Recommended long-read of the week goes to Francis Fukuyama. LIBERALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS: The challenges from the left and the right begs, like the notorious essay that netted FF sustained attention thirty years ago, for a spirited Q&A follow-up, as Fukuyama piles up bones of contention like so many turkey carcasses after Thanksgiving Monday. Anyhoo, Fukuyama’s rhetorical perambulations lead to this money-quote:
I suspect that most religious conservatives critical of liberalism today in the United States and other developed countries do not fool themselves into thinking that they can turn the clock back to a period when their social views were mainstream. Their complaint is a different one: that contemporary liberals are ready to tolerate any set of views, from radical Islam to Satanism, other than those of religious conservatives, and that they find their own freedom constrained.
This complaint is a serious one.
Read it here.
Also:
- Headlines I never expected to read: Why China’s liberals like Trump; and (at Quartz, of all places!) How Trump’s presidency changed Europe for the better.
- “Times as weighty as these do not allow for easy enlightenment” — indeed. James Jiang’s profile of Eileen Chang has sent me to the lye-berry.
- And finally: Is Pandemic Brain changing your taste in music? Personally, I’ve been giving podcasts more and more airtime, but that was a trend started some years before COVID hit. Just this morning I discovered Lost Notes: a collection of the greatest music stories never told — over here. Michael Donaldson brought this to my attention over at his 8sided.blog, a reliable source of internet joy I recommend to anyone who loves music.
Returning to the subject of turkey carcasses come Monday morning — it’s Thanksgiving weekend for us Canuckleheads, so I am wishing you, dear reader, a happy Thanksgiving.
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| This year's Thanksgiving playlist, courtesy of... |
7 comments:
I skimmed the long read. I haven't read it carefully yet. I don't know if the FF quote makes more sense in context, but there are several flags going up at the moment that indicate that FF is setting up a strawman.
1) Satanism and Radical Islam--I think these are strawmen. The left's relationship to Radical Islam has gone back and forth a lot during the past 25 years, but I think they have a tenuous tolerance of Radical Islam at best. Satanism? Is that even a real thing, or is it something teenagers associate with heavy metal.
2) Freddie Deboer made a good point recently that Cancel Culture exists almost exclusively on the left. It's all friendly fire. The Right Wing Publications are still churning out the same reactionary stuff they've always churned out, but nobody on the left even bothers to read them any more. (Deboer, per his usual M.O., deleted the blog post.)
3) I'm never quite sure what conservatives mean when they say they want tolerance for their views. Too often, I worry that they are asking for tolerance to be intolerant.
I don't know if you saw this story, but it was widely circulated across Christian Facebook and Christian Twitter as an example of how oppressed Christians are these days
https://www.christianpost.com/news/high-school-student-sent-home-for-wearing-homosexuality-is-a-sin-t-shirt-father-says.html
Well, you're going off in several directions which were, I admit, triggered by a "money quote" I chose to emphasize, one which does not in any way sum up or even indicate just what FF's argument strives to accomplish. My bad.
A couple of my own thoughts, triggered by this poorly chosen quote: 1) FF's repeated use of "the religious right" is a lamentably dense rhetorical choice. There ARE other religions in the USA, and, if the erosion of Christian numbers continues apace, these others will surely influence the nation's politics in ways FF can hardly anticipate -- particularly Islam, I would think. And here the left is at a disadvantage, because they hold little to no appeal for religious conservatives <-- which is where most people of Islamic faith would self-identify, I suspect. If the Christian right had any capacity to give their collective head a shake, they might actually sort this out to their political advantage and engage in strategic discussion with other religions of conservative leaning.
2) I think FF's throw-away about "radical Islam and Satanists" is made for effect, and shouldn't be regarded necessarily as a straw man. From my own experience, I can easily recall mornings in the '90s-and-aughts listening to CBC Radio in Toronto. It was not at all uncommon for host Andy Barrie to respectfully engage in discussion with an advocate for Sharia Law one minute, only to turn prickly toward the Chair of the Catholic School Board the next. In this, Barrie was very much the model of the democratic liberal, embodying precisely the attitude FF decries. The left seems to have no appreciation for the irony of this hypocritical posture -- favouring one super-conservative voice while decrying another, simply because the accent and skin-tones are different.
And 3) Although they've been quiet during COVID, The Satanic Temple has regularly made headlines in the US with its political pranking -- it's quite clever agitprop, actually. Though probably not the sort of thing FF approves of.
First of all, apologies for starting a dialogue, and then not replying for the past several days. It's been an insanely busy week with work and the young one. But fingers crossed I have a more relaxed week coming up.
Also apologies for commenting without having read the whole article. It just looked so long, and I thought maybe I could see some of FF's biases coming through in that quote, but I should have read the whole thing.
I should qualify a couple of my statements: 1) Admittedly there are some people on the left who have been too kind to radical islam. I've always seen this as a minority, but maybe that's my own biases coming through.
But there has always been a balancing act on the secular left--one the on hand, we don't want to encourage discrimination against a particular religion, on the other hand, we want to make it clear that we disagree with the intellectual tenants of that religion, even as we uphold the rights of its believers. Push too far in one direction, and you get Dawkins or Hitchens. Push too far in the other, and you get folks like the one you mentioned above.
Hey Joel, THIS is the place to jump in before the referred-to content has been absorbed! ('cos I'm not altogether confident I've absorbed it myself...)
My issue with the (new) left is they have little-to-no capacity to engage with Dawkins or Hitchens -- or Andy Barrie, I should think.
"Waking up with Sam Harris" -- how is it he's not yet been arrested?
I really like Sam Harris. (I have a soft spot for Dawkins and Hitchens as well, come to that.)
But... I've been listening to Sam Harris a lot, and I think he's got a blindspot. He's unable to distinguish between Islam as a system of beliefs that people actively buy into, and Islam as a culture that people are born into.
I'm fond of those chuckle-heads myself. And it's curious to me that they're on the outs with the current left (though Hitch seems immune, possibly largely because he's dead and can't dig another hole for himself, a la Iraq).
Getting back to Fukuyama, I think he's largely writing to his conservative Catholic buddies, intellectual-types who write for First Things, or the occasional NYT ed etc. FF seems to position himself outside their circle, while trying to appeal those within. And he's simultaneously dropping hints that others could stand to lend their ears to the Catholic cause. I'm not sure what the attraction is for FF. Mebbe American Catholicism represents the final Christian bulwark before the splinter-net finishes off the commonweal?
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