toward a warmer secularism

Many secular-minded individuals are rather hypocritical in the way they demand tolerance but often don't practice it themselves. Religion per se is not the enemy. Making religion the enemy only adds to the problem. The problem is that modern society tends to be inhospitable. Its being inhospitable is the inevitable byproduct of cultural collisions. We are thrust together with people we don't understand. Many of their values are alien and even contrary to ours. It is hard to be sympathetic toward cultures that condone so-called "honor killing" for example.

Secularists obviously don't want to make de-conversion a mirror image of conversion. What we can do though is provide viable alternatives. Secularism tends to be relatively impoverished emotionally. It is easy to understand why so many otherwise quite sensible people feel drawn to religion. I believe that if there were more emotionally warm secular alternatives, religion would lose much of its draw.

We are heirs to a splendid legacy that we have inherited from brave pioneers who were guided by a vision of a world that would be guided by reality-based reasoning. Many of those pioneers underestimated the difficulties their successors would encounter. They had their own difficulties with their superstitious contemporaries, but they believed that reason would eventually triumph once enough people began to get a taste of freedom. Theirs was a worthy vision that can still inspire us even though we seem further away from its realization than ever. 

The revolutionary thinkers whose legacy is constitutional democracy understood some of the inherent dangers and thus put safeguards in place, but who among them could have imagined their baby growing up to choose Donald Trump as its president. We seem to have made a wrong turn somewhere along the way, but I don't think we did it on purpose. Perhaps the greatest factor in our ending up where we are is backlash.

It might seem strange that there are a lot of people who honestly believe that political correctness is the source of all our problems, but it is not so strange if we view it in context. It is a solipsistic conflation of feelings and beliefs. They feel put down, and they, not wholly without warrant, believe that their being put down says everything about the extent to which democracy has been undermined.

Their (solipsistic) inability to imagine democracy as anything other than people like them getting their way creates a no-win situation for everybody. They would rather steer the ship into the rocks as one big "f*** you" than accept the imperatives of a culturally pluralistic democracy, and everybody is paying the price now and probably will for years to come.

How do we recover from this cultural, social, and political crisis? How do we calm the storm created by backlash? How do we recapture a vision of a truly inclusive civil society? What is the message that we can put on the banners that we would raise high?