In Praise of Prejudice: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past by Theodore Dalrymple

Author:Theodore Dalrymple [Dalrymple, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Health; Fitness & Dieting, Psychology & Counseling, Medical Books, Psychology, General, Parenting & Relationships, Politics & Social Sciences, Sociology, Race Relations, Discrimination & Racism, Social Sciences
ISBN: 1594032025
Amazon: B0056IJKAW
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2007-09-24T22:00:00+00:00

17

The Law of Conservation of Righteous Indignation, and its Connection to the Expansion of Human Rights

THE ARGUMENTS ABOVE are always used only to remove restraint, of course, never to encourage or establish it. No one would think to ask a person who did not put his feet up on the seat opposite him why he did not do so, or engage him in a discussion as to why he did not do so. The arguments are used only to render permissible the formerly impermissible, except (perhaps) in one or two isolated cases, for example smoking. There, a strange kind of moral fervor supervenes, an illustration of a phenomenon akin to a law of thermodynamics: namely, the law of the conservation of righteous indignation, which, if it does not attach to one thing, will attach to another. It is as if the total fund of such indignation is of constant size. As traditional moral prohibitions, inhibitions, and considerations are destroyed by the gnawing criticism of philosophical disputatiousness, new ones rush in to fill the vacuum.

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