08 Nov 2004
The End of the Enlightenment?

Now that the dust is settling from the recent election, some very interesting opinions are beginning to emerge. Some is bunk, but some is quite perceptive. And one meme bears very close examination, indeed.

This link appeared over at Antipixel this morning: it's an op-ed from the New York Times by Garry Wills:

This election confirms the brilliance of Karl Rove as a political strategist. He calculated that the religious conservatives, if they could be turned out, would be the deciding factor. The success of the plan was registered not only in the presidential results but also in all 11 of the state votes to ban same-sex marriage. Mr. Rove understands what surveys have shown, that many more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin's theory of evolution.

Jan over at Secular Blasphemy, a Norweigan blog, recently posted his wonderment at the fact that a school district in Wisconsin has decided to put creationism back in the classroom, and asked "Where do they find these people?"

They're the Bush voters. They're everywhere over here: even in the "blue states". And they are alot scarier up close than they are from across the pond.

Mr. Wills continues:

The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies.

Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.

It's hard to describe to my European readers the extent of this societal transformation. I sometimes think that they see in Bush the classic Republican, like a Reagan or Goldwater. Not so. But neither can the "blame" for this turn be laid entirely on Dubya: he's just along for the ride, like the rest of us, only he (or Karl Rove) figured out how to tap into the wave first.

It's impossible for me to leave my home and drive in any direction for more than 15 miles now without seeing at least one billboard proclaiming "REPENT! Or burn in Hell!". I noted this trend earlier this year, and it's getting worse, not better. I wonder: do these religious screeds dot the European countryside?

A nomination to the European Council of Ministers was recently withdrawn because of some vaguely anti-homosexual remarks the [Italian Catholic, if memory serves] candidate had made: we have newly elected United States Senators openly calling for the death penalty for abortion doctors and homosexuals.

Apparently, Wills is not the only one to see the forthcoming death of the Enlightenment in America. Dana Blankenhorn over at Moore's Lore mentions a recent speech by David Brin:

Brin’s theme was the election. For the first time in American history, he said, a President won re-election by running against the Enlightenment, against Galileo, against pragmatism, against the very idea of criticism as a good.

The general tone right now in America, in politics as well as general cultural life, makes Reagan's sabre rattling and rants about the "Evil Empire" look mild and conciliatory. Goldwater would be castigated by the Republican majority as a "liberal". McCarthy ain't got nothin' on Ashcroft & Co.

I'm not sure how the Democrats (or anybody else, for that matter) can stop this trend. Hel, I'm not even sure that this trend can be stopped at all, short of the Apocalypse. And that's what really scares me ...

00:00 /Politics | 3 comments | permanent link