Quality post from homo upstairs
Read this article in the NYT Magazine today--probably my first perusal of a Sunday Times, by the way, and my Sunday afternoons are officially shot from now on--and I can't begin to believe it. This woman was shot and killed at point blank range. The culprits? Her three brothers, one of which bought the gun, a second lured her to the spot, and the third and youngest shot and killed her. Her crime? She was a Turkish woman acting like a liberal secular German.
I want to be an ecumenical person. I want to allow for people to live their lives how they wish, and even for families and communities to be able to follow whatever traditional archaic bullshit codes they inherit. But this is just fucking sick. It's times like these when I worry I am completely blinded by liberalism and think it is the solution to many of the world's problems. I cannot conceive of a better political and social order than one in which individuals can actually, you know, choose their lifestyles without worrying about some secret family synod deciding they can no longer live. Not to mention the obvious sexism and patriarchal injustice wrapped up in tragedies like these that Western liberals ought to be outraged over.
I have no idea for a solution, but I think the article further illuminates the greater problem in Europe, especially in France and Germany, where the governments have no clue how to integrate their citizens. America has somehow fared better, but it probably helps that our biggest minority population, Hispanics, already inhabit a society much like our own before immigrating to the US.
On a related note, check out this piece in the Times about the new conservative Polish government. The greater point seems to be that some of the newest members of the EU, which are largely Roman Catholic, are opposed to the more liberal members on matters like homosexuality and even women's rights. Poland abolished its Ministry of Women's Interests, for example. Is it a coincidence that conservative religious values seem to be at the core of both cases? I've said it before and I'll say it again: religion is not just an extension of some economic establishment (for all the socialist critics out there, ahem) but is a very real, practicably important ideology with its own power. I should be surprised if I ever recant my view that religion and superstition are on the whole BAD for people. Bad, not just neutral with some good aspects and some bad aspects. I don't even want some people living under it for their own good and social stability because they can't control themselves otherwise (for all the Straussian or Machiavellian critics out there, ahem). And now I end this overly long and unabashedly serious and self-important post.
I want to be an ecumenical person. I want to allow for people to live their lives how they wish, and even for families and communities to be able to follow whatever traditional archaic bullshit codes they inherit. But this is just fucking sick. It's times like these when I worry I am completely blinded by liberalism and think it is the solution to many of the world's problems. I cannot conceive of a better political and social order than one in which individuals can actually, you know, choose their lifestyles without worrying about some secret family synod deciding they can no longer live. Not to mention the obvious sexism and patriarchal injustice wrapped up in tragedies like these that Western liberals ought to be outraged over.
I have no idea for a solution, but I think the article further illuminates the greater problem in Europe, especially in France and Germany, where the governments have no clue how to integrate their citizens. America has somehow fared better, but it probably helps that our biggest minority population, Hispanics, already inhabit a society much like our own before immigrating to the US.
On a related note, check out this piece in the Times about the new conservative Polish government. The greater point seems to be that some of the newest members of the EU, which are largely Roman Catholic, are opposed to the more liberal members on matters like homosexuality and even women's rights. Poland abolished its Ministry of Women's Interests, for example. Is it a coincidence that conservative religious values seem to be at the core of both cases? I've said it before and I'll say it again: religion is not just an extension of some economic establishment (for all the socialist critics out there, ahem) but is a very real, practicably important ideology with its own power. I should be surprised if I ever recant my view that religion and superstition are on the whole BAD for people. Bad, not just neutral with some good aspects and some bad aspects. I don't even want some people living under it for their own good and social stability because they can't control themselves otherwise (for all the Straussian or Machiavellian critics out there, ahem). And now I end this overly long and unabashedly serious and self-important post.
posted by to scranton at 7:24 PM
1 Comments:
I tend to agree with you, but...
"I've said it before and I'll say it again: religion is not just an extension of some economic establishment (for all the socialist critics out there, ahem) but is a very real, practicably important ideology with its own power."
How are these two mutually exclusive or otherwise contradictory? No socialist would argue, I would think, that ideology is a real thing with visible and explicit power. However, I think that a recognition of how ideology-religious/political/cultural and otherwise- arises within a society and functions within societies is just as if not more important. We see a superb amount of death and injustice committed at the hands of religion, but in the same case is it not so that we've seen an equal amount meted out in the name of any number of secular causes, least of all those grandieloquent Enlightenment visions? In the case of the latter, can we merely make the excuse that enlightenment is a work in progress, that this is just not in accordance with such principles, but not make the same excuse for the former? Injustice in the secular world is just seen as a sort of incompleteness or is written off in the future-perfect "we will have soon eliminated this" but religion is taken as having a concrete essense, and crimes in its name or related to it are clearly a sign of some deeper corruption. Is there any a priori reasoning which indemnifies the one and villifies the other? Liberalism's standpoint is, in my estimation, often no more than a simple disguise painted over just as much ideology, exclusion, and exception.
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