Angry ghosts

The pervasive, moralistic anger in our public life is an obvious sign of a weak human fabric and of progressive detachment from reality, in which the person becomes

a ghostlike figure, perpetually in search of “something solid against which it can prove its own existence.” New Anger, Wood concludes, “is the desperately intense effort of these ghosts to feel real.”

For good examples of dogmatic, unquestioning, utterly moralistic and irrational anger, you can always rely on the editorial page of the Boston Globe. The possibility that people who disagree with them may have motives other than bigotry and ignorance never, ever arises. No fundamental questions (What are "rights?" Where do they come from? What is marriage?) are ever asked.