Today I read a good piece by one of my favorite political writers, Mollie Hemingway. In the wake of the Amtrak derailment, and the Left’s immediate rush to blame the disaster on inadequate government spending (which is to say, on fiscal conservatives), she raises the concept of ‘theodicy’ — that is, “attempts to defend God’s goodness and omnipotence in light of the existence of evil”. Theodicy, she argues, is just as necessary in the secular, liberal religion that runs the show these days as it ever was to Christian apologists.
An excerpt:
The theodicy of federal government requires an explanation that defends the goodness of government control or subsidies into the given sphere. So just as some religious groups might blame a weather event on insufficient fealty to the relevant god, some progressives blame ”” before the National Transportation Safety Board has even shown up on site to investigate the cause of a crash ”” insufficient fealty, sacrifice and offerings to the relevant god of federal government.
Yes, it’s annoying how some progressives politicize everything. But if it’s understood as a sort of primitive religious reaction to confusion about holy government’s many failures, it at least helps explain why they do it.
Read the rest here.
2 Comments
“But if it’s understood as a sort of primitive religious reaction to confusion about holy government’s many failures, it at least helps explain why they do it.”
Primitive? Hardly.The more I read, the more it is becoming likely that Marx, Engels, Lenin and all the rest were fully aware they were creating a sophisticated theodicy retro fitted to Hegel’s dialectics.
Marxism 3.0