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May 9, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:30
GOTCHA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep575
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com.
That's friendofdinesh.com.
Coming up, I'll preview a big press conference coming up on Wednesday.
Representative James Comer outlines the scheme of foreign bribe payments to the entire Biden crime family.
I'll evaluate some developments in the case against Trump that Georgia District Attorney Fannie Willis is likely to bring.
I'll talk about how U.S. universities are losing their global cloud, and that's actually a good thing.
And I'll explain why morality is objective and relativism is a ruse.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to the podcast.
I'd appreciate it. This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy. In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Yesterday I did a segment on the podcast, Slightly Tongue-in-Cheek, about a Chinese student visiting the United States who was making sardonic observations about America and about how she came to America full of optimism, looking to find, if you will, the American dream.
And what she discovered is this sick and depraved culture with a lot of, as she puts it, perverts and sluts.
And I made the comment that one of her solutions, again, I think offered wryly and sardonically is we need to send these sluts and perverts to the moon.
I just want to update you on that segment with a new and a very amusing tweet.
From Wei Wu, she goes, bad news.
I do quick calculation.
I send all pervert and slut to moon.
Very, very expensive.
Why? Too much pervert and sluts.
All very fat. Need lots of fuel.
I calculate the cost.
Total fuel cost?
$28 trillion.
Then she goes, I save $800 a month.
I need to save 30 million years.
And then she goes, do not worry.
I'm smart. I make new plan.
Give me time. Out of the population of America, average weight, 200 pounds, estimated fuel.
So what makes this so amusing is not simply the idea, but the working out of the idea and the whole calculation is presented here.
Well, on to the news of the day.
Well, it's really coming news.
There's a big press conference on Wednesday, which I'm looking forward to.
I will, of course, cover it on, well, it's early in the morning, so I might even be able to cover it on Wednesday as podcast.
And the press conference is James Comer, the chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.
Now, James Comer put up a very interesting statement.
Here it is.
My message to the Department of Justice is very loud and clear.
Do not indict Hunter Biden before Wednesday.
And then he goes on to say, we believe that there are a whole lot of tips that the IRS and DOJ don't know about because we don't believe they've done a whole lot of digging in this and we have.
Now, what is Comer getting at?
Why would he make the odd statement, do not indict Hunter Biden?
I think it's because he thinks that the DOJ might try to cover for Joe Biden and And the other members of the Biden family by trying to put all the blame on Hunter.
Hey, we're indicting Hunter Biden.
See, we're not political.
We follow the truth where it is.
But the real idea here is in kind of getting this, well, let's call it mafia son, we let the kind of real crook, the Don Corleone, the Joe Biden himself, the president of the United States, off the hook.
And I think what James Comer is trying to say is that he has discovered Involving many countries and many banks and many shell entities that are used as the pass-through for money, an elaborate bribery scheme.
So this is not just, you know, with the Clinton Foundation, the Clintons always deny that they were doing anything in return.
Yeah, these governments just want to, perhaps they want to maintain good relations with the Clintons.
They put money into the Clinton Foundation.
But with the Bidens, we're talking about specific Kind of pay-for-play schemes.
I will give you money if you will do this in return for me.
And it looks like this is how the Biden family got rich.
Again, not Hunter Biden exclusively, but Frank Biden and James Biden.
And even that's the tip of the iceberg.
Joe Biden is driving the whole scheme.
He is the mafia don, but apparently the wives, the in-laws.
Comer says that there could be as many as nine Bidens involved in this.
Now, there was a report which I talked about on the podcast.
An FBI whistleblower filed a confidential human source report of a top IRS agent who says, I can give you specific information of at least one case where there is straight out bribery of the Bidens.
And it is done by a foreign country, apparently not China.
So this IRS agent is being protected as been approached by the House Oversight Committee.
But Comer is saying it's a lot more than that.
Payments have been routed to a web of limited liability corporations in exchange for something that then Vice President Biden and now President Biden would have done.
So he says more and more evidence is pointing toward Joe Biden.
Obviously, Joe Biden was involved in all this despite the fact that he lied to the American people, despite the fact that his press secretary continues to lie about it.
