In an ideal situation, the enemy is never the individual, but the unreasonable positions that the individual embraces. Notwithstanding the fact that for obvious reasons, when push comes to shove and people act on their positions, the individuals become the enemies as well until they are prevented from doing harm.
I like the kind of effort that the Institute for Cultural Evolution is making. And it is time to take back the pride in the values of the West -- the ones that every good thinking progressive and every good thinking conservative once endorsed. To remember that the culture born of the Enlightenment (from ancient Greece through the best traits of Christianity and because of the material environment created by the Industrial Revolution, with all its evils) is the one culture that gave humanity the Rights of Man, the refusal of slavery, the ideal of the equality of human beings, and democracy. It does not make it a superior culture, but it is the culture that informs the ability/hope of our species to progress and yes, to evolve. It is something to be proud of, without arrogance.
It would also be important to remember that this one is not the first time that an ideology was born as a reaction to modernity and took root. Nazism and Communism were such, and both promised to erase the 'evils' of modernity with an end-of-times kind of faith. Such ideologies have strong appeal to the minds of people for whom to be self-determined individuals is often too hard (and all of us tend to be that, at one time or another), especially because of the strong element of faith and group cohesion.
Besides, the concern about the pathological progressive ideology of today is more pressing for intellectuals like myself (and Loury, and McWorther, and Weiss, and Singal, and many others), for we care about cultural institutions, academia, the traditional media, the once established guardians of knowledge and truth. This is our fight to take up (even if not in a belligerent way, it is a fight nevertheless).
But we should also never forget that the attack on modernity and the values of the Enlightenment come not just from that side -- the reaction is always two-fold, on both extremes. The obscurantist forces bent on dismantling democracy from the right (which have always existed just like the quasi-psychotic delirium of the far left) are as active and influence society at different levels than our revered institutions: they have alternative media that propagate their distorted vision of the world and conspiracy theories, and an easy pool of grievances personal and collective from which to draw to inflame mobs in their specific echo chambers. Cancellation is not a tool used by the left alone... it is the preferred tool of totalitarian thought.
These two plagues, so different on the surface and so similar in their essence, feed on each other constantly. And they may well create immense destruction before being put out.
If they can be. Because Progress is not an linear path, and neither is evolution. And like a friend of mine who is a Professor of Genetics often repeats, the normal condition of species on the evolutionary playfield is EXTINCT.
In an ideal situation, the enemy is never the individual, but the unreasonable positions that the individual embraces. Notwithstanding the fact that for obvious reasons, when push comes to shove and people act on their positions, the individuals become the enemies as well until they are prevented from doing harm.
I like the kind of effort that the Institute for Cultural Evolution is making. And it is time to take back the pride in the values of the West -- the ones that every good thinking progressive and every good thinking conservative once endorsed. To remember that the culture born of the Enlightenment (from ancient Greece through the best traits of Christianity and because of the material environment created by the Industrial Revolution, with all its evils) is the one culture that gave humanity the Rights of Man, the refusal of slavery, the ideal of the equality of human beings, and democracy. It does not make it a superior culture, but it is the culture that informs the ability/hope of our species to progress and yes, to evolve. It is something to be proud of, without arrogance.
It would also be important to remember that this one is not the first time that an ideology was born as a reaction to modernity and took root. Nazism and Communism were such, and both promised to erase the 'evils' of modernity with an end-of-times kind of faith. Such ideologies have strong appeal to the minds of people for whom to be self-determined individuals is often too hard (and all of us tend to be that, at one time or another), especially because of the strong element of faith and group cohesion.
Besides, the concern about the pathological progressive ideology of today is more pressing for intellectuals like myself (and Loury, and McWorther, and Weiss, and Singal, and many others), for we care about cultural institutions, academia, the traditional media, the once established guardians of knowledge and truth. This is our fight to take up (even if not in a belligerent way, it is a fight nevertheless).
But we should also never forget that the attack on modernity and the values of the Enlightenment come not just from that side -- the reaction is always two-fold, on both extremes. The obscurantist forces bent on dismantling democracy from the right (which have always existed just like the quasi-psychotic delirium of the far left) are as active and influence society at different levels than our revered institutions: they have alternative media that propagate their distorted vision of the world and conspiracy theories, and an easy pool of grievances personal and collective from which to draw to inflame mobs in their specific echo chambers. Cancellation is not a tool used by the left alone... it is the preferred tool of totalitarian thought.
These two plagues, so different on the surface and so similar in their essence, feed on each other constantly. And they may well create immense destruction before being put out.
If they can be. Because Progress is not an linear path, and neither is evolution. And like a friend of mine who is a Professor of Genetics often repeats, the normal condition of species on the evolutionary playfield is EXTINCT.