On Tue, 31 Jan 2006, Doug Henwood wrote:
> I know I can't go out and say "your religion sucks." But, really, there's
> nothing like American piety anywhere in the First World
So America should model itself on Europe because Europe is obviously better? You're not going to sells a lot of policies to Americans with that line either :o)
And I'm not actually sure it's true even in the abstract.
In Europe, atheism makes common sense. No one has to defend themselves for being one. In America, religious tolerance and multiculturalism make common sense. To Europeans, those ideas are enviable and hard for them to comprehend. They don't understand why we don't have headscarf crises, and why we don't have to post national guardsmen in front of our synagogues like they do.
So I'm not convinced that even in the abstract our hand is worse. I think if had a choice between taking tolerance/multiculturalism to the nth degree, and taking atheism to the nth degree, I'd take the first. You can be an atheist and be a genocidal monster. But you can't be a supertolerant multiculturalist and be bad.
And of course in reality we don't have a choice. In America -- as in any other country -- you have to work with the imaginaire you're given. Atheism is alien to the American identity, where religious tolerance and multiplicity is part of the American creed. So those are the trumps in the hand we've been given to play. And denouncing religion throws them all away. What we need is do to proclaim our creed, which is absolute freedom for all people to define their own creeds without anyone dictating to them. And to convince people that this is the true American creed and that the other side are the deviants.
There problem is that there's a huge intellectual challenge before us. Our concept of tolerance hasn't evolved much since John Locke. Tolerance is still conceived of as something that has inherent limits, as tolerance of wrongness and heresy, as tolerance of things you wish you could remove if you could but don't because you can't without inducing civil war.
But ever since 60s, we've had a world where we don't believe in heresy, where all religions and cultures are considered equally worthy of respect. A world of multiple identities and multiple truths. In this world, tolerance is a positive virtue, the more the better. That's what multiculturalism means.
But we've yet to evolve an intellectual framework in which this intuitive conviction makes sense. Whenever we get heated about tolerance, we start talking about its limits, and denouncing other people's ultimate personal beliefs as the taproot we need to cut out. And as long as that's true, we'll keep on lighting firecrackers in our ass.
Michael