Our Ruling Class is filled with people who do not habitually examine their consciences

The Nation at Princeton’s Service

by Anthony Esolen

Would I pay to help ensconce Princetonians or Yalies in political life? 

 I’d rather pay to send them to confession. I’d go, too.

The campus was safe. Painfully shy though I was, I made friends there whose affection I still treasure, though some of us have grown apart over the years. I can never repay the debt I owe them for befriending me, nor have I done well at repaying it.

What’s the trouble, then? One that I think they share with that never-doubtful president they jauntily call Woody Woo: our Ruling Class is filled with people who do not habitually examine their consciences. They do not enter the confessional.

The confessional is a brush with death, as well it should be. In the confessional, we face our nothingness, and our worse than nothingness; our stubborn folly, our petty self-concern, our cowardice, our persistence in opinions because they happen to be ours; our hardness of heart towards what other people suffer, especially when we are the cause of it; our touchiness when we ourselves suffer, especially when we think we can point to the person who caused it; all that foul black dead lump of sin that lies upon the heart, subduing, stifling, smothering.

Nobody is really used to the confessional. How does one grow used to death and resurrection? But it occurs to me that our Ruling Class seem quite unaware that such a thing exists, or that if in their private moments they remember it, they forget it as soon as they enter the halls of power.

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