Did you notice the note at the bottom of the post below referencing “The Dish“? That’s the name of the best blog on the Internet (IMHO) – Andrew Sullivan’s home for his thoughts and all the miscellanea he and his staff pick up and post daily.
They clearly borrow from others, so I don’t feel too bad in borrowing from him. But I should encourage others to takeit for a test read and perhaps subscribe (he’s so far successully found a way to make blogging pay). As a public intellectural, he’s acknowledged to be one of the best. (Some credit him with identifying gay marriage as an issue that was worth fighting for well before others even thought it relevant.)
Occasionally he posts an essay that probes an issue broadly and in depth – a difficult trick to pull off, believe me. Most currently, this one: A Redder and Bluer World. I’ll quote a few paragraphs from it, but I’d encourage you to link over and read the while thing.
… the cultural gulf has rarely been as deep or as wide. My view on this is that our division is not really about politics or even ideology. Ideology is an often ill-fitting misnomer for something much more powerful – deep cultural alienation between the two parts of America.
That alienation, in my view, is at its core the same alienation we are seeing in countries as diverse as Turkey and Egypt and Iran and Israel. It’s about the response to modernity – a choice between fear/rejection and relish/adoption. It’s between a red world and a blue world. Or rather an increasingly blue world in deadly conflict between an increasingly red one. …
The real question, however, is how societies can retain their coherence and unity when they are caught between the reassuring certainties of fundamentalism and the exhilarating disorientation of modernity. The worldviews are from such different places – and are now penetrating cultures which, before the globalization of information, were able to keep them at bay. …
The only way through this impasse is through religious reform, in my view. This may take more than my lifetime. But proving the ineptness of theocracy, exposing the fallacies of the fundamentalist psyche, while treasuring varieties of religious experience that include within them a toleration of the conscience of others, is surely the only way forward. It will not be easy getting to a more purple world. …
Full essay here.
