In what may be the most thorough and satisfying rout of a book in a review since Garrison Keillor unforgettably eviscerated Bernard-Henri Levy’s American travelogue, Leon Wieseltier excoriates the Duke philosopher of science Alex Rosenberg’s “The Atheist’s Guide to Reality,” which he calls “the worst book of the year.” Excerpts:

Unfortunately, the defense of science became corrupted in certain quarters into a defense of scientism, which is the expansion of scientific methods and concepts into realms of human life in which they do not belong. Or rather, it is the view that there is no realm of human life in which they do not belong. Rosenberg arrives with “the correct answers to most of the persistent questions,” and “given what we know from the sciences, the answers are all pretty obvious.” (I have cited most of them above.) This is because “there is only one way to acquire knowledge, and science’s way is it.” And not just science in general, but physics in particular. “All the processes in the universe, from atomic to bodily to mental, are purely physical processes involving fermions and bosons interacting with one another.” And: “Scientism starts with the idea that the physical facts fix all the facts, including the biological ones. These in turn have to fix the human facts—the facts about us, our psychology, and our morality.” All that remains is to choose the wine.

In this way science is transformed into a superstition.

(This is the right time to commend to you Wendell Berry’s brilliant little philosophical broadside against scientism: “Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition.”)

Wieseltier continues:

This shabby book is riddled with other notions that typify our time. Rosenberg maintains that atheism entails materialism, as if the integrity of the non-material realms of life can be secured only by the existence of a deity.

An interesting line, that last one.

Wieseltier approach to this material reminds me of the English philosopher John Gray’s criticism of the New Atheists as smug, ignorant, and somewhat fanatical. I believe Wieseltier is a religious Jew of some sort (he worked his way back to the practice of his childhood faith after the death of his father, if I remember correctly), and Gray is an avowed skeptic. But both bristle at the baseless, brittle intolerance of many who believe that science tells us all we need to know about life and how to live it. As Wieseltier says in his withering final lines of the Rosenberg review:

He is untroubled by everything under the sun. The man’s peace of mind is indecent. “We know the truth,” he declares sacerdotally in his preface. “Some of the tone of much that follows may sound a little smug. I fear I have to plead guilty to this charge …” Once upon a time science was the enemy of smugness.

Sacerdotally. Le mot juste. Exchanging bully-boy religious fundamentalism for its scientistic/materialistic version does not improve a thing.

Incidentally, why did Wendell Berry call scientism “superstition”? Not because he was against science, but because he believed that those who elevated science as a way of knowing beyond its proper boundaries were engaged in a form of primitive religion. Excerpt from “Life Is a Miracle”:

It is not easily dismissable that virtually from the beginning of the progress of science-technology-and-industry that we call the Industrial Revolution, while some have been confidently predicting that science, going ahead as it has gone, would solve all problems and answer all questions, others have been in mourning. Among these mourners have been people of the highest intelligence and education, who were speaking, not from nostalgia or reaction or superstitious dread, but from knowledge, hard thought, and the promptings of culture.

What were they afraid of? What were their “deep-set repugnances”? What did they mourn? Without exception, I think, what they feared, what they found repugnant, was the violation of life by an oversimplifying, feelingless utilitarianism; they feared the destruction of the living integrity of creatures, places, communities, cultures, and human souls; they feared the loss of the old prescriptive definition of humankind, according to which we are neither gods nor beasts, though partaking of the nature of both. What they mourned was the progressive death of the earth.

(Via First Thoughts.)

Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out for longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence. — Wendell Berry, from the essay “A Poem of Difficult Hope”

Words of encouragement and direction in the face of the dullness and despair of our current political moment. As Richard Linklater similarly said in the film Slacker, “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy.”

Paul Pillar, a former CIA agent, says that good intelligence work doesn’t matter all that much to presidents on big decisions, which they make according to their ideological instincts. Excerpt:

 From George W. Bush trumpeting WMD reports about Iraq to this year’s Republican presidential candidates vowing to set policy in Afghanistan based on the dictates of the intelligence community, Americans often get the sense that their leaders’ hands are guided abroad by their all-knowing spying apparatus. After all, the United States spends about $80 billion on intelligence each year, which provides a flood of important guidance every week on matters ranging from hunting terrorists to countering China’s growing military capabilities. This analysis informs policymakers’ day-to-day decision-making and sometimes gets them to look more closely at problems, such as the rising threat from al Qaeda in the late 1990s, than they otherwise would.

On major foreign-policy decisions, however, whether going to war or broadly rethinking U.S. strategy in the Arab world (as President Barack Obama is likely doing now), intelligence is not the decisive factor. The influences that really matter are the ones that leaders bring with them into office: their own strategic sense, the lessons they have drawn from history or personal experience, the imperatives of domestic politics, and their own neuroses. A memo or briefing emanating from some unfamiliar corner of the bureaucracy hardly stands a chance.

