Sin Intellectually and the Rest Follows

I suppose most people, when -- or these days, if -- they think of sin, they imagine certain behaviors, from murder to theft to lying, et al. Jesus, of course, shifts the focus from external behavior to interior intent. 

Now, this cannot contradict the truism that the highway to hell is paved with good intentions, because intentions, in order to be good, must be in accordance with the virtue of prudence, and prudence always considers unintended consequences. 

Which, as you will have no doubt noticed, is precisely what makes the left so foolish and so bereft of wisdom (wisdom being synonyms with prudence). 

We won't say "evil," because the left's iniquity is a somewhat separate matter: it takes all kinds (or five kinds, rather) to make up the left, and there is a difference between ignorance, stupidity, indoctrination, mental illness, and demon possession, even if the demons exploit the first four. There is also excusable ignorance and the culpable kind, innocent stupidity mingled with the tenured kind. 

Having said that, it is certainly the case that when the left's good intentions are on the march, iniquity is in the saddle. For which reason the Aphorist reminds us -- as if we need reminding -- that

The devil can achieve nothing great without the careless collaboration of the virtues.

Being that this is -- obviously -- a  human problem before it is a political problem, one will find plenty of people with good but unexamined intentions among conservatives. 

However, given the deeper principles of conservatism, such purblind worldlings must be considered accidental to the movement; conversely, the essence of leftism involves a conflation of intentions and results. Examples are too numerous to mention:

"rent control"; "minimum wage"; "affordable healthcare"; "war on poverty"; "public education"; "diversity"; "anti-hate speech"; "anti-racism"; "pro-woman"; "sex education," etc.

In each case, the intention leads to its opposite: housing shortages, increased unemployment & small business failures, more expensive healthcare, institutionalized poverty, credentialed idiocy, intellectual conformity, legitimization of hatred, structural racism, institutionalized misogyny, and increased abortion & unwed motherhood, respectively.

Since intention is prior to act, it seems to me that the greatest and most consequential evil must be intellectual sin. For example, extermination of Jews was predicated on the belief that Jewish blood polluted and poisoned Aryan blood. 

Likewise, the 100 million deaths that followed in the wake of communism's good intentions resulted from the principles of class warfare and elimination of private property.

Unfortunately, the reports of Marxism's death in 1991 are greatly exaggerated. In reality, Marxism cannot die, at least until the end of the world as we know it.  

If there is ever an "apocalypse" -- i.e., final unveiling of history -- one of the things it will reveal is the deeper structure of Marxism, the latter being only an effect of something quintessentially human. This nasty thing takes many forms; it apparently accompanies the human journey from the beginning and will be with us until the end. Wheat & tares.

Gosh. What could it be? Let's stay out of politics per se, and try to look at it as a biologist might look at any other animal. We don't consider, say, an anthill and criticize the queen for lording it over the drones. We don't criticize dogs for their prejudices against cats, or cats for sadistic tendencies towards mice.

So let's take man as we find him. As it so happens, over the weekend I read an enjoyable book called Why We Bite the Invisible Hand: The Psychology of Anti-Capitalism (see sidebar). Nothing new, really -- nothing you won't find in a book by Sowell or Hayek or Friedman, nor does the author proceed far enough in his analysis, as he is a secular thinker and stalls out at the level of sociobiology. 

Even so, not only is this deeper than any ideological leftist dares go, but even going there provokes hysteria among the usual suspects: biology is racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-LGBTQ, etc. 

More to the point, it contradicts the principles of the left, so it must be attacked and discredited. If biology decrees that men can't be women or that IQ is inherited or that envy is genetic leftism, then biology's gotta go.

To be continued....