So, quote, we're going to produce an additional five Biden family members, more countries, more LLCs, more bank accounts.
This thing is much bigger than anyone would have predicted.
And it all points to Joe Biden.
So the evidence is coming out.
It looks like it's irrefutable.
Why? Because you actually have bank records supplied by the banks themselves.
So this cover-up scheme that really began with the censoring of Hunter Biden's laptop before the election, it's coming unraveled.
And I commend the House Oversight Committee for being so dogged and relentless on this.
Certainly the media is trying not to cover it.
I don't even know if they will do a lot with the With the press conference on Wednesday, but the truth itself is very valuable to get out.
It may only be the first step, but nevertheless, it is a necessary step.
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We've seen some headlines in the last few days building off of the idea that eight Trump electors, these are Trump electors in Georgia, have accepted immunity in the Georgia investigation.
And this has led to a flurry of confident speculation.
That Fannie Willis, the DA, has got the goods on Trump.
That these eight electors have agreed to flip on Trump.
They have incriminating information.
Now, none of this is explicitly said in these articles and reports, but it is strongly implied that why else would Fannie Willis give If not, that these guys have said, look, here we've got smoking guns, we've got these emails, we've got these texts, we've got things that we can use to show that Trump was trying to rig the election in Georgia.
This was in, of course, 2020.
But as we look a little more closely to this, you discover that not only is there no there there, but it doesn't look like there is any incriminating information, any, coming from these eight Trump electors.
The reason for them getting immunity is not because they have flipped on Trump.
There was pressure on them to try to get them to say incriminating things, but these electors have basically pushed back and said, listen, we don't even trust this process because you're trying to get us to say things that aren't even true.
The attorney representing the electors, or at least a number of these electors, has come forward with a brief, a 28-page response, where Kimberly Dubrow makes the point that there is a Evidence of malpractice,
just questionable conduct by the prosecutors who are trying to twist the legal process in inappropriate ways to try to get a result that is not supported by the evidence.
Now, let's follow how all this came about.
In January of 2022, Fannie Willis, this is the Fulton County DA, got permission from a chief judge to impanel a special grand jury.
Now, the grand jury did not have the power to bring an indictment, but it had the power to make a report.
Issuing a recommendation.
Now, the report is largely under seal, but we do know that the grand jury concluded that, quote, perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses testifying before it.
But that by itself doesn't mean anything.
Perjury in what way?
Who committed this perjury?
What is the nature of the perjury?
Well, the big issue here is that The context seems to show that Fannie Willis misrepresented to the grand jury what Trump said in his famous or infamous call on January 2, 2021, to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Now, we actually have the content of that call, and when you look at the call, It's pretty clear that Trump is saying to Raffensperger, there's been all this inappropriate conduct, there's been all this voting in violation of Georgia law, and this is the reason I lost the state of Georgia.
Trump says, basically, he's down by 11,700 votes, thereabouts.
And he goes, find me those votes.
In other words, the votes are there.
Trump is not saying that he wants Raffensperger, in fact, would be preposterous to call somebody who is kind of a never-Trumper and, in fact, had been taking a public stance against Trump and demand that that guy produce out of thin air some 11,780 votes.
And yet... This seems to be exactly what Fannie Willis told the grand jury, that this is in fact what Trump is calling for in his call to Raffensperger.
Now, the DA and the prosecutors in Georgia appear to be going to these electors and trying to strong-arm them.
At first, they said to the electors, well, hey, listen, we want you.
You're just witnesses in this process.
You're not actually under investigation.
You don't face legal liability.
So these guys go, well, all right, well, we're happy to be interviewed and give you our point of view.
But as soon as that process gets going, it becomes clear that they are trying to use the legal bludgeon.
Hey, either you say what we want you to or you may be indicted.
So suddenly these guys realize we are in fact facing legal liability and all of this talk that we are merely witnesses and not subjects of the investigation is in fact false.
Now, in the report, the defense counsel also says that her clients, which is the electors, had, quote,"...grave concerns that if they testified truthfully that neither they nor the other electors committed any illegal act or engaged in any sort of conspiracy with regard to the 2020 election,
the DA and your team would not accept that truth." That the prosecutors would, quote, So to translate out of the legalese,
the contention here is that the DA is saying, in effect, I'll give you immunity, but only on the condition that you say what I want you to say.
