A deadline is looming, so no time for anything lengthy or considered. Instead, a few links to interesting things. Over at Crooked Timber there are two fascinating and provocative posts on religion and politics and the implications, for the Democrats, of Bush's -or rather Karl Rove's- success in mobilising the GOP's religious/fundamentalist base. I think this is in fact of more than merely psephological interest, and ought to cause liberals to ask themselves whether religious beliefs are usefully understood as just another kind of preference, analogous to other ends and interests that autonomous individuals may choose. Harry Brighouse makes some good points in the comments there too:
Look, atheists have some work to do here too. Liberal atheists/secularists have been happy to treat religious believers like some sort of lunatic; to make it sound as if, int he moral arena, anything goes. The truth is that adultery, for example, is wrong. And most of us think that. But Dems gave the impression that they didn’t think that when they sprung, absurdly, to Clinton’s defence in 1998.
Divorce (which the fundamentalists practice as much as anyone) is usually bad; we need to say that, and think through ways of protecting children from it, which might include making it harder.
The public culture is… well, its disgusting. We may differ in our diagnosis of exactly what is disgusting about it; but we converge with the right about a good deal of what we think about it (they think homosexuality is wrong; but it isn’t. They think that constant in-your-face represntation of meaningless sex and wanton violence is bad — they’re right!) We may also differ in our diagnoses of what causes it (an interaction between unregulated corporate domination of the culture, and certain universal human weaknesses, in my view) — but let’s discuss that with them. The secular left has a lot of work to do demonstrating that we do, in fact, have largely sensible moral values, and we shouldn’t leave all the work of mediating to believers like Russell and Amy Sullivan.
The latest edition of the New York Review of Books has arrived and contains several things I look forward to reading: Garry Wills on Michael Walzer; J.M. Coetzee on Philip Roth; and John Lanchester on Muriel Spark.