I’m going to pick up on what I talked about yesterday, about the rise of religious fervor in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, and the lack of understanding of this movement that you can see among the mainstream urban Western secular population.
I don’t know–having grown up as a part of one of those religious cultures, I feel like I’ve got more of a sense of where the motivation for the rest of them comes from. I don’t always agree with them–obviously, I don’t condone suicide bombing–but I also know that they’re definitely not doing this out of a sense of personal despair because they don’t own enough STUFF. If you were taught from childhood that the greatest thing you could do with your life is give it up in a way that helps to defeat the oppressors of your people, then a suicide in that context would be almost as far from an act of despair as you could get. Indeed, you’d probably do it in a state of religious euphoria (which was something that the producers of United 93 and Syriana clearly didn’t understand).
A thoroughly secular Westerner is pretty unaware of how pervasive, stifling, and oppressive their worldview can seem to a devout believer. We in the West have perfected a cultural hegemony that centers around consumerism, with healthy dose of greed, lust, gluttony, envy, and a smattering of the other deadly sins. Yeah, maybe it does universally appeal to people, though perhaps only to our baser instincts. It’s rough going for a devout person who’s seeking to please God in their life, to be surrounded by a society that believes everything is and should be permissible. (Except hate speech or being fat, of course.)
Like any other majority, this mainstream consumerist culture really can’t see how thoroughly it tramples all over the beliefs of other cultures. Somehow, the purveyors of “tolerance” can’t see that they’re unilaterally attacking all that many other cultures hold dear, by their very insistence that everyone must accept everything. (Except hate speech or fat people, of course.)
Wouldn’t it work better to have a rule that everyone must coexist peacefully, but that you don’t have to agree with or accept everything that the people around you believe or do in their lives? Respect them, but let them make their own decisions, and free them from your expectations for them? Well, maybe that’s unrealistic.
Maybe it worked better before the world was as interconnected as it is now. Perhaps the fact that we’re perpetually bumping up against, and having to deal with, people who are so profoundly different than we are, has made this war of conflicting values so much more virulent. A hundred years ago and more, there weren’t many places where cultures were coming into direct contact, but now it’s everywhere, in everyone’s home, if you have any connection to the outside at all. I wonder what this will mean for us in the future?
Posted by Kjirstin 