Now, this is, again, a brutalization of the legal process.
This is not how it's supposed to work.
Yeah, witnesses are sometimes given immunity, but that is to tell the truth, not to make up falsehoods or lies.
And so this Georgia case, which the left is putting a lot of hopes on, they've basically said, yeah, we're a little doubtful about the Alvin Bragg case.
That may, in fact, go nowhere.
But we think that this Georgia case has a lot more merit.
I don't think it does.
But this is not to say that Fannie Willis, who is a kind of dug-in enemy of Trump, will not bring the case nevertheless.
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The conviction of some of the proud boys on charges of seditious conspiracy seems to me a grave miscarriage of justice.
Now, sure, these prod boys are boisterous characters.
They get into fights with Antifa.
They see themselves as a kind of a group that is self-appointed to provide security to MAGA people and to Trump.
They have evidently came to Washington, D.C. with those ideas.
And they engage in a lot of tough talk, particularly in their chats, where they talk about, if this happens, we're going to move into action.
And I'm giving a couple of sample tweets where they talk about if things get violent, we're ready for it.
But the important thing to realize is that none of these Proud Boys brought any weapons.
Enrico Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys, Hispanic guy wasn't even in D.C. on that day.
But nevertheless, the Justice Department claims that these guys were part of a conspiracy.
And they're able to get a conviction here by, first of all, defining conspiracy in an unbelievably general way.
Essentially, conspiracy is nothing more than talking.
What the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt is that two or more persons arrived at some type of agreement, including a mutual understanding or meeting of the minds, to try to accomplish a common and unlawful objective.
So two or more people arrived.
Come to some sort of agreement.
Again, the agreement doesn't have to be explicit.
It doesn't have to be evidently in writing.
People could even, in fact, the prosecutor himself said you can use a wink and a nod to imply your agreement.
And so this is a very low standard, especially for such a serious charge, a charge that has been virtually never brought in American history.
You have to go back over a century, I mean, pretty much to the time of the Civil War, to find when these kinds of charges were even contemplated.
And yet here they are being deployed by vengeful prosecutors, by compliant judges, and highly biased juries.
So all of this shows the degree to which we have really departed from the norms of laws fairly applied in the United States.
And all of us have to be much more vigilant ourselves not to get caught in these kinds of traps.
The idea that we have today a justice system, particularly on political matters that is sort of equitable or fair, I think is now should be recognized as an illusion.
I don't know if it means that we are as bad or worse than other countries.
But let's just say that this sort of contrast between us and them, we do things right.
Our jury system is the best in the world.
I don't think it is the best in the world.
And certainly, no one has provided any comparable evidence today to show that our jury system is better than the jury system of lots of other countries, where I'm sure lots of shenanigans go on as well.
But there's a very interesting angle on this Proud Boys trial that can be missed, and that is that what the prosecutors have been trying to do consistently is set up the blame to be put on Trump.
So, Julie Kelly, in one of her articles on this, makes the point that in discussing The Proud Boys case, presenting the kind of closing argument to the jury.
The prosecutors, of course, had a lot of clips, but they begin with a clip not from any of the defendants, but they begin with a clip from Trump.
And what is the clip? Well, Trump is in the debate with Joe Biden, and they're talking about white supremacists and militia groups.
And Trump says, well, what are you talking about?
Give me the name of a group.
And Biden goes to Proud Boys.
And Basically, Trump goes, proud boys, stand back and stand by.
That's all he says. Now, I don't exactly know what that even means, but it looks like the proud boys, according to the DOJ, they took this as some kind of call to arms or call to action.
Quote,"...these defendants saw themselves as Donald Trump's army, fighting to keep their preferred leader in power no matter what." And then as the case goes on, you find other examples where Trump is sort of pulled in the case.
You know, Trump's comment to, quote, fight like hell, which again, doesn't necessarily mean to pick up clubs and batons and fights.
It can mean politically, stand up and fight.
which we see on social media all the time.
Our side needs to fight, our side needs to not let this go unanswered.
