On Wed, 24 Nov 2004, Seth Ackerman wrote:
> It's Henry Agard Wallace, from his Century of the Common Man speech.
Oh that's completey unfair, if it could come from any era! I just assumed it was contemporary since you didn't say. Include the last century and a half and it could literally have been said by a million different people.
> When I came across it, two things struck me. First, to be blunt, it sounds
> like the kind of thing Bush would say. Second, it's the kind of thing
> that, when Bush says it, makes the left shudder (includng me). Just an
> observation.
Yes, the left has to stop thinking that liberal values are secular values. It simply isn't true in numerical terms. The simple fact is that most of the people who believe in those values in this country believe in God. Progressives are a coalition who, when they reach 50%, are roughly 15% atheist and 35% believers. Attacking religion as inherently corruptive is both empirically wrong and politically nuts.
What we call "secular" values are really the principles of religious tolerance. And that's really what we atheists want, and share with liberal christians. We both want a society in which everyone is free to practice their creed, and no one is allowed to impose their creed on anyone else.
That is a very attractive, and very American idea, and one that the right cannot lay claim to and which we should. When people say we should reframe our programme in terms of values, tolerance should be one of the handful we should make our base. (Although personally I think we should call them "principles" rather than values for a whole host of reasons -- not the least that sounds less like me-toism and pandering. But that's another discussion.)
But the precondition for being able to do so is to realize that secular humanism is a creed. Which people are free to preach as heatedly as they wish. But not to impose on others.
Religious tolerance is only believable if you want it for more creeds than your own. And to do that, you have to precipitate your creed out. Because as soon as people act like they haven't got a creed, just the truth, then nobody trusts them when they talk about tolerance. And with good reason.
Progressivism should be reconceived as a coalition of creeds united by an ur-American belief in tolerance: the belief that not only is a harmonious society possible where people don't agree on ultimate ends, but that is the only path to the best society. And the most American. It's a paradoxical idea. But then, so is America.
Michael