THOUGHTS ON VIRTUE SIGNALING FROM FLANNERY O’CONNOR

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

“If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”

— Catholic novelist and short story writer Flannery O’Connor

Way back in the 1950s and ’60s, Flannery O’Connor foresaw the doleful effects of contemporary identity politics.

“On the subject of this feminist business,” she once wrote to a friend, “I just never … think of qualities which are specifically feminine or masculine. I suppose I [divide] people into two classes: the Irksome and the Non-Irksome without regard to sex.”

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.