Wrong Lesson Drawn From Leftist Sanctimony

At the Spectator, Matt Purple, who is Catholic, likens the sign pictured here, and common in blue areas, to the Nicene Creed:

Rorschach test -- or funhouse mirror? (Image by Lorie Shaull, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)

There is an apparent power to the sign that's lost on right-wing unbelievers like me. A writer at Mashable describes her reaction to seeing it as "a fist-pumping 'fuck yeah'" and "oh, I gotta take a picture of that." Amanda Hess at the New York Times sighs that she was "seduced by its chaotic jumble of typefaces, its lifestyle-blog-adjacent aesthetic, its sanctimonious final line and its curious staying power." Having never been ravished by an Arial typeface before, I can't possibly comment. But there's a word for those who find transcendence in rote recitation: not liberals or scientists but believers. [links dropped, bold added]

Amen, so to speak.

Unfortunately, only disappointment will follow for anyone hoping that Purple would take this as a sign that we should remember that our Founders practiced and celebrated reason -- and that we might consider their example and do the same.

What we get instead is the usual thin gruel of conservatism: Faith is the basis of knowledge. Classical liberalism can't win (they half-hope, half-fear), because (they claim or imply) morality is outside the scope of reason. So those who abandon religion must necessarily create some hollow mockery of a replacement of their own. Religion is the basis for morality and governing society. Q.E.D.

The Underpants Gnomes from back in the day have nothing on them.

This always concludes without a hint of irony, that their religion is good, and the (newly) made-up one is bad and weird. Just look at those stupid hippies with all their nonsense!

So while progressivism might be religion, it's stupid, hypocritical bad religion. We Catholics sometimes get tongue-tied mumbling words like "consubstantial," but I'll take that over a wan sloganeered imitation any day of the week.

I'll take neither, but let me first give the angels their due, so to speak, with the help of Hugh Hefner and the very thoughtful atheistic philosopher, Ayn Rand:

PLAYBOY: Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life?

RAND: Qua religion, no -- in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man's life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy. And, as philosophies, some religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on a very -- how should I say it? -- dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground of faith. [format edits, emphasis added]

Whether modern leftism is (or is becoming) a religion I leave as an exercise for the reader, but there can be no denying that it is increasingly approaching the level of irrationality of religion, whatever idealism might be conflated with it.

So, one cheer for Purple for spotting the other believers, but the following, which I repeat, is just as revealing as the sign:

So while progressivism might be religion, it's stupid, hypocritical bad religion. We Catholics sometimes get tongue-tied mumbling words like "consubstantial," but I'll take that over a wan sloganeered imitation any day of the week.

Consubstantial? Bad religion? Without a trace of irony, Purple drops a Latinate name for a doctrine at least equally as ridiculous as any left-wing fashion and -- in the same breath -- implies that his brand of contempt for reason is the "good" one.

Hmmm. Which of these is the "good" one? (a) Socialism and its variants, which have murdered 100 million plus people and counting in the century they have been tried on the one hand. Or (b) Religion, which held down the West in perpetual misery, poverty and (often religious) warfare for hundreds of years, until Aristotle liberated her in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment? Raw numbers may not be helpful in such a comparison, because the society the Catholic Church created couldn't even support enough people to murder at such a ghastly scale as socialism -- which took over areas that had benefitted from more freedom than there ever had been in the Middle Ages.

That is a trick, non-math question: Any political system that fails to recognize -- and so tramples -- individual rights is a bad one. There is no such thing as a good social system based on the denial of reason and on its corollary of unleashing physical force on the hapless human beings caught up in it.

For further elaboration, I refer the reader to Ayn Rand's "Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World."

-- CAV

P.S. Regarding the question of the basis for America's founding (which conservatives routinely assert was religious), I refer the reader to the historian Brad Thompson, in his book, America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It.