for reform with a mix of denial and deflection. “Professors are not the enemy,” Wolfson recently declared. “Fascists are.”

While FIRE defends higher education from federal intrusion, the AAUP defends higher education from reform. It is a guild that sees itself as untouchable: the critic-proof steward of a trillion-dollar industry, allergic to feedback from a public it doesn’t seem to know it serves. It stands atop its Perfect Rhetorical Fortress, ready to (mis)label anyone who disagrees with it.

Here’s what the AAUP has called various stands for academic freedom and free speech.

The genuinely politically diverse heterodox Academy? “Conservative.”

Critical of DEI, which has in fact been used to threaten academic freedom? “Right-wing.”

FIRE? “[C]omplicit with the attacks on higher education being led by the right” — and when someone demanded evidence, the AAUP hilariously pointed to the STOP WOKE Act, which FIRE successfully sued to block. (And then, of course, they deleted the tweet.)

Finally, Lukianoff et al. masticate the meat of Siraganian’s article, taking her seven arguments one by one. (they call her piece a “masterclass in how to lose the moral high ground”).

I’ll show Siraganian’s seven points in bold, and will give some brief excerpts from Lukianoff et al. (indented) refuting those points. Bolding in their quotes comes from the authors:

Thesis 1: “Viewpoint diversity functions in direct opposition to the pursuit of truth, the principal aim of academia.”

The piece starts out with this genuine banger. Siraganian treats “viewpoint diversity” as a threat to truth-seeking itself, tossing out caricatures about “flat-earthers” and “QAnon believers” (because of course it does) to avoid addressing the real question: How can you find truth in a system that systematically excludes dissenting voices?

. . .For decades the educational case for affirmative action was that diversity — of background and experience — improves the exchange of ideas. Last year, the AAUP put out a statement reading, “Progress toward diversity goals has resulted in better knowledge production that has started to fill in some of the gaps, expose and correct blind spots, and open entirely new vistas of inquiry that were not possible without it.”

If viewpoint diversity by racial proxy is good because it enriches the conversation, then direct diversity of viewpoints should be celebrated, not considered “direct opposition to the pursuit of truth.”

That’s a good analogy, but of course the purpose of increasing racial diversity was never really to provide viewpoint diversity but to produce racial equity. And it’s always assumed, in a patronizing way, that all members a given minority would have similar and “approved” opinions. No diversity wanted there!

Thesis 2: “Viewpoint diversity can only work as an instrumental value.”

In a nutshell, Siraganian is arguing that viewpoint diversity isn’t the real goal. Rather, truth is the real goal, and so it’s okay to remove viewpoint diversity in the pursuit of truth since it is merely “instrumental.”

. . . Call viewpoint diversity instrumental if you want, but it’s one of the most important instruments we have.

Thesis 3: “Viewpoint diversity assumes a partisan goal based on unproven premises.”

This is where the essay’s denialism crosses into comedy. Siraganian insists there’s “no proven problem” of ideological imbalance in academia — as if fifteen years of research documenting it, often by scholars inside the system, never happened.

In fact, the evidence is overwhelming. In 2012, Inbar and Lammers found that many social and personality psychologists admitted they would discriminate against conservatives in hiring or publication decisions. As Sam wrote in his initial response to Siraganian’s article:

Faculty surveys consistently reveal dramatic ideological imbalance. In many humanities and social science fields, the ratio of liberals to conservatives exceeds 10 to 1. In disciplines such as sociology, gender studies, and English, the imbalance is so extreme that it approaches a ratio of 100 to 0. A 2022 national survey found that nearly 80 percent of professors identify as liberal, while just six percent identify as conservative. These results have been replicated across multiple studies and over many years.

Thesis 4: “Viewpoint diversity undermines disciplinary and specialized knowledge and standards as well as the autonomy of academic reasoning and scholarship.”

The AAUP’s stance on DEI statements makes its hypocrisy on viewpoint diversity even worse. It has come to defend DEI statements — literal ideological litmus tests — as compatible with academic freedom. The same organization that sometimes rails against loyalty oaths now endorses their mirror image, provided the creed is fashionable. When Republicans want loyalty oaths, it’s “fascism.” When the test runs the other direction, it’s “progress.”

This extraordinary hubris merits no deference.