Besides, one should never underestimate the influence of conventional wisdom.

Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga says that the brain has a mechanism that makes decisions prior to the subject becoming aware that the decision has been made. This does not mean that one doesn’t have free will; it means that all the decisions and experiences leading up to the point of decision-making have conditioned this unconscious apparatus. Sounds to me like the neuroscientific reason behind Paul Pillar’s observation above. So often we think we’re reasoning, but in fact we’re rationalizing a decision we’ve already made, whether or not we’re consciously aware that we’ve made it.

I’ve just been sent a link to the Imaginative Conservative website, something that I’m very glad to see, and pleased to bring to your attention. It’s a Kirkean sort of place. Here’s a piece from last month by Brad Birzer, marking the passing by Congress of the National Defense Reauthorization Act, which, as you know, was subsequently signed into law by Obama. Excerpt:

On the 220th anniversary of the ratification of that most excellent common law document, the Bill of Rights, Congress (as the House had already passed it earlier in the week) agreed to hand over some of the broadest powers to the Executive branch it’s ever given away.

President Obama will sign this into law very quickly, if he hasn’t already done so by the same this is posted. Once he signs it into law, the dreams of every progressive president since Teddy Roosevelt will have been fulfilled. The executive will now be authorized by Congress—against a number of vital constitutional provisions—to detain American citizens accused of terrorism indefinitely and without trial.

There’s been very little public debate about this, and the news reports from the major news outlets yesterday mentioned these wide-sweeping powers only in passing. There’s more than a little hypocrisy in all of this, given the way the press responded to the rather heinous Patriot Act (remember how we were promised that would be a temporary measure) under Bush and the Republicans a decade ago. But, the NDAA is even worse than the Patriot Act, and it’s now clear that the Patriot Act was merely one step in the advance of this move toward extreme centralization.

As I wrote at CatholicVote yesterday, I believe it’s very possible that yesterday or the day (probably today) President Obama signs this into law will be remembered by future historians of western civilization as the “official” day the American republic became an empire, in the way historians now regard the murder of Cicero as the last day of the Roman Republic and the first day of the Roman Empire. I know many readers of TIC already believe we drifted fully into an empire, but we’ll all admit, I think, that we’ve been drifting for a very, very long time. As with Rome, we’ve kept the forms of the republic by destroying the essence of it.

Cranky old Ron Paul, let it be said, is the only presidential candidate talking about this.

A Louisiana expat friend in DC passes along this interview with New Orleans chef John Besh, commenting that Besh’s is probably the best ambassador the Great State has for itself right now. Excerpt from the interview, in which Besh talks up his new cookbook designed for the home cook:

Your business advisors must not be happy that you’re encouraging people to cook at home. What’s the idea here?

The genesis of the book was my personal discovery of making the transition from restaurant chef to home cook. I would always cook these Sunday suppers, but it was something I cooked for myself. In some ways that’s my own therapy of jumping in my own kitchen without any distractions, where I can connect with food. But I was still cooking like a restaurant chef. And one day I questioned my wife about what she was feeding the boys — with four boys and the restaurants, our lives are insane. And she’d quickly pointed out that I’d go to the ends of the earth to find that special something to serve our restaurant guests, but I’d neglected my family in the process. That really hit home.

So it’s the one time that nagging has paid off?

[Nervous laughter.] No, It made me really reflect. It’s a maturing process in my life, where my responsibility is first to my family, and how am I going to change my ways? Really simply put, the first couple of chapters of the book focus on kitchen logic—taking two decades of professional [experience] and applying it to the way I’d run my own home kitchen. One comment I hear about my first cookbook, My New Orleans, was that the recipes were so long, that it takes so much time to go out and shop just to get the ingredients. That made me think—you should have a lot of these things in your pantry. The average home cook shops for the recipe. They don’t keep this parstock of things in the pantry.

A lot of people don’t necessarily have access to great ingredients, so they take the easy way out.

As I was going through this I read a Michael Pollan article in the Times that spoke to the tragedy of people not cooking their own food, and the further we get away from that, we’re losing something critical to every part of our culture, our society, our being. We need to commune at a table — not only for sustenance, but I think our souls crave sitting down and breaking bread.

More local food news: I was thrilled to see that in the past year or so in St. Francisville, a butcher shop has opened in town. The butcher, Marty, is really knowledgeable. It turns out that he and his veterinarian wife also homeschool their kids, and his wife, Sonya, a veterinarian, advises the 4-H program (our kids will join the poultry club, once we can figure out a place to raise chickens, which aren’t legal for backyards inside town). Can’t wait to make my first brisket from his shop. What a great thing it is to have a butcher in town. I lived in one of the most prosperous parts of Philadelphia, and we didn’t have one nearby.

