Writing yesterday in the Star Tribune newspaper, Katherine Kersten explains the recent rioting in London to puzzled auditors here in the Upper Midwest. It is all to be attributed to a falling away from religion. Here is the evidence:
- The pope says so.
- The chief rabbi of Great Britain says so.
- Though they come from different religious traditions, their diagnoses are "strikingly similar," and it would be a miracle if a Jew and a Catholic were both wrong.
The details are not very much more coherent. According to the rabbi, anarchy has been brewing in the UK for half a century. In the 1960s, you see, the West "abandoned its traditional ethic of self-restraint." Having "tossed the Judeo-Christian moral code out the window," you could count on rioting in another fifty years.
It had indeed been brewing for a long while. The effect follows so tardily upon the cause that those not predisposed to accept the argument will never be persuaded. For the argument is rooted not in logic but in the psychology of those who advance it. They think morality depends upon religion and do not want to make it too hard on themselves to prove it. Why now? And, since they keep talking about "the West," why London? Perhaps in another thirty years there will be a riot in Paris and this, too, will be attributed to the "moral vacuum" following upon Europe's rejection of religious values.
Kersten proceeds to the similarly turbid views of the pope before closing with a call for the "remoralization" of society. In general, beware of arguments that lean upon made-up words. And beware of those eager to perform sociology whenever some big event occurs. This tendency to detect in Everything That Happens more evidence for one's own most cherished beliefs is a sign of a mind having fallen off a hinge.
