perfidy

I ran across a James Bennett article from a couple years ago about differing conceptions of Columbus Day. The whole thing is worth a read, but one thing in particular caught my eye:

Now, of course, Columbus Day is under attack as a holiday in the United States by the forces of political correctness. This is primarily an effect of the Calvinist Puritan roots of American progressivism. Just as Calvinists believed in the centrality of the depravity of man, with the exception of a miniscule contingent of the Elect of God, their secularized descendants believe in the depravity and cursedness of Western civilization, with their own enlightened selves in the role of the Elect.

Fairly apt. I first encountered this phenomenon when I worked for an environmental lobby group back in the nineties. It quickly became clear that what they felt was more religion than public advocacy. There I was, proto-conservative in Ohio but with legitimate concerns about pollution and the condition and future of the environment. The environment, after all, was where I lived. While I can tolerate a certain (my wife might say large) amount of mess and filth in my personal habitation, there are limits beyond which it is unsafe to go. At that point, I start cleaning. My views of the larger environment were similary constructed. We'd made a bit too much mess, and cleaning up and forestalling future mess was in order.

However, I didn't view my apartment as a sacred place that was despoiled by the very presence of the works of man. And this was what the environmentalists I worked with did believe. I found it ironic that even though they lived in the same world I did, somehow they were pure and I was not. Even though they wore leather jackets, drove cars and took advantage of aircraft, telephones and in general the entire panoply of modern technology and infrastructure. The concept that I was missing at the time was that they were the Elect, and I was not. Like wealth for the Puritans, there are outward signs of inner grace. For the enviroweenies, it was Birkenstocks, a set ideology of beliefs and a distinct lack of personal hygiene.