Western radical secularists have vanquished Christianity but, as they dance contemptuously upon its grave, the swords of Islam draw nearer. Shall we all rally around the flag of moral relativism to meet the challenge?
Aa opposed to trying to falsely convince themselves that a “creator god’ exists? Do you realise how ridiculous that would be, based on your perceived threat?
You’re entitled to your beliefs, but don’t malign those who’ve grown out of them just because your version of god isn’t holding the line against a different version.
Interesting comment, exposes the Liberal treatment of religion. “You’re entitled to your beliefs, but the adults in the room know better”.
At the end of the day, if we’re only schizophrenic chimpanzees in some rock, your stupid make-believe ideology of Liberalism or whatever is no more “mature” than any other, because what that terms denotes has no real meaning here.
Indeed. I wonder how people who claim to cherish logic and reason above ‘superstition’ can seriously not see the contradiction of their own philosophy. Materialism is a philosophy that endorses the notion of humans as one insignificant species of animal that just so happened to evolve on this blue rock floating through space, but all that is based on the conclusions and collective wisdom of said insignificant animals. It’s self-referential, and I’ve never yet heard a materialist or a secularist or a humanist come up with a good explanation of why creatures that evolved to survive by hunting mammoths and gathering fruit could also tease truth from falsehood and uncover the secrets of the universe with unfailing accuracy. As things stand, the conclusions of materialist philosophy tend to call the competence and abilities of the philosophers themselves into serious question.
Religion at least attempts to resolve the difficulty by acknowledging and appealing to some higher power or level of truth and authority. Materialism doesn’t attempt to resolve it at all. It basically admits the monkeys are running the zoo and suggests the people looking for a zookeeper or some set of rules that wasn’t invented by a bunch of monkeys are just being silly. I’m apt to question why listening to whichever group of monkeys happens to be in charge this week is the more sensible approach? Seems like not having a higher authority to appeal to would be awfully convenient to whoever happens to be in charge at the moment. Seems like without some idea of God or a higher power, whoever is standing on top of the mountain gets to play God instead. Believing in God requires faith. Believing that I don’t want a bunch of rich and powerful people playing god requires nothing but plain old self-interest.
I am agnostic, not Christian, and have no “version of god”. Having undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral science degrees, I’ve spent my career in applied science with a consummate secular orientation. I hold many secular viewpoints but also recognize its limitations and failures and recognize the practical potential for spiritual concepts to ameliorate some of the ills of humanity. To me that equates with being more broad minded than sneering skeptics like you.
Secularism has culturally become a religion unto itself and has deliberately destroyed salutary cultural traditions without adequately replacing them with anything that answers the needs of the vast swaths of humanity. Having “outgrown” the Christianity that you mock it is now the responsibility of secularism as the dominant and prevailing cultural hegemon to respond to the real, not perceived, threat of radical Islam. But it won’t. Secular humanism answers nicely to the needs of the intelligent and privileged but not nearly as well for the poor and undereducated masses who seek an outlet for their fear, anger, and alienation. Consequently, I predict that it will fail to protect Western culture from the superstitious violence of radical Islam.
Matt Hindman
17 days ago
I don’t get what is so hard about this. The answer is simple. What is referred to as “Liberalism” these days is nothing more than a malicious imposter wearing the skin of old philosophies and covered with the trappings and rituals of an old order. Care to guess who slowly killed it? Even many on these very pages and comment sections who whine about the demise of the Classical Liberalism they knew demonstrate how little they care about its ideals. Let’s take a short trip down memory lane to see how we got here.
First is how easily self-righteous people gave away their liberty. “Maybe if I give the government more and more control over my liberty we can eliminate all the negative consequences inherent in allowing people freedom… Oh, no! My government is now violating rights that I care about and I can’t do anything about it! How did this happen? I just wanted to create a perfect society where nothing bad ever happens!” It turns out trading liberty for security and getting neither does not work out that well in the long run.
Next, what about that whole moral and engaged citizenry thing? Yeah, well guess what? Somewhere along the line the idea of morality was replaced with “just do whatever you feel” and engaged citizens were replaced by power hungry and unaccountable technocrats who were supposed to have all the wisdom and answers. Oops! They actually turned out to be some of the stupidest and most irresponsible people on the planet. Things like religion, culture, and tradition as well as an independent press helped keep society grounded and cohesive. Those things are being actively and intentionally torn apart.
