An Adolescent Conceit
4th August 2021
Theodore Dalrymple has observed that there are few feelings more congenial than a sense of moral superiority. It’s both easy and pleasing to feel superior to people from the past. It’s especially easy, in part, because the dead can’t defend themselves. The old admonition not to speak ill of the dead came about for a reason.
All of this came to mind recently on the heels of David French’s johnny-come-lately embrace of hereditary racial moral culpability. In short: he has decided that the majority of Americans are complicit in the racial sins of the past primarily on the basis of sharing the same skin color as some of the perpetrators from days gone by. If that rationale comes across to you as flimsy and outrageously unjust, well, you would not be David French.