And this is the most plausible description of what Trump is saying, but nevertheless, and this is Julie Kelly's point, that the reason that they're weaving in Trump, Trump, Trump is that when you get the conviction for seditious conspiracy, this then comes to the attention of the special counsel, Jack Smith, and Jack Smith can say, wait a minute, if there was a conspiracy, and by the way, we've already proven to a jury with the Proud Boys that there is a conspiracy,
well, who is the leader of this conspiracy?
None other than Trump.
Now, in a sense, this is moving too fast, and by itself, it's not convincing, because simply to say that the Proud Boys understood Trump to be saying, hey, you're my army, Well, first of all, Trump didn't say, you're my army.
But second of all, the fact that they took it that way doesn't mean that Trump meant it that way.
Obviously, in a case against Trump himself, you have to prove that Trump intended Trump.
To foment a controversy.
But again, biased judges, biased juries, a vengeful prosecutor.
In some ways, the elements are in place to try to go after Trump and try to obtain a conviction of Trump for inciting for seditious conspiracy in much the same way that they were able to establish in front of the D.C. biased juries for the Proud Boys.
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I'm not really very knowledgeable about the rock groups of the 70s and 80s.
So I say to Debbie, I go, do you know who Dee Snider is?
She goes, of course I know who Dee Snider is.
Well, evidently the dude is the singer, the lead singer of Twisted Sister.
And this fellow, Dee Snider, kind of a rock legend, although not to me, but nevertheless, he was supposed to perform at San Francisco's annual Big Pride event, Gay Pride event.
And then he was cancelled.
And the reason he was cancelled had to do with his position on the transgender issue.
And Dee Snider has issued a, well, I gotta say, it's a pretty measured and eloquent statement, which I generally wouldn't expect from some guy who's the lead singer of Twisted Sister.
But I think it's worth looking at what he has to say.
He's speaking, he says, as an ally of the LGBTQ community.
He says that they had asked him to To perform his song, We're Not Gonna Take It, except they wanted him to modify the song, not We're Not Gonna Take It, but Queer Not Gonna Take It.
And he was totally game for this, and I think he seemed to be kind of excited about this clever, verbal play on the song.
But it wasn't apparently enough, and they decided he had somehow betrayed the cause and should be booted off.
And so he begins his statement by going, "'So I hear I'm transphobic, really?' He goes on to quote San Francisco Chronicle's political reporter that Dee Snider is a longtime supporter of LGBTQ rights." He says he was honored to accept the Gay Pride invitation.
And then he says, where's the transphobia?
He goes, I was not aware that the transgender community expects fealty and total agreement with all their beliefs and any variation or deviation is considered transphobic.
He says basically, my lifetime of supporting the transgender community, the right to identify as they want and honor whatever changes they make and how they present themselves to the world isn't enough?
And he goes, why not?
He says, and this is really coming to his parent heresy, he goes, I've recently stated I do not believe young children are ready to decide their gender allocation.
He says, I believe their choices should be supported and accepted by their parents, but I do not think kids have the mental capacity to make rational, logical decisions or things of a magnitude that will affect them for the rest of their lives.
I do not believe they are mentally developed enough.
And this, for him, is the sole issue.
He's just saying, hey, listen, I'm not talking about adults who I'm presuming he supports, but I'm talking about young children who have not developed.
And then he goes on to quote Dr.
Jennifer Katzenstein, Director of Psychology, Neuropsychology and Social Work at Johns Hopkins, basically affirming what he just said.
And then he goes, well said.
It's just good parenting.
Then he goes on to say, interestingly enough, and this is a broader statement of Dee Snider's political views, he goes, I'm a proud moderate.
I drive a Tesla and a Hummer.
I have too many guns but strongly support intelligent gun control.
I have four children yet fight for a woman's right to choose.
I'm a motorcycle riding environmentalist.
I'm a heterosexual who proudly supports LBGTQIA plus rights.
To me. And then he says, and I believe to many of you, none of these things are mutually exclusive.
So I think what you have here is a guy who is certainly politically in the middle, has a mixed bag of opinions, is in general pro-gay, pro-LGBTQ, pro-transgender, and is merely saying, hey listen, When it comes to the kids, we're talking about something a little bit different.