Democracy? Representative government? What are those? This modern “Liberalism” has made it clear how little your voice matters in things like war, immigration, or economic policy. Also, we have this little thing where modern Democracy fetishists think that voting over whether you should keep your rights is a great idea. This very idea is something that would cause all the old European Liberal philosophers to roll in their grave and the American ones to want to crawl out of theirs in search of a sword, rifle, and powder horn.
Finally, we get to equal protection under the law. You know that thing that got wrecked right about the time some idiots those that putting their fingers on the scales of justice in the name of “social justice”? Bad idea. It felt like we had almost addressed the biggest flaw in the history of Western Civilization and started living by “all men are created equal”. Then our societies decided to sprint in the opposite direction. Even worse, the law itself is now regarded as a weapon to be abused in the pursuit of power instead of a framework holding society together.
“Liberalism” has no desire to protect Salman Rushdie because the facsimile wearing its face does not care about Rushdie or even any of its supposed values. Even worse, many of those decrying the state of modern “Liberalism” do not care about Rushdie or any liberal values either.
‘Things like religion, culture, and tradition as well as an independent press helped keep society grounded and cohesive.’
Ye olde Commie Terry Eagleton makes just this point in his mini-tome ‘The meaning of life’. How all these elements fed into and supported each other. But now all the links have been broken, the individual elements can no longer take the strain and we have this sense of collapse. People then chase all manner of nonsense as a substitute.
Milton Gibbon
17 days ago
Click on the link and you find that the study Mr Anil cites does not say that “the rest [of campus cancellations] were the work of Right-wing snowflakes”. The figure he quotes is that 52% of cancellations come from “the political right of the scholar” (my underline) which does not mean that they are Right-wing,
Thank you – in fact, the report that the author relies upon fails to support his point in another way, too. Namely, the vast majority of the ‘right wing cancellations’ that are documented are in fact complaints by students and parents about left-wing professors discriminating against right-wing students in their classrooms. Right-wing professors discriminating against left-wing students is simply not a thing.
Pretending there is a moral equivalence on free speech issues between the left and the right betrays the author’s underlying sympathies. “A pox on both your houses” is the refuge these days of the lefty who is terrified to realize that his leftism has eaten itself, calling into doubt his years of allegiance.
Andrew McDonald
17 days ago
Royal Soc of Lit – ‘Here’s Bernardine Evaristo, its president: “the society cannot take sides in writers’ controversies and issues, but must remain impartial”. Rushdie spelled it out with greater clarity: “Just wondering if the Royal Society of Literature is ‘impartial’ about attempted murder?”
If that’s a genuine quote and not taken out of context, that’s truly shocking.
That’s just what I was thinking. If the Royal Society of Literature doesn’t want to take sides between a writer and his silencer then what’s its point?
Another DEI hire, I expect. If he’d been a ‘woman of colour’, we’d have all been expected to man the barricades.
But it’s just some male Muslim on Muslim shit (see Whoopi Goldberg ‘s Holocaust ‘white on white shit’ comment) so it’s not really my prob (also it’s cultural appropriation).
It is a real quote from the Royal Society of Literature’s leader; however the reason she isn’t interested in defending Rushdie is because he isn’t of subsaharan origin.
Tyler Durden
17 days ago
I just hope the international community finally wakes up to 4 decades of the Iranian threat and puts together a plan to remove that regime now.
Dirty diplomatic dealings will doubtlessly be involved once again in terms of bypassing the UN, but being that Israel and most of the Gulf States are on a similar page it might be possible to find a novel approach improving on the debacle of 2003 in Iraq.
will that effort work as well as previous plans that removed Saddam and Qaddafi from power? Will it turn out better than the last time the US imposed regime change on Iran, back in the 50s when a democratically elected govt was overthrown and the Shah was installed? Iran is not a problem that the West can solve; that has to come from the rest of the Muslim world.
Martin Layfield
17 days ago
Rushdie is an early example of the multiculturalists finding out that their actions and beliefs may have…. unforseen consequences…..and then expecting and demanding helpfrom the supposedly irredeemable whitey they spent their careers demonising to protect them from the demons they helped unleash.
So many cases of left-liberals doing this.
UnHerd Reader
16 days ago
Gosh, reading this you wonder how Islam ever got such a bad rap. Turns out it was the secularists all along.
Nathan Ngumi
16 days ago
The stabbing of Salman Rushdie was unfortunate. But he was not the first speaker at a public event to not react while a would-be assassin suddenly rushed towards him menacingly.
