As a follow-up to my last post, I must note here that “ontological evil” is not tra
As a follow-up to my last post, I must note here that “ontological evil” is not traditionally a leftist or liberal category—to the credit of leftism and liberalism. It’s not even a Christian category: even sinners are made in God’s image. On the other hand, “ontological evil” probably is entailed, if not through logic then through affective association, by the identity politics the left has so recklessly indulged over the last decade. (Affective association beats logic every time, as the imaginative authority of our dreams proves nightly.) “If we could just exterminate those people over there, the rain would fall and the crops would grow”—setting aside the ethics ever so briefly, it won’t work. Your ontological quarrel is with God or the gods or the universe; whereas “conservative” is not even an ontological condition, since you can be talked into and out of it. (I will politely pass over the irony of this kind of rhetoric coming from a trans person, whom I would have expected to be less judgmental about ontology in general.) Arendt borrowed from Kant the term “radical evil” to name “a system in which all men have become equally superfluous,” in other words, the very politics of extermination in which a term like “ontological evil” is intelligible. -- source link
#conservatism#leftism#hannah arendt