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The biggest difference between a secular critique of political correctness and a Christian critique is that the seculars see things in terms of who exploits whom; while a Christian may see things in terms of the war between Good and evil: between God and Satan.
Is there a perceptible difference? Yes, I think so.
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If it is agreed that the
present Western ruling elites are destroying the peace, prosperity, comfort and status of their own lives along with everybody else's (just delayed by a few extra
years), and also destroying the lives of their descendants (if they have any), and also the lives of their friends and colleagues, and also destroying the long term success of their own supposedly most cherished ideals and allies...
Then the choice is between the modern Leftist elites being afflicted with some combination of incompetence and suicidal insanity
- or else, instead or in addition, service to purposive evil
(by which I mean deliberate destruction of The Good - destruction of Truth, Beauty and Virtue and also the unity of Goodness).
So they are either dumb and mad only; or mostly evil, plus various possible degrees of dumbness and madness.
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I think if we honestly and objectively look at the world we can observe empirically that the politically correct elite seek-out goodness in order to attack it, and seek out evil in order to promote it.
And they do this in the teeth of resistance, with tenacity, with zeal, doubling-down on the job.
This cannot be explained by random madness or dumb good intentions.
Of course, the modern politically correct elites don't try to destroy all forms of Good, nor do they promote all forms of evil - but I think long term trends show that this restraint is only a mixture of tactics and the impossibility/ incoherence of pursing all evils at once - over time I think we can clearly see that sooner or later all Goods will be attacked, all Evils promoted.
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So, assuming that you are a Christian and regard rulers as being in service to Satan as a real possibility - then I think this is a much stronger hypothesis than the psychosis/ incompetence idea.
Even if the elite are indeed crazy fools, which I think they are; the big problem is that they are bad crazy fools.
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I think you nail it with the assessment of their intent as evil-by-omission and not "good." Good people consider the consequences of their actions, all of them no matter how many layers removed. Bad people don't care, and act only for temporal gratification right now. That's the leftist elites in a nutshell.
ReplyDeleteBad and crazy fools indeed.
ReplyDeleteI found the keys to understand this problem 30 years ago in my first course in theology, on the Gospel of John. The main subject was the choice between light and darkness (John 3;17-21), in other words the war between good and evil inside man’s soul. The same was confirmed and more practically outlined while working on term papers in moral theology, in which I made the link between the core notions of moral philosophy and the Church’s moral teachings.
The fools begin to fool themselves at a young age – at the first act of free will at the end of childhood, Maritain remarks. They fool themselves in choosing what is evil over what is good, while sincerely thinking they are doing the contrary, because human will cannot normally do evil consciously without experiencing guilt. They experience guilt anyway, but they transfer it on scapegoats and put all their efforts to remain in the dark and avert their interior eye from what they are really doing.
As man cannot do evil without becoming evil, consciously or not, the crazy fools become gradually bad, because they continue to live in darkness, so that their evil deeds do not appear so, at least to themselves. This is made easier when they assemble in order to excuse and approve of each other, and then consciously and publicly reverse the norms, rules, values. The darkness is then complete as they have successfully masked as righteousness what is self-righteousness of the worst sort.