Millennium-Shock

[poliphilo]

I think of it as millennium-shock- the mindset that has propelled conservative governments and dictators and demagogues into power and influence all round the world. We're afraid of the future with its shinyness and its mind-and-body-warping technologies and its promise of an end to life as we know it, and we fall back on the defence of green-mouldy certainties from way back when. Thus the demand for sharia law throughout the Muslim world, thus the dominance of the religious right in the USA, thus a Pope who decries personal religion and demands that his young people submit to (his) authority. We're a race of scaredy-cats. We'd prefer to have the Middle Ages back rather than commit ourselves to the unknown.

I think in the end we'll get over this reactive fit. Science and invention will continue to motor away- and we like the goodies they provide too much to shut them down. And ideas are harder to censor than they used to be, now that we have the Net. Even so, these are hard times, and those of us who don't want a new Dark Ages to descend- and the world be run according to the lights of Bush and Khamenei and Pope Ratzinger- are going to have to make a fuss.

Comments

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Yabbut -- it's not just that liberals don't pay attention. It's that many of the liberals in the media are so damned condescending, while at the same time using the barking moonbats as exemplars of the other side, with the result that folks on the other side but not all the way out in barking moonbat territory get their backs up.

I once spent some time in North Carolina where, as bad luck for me would have it, the only station that came in well was the local public radio station. The notion that conservatives constitute a mass of the great unwashed was palpable in every news report, every commentary, every discussion. At the same time, it was painfully obvious that all these reporters and commentators considered themselves 120% unbiased.

On my own LiveJournal I posted links to a survey, recently commissioned by Newsweek and BeliefNet, that indicates that the so-called "religious right" is a lot more laissez-faire and tolerant than one would know from the regular reporting in the press. Also, recent coverage of our barking moonbat Pat Robertson has dutifully, although not loudly, chronicled the decline of his influence over the past decade.

(I personally think Robertson should be arrested for making terroristic threats.)