India/western Sociology

[acharya]

A sentence in today's (Sunday, December 13) New York Times

[size="6"]

"Belief systems in which the categories of Western religion are reproduced in

the guise of pseudo-science, they are redundant in a world where the most

rapidly advancing nation state has never been monotheist."[/size]



URL:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/weekin...ading.html



Full context:



"Today The Times Magazine looks at ideas that made an impact this year. But in

The New Statesman, John Gray looks at influential ideas that faltered across the

decade now ending — from neoconservatism to liberal interventionism to the

neoliberal "Washington consensus" about debt-fueled free markets. And in them he

finds a common denominator."



It is not often that large-scale crises are due to intellectual error, but a

single erroneous belief runs through all of the successive delusions of the past

decade. [size="5"][color="#8B0000"]With few exceptions, both left and right seem to think that history is a

directional process whose end point — after many unfortunate detours — will be

the worldwide duplication of people very like themselves.[/color][/size] At the end of the

decade, opinion formers in Britain, the United States and Continental Europe

still imagine that the normal pattern of historical development leads eventually

to an idealized version of Western society, just as Francis Fukuyama forecast 20

years ago.



But whereas this confidence-boosting notion was still genuinely believed a

decade ago, today it is a kind of comfort blanket against an unfamiliar world.

The reality, which is that Western power is in retreat nearly everywhere, is

insistently denied. Yet the rise of China means more than the emergence of a new

great power. Its deeper import is that the ideologies of the past century —

neoliberalism just as much as Communism — are obsolete. Belief systems in which

the categories of Western religion are reproduced in the guise of

pseudo-science, they are redundant in a world where the most rapidly advancing

nation state has never been monotheist. Western societies are well worth

defending, but they are not a model for all of humankind. In future they will be

only one of several versions of tolerable modernity."



---



One can go to the New Statesman:

http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2009/1...ld-western



It continues:



"For secular western intellectuals to accept this fact would rob their life of

meaning. Huddled in the tattered blanket of historical teleology, which tells

them they are the leading lights of humanity, they screen out any development

that demonstrates their increasing irrelevance. Religion is resurgent in many

parts of the world, not least emerging powers such as Brazil and China, but for

the secular intelligentsia this is just an unfortunate lag, a temporary setback

in humanity's slow march to join them on the sunlit uplands of reason. The

hysterical stridency of evangelical atheism - one of the most characteristic

phenomena of the Noughties - is symptomatic of a pervasive cognitive dissonance.

Like everyone else, these intellectuals assert their beliefs all the more

adamantly when the only reason for holding them is a well-founded suspicion that

they are not true."



http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheHeathen...ssage/4963