You can’t help but notice that the New Religion is developing its own language. It sounds like English and much of it is understandable to English speakers. Much of it is a weird jumble of sounds that have magical properties for the faithful, but sound like nonsense to normal people. Check out this letter to the editor in the NYTimes.
To the Editor:
We are militant about justice, but the justice we seek and enact looks like healing, reparation and care. We do have demands, but not that you submit to our “etiquette,” rather that you join a culture of compassion and acknowledge vulnerability.
College students are volatile, and if our “safe spaces” seem more for hiding from ideas than for shelter from oppression, it is because we occasionally confound structural injustice (which hurts, badly) with being-in-the-world (also hurts). We are obliged as social individuals to fight the first and weather the second, and also to help others do the same.
We do have a settled philosophy. It combines an understanding of power structures with the golden rule. Do unto others as you would if you wanted to heal the pain of injustice. We ask no more than David Brooks does: to defer to the complexity of reality, and to find in our deference the kindness to care for one another’s vulnerabilities and to be honest about our own. HANNAH McSHEA
Durham, N.C.
The writer is a student at Harvard.
I understand that I’m just an unfrozen caveman lawyer, but this confuses and frightens me. I do like the implied threat in this bit:
“We do have demands, but not that you submit to our “etiquette,” rather that you join a culture of compassion and acknowledge vulnerability.”
How can that be read as anything but “join us or die”??
That’s the thing with new religions. When they can’t convert the heathens, they settle for killing them. Fortunately the little princess who wrote that letter and her coevals lack the stones to do it, but that will not always be so.
Better watch out. Derby Milton’s coming to get ya!
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Guest host and last unamnested foreigner in the US, Mark Steyn, was commenting this article the other day on The Rush Limbaugh Show…
You wrote the other day that the doctrines of Christianity guided Christians through life in a fallen world. The Snowflakes also inhabit a fallen world, but their world fell not because of man’s innate sinfulness, but because of the stain of ever-shifting “injustices” which must be put to right, or else. Just substitute Rousseau for St. Paul, and you get the idea. The inherent problem, of course, is that Christianity has a clearer understanding of the human condition than Rousseau and the Snowflakes: injustice cannot be eradicated with right-think. But rather than come to that realization, the Snowflakes are more apt to see the frustration of their utopia as the result of those engaged in wrong-think, and the subsequent need to eradicate them. Such was the reasoning of the first Rousseauist movement, which we call the French Revolution. And we all know how that turned out.
This precious flower needs to pull an eight hour shift waiting tables in a coffee shop.
Actually she needs a good hard spanking.
JWM
“Do unto others as you would if you wanted to heal the pain of injustice.”
And there, my fellow travellers, we have the greatest twisting of all. Not ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ because that would be too simple, too transparent. Much too, well, sensible. You have instead to talk about ‘injustice’ and its attendant pain, because the pain is in you. Your feelings, your perception, because it is an act of selfishness. No matter too that the greatest injustices of the past two hundred years have been fashioned by communists, honed by left-adoring dictators, practiced daily by socialist cant and hypocrisy and supported by the fools in the overfed media who of all people should see what is going on but choose to avert their gaze.
Language has been hijacked to help too, replacing clarity with emotion, replacing accuracy with vagueness, insisting that what you see is not what is happening so the reality you express must be judged by trends and fashions but above all being compressed and squeezed to cover a thousand issues with a few simple words and phrases that will never bring understanding.
Reminds me of this Salon quote on conservatives/AmRen:
“Modern science now undermines all of their basic premises, and there is no reason to tolerate their hateful, dangerous, ancient, and outdated assertions.”
While the left is of course scientific, logical, loving, modern & forward looking!
They should bring that thinking full circle and make “be better” their 2016 slogan.
Obama 2008, Yes We Can!
Hillary 2016, Be Better!
“Fortunately the little princess who wrote that letter and her coevals lack the stones to do it, but that will not always be so.”
And on that black day, when the dust from the Pajama Boy Horde appears on the horizon, all will cry out in fear and anguish to a god that seems to have forsaken them.
And the part of the Pajama Boy Horde that doesn’t trip over its own footies, as it runs down the hill, will start a slap fight with the princesses, with squealing all around.
That’s the point at which the animated Monty Python foot falls out of the sky, squishing everything.
Seriously, I just cannot keep up any more. Did our elders think that we were imbeciles, too?
They think they’re talking, but all I hear is “Waaaaaahhhh! Waaaaaaahhhhhh!”
Neo-gnostics, perhaps? “Being-in-the-world” hurts? What’s next? They doubtless will recreate the demiurge as the bad guy creator with a small c who blindly made this vale of pain.
My worry z-man is not that they will turn to coercion, but rather that they are the worldly expression of the suicidal impulse that seems to have seized our world. They are the word made flesh. My second worry is that rather than just offing themselves, having decided that the world isn’t worthy of their pure compassionate hearts, they will try to take us all with them.
This is a suicide cult. These are the people who watch those animated “the world after man” specials with their collapsing skyscrapers and bursting dams and feel a spark of pure joy instead of profound disgust.
But where does that leave us who don’t give a hoot about others’ vulnerabilities, hurts of “structural injustice”, triggers, micro-aggressions, safe spaces, world views and so on. What a bunch of wimps and whiners. Jees I can’t stand this group. What will they ever do when a hard rain’s gonna fall?