My dogma just peed on your karma.

Was Goldberging today.  It's sort of like Gold-bricking in that it's a lazy man's activity but in this case it's my desire to get clever ideas and analogies to play with without the tedious mucking about of actually thinking.  Anyway, Jonah Goldberg was in turn Goldberging (hmm, I wonder if he calls it something else like 'Chesterbumping') - quoting that ur conservative public intellectual cum curmudgeon G.K. Chesterton that for man to progress he must become more conversant, more aware, indeed more certain and dogmatic about reality, not less so.  The key to mankind's advancement is more knowledge of what is true and good - more good dogma if you will.  To the extent that 'karma' is simply the desire to 'do one's thing', throwing away the accumulated wisdom of the age, then in fact 'karma' or secular relativism as it's better known is in fact retrograde - it takes society's achievements, things like families and moral codes and deconstructs them, stripping them of their dogmatic certainty.  This leads people to abandon the good simply because it is not perfect.  But GKC always does GKC better than I can do GKC so here's the great Chesterton on why you want my dogma to pee on your karma:

Whether the human mind can advance or not, is a question too little discussed, for nothing can be more dangerous than to found our social philosophy on any theory which is debatable but has not been debated. But if we assume, for the sake of argument, that there has been in the past, or will be in the future, such a thing as a growth or improvement of the human mind itself, there still remains a very sharp objection to be raised against the modern version of that improvement. The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having almost the character of a contradiction in terms. It is like hearing of a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too strong to keep a door shut. Man can hardly be defined, after the fashion of Carlyle, as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and many other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an apparatus. Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.

If then, I repeat, there is to be mental advance, it must be mental advance in the construction of a definite philosophy of life.

In other words, in the movable feast that is life we must all serve someone or thing.  As Bob Dylan might have said "It may be the Devil or it may be the Lord" or it might be a dead economist or it may be a blooming confusion of relativism. The only question is whether you have a clue what you're bowing to.