Good morning. Went to bed last night before the final Iowa results. Eight votes! Mercy. Ramesh Ponnuru says you could make a case that Romney’s victory is fairly impressive, given that he didn’t devote a lot of time or money to the state (N.B., I was under the impression last night that he had spent a lot of cash in Iowa):

But that’s not going to be the prevailing interpretation of what happened a few hours ago, and that is because the Romney campaign completely lost control of expectations, in important part through its own–and especially the candidate’s own–mistakes. For weeks, the Romney campaign had tried not even to whisper that it could win Iowa. Then in the last days of the campaign Romney decided to indulge in bizarre bravado. His political instincts do not seem to be finely tuned. This tie is going to go to Santorum: When you have to explain a victory, you haven’t won one. (See Buchanan-Bush in the ‘92 New Hampshire primary.) It is only his lack of money and organization that has prevented Santorum’s political victory from being a fiasco for Romney.

Meanwhile, Ramesh’s NRO colleague Jim Geraghty points out that Rick Santorum didn’t even try to get onto the Virginia ballot. This is why Santorum’s post-Iowa campaign won’t last long: he doesn’t have the organization in place to capitalize on his victory there. He won Iowa by relentless retail campaigning. There’s just no time or opportunity for that sort of thing from here on out.

On the other hand, Mike Huckabee was similarly hobbled by a small campaign organization after his 2008 Iowa victory, yet he managed to fight on consequentially for some time. But he was a far more charismatic, telegenic figure than Santorum is — this matters when you’re relying mostly on free media. And the major consequence of his campaign was to wear Romney down for John McCain. If Romney faced a significant threat, Santorum could be a serious danger as a spoiler. But the only other candidate standing between Romney and the nomination is Ron Paul, who famously has a ceiling that he can’t break through; the passion of Paul’s supporters runs deep, but not terribly wide.

Still, I believe Santorum, as an unabashed social and religious conservative, will do well in the South, if he can last long enough — and if he can get on enough ballots. The problem is, he’s got a long way to go. Florida is not till January 31. A good showing in South Carolina will boost him there. But after Florida, he has to wait till March 6, and the Georgia vote, to hit a state that should be strong for him. I don’t see how he pulls that off, but then again, nothing seems normal about this year.

Romney is inevitable, but the fact that Republican voters act like they’re being forced into an arranged marriage does not bode well for him in the general election.

UPDATE: Perhaps the most truthful remark I can make about the Iowa result is also the most banal: I really don’t give a rip. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to say that the outcome of a Republican presidential primary doesn’t matter to me. But I have been trying to force myself to care about this one, and failing. Maybe that’s my fault. It probably is my fault.

Y’all watching? It’s just past 9pm central here at the Mothership, about half the votes have been counted, and it’s fairly safe to say that after tomorrow, there won’t be any more Michelle Bachmann candidacy. Rick Perry may ride his fat campaign bank account through South Carolina, but given how hard he’s run in Iowa, this pitiful showing of his means this ain’t his year. The Gingrich boom has gone definitively bust (wasn’t it hilarious that Newt Gingrich — Newt Gingrich, of all people! — whined yesterday about Romney’s negative ads?). Huntsman will stay in through New Hampshire, but after that will withdraw.

So unless things change much, after tonight, it will be a Romney-Paul-Santorum race. Big disappointment for Romney, who blew a fortune in Iowa. Santorum has no money now, but he’s peaked at just the right moment, and may well rocket out of Iowa as the go-to guy for the anti-Romney Republicans. Romney will win in New Hampshire, but that won’t mean a lot. The real race in NH will be for second place. Hard for me to imagine that the GOP will ever nominate Paul, but this is an unbelievably volatile year, so who knows? If Santorum or Paul pulls close to Romney in NH next week, the South Carolina primary on Jan. 21 will be one hell of a night.

UPDATE:Jonathan Tobin:

The greatest danger to Romney’s hopes of winning the nomination was for one of his conservative rivals to break out from the pack. So long as the various not-Romneys are fighting each other, the actual Romney wins. So no matter who comes out ahead in this three-way tangle, the fact that there is no single rival for him in the top tier constitutes a strategic victory for him.

Ross Douthat:

[T]his is a remarkably weak field, and at this point I’m not sure that Santorum’s various flaws are any more glaring than Perry’s or Gingrich’s. He won’t take the nomination, but if I were the Romney campaign I wouldn’t be too quick to assume that he’s their ideal foil.