Famously, Malcolm X had just began speaking on stage to a group in a ballroom on the day of his assassination in New York when he spied his assassins get up and walk towards him after a convenient distraction had been created that enticed nearly everyone in the audience to turn and look back. The quartet when near the stage then pulled out their guns and started blasting at him. Screams and smoke immediately filled the ballroom as attendees scampered for safety.
Even stand-up comics like Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock have been attacked in the recent past while on stage. Why do speaking event organizers not invest more in visible security measure like in music concerts so as to deter such?
Daniel Lee
16 days ago
“…it is the new lexicon of hate speech that has animated the most sustained assaults on the First Amendment — some of it with good reason (in a world of swastikas and fasces, it would be churlish to be a free speech absolutist)”
It is in precisely THAT world that it is most important to be a free speech absolutist.
Gregory Toews
16 days ago
Snowflakes to the left, snowflakes to the right. Into the valley of postmodernism rode the modernist.
I suspect that if Anil were writing of Joseph Stalin he’d accuse him of using communistic ideals as a tool for gaining power, as opposed to using power to serve communistic ideals. Anil probably disagrees with most of what Tom Holland says in Dominion.
Alex Lekas
16 days ago
Liberalism barely exists. Has the author not noticed how that ostensible part of the left has taken on a much harder edge, first as progressive and now as full-blown authoritarian with the legal crackdowns on free speech to prove it? The measure in Scotland may be an outlier in terms of its scope but it’s becoming common in terms of intent. The is a rush across the Western world to silence inconvenient voices, to shush those whose words might offend others as if there is some divine right to never having a moment of upset.
Few things are more cringeworthy than the normalization of the term “hate speech.” There is no such thing just as there are no ‘hate’ crimes. There is only speech and there are only crimes. This attempt to politicize and criminalize thought is not serving us well.
UnHerd Reader
16 days ago
The bio of the attacker is troubling because it describes so many young men. The lack of a coherent motive suggests that they may be so un-moored they can be diverted easily into brutality. Campus riots for Hamas make more sense given this phenomenon. Governments premised on free speech etc. Will struggle to address such deep rooted social pathology. More optimistically, the passions of youth may fade as their lack of rational basis becomes clear to middle age.
Nanda Kishor das
16 days ago
This is the second article today I literally can’t read… I just don’t have a clue what he’s saying.
Western radical secularists have vanquished Christianity but, as they dance contemptuously upon its grave, the swords of Islam draw nearer. Shall we all rally around the flag of moral relativism to meet the challenge?
“…not with a bang but a whimper.”
I suspect a lot of radical secularists will regret their foolishness just before their heads hit the ground.
Aa opposed to trying to falsely convince themselves that a “creator god’ exists? Do you realise how ridiculous that would be, based on your perceived threat?
You’re entitled to your beliefs, but don’t malign those who’ve grown out of them just because your version of god isn’t holding the line against a different version.
Interesting comment, exposes the Liberal treatment of religion. “You’re entitled to your beliefs, but the adults in the room know better”.
At the end of the day, if we’re only schizophrenic chimpanzees in some rock, your stupid make-believe ideology of Liberalism or whatever is no more “mature” than any other, because what that terms denotes has no real meaning here.
Indeed. I wonder how people who claim to cherish logic and reason above ‘superstition’ can seriously not see the contradiction of their own philosophy. Materialism is a philosophy that endorses the notion of humans as one insignificant species of animal that just so happened to evolve on this blue rock floating through space, but all that is based on the conclusions and collective wisdom of said insignificant animals. It’s self-referential, and I’ve never yet heard a materialist or a secularist or a humanist come up with a good explanation of why creatures that evolved to survive by hunting mammoths and gathering fruit could also tease truth from falsehood and uncover the secrets of the universe with unfailing accuracy. As things stand, the conclusions of materialist philosophy tend to call the competence and abilities of the philosophers themselves into serious question.
Religion at least attempts to resolve the difficulty by acknowledging and appealing to some higher power or level of truth and authority. Materialism doesn’t attempt to resolve it at all. It basically admits the monkeys are running the zoo and suggests the people looking for a zookeeper or some set of rules that wasn’t invented by a bunch of monkeys are just being silly. I’m apt to question why listening to whichever group of monkeys happens to be in charge this week is the more sensible approach? Seems like not having a higher authority to appeal to would be awfully convenient to whoever happens to be in charge at the moment. Seems like without some idea of God or a higher power, whoever is standing on top of the mountain gets to play God instead. Believing in God requires faith. Believing that I don’t want a bunch of rich and powerful people playing god requires nothing but plain old self-interest.