And we have to allow them a chance to mature before they can make decisions that are not temporary, that are not actually easily reversible, and that have long-term impact.
So this is the most...
This is common sense, stated in a very diffident manner.
And his point is, and yet you call me a heretic.
And he seems a little hurt by it.
But I think what he's putting his finger on is the fascism of the transgender left.
The fascism of activists who will brook no disagreement and will cancel you, shut you down, boycott you, try to ruin you.
If you fall off, if you depart from their straight path, so to speak, I'm using the term, of course, ironically, in any way.
And so when you've lost Dee Snider, it seems to me, you're losing the middle for sure.
And now the only question is whether Americans like Dee Snider will have a little bit of backbone in order to say, all right, well, if you insist on taking that intolerant stance...
Then you are making of me not just someone who's not going to be an ally, but actually a political enemy.
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Make sure to use the promo code DINESHDINESH. American universities have long had the reputation of being the best in the world.
And even though America's school system, particularly the public school system, performs terribly in comparison with other countries, our universities have stood out and have been recognized in other countries to be really good.
And this is really why foreign students from all over the place, from Europe, from India, from China, Now, the American educational system is, in fact, a kind of work of...
And by that, I mean it, well, here's a little bit of the history of the university.
Universities started in Europe in the Middle Ages, the University of Paris being one of the first.
And then, of course, you had Oxford and Cambridge.
But America built really an unrivaled university system, starting in the 18th century when places like Harvard got started, then Yale.
But then later, the huge research universities of the 19th century And what the American system combined was the best of the German research university with the Oxbridge.
Oxbridge is a combination of Oxford and Cambridge.
The Oxbridge Liberal Arts University.
And so... These massive universities with very successful funding systems that came partly from the students and their parents, partly from the government, but also partly through private institutions, philanthropic foundations, alumni, and so on. And then universities became smart about hiring financial people to invest money as endowments got built up.
The endowments produced really good returns.
The university's endowments grew even bigger.
And so when you look at the richest universities in the world, I think of the top 10, well, there's one in Saudi Arabia probably bankrolled by the, well, here it is, it's King Abdullah University, so it's bankrolled by the royal family.
But apart from that, virtually all the others are in the United States.
But universities are now having serious problems.
Part of their problems are that while you have a tiny elite that's making all the decisions, the ordinary university employee is a kind of proletarian worker, does not have tenure, does not have job security, and isn't very well paid.
We have mountains of student debt.
And of course, they're looking for schemes for the government to kind of pick up that debt.
Universities continue to suffer high inflation that makes their costs go up, up and up, and the costs have been rising even when inflation wasn't as high as it is now.
But I think none of those problems are really fundamental.
The fundamental problem is that the universities have, and certainly the elite universities, as much if not more than any others, have really lost their sense of purpose.
They have stopped being about excellence.
They have stopped being about merit or meritocracy.
Meritocracy was really the governing idea of the university.
And it was certainly, it's not to say that there weren't departures for meritocracy.
you had, for example, universities would look the other way and admit alumni kids, for example, when the alumni went to the institution or gave money to the institution.
So there were these kind of deviations.
Going back to the 70s, 80s, and 90s, there was affirmative action in which there was preferential treatment.
But preferential treatment was, again, understood to be a temporary departure from meritocracy in order to create a more diverse meritocracy.
But that is, in fact, not the way that it has played out.
Universities have now jettisoned, to a large degree, the idea of merit, replaced it with the idea of diversity.
And so the old idea, if someone gets to Harvard, they're really smart, you can no longer take that for granted.
If there's a professor hired at Yale, this person is going to be eminent in their field, you can no longer take that for granted.
And on top of the violation of meritocracy, which is a serious problem, by the way, in other countries, merit remains the governing ideal.
The Chinese, the Indians, many others are trying to push forward their best students, recognizing that ultimately it's very often the best students that make a huge difference in science and technology and new discoveries and new innovations in business and so on.
In addition to the collapse of meritocracy, we've seen the collapse of the free speech idea and the establishment of a kind of intolerant orthodoxy.
And it's not just an orthodoxy of the Democrats or even the left.
The left keeps moving further left.