Thesis 5: “Viewpoint diversity is incoherent.” A remedy for the problem is contained in Lukianoff et al.’s response (via Jon Haidt):

The search for truth is the search for ever more complicated and refined questions. We pursue that search by considering competing possible answers. To do that, we need a diversity of speakers to postulate such answers, and more carefully refine the next question. Therefore, the search for truth requires a diversity of views. As Ohio State University professor Michel W. Clune explained in his own response to Siraganian, citing viewpoint diversity defender (and Greg’s The Coddling of the American Mind co-author):

The goal, for Haidt, is neither the proportionate representation of conservatives in academe nor the representation of every possible view on an issue, but “institutionalized disconfirmation.” There should be a sufficient diversity of views in academic units to enable teachers and researchers to identify and challenge claims that, in homogenous conditions, are often tacitly accepted.

Thesis 6: “Viewpoint diversity has already been used, both in the United States and abroad, to attack higher education and stifle academic freedom.”

and the last one:

Thesis 7: “The argument for viewpoint diversity is made in bad faith.

This one is particularly rich, given the organization has frequently engaged in bad faith arguments — such as their recent approval of academic boycotts. Of course, the major boycott movement underway is BDS, a movement against Israel. But that’s not really why they did it, you understand. It’s only a coincidence that Todd Wolfson decided the very next thing he’ll do is support BDS at Rutgers.

It was transparent, and it thought people looking on were fools. Yes, the AAUP’s decision to abandon its position on boycotts while pretending there wasn’t one specific thing it wanted to boycott was made in bad faith. Indeed, it’s hard to take the argument that viewpoint diversity is anathema to academic freedom as anything other than bad faith, given that the AAUP, like many institutions, seizes the value of viewpoint diversity when it’s attached to identity, color, or sexuality, but not when it’s attached to actual diversity of opinion.

Done and dusted! The dissimulation of the AAUP when it rescinded its opposition to academic boycotts was definitely an example of bad faith, and if you think otherwise, you’re clueless. It was made to rubber-stamp boycotts of Israeli universities and academics.

THE SOLUTION:  Here’s how Lukianoff et al. end their piece: by telling us what we should do (i.e., reform ourselves) and how the AAUP, which now seems completely worthless, is in fact buttressing the anti-academic authoritarianism of Trump:

Since these theses were a challenge, we have a challenge in return. If you’re serious about reform, prove it in two moves:

First, say it out loud: “We have a homogeneity problem that makes error invisible and dissent costly.”

Second, do the basics: End compelled statements and ideological screens. Adopt institutional neutrality and robust free-expression commitments. Protect due process. Build recurring, in-house debates across real schools of thought.

If you can’t do those two, you’re not serious. You’re just ideological bullies looking for protection against a much bigger, scarier ideological bully.

Where this ends.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: FIRE will fight government overreach from any administration. But the AAUP’s current posture — insisting that higher ed has nothing to fix while the public’s trust in academia plummets — is a gift to every demagogue who wants to control it.

This is how Trump wins — not because his administration understands or cares about free speech and academic freedom, but because the people who should have been steadfastly defending those principles decided they were optional.

Reform is coming either way. The only question is whether universities will do it themselves, or have it done to them.

This is getting long, so I’ll just recommend that you read the critique of the AAUP by attorney and legal scholar Jonathan Turley on his website (click below):

A quote from Turley, who has another solution, though he does seem to approve of some government interference (“public-funding legislative bodoes”). To me, pressure from donors are fine, but not so much the government.

The current generation of faculty and administrators has destroyed higher education by destroying diversity of thought and free speech on our campuses. The effort of the AAUP and faculty like Siraganian to rationalize the basis for this intolerance is evidence of the hold of such bias. Faculty members would prefer to allow higher education to plunge to even lower levels of trust and applications than to allow for greater diversity in their departments.

Once again, we cannot rely on faculty members to restore balance. We will need to focus on donors (as well as public-funding legislative bodies) to withhold money from these departments. Universities will not allow for opposing or dissenting views unless they have little financial choice. In this sense, we need to focus on public universities as the best ground to fight for diversity of thought. These schools, directly subject to First Amendment protections, can offer an alternative to schools like Johns Hopkins and Harvard for those who want to learn in a more diverse environment.