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Friday 12 March 2010

That trailblazers of wingnuttery like Glenn Beck would explicitly condemn justice itself shouldn’t be surprising. You’ll recall that just a few months ago, Beck and his allies (including most of the Republican caucus in Congress) were loudly railing against a related prerequisite virtue, empathy. Yes, that’s right, they said empathy was bad. Once they decided that, then it was only a matter of time before they were bound to come out against justice as well, because empathy is the foundation of justice. (See if you can arrive at some conception of justice that does not rely upon empathy. No philosopher, ethicist or religious genius ever yet has managed to do so.) Let me be clear: When Glenn Beck asserts that justice is incompatible with the Gospel and with the teachings of Christ, he is not following the Pauline/Augustinian argument that perfect love transcends justice (“Justice that is only justice is less than justice,” in Reinhold Niebuhr’s phrase). He is, rather, saying that justice itself is a bad thing. Glenn Beck is anti-justice. And he’s telling his radio audience that Jesus Christ was anti-justice. It’s hard to see how that doesn’t make Glenn Beck anti-Christ. (The word there is an adjective, but the noun would also seem to fit.) slacktivist

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