What do leftist, mostly secular elites share with medieval sinners?
They feel bad that the way they live sometimes doesn't quite match their
professed dogma.
Many in the medieval church were criticized by internal reformers and the
public at large for their controversial granting of penance, especially to
the wealthy and influential. Clergy increasingly offered absolution of sins
by ordering the guilty to confess. Better yet, sometimes the well-heeled
sinners were told to pay money to the church, or to do good works that could
then be banked to offset their bad.
Of course, critics of the practice argued that serial confessions simply
encouraged serial sinning. The calculating sinner would do good things in
one place to offset his premeditated bad in another. The corruption
surrounding these cynical penances and indulgences helped anger Martin
Luther and cause the Reformation.
Maybe it was inevitable that the old practice of paid absolution would
appeal to elite baby boomers -- a class and generation that always seems to
want it both ways by compartmentalizing their lives. The only difference is
that the new sinners are not so worried about God's wrath as they are about
their reputation among their judgmental liberal gods.
Take the idea of "carbon offsets" made popular by Al Gore. If well-meaning
environmentalist activists and celebrities either cannot or will not give up
their private jets or huge energy-hungry houses, they can still find a way
to excuse their illiberal consumption.
Instead of the local parish priest, green companies exist to take confession
and tabulate environmental sins. Then they offer the offenders a way out of
feeling bad while continuing their conspicuous consumption.
You can give money to an exchange service that does environmental good in
equal measure to your bad. Or, in do-it-yourself fashion, you can calibrate
how much energy you hog -- and then do penance by planting trees or setting
up a wind generator.
Either way, your own high life stays uninterrupted.
Some prominent green activists pay their environmental penance in cash,
barter or symbolism to keep the good life. Al Gore, for example, still gets
to use 20 times more electricity in his Tennessee mansion than the average
household.
Take also the case of Laurie David, the green activist and wife of
"Seinfeld" co-creator Larry David. She has recently generated plenty of
publicity for her biofuel-powered bus tour to promote environmentalism. But
in other circumstances, David still flies on gas-guzzling private jets.
The best thing about this medieval idea of penance is that it can now be
repackaged as politically correct "offsets." During the last few decades,
the return of these modern indulgences has caught on in a variety of ways.
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