James Kalb, writing today at Crisis Magazine:
What is going on? When did opposition to bigotry become so bigoted, and “hate” lose its connection to hate? How did it happen that pretty much everyone who ever lived now counts as a bigot to be ashamed of? For that matter, when did ordinary Church teaching regarding sex and the sexes, or the value of recognizing and protecting national distinctiveness, become equivalent to crimes against humanity?
At first such views seemed extreme, but more and more they are becoming the conventional wisdom, taught in the schools, proclaimed by moral leaders, assumed as a matter of course in law and public policy, and re-enforced by high and low culture and even by penal sanctions. The transformation is barely noticed, and generally taken for granted as an obvious good thing.
Such a change must have something immensely powerful behind it. But what? It’s a complicated story, but at bottom it has to do with the emerging globalized, technological, and integrated social order in which we live, and the ideals that support that order and the position of those who run it. These ideals present an image of a world reconstituted in accordance with technocratic norms and understandings, a single economic and social network ordered by global markets, certified experts, transnational bureaucracies, electronic entertainment, and electronic communications that make everyone in the world equally present to everyone else.
In that world, the world of Facebook, Amazon, and global mobility of labor, specific inherited culture loses coherence and function. Men and women become interchangeable economic units. Family is replaced by day care, fast food, and welfare rights. Religion merges into politically correct progressivism. And common sense and the wisdom of the people—the secular equivalent of the Catholic sensus fidei fidelium—are replaced by spin, memes, propaganda, alleged expertise, and commercial pop culture.
To read the entire essay, click on the below link:
http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/haters-and-haters