UPDATE.2: Ari Fleischer, just now on CNN, on Santorum’s big showing: “This is going to break his back.” Fleischer means that Santorum has no money, no campaign infrastructure, no nothing. The money could start rushing at him tomorrow, but he’s got no way to capitalize on this, says Fleischer. And of course the attacks begin tomorrow.

UPDATE.3: Just saw this interesting bit on Ron Paul by the excellent Bob Wright, now blogging at The Atlantic. Excerpt:

 I’ve long thought that the biggest single problem in the world is the failure of “moral imagination”–the inability or unwillingness of people to see things from the perspective of people in circumstances different from their own. Especially incendiary is the failure to extend moral imagination across national, religious, or ethnic borders.

If a lack of moral imagination is indeed the core problem with America’s foreign policy, and Ron Paul is unique among presidential candidates in trying to fight it, I think you have to say he’s doing something great, notwithstanding the many non-great and opposite-of-great things about him (and notwithstanding the fact that he has in the past failed to extend moral imagination across all possible borders).

UPDATE.4: I’m sorry, I can’t believe that Ron Paul is using this moment on live TV to talk about why America needs to get the gold standard back.

UPDATE.5: Newt Gingrich is such a crybaby, whining on TV now about negative ads. Are there any politicians who actually look good complaining about how their opponents said mean things about them? Romney sure did kill Gingrich’s campaign with those ads. No wonder Gingrich is p.o.’d. — but still, whining about it is unseemly, especially if you’re Newt Gingrich, who was a master negative campaigner back in his day.

I wish Gingrich would be quiet about “changing the culture.” Politics isn’t going to change the culture. Ever. It’s folly to speak as if it will. Anybody who believes that is going to be disappointed.

UPDATE.6: Well, I was wrong about Bachmann — she’s staying in. That’s stupid. You have to wonder what in the world she’s thinking. Why carry on now? She’s hardly a factor anymore. She gave a mindless, robotic speech, denouncing Obama’s “socialism.” Is she even running for a Fox News show at this point?

I think Noah makes a very good observation in the combox:

It looks like the number of participants tonight will be almost exactly equal to four years ago (about 120,000). Four years ago, the Republicans were demoralized with a highly unpopular president. This year, they have a highly fluid, competitive race, and a vulnerable Obama in a weak economy, and yet we don’t see more enthusiasm. If we subtract Paul’s voters — many of whom either did not participate four years ago, and/or are not registered Republicans — we probably have fewer GOP partisans coming out today than in 2008.

Which goes to show you what a s***ty bunch the R’s got this year (except Paul).

UPDATE.7: Along those lines, Scott Galupo makes a strong point:

I imagine the White House tonight would be shot through with concern if Iowans had turned out in droves for the GOP. They didn’t.

If anyone attracted new and younger voters to the caucuses, it was Ron Paul—who I can say with certainty will not be the nominee.

Romney, for his part, does well among wealthy, older voters. Tonight’s results are mildly troubling for Romney—but more than mildly troubling for the GOP long-term.

The party appeals mostly to a segment of the country that’s literally dying.

UPDATE.8: Rick Perry drops out! He didn’t say so explicitly, but that’s what he said, in effect when he said he was “going back to Texas” to think about whether or not there’s a way forward. Smart. There’s not, not for him. Boy, did he blow it in those debates.

Today is my wife Julie’s birthday. I didn’t have time to make a cake. I asked my cousin Amy Dreher, a professional pastry chef (her husband Daniel was the guy who made the insanely delicious, Joel Robuchon-inspired pear tart the other night), if she could make a simple white cake with buttercream frosting for Julie.

Emphasis on “simple.”

This is what she just sent over:

Dipped my finger in the buttercream frosting just now, and I swear I saw colors that aren’t perceptible by normal human eyes.

Good grief, somebody, please put these talented chefs to work! In a kitchen! In St. Francisville, I mean, so I can eat their food regularly.

UPDATE: Well, that is one of the most barbaric things I have ever seen. She’s over there eating it with a spoon. From the cake itself, I mean. We’ve all had slices, but she won’t stop. “I can’t believe I actually know someone who can make something like this,” she says.

UPDATE.2: Julie said just now: “Living here, the phrase ‘an embarrassment of riches’ occurs to me all the time.” True, that.

TNC has an interesting post interpreting the enthusiasm many people have today for Ron Paul, despite his great flaws, in light of the enthusiasm many black folks had for Louis Farrakhan a couple of decades ago, around the time of the Million Man March, amid various crises in black America, and the fecklessness of the black political leadership. Excerpt:

The fervency for Ron Paul is rooted in the longing for a reedemer, for one who will rise up and cut through the dishonest pablum of horse-races and sloganeering and speak directly to Americans. It is a species of saviorism which hopes to deliver a prophet onto the people, who will be better than the people themselves.

But every man is a prophet, until he faces a Congress