Seinfeld’s Manhattan is far from a cosmopolitan playground: It is a little island crammed with nasty little people who wave their empty pieties around like pointy sticks, eager to injure each other. (…)
G.K. Chesterton—according to Ian McEwan, the subject of Hitchens’ last piece—warned against such phenomena when he railed in his Orthodoxyagainst the modern intellectual urge to convert the stirrings and mysteries of religion into easy sentiments, jokes, or clichés. He would surely have been appalled to see “tikkun olam,” say, turn from a specifically theological tenet to a worn-out catchphrase, indistinguishable from any other sort of feel-good charity and, without its divine underpinnings, meaningless.
