I seem to be having a little difficulty getting back in to non-travel blogging. Oh well, three posts today.
First, Yglesias, who is presently in the Netherlands, has a post up on the differences between American and European secularism.
One thing that I guess I could have learned just pondering the world from my chair but that I don’t think I really understood until I went to the Netherlands and talked to people involved in politics there is the extent to which the "new atheism" -- which is mostly like the old atheism but involves people acting like jerks -- is specifically bound up with some problematic anti-Muslim sentiments. Previously, things like this Christopher Hitchens column bashing Hanukkah had struck me as merely weird...
In Europe, though, the face of "religion" is increasingly Islam whereas elements of the secular consensus are part of a national identity that elements of the right can embrace. It was explained to me, for example, that one thing Dutch people worry about when they worry about Muslim immigrants is that socially conservative Muslim immigrants might spoil their same-sex partnership law. I joked that conservatives should love immigration, then. But in reality the forces of indigenous religious conservatism are way too weak for anything like that to happen. So instead of a system of cross-currents, where both a cosmopolitan left and a traditionalist right find something to admire about growing diversity, you get a substantial block of people pushing against Muslim immigrants from both a secularist and a nationalist perspective.
From the point of view of an American liberal, it’s an awkward situation.
Based on my prior reading and that event on Islam in Europe last week I think Yglesias is missing the main drivers here. In Europe many countries in Europe there’s an underclass that often turns to fundamentalist Islam to express their dissent with the status quo. On several occasions, this has led to violent demonstrations, assassinations, and outright terrorist bombings, although the situation varies greatly form country to country. In the U.S. Islam presently is not strongly associated with the underclass, in fact Muslims do better economically than the average American. As a result, we’re able to handle the violence dimension which is really a key driver of the fears he’s talking about.
That said, I think his general analysis holds, it’s just the drivers he’s talking about are of secondary importance.
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