I am agnostic, not Christian, and have no “version of god”. Having undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral science degrees, I’ve spent my career in applied science with a consummate secular orientation. I hold many secular viewpoints but also recognize its limitations and failures and recognize the practical potential for spiritual concepts to ameliorate some of the ills of humanity. To me that equates with being more broad minded than sneering skeptics like you.
Secularism has culturally become a religion unto itself and has deliberately destroyed salutary cultural traditions without adequately replacing them with anything that answers the needs of the vast swaths of humanity. Having “outgrown” the Christianity that you mock it is now the responsibility of secularism as the dominant and prevailing cultural hegemon to respond to the real, not perceived, threat of radical Islam. But it won’t. Secular humanism answers nicely to the needs of the intelligent and privileged but not nearly as well for the poor and undereducated masses who seek an outlet for their fear, anger, and alienation. Consequently, I predict that it will fail to protect Western culture from the superstitious violence of radical Islam.
I don’t get what is so hard about this. The answer is simple. What is referred to as “Liberalism” these days is nothing more than a malicious imposter wearing the skin of old philosophies and covered with the trappings and rituals of an old order. Care to guess who slowly killed it? Even many on these very pages and comment sections who whine about the demise of the Classical Liberalism they knew demonstrate how little they care about its ideals. Let’s take a short trip down memory lane to see how we got here.
First is how easily self-righteous people gave away their liberty. “Maybe if I give the government more and more control over my liberty we can eliminate all the negative consequences inherent in allowing people freedom… Oh, no! My government is now violating rights that I care about and I can’t do anything about it! How did this happen? I just wanted to create a perfect society where nothing bad ever happens!” It turns out trading liberty for security and getting neither does not work out that well in the long run.
Next, what about that whole moral and engaged citizenry thing? Yeah, well guess what? Somewhere along the line the idea of morality was replaced with “just do whatever you feel” and engaged citizens were replaced by power hungry and unaccountable technocrats who were supposed to have all the wisdom and answers. Oops! They actually turned out to be some of the stupidest and most irresponsible people on the planet. Things like religion, culture, and tradition as well as an independent press helped keep society grounded and cohesive. Those things are being actively and intentionally torn apart.
Democracy? Representative government? What are those? This modern “Liberalism” has made it clear how little your voice matters in things like war, immigration, or economic policy. Also, we have this little thing where modern Democracy fetishists think that voting over whether you should keep your rights is a great idea. This very idea is something that would cause all the old European Liberal philosophers to roll in their grave and the American ones to want to crawl out of theirs in search of a sword, rifle, and powder horn.
Finally, we get to equal protection under the law. You know that thing that got wrecked right about the time some idiots those that putting their fingers on the scales of justice in the name of “social justice”? Bad idea. It felt like we had almost addressed the biggest flaw in the history of Western Civilization and started living by “all men are created equal”. Then our societies decided to sprint in the opposite direction. Even worse, the law itself is now regarded as a weapon to be abused in the pursuit of power instead of a framework holding society together.
“Liberalism” has no desire to protect Salman Rushdie because the facsimile wearing its face does not care about Rushdie or even any of its supposed values. Even worse, many of those decrying the state of modern “Liberalism” do not care about Rushdie or any liberal values either.
Great comment. I find little to disagree with.
A rather dark, nihilistic take. Unfortunately, I think you’re more correct than not.
‘Things like religion, culture, and tradition as well as an independent press helped keep society grounded and cohesive.’
Ye olde Commie Terry Eagleton makes just this point in his mini-tome ‘The meaning of life’. How all these elements fed into and supported each other. But now all the links have been broken, the individual elements can no longer take the strain and we have this sense of collapse. People then chase all manner of nonsense as a substitute.
Click on the link and you find that the study Mr Anil cites does not say that “the rest [of campus cancellations] were the work of Right-wing snowflakes”. The figure he quotes is that 52% of cancellations come from “the political right of the scholar” (my underline) which does not mean that they are Right-wing,
When Stalin cancelled Trotsky, which one was the right-winger?
Thank you – in fact, the report that the author relies upon fails to support his point in another way, too. Namely, the vast majority of the ‘right wing cancellations’ that are documented are in fact complaints by students and parents about left-wing professors discriminating against right-wing students in their classrooms. Right-wing professors discriminating against left-wing students is simply not a thing.
Pretending there is a moral equivalence on free speech issues between the left and the right betrays the author’s underlying sympathies. “A pox on both your houses” is the refuge these days of the lefty who is terrified to realize that his leftism has eaten itself, calling into doubt his years of allegiance.