So it used to be you have to be, well, tolerant of gay rights.
But now it's not just gay rights.
You've got to be tolerant of queer studies.
You've got to be tolerant of the transgender agenda.
Men in women's bathrooms, no problem.
Boys competing with girls in mixed martial arts, no problem.
You have to sign on to the full agenda.
And so our universities are seizing to really be universities in the old sense of the term.
The mechanics go on.
The structures are still in place.
In some cases, the endowments are still in place.
You still have graduation.
You have people in long robes.
But the point is that behind these forms, behind this outer shell, the inner core of the university, the soul of the university, has been gravely damaged.
So if you were to ask me today if we should...
Can we unhesitatingly send our sons and daughters to these very fine universities?
I don't know anymore.
I sent mine to Dartmouth, but she graduated in 2017 and the situation has deteriorated considerably even in the last five years.
The American University is no longer what it once was.
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Feel the difference. Why do some groups perform better than others?
This is a huge issue in academia and particularly in higher education.
I'm looking here at the composite SAT scores from 1941 to 2021.
So we're looking now not at SAT scores over the last year or five years, but really over more than half a century.
And we see some trends in these SAT scores, and we see clearly a kind of hierarchy of results, a hierarchy that seems to be getting more And the gaps seem to be getting bigger.
So, for example, we see going back to the 70s and 80s that Asian Americans, for example, are doing about the same as white students.
The Asian line kind of pulls ahead around the late 80s.
But since then, the gap between the Asian-American students and the white students becomes pretty big.
In fact, it's about 150 points out of 1600 on the SAT. Similarly, we see large gaps between white students and then Black, Hispanic, and Native American students.
We saw a slight rising trend for Hispanic and Black students, but that has tapered down in recent years so that the gaps between the sort of high-performing groups—and here you have Asian Americans and whites are second— The gaps between them and then the Black, Hispanic, and Native American is quite large.
In fact, to compare the top to the bottom, the score, for example, for Blacks is under 950, and for Asian Americans, it's over 1200.
That's just a huge, huge difference.
Now, there's been a lot of anxiety over the cause of this.
And of course, there are a lot of people who are really frightened that it could be that you have genetic, natural, biological differences between races, and that's the reason for this result.
Let's remember that the SAT used to be called a scholastic aptitude test.
Now, they got kind of scared of that test.
Name and they change it to a scholastic assessment test.
These days, just the SAT. But the word aptitude means basically your innate ability.
What is your aptitude for music?
Well, that means how musical are you by innate disposition?
What is your aptitude for running or basketball?
Well, that means you have a kind of athletic ability to play those types of sports.
So while the racial theory has been around now since the 1970s, you might know the name Arthur Jensen.
He was a Harvard psychologist who was a strong defender of the idea that differences in academic performance, he argued, are the result of differences in IQ. And IQ, he said, has a considerable innate component.
Not that IQ was 100% genetic, but IQ was largely genetic.
I've never really agreed with this, and yet I've read these studies with interest to see what it is that they're able to show.
It's hard to deny that there is such a thing as aptitude, at least in certain things.
For example, I am good in certain types of things academically.
I'm not good in others.
And in the things that I'm good at, it's true.
I work hard and I develop my abilities, but I develop my abilities in part because I have those abilities.
Whereas in other areas, even though I seem to work hard, I'm like, wow, this is really just not my area.
I'm just not that interested or I don't really get it.
And so clearly in those areas, I have diminished aptitude, less aptitude than other people.
Now, There have been some very interesting studies that look not at innate aptitude, but look at effort.
And I'm looking here particularly at a new study by the Brookings Institution that focuses on homework time.
So take a look at this.
We're looking now at the time high school students spend on homework essentially divided by race.
And we find that We're looking at minutes per day.
So Black students devote for homework about 30 minutes a day.
No more than that. Hispanics about 42 minutes a day.
White students about 55 minutes a day.
And Asian Americans 110 minutes a day.
Wow. Now, isn't it obvious that huge differences like this in the amount of effort that you put in are going to have an impact in how you perform?
And by the way, these differences do not change even when you look at socioeconomic status.
Another way to put it is Asian American students from poor families do better on math tests than Black Americans who come from upper middle class families.
