Posts

Showing posts from September, 2010

Of Mosques and Migrants

Along with many others, I have become increasingly distressed over the summer by the public discourse and conduct of some of my fellow citizens. At the moment, I am not inclined to describe this simply as “politics,” even though campaigns for the mid-term Congressional elections are underway and many of the issues over which opinion is diverging are also matters that are, to some extent, the purview of government. Nor am I willing to reduce it to differences in political “ideology,” even though one of the contested issues is precisely the role of government, its size and reach, in its management of our common socioeconomic life. Rather, I have been wondering whether there is something else operating at a deeper level, catalyzing our abrasive politics and ideologies, some sort of vestigial sensibility that is evoked by a perfect storm of socioeconomic conditions, cultural group membership, and existential receptiveness to change. Social and political extremism is hardly un