Royal Soc of Lit – ‘Here’s Bernardine Evaristo, its president: “the society cannot take sides in writers’ controversies and issues, but must remain impartial”. Rushdie spelled it out with greater clarity: “Just wondering if the Royal Society of Literature is ‘impartial’ about attempted murder?”
If that’s a genuine quote and not taken out of context, that’s truly shocking.
That’s just what I was thinking. If the Royal Society of Literature doesn’t want to take sides between a writer and his silencer then what’s its point?
Another DEI hire, I expect. If he’d been a ‘woman of colour’, we’d have all been expected to man the barricades.
But it’s just some male Muslim on Muslim shit (see Whoopi Goldberg ‘s Holocaust ‘white on white shit’ comment) so it’s not really my prob (also it’s cultural appropriation).
Par for the course for Evaristo, the Guardianista’s Guardianista.
It is a real quote from the Royal Society of Literature’s leader; however the reason she isn’t interested in defending Rushdie is because he isn’t of subsaharan origin.
I just hope the international community finally wakes up to 4 decades of the Iranian threat and puts together a plan to remove that regime now.
Dirty diplomatic dealings will doubtlessly be involved once again in terms of bypassing the UN, but being that Israel and most of the Gulf States are on a similar page it might be possible to find a novel approach improving on the debacle of 2003 in Iraq.
will that effort work as well as previous plans that removed Saddam and Qaddafi from power? Will it turn out better than the last time the US imposed regime change on Iran, back in the 50s when a democratically elected govt was overthrown and the Shah was installed? Iran is not a problem that the West can solve; that has to come from the rest of the Muslim world.
Rushdie is an early example of the multiculturalists finding out that their actions and beliefs may have…. unforseen consequences…..and then expecting and demanding helpfrom the supposedly irredeemable whitey they spent their careers demonising to protect them from the demons they helped unleash.
So many cases of left-liberals doing this.
Gosh, reading this you wonder how Islam ever got such a bad rap. Turns out it was the secularists all along.
The stabbing of Salman Rushdie was unfortunate. But he was not the first speaker at a public event to not react while a would-be assassin suddenly rushed towards him menacingly.
Famously, Malcolm X had just began speaking on stage to a group in a ballroom on the day of his assassination in New York when he spied his assassins get up and walk towards him after a convenient distraction had been created that enticed nearly everyone in the audience to turn and look back. The quartet when near the stage then pulled out their guns and started blasting at him. Screams and smoke immediately filled the ballroom as attendees scampered for safety.
Even stand-up comics like Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock have been attacked in the recent past while on stage. Why do speaking event organizers not invest more in visible security measure like in music concerts so as to deter such?
“…it is the new lexicon of hate speech that has animated the most sustained assaults on the First Amendment — some of it with good reason (in a world of swastikas and fasces, it would be churlish to be a free speech absolutist)”
It is in precisely THAT world that it is most important to be a free speech absolutist.
Snowflakes to the left, snowflakes to the right. Into the valley of postmodernism rode the modernist.
I suspect that if Anil were writing of Joseph Stalin he’d accuse him of using communistic ideals as a tool for gaining power, as opposed to using power to serve communistic ideals. Anil probably disagrees with most of what Tom Holland says in Dominion.
Liberalism barely exists. Has the author not noticed how that ostensible part of the left has taken on a much harder edge, first as progressive and now as full-blown authoritarian with the legal crackdowns on free speech to prove it? The measure in Scotland may be an outlier in terms of its scope but it’s becoming common in terms of intent. The is a rush across the Western world to silence inconvenient voices, to shush those whose words might offend others as if there is some divine right to never having a moment of upset.
Few things are more cringeworthy than the normalization of the term “hate speech.” There is no such thing just as there are no ‘hate’ crimes. There is only speech and there are only crimes. This attempt to politicize and criminalize thought is not serving us well.
The bio of the attacker is troubling because it describes so many young men. The lack of a coherent motive suggests that they may be so un-moored they can be diverted easily into brutality. Campus riots for Hamas make more sense given this phenomenon. Governments premised on free speech etc. Will struggle to address such deep rooted social pathology. More optimistically, the passions of youth may fade as their lack of rational basis becomes clear to middle age.
This is the second article today I literally can’t read… I just don’t have a clue what he’s saying.
I thought I was the only one. Much of the prose is unreadable. I think he passes off this as being very clever.
in a world of swastikas and fasces, it would be churlish to be a free speech absolutist
What an absurd thing to write!
Oh to be free from the burden of freedom