This may seem kind of shocking because we think somehow this is all a matter of class or income and by and large if you sort for income that differences between ethnic groups will go away.
They do not go away, but I'm saying that they do not go away not because there are some biological differences between groups, but because there are differences of culture, of behavior, of effort, and as we can see from this latest study, study habits.
I'm in a section of the book What's So Great About Christianity and I'm discussing moral law and whether or not moral laws are objective or whether they are well subjective and subjective is another way to say relative relative to the observer.
Now When we're talking about relativism, there are kind of two types of relativism.
There is the relativism which says that within a culture, each individual decides for himself or herself what is true and what is false, what is good and what is evil.
And there's also cultural relativism which says that each culture has its own ideas of good and evil, right and wrong.
So, I'd like to say a word about relativism and show why relativism really doesn't make sense.
It's not that there's nothing going for it, but at the end of the day, relativism doesn't really hold up.
Either individual relativism or moral relativism.
Let's start by asking, don't in fact the moral cultures of the world differ pretty widely?
Isn't there moral diversity in our own society?
It seems, when you look at those two things, that there isn't a universal objective morality.
But I think this reasoning that denies objective morality arises both from an error of fact and an error of logic.
Now, let's start with the error fact.
And that is certainly true that the moral behavior of the world's culture shows a considerable amount of variation.
Here's Carl Sagan. He's writing about the kind of a remote culture.
It's the culture of the Ik, the I-K, of Uganda.
He says over there, quote, all the Ten Commandments seem to be systematically, institutionally ignored.
Now... I don't really have my own anthropological work on the ick to say if this is true, but let's say that he is.
Let's assume that Sagan is right.
But what does this really prove?
Does it show that the ick are radically different from people in other societies or in the West?
Well, no. Why? Because we too live in a culture where the Ten Commandments are systematically and institutionally ignored.
And so Sagan's example, which is intended to show diversity of practice, in a way shows a certain kind of unanimity.
But even if you can give better examples, I don't think you can prove Sagan's point.
Let's say that we do anthropological investigation on the ik.
In Uganda, we find that they routinely beat their wives.
Now, would this prove that beating your wife is the right thing to do?
Of course not. The presence of moral disagreement or even moral variation in no way indicates the absence of universal morality. How can the fact of behavior, however eccentric and diverse, invalidate a norm of what is right?
Now, it'd be interesting to do a survey, by the way, all around the world to see if people across the globe accept scientific propositions.
So let's take the heliocentric theory.
The Sun is at the center of our solar system.
The Earth goes around the Sun.
And let's say that you do a study and you find that in a certain region of South America or Southeast Asia, Even after you explain to people this is what Copernicus found and this is what Galileo affirmed, they go, we don't care.
We don't believe it. We reject the idea that the earth goes around the sun.
So these people will say, hey, wait a minute, wasn't there a rival guy named Tolmi?
Didn't he have a different view? Didn't he think that the earth was at the center, the sun goes around the earth?
Well, we think he's right.
Now, let's say we find such a tribe, such a group of people that believes this.
Would you say that this is a refutation of the heliocentric theory, that just because there are people in the world who don't accept it, therefore the scientific truth is relative?
No, you wouldn't say that.
You'd say, wait a minute, those people are mistaken.
I'm sure you can find lots of people around the world who will reject Darwin's theory of evolution, Einstein's theory of relativity.
And so none of this would show that these scientific laws are somehow relative.
Now, it's true that scientific laws are not, in a sense, permanent or they aren't proven.
They are open to revision.
But it's one thing to say I've got a theory.
It's the best theory to explain the evidence that's available to me.
I might get a better theory later that will do an even better job in explaining the evidence.
And that is not the same thing as saying that scientific laws are relative.
Relative basically means that it is up to each individual and each culture to decide whether or not this is true.
So the testimony of a hundred quarreling tribes and widespread differences about morality do nothing to undermine the notion of universal morality in the same way that if the same quarreling tribes had differences about science, that wouldn't prove that the science is wrong.
So... To sum up, relativism is observable in the difference of opinion of different people, different groups, different cultures, different tribes, but that in no way proves that morality is relative.
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