{"id":2178,"date":"2015-02-13T10:16:49","date_gmt":"2015-02-13T18:16:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=2178"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:54:12","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:54:12","slug":"links-and-comments-still-climbing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2015\/02\/13\/links-and-comments-still-climbing\/","title":{"rendered":"Links and Comments: Still Climbing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>The New Yorker<\/i>, Adam Gopnik, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/daily-comment\/obama-crusaders\">Obama and the Cruaders<\/a>. Parsing faith, fanaticsm , liberalism, pluralism.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nBad acts may rise from good causes: faith may never be the enemy; fanaticism is always the enemy. But faith has always been the first seedbed of fanaticism. That\u2019s why, when people commit acts of horrible cruelty for political purposes, we say that they\u2019ve made a \u201creligion\u201d out of their politics, or have succumbed to a mad ideological dogma. Fanaticism is the belief that a single faith or ideology contains all the truth of the world, and that others should at best be tolerated. Liberalism is the belief that toleration is not enough, that an active, affirmative pluralism is essential to social sanity. Pluralism is the essence of liberalism\u2014including the possibility of self-reproach for things that liberalism has done badly. America is not responsible for My Lai only to the degree that America renounces the self-righteous \u201cexceptionalism\u201d that put those murders in motion and then prevented those who caused them from being blamed. Excessive scruples\u2014liberal guilt\u2014are as sure a sign of sanity as excessive sanctimony is a sign of the opposite.<\/p>\n<p>The President\u2019s point turned out to be not just exactly right but\u00a0<b>profoundly<\/b>\u00a0right: no group holds the historical moral high ground, and no one ever will. But this is not because a moral high ground doesn\u2019t exist. It\u2019s because we\u2019re all still climbing.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik, Obama and the Cruaders. Parsing faith, fanaticsm , liberalism, pluralism. Bad acts may rise from good causes: faith may never be the enemy; fanaticism is always the enemy. But faith has always been the first &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2015\/02\/13\/links-and-comments-still-climbing\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-morality","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2178"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2180,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2178\/revisions\/2180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}