Today’s liberals were born progressives, but in the wrong time. We live in a secular age, where technical language and scientific concepts have invaded the space traditionally reserved for religion. It’s not that science no longer exists, it’s that people have put it on pedestal claiming it is something it isn’t. One need only follow the vapid Twitter fatwas of people like Neil de Grasse Tyson to see what I mean.

If you pay attention, today’s liberals talk around their faith in a way that discloses its location in their internal cosmography. It’s sort of like the way scientists figure out where black holes are by studying how other objects move around them. You can’t see the black hole because, well, it’s a black hole. But you can tell it’s there by how all sorts of things get sucked into its maw. Similarly, you can see how the trajectory of liberal rhetoric and ideas are bent toward this unspoken, unacknowledged, un-fillable void at the center of their universes. (It can’t be filled, because utopias cannot exist in this life, no matter how much money we spend on them.)

As Kevin Williamson recently wrote, Paul Krugman talks as if he has oracular knowledge of the “science” of economics, and yet he lets slip the fact that “conscience” — not facts — is his lodestar. “There are some very hot disagreements in the sciences, such as the dispute over the question of measurement in quantum mechanics,” Kevin writes. “However that gets sorted out, it seems likely that conscience will play at most a minor role in it.”