TWO-BIT BARBERY:
Ideology is the Enemy of True Faith (ANTHONY ESOLEN, CERC)
There is rest in their faith, but there can be no rest in ideology. Indeed the ideologue looks upon their prayer as quaint and pointless at best, and at worst a waste of human potential, even a culpable refusal to put their shoulders to the wheel of revolutionary change. The ideologue has no use — no use, for all things must be used — for what Christopher Lasch happily called the true and only heaven. The monk knows that no matter what political regime should come to power, this world, so beautiful and so bittersweet, will always be a world of sin and death; it will always be less of a home than a wayside inn. And if the inn’s sign is hanging from a broken nail, and the bed sheets are a little musty, and the roast beef is overdone, it does not matter too much, because he himself, he considers with a smile, stoops in the shoulder, and is a little musty and overdone too.
But the ideologue has no clear sense of the pilgrimage. He believes in progress, and the imperfections of the world offend him; they must be eliminated. Fortunately for him, those imperfections are external to his person. Sometimes they are social conditions, including those that come naturally to mankind, such as the stubborn particularities of the family. Sometimes they are persons who ought to lose their jobs for a crime of least dissent; or to be re-educated by a regimen of ridicule, emotional manipulation, and threats; or, when the ideopathy is particularly virulent, to be cured by a haircut from the national barber, a purgative stay hacking at permafrost in a gulag, or a bullet in the back of the brain. Ideology does not forgive.