Alan Jacobs


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I suspect — I can only guess — that Price’s environment is one in which the narrow-minded anti-intellectualism of Christianity is just part of the epistemic furniture, one of those things that Everyone Knows, in precisely the same way that the white people I grew up among simply knew that Negroes were shiftless and lazy. I find two things especially noteworthy about these things that Everyone Knows: first, they tend to be really nasty-minded; and second, they tend to be equally tidy-minded — that is, they make the world a neat, simple place in which there are ever so many people one needn’t take seriously, or treat with anything other than immediately reflexive contempt, because one knows in advance of any particular encounter exactly what they’re like.