One of the nicer things about living in a time when there is a practically unlimited amount of political information and opinion on-line is that one is no longer forced to rely on the – ahem – lesser lights of The New York Times op-ed page for a daily dose of contrary analysis or perspective. The evergreen spring of electronic commentary means that one need not waste time on ditzes like Thomas Friedman and Maureen Down or the bojangling likes of David Brooks and his understudy Ross Douthat.
However, every once and a while one of those media lottery babies will produce something so starkly stupid that it gets linked all over the less knuckle dragging portions of the American internet. Monday’s 800-word pustule from the abscess that is minstrel-troll Douthat’s presence on the Paywalled Lady’s most valuable real estate was just such an occasion. Summoning the ignorant certainty that used to be beaten out of first year theology students at Harvard, Douthat makes the case for the moral need for – I am not making this up – “Hell”. In The New York Times. In the twenty-first century.
Among the many people making fun of Douthat’s typically narrow and unintentionally revealing logic was the venerable Atrios (whom I shall quote in full because he doesn’t often write posts long enough to excerpt), who nailed it:
He Who Dies With The Least SexyTime Wins
I don’t think Douthat’s concept of hell is “gun to the head” morality, it’s about everyone else being punished for being naughty, and him getting the grand reward for being nice. He doesn’t emphasize hell as something we should believe in to prompt us to do the right thing, he just needs to know that someone is keeping record of all of the times he rejected Chunky Reese Witherspoon’s advances and rewards him accordingly.
This is a concept my father once derisively described to me as “God the Bookkeeper”. It’s the idea that if one piles up a lifetime’s worth of dastardly deeds against virtuous acts like little old ladies helped across the street, and the virtuous pile comes out just slightly taller, then all will be well forever and ever amen. Believing in it has the advantage of allowing you to dismiss your own sins, past or presently contemplated, the same way dieters allow themselves dessert on account of five extra minutes on a treadmill. It has the disadvantage of potentially sentencing you to an eternity of unspeakable horror on account of an unpaid library fine, but that part doesn’t get mentioned as often.
But the self serving simplicity of this is not what’s notable here. What Douthat is assuming, and what Atrios is perceptively skewering, is the conservative belief that the justice of the world is true and righteous altogether. Douthat is operating on an (ecumenically un-Catholic) idea that rewards naturally flow to the just and punishments to the wicked, if not in this life than surely in the next. It is the quintessential conceit one often sees among those to whom Earthly rewards have already flowed.
It’s an assumption one can see baked into every right wing idea on the current stage, from Rick Santelli’s rant about “the losers’ mortgages” to Paul Ryan’s belief that the wealthy are ankle bound to a debilitating iron ball of federal taxation. An immutable faith in the righteous justice of consequences, both rewards and punishments, is necessary for that kind of fanatical devotion. Without it, some of the modern elect might begin to doubt their own righteousness, and we can’t have that.
Down that road lies madness. If the reward and punishment crowd ever paused for a second from their self congratulation to contemplate the reality based notions that hard work is not always rewarded, that shitty luck simply falls on some people, that even those too destitute to afford proper grooming are sometimes “deserving”, then they might subscribe to a notion that the world isn’t completely just. Worse, they may even decide that making it a little less unjust would be a good idea. And we certainly can’t have that; no wonder Douthat needs “Hell”.
