Great Chain of Contempt
Intellectuals left and right have lost faith—and mercy.
the Great Chain of Being served the double purpose of insulating those on top from peasants with pitchforks below while reassuring those below that their natural desire to move up was nothing more than a snare. As all this was God’s invention, rebellion was both foolish and impious.
.. Beneath them, like the serfs of old, are the graduate students, the undergraduates, and then—surprise—lower still is the animal and plant world, and Mother Earth. The non-progressives whom Obama described as clinging to their guns and religion, on the other hand—NASCAR nation, country-music fans, people accounted to be dumb as dirt—count for less than dirt in the eyes of the progressive elite.
If you don’t believe me, look at their policies, in which saving the planet takes precedence over saving ordinary lives. Malaria kills nearly half a million people a year, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. This can be addressed by spraying with DDT, which never killed anyone. It does kill birds, however, and the progressive worries more about them than he does people.
.. One can’t love something that can’t love back. That was the meaning of Cardinal Newman’s motto:cor ad cor loquitur, “heart speaks unto heart.” It’s why you can love your dog but not your goldfish.
.. It’s as silly as people who tell you they worship an impersonal god.
.. So what’s behind the earth lovers, if it’s not love? Just the opposite. Enmity. Contempt. Derision. The goal is to establish oneself in the pecking order by asserting one’s superiority over conservatives, sincere believers, “white trash,” placing them at a lower level than the plant and animal kingdoms. It’s the ultimate form of passive aggression. It’s the indignation of the social-justice warrior at Yale who asserts her own privilege by asking you to check your privilege. And it’s the product of our factories of hatred, the modern U.S. university.
.. Trump’s message, they might have realized that he spoke to real middle-class concerns. Our immigration laws are a scandal and effect a wealth transfer from poor to rich native-born Americans. Our tax system has done the same, and our schools betray our students.
.. The perfect Republican idiots looked at the evidence of income immobility in America and blamed it on the move to an information economy, as though the highly mobile countries to which the American Dream has fled—Denmark and Canada—are living in the Stone Age.
.. the unfeeling strain in contemporary conservatism. It’s something we’ve seen in Mitt Romney, Ted Cruz, Randians, and not a few libertarians. What Romney and Cruz communicated was a perfect fidelity to right-wing principles and an indifference to people.
.. What Romney and Cruz had promised was growth, more growth, a greater GDP, but none of this much appealed to middle-class voters who thought that all of the growth would go to people at the top of the heap, asset-fund managers like Romney or lawyers like Cruz.
.. most intellectuals on the right draw their inspiration not from the Judeo-Christian tradition but from abstract theories of natural rights that have little need of God.
.. One doesn’t learn empathy or kindness from John Locke. Perhaps it’s not something one learns at all.
.. The natural-rights theorist can tell you what others owe him, but not what he owes to others save for the thinnest of duties: don’t harm others, don’t steal from them or defraud them.
.. My friends are the inheritors of a religious, Western culture in which they live as illegal aliens, enjoying its harvest without planting the seed.