Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 72:
Virtue is not hateful. But speeches on virtue are. Without a doubt, no mouth in the world, much less mine, can utter them. Likewise, every time somebody interjects to speak of my honesty . . . there is someone who quivers inside me.
This entry betrays something of the mind of the leftist. Leftists are deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of 'preaching.' Theirs is the hermeneutics of suspicion. Nothing is what it manifestly is; there is always something nefarious at work below the surface. Too much enamored of the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, leftists failed to achieve a critical stance toward them where a critical stance allows for a separation of the true from the false, the coherent from the incoherent.
Surely Camus goes entirely too far in the above entry. If speeches are hateful, then so are sermons and exhortations. Civilization and its transmission are impossible, however, without appeals to our higher natures.
To a leftist, preaching can only be 'moralizing' and 'being judgmental.' It can only be the phony posturing of someone who judges others only to elevate himself. The very fact of preaching shows one to be a hypocrite. Of course, leftists have no problem with being judgmental and moralizing about the evil of hypocrisy. When they make moral judgments, however, it is, magically, not hypocritical.
And therein lies the contradiction. They would morally condemn all moral condemnation as hypocritical. But in so doing they condemn themselves as hypocrites.
We cannot jettison the moral point of view. Marx tried, putting forth his theories as 'science.' But if you have read him you know that he moralized like an Old Testament prophet.