Roman Schmidt in Eurozine:

In early 1963 they admitted defeat. Conceived in late 1960, Revue internationale was intended by its French, German and Italian founders to be the historic realization of the idea of a “plural writing”. Yet it remained a project and no more. In 1964, a record of the collated material[1] appeared in Italy. Hans Magnus Enzensberger called it the “remnants of a shipwreck”.

Ships run into trouble not when they are in the harbour but when they are on the high seas. If the boards shatter, then the collapse, in all senses, is the result of great activity.[2] Failure results from aiming too high.

This is where the idea of an international journal comes into its own. At the point of failure it is most true to itself. “For indeed”, as Daniel Defoe noted as early as 1697 in his Essay upon Projects, “the true definition of a project, according to modern acceptation, is […] a vast undertaking, too big to be managed, and therefore likely enough to come to nothing.”[3] Defoe portrays the project-maker as a Promethean figure drawing up plans at the margins of the era, stretching the limits of what the era allows. Fascinated yet at sea, he knows that, as he steps into the realm of practice, he may run aground. As he wrote these words, Defoe, the writer and businessman, may well have been thinking of the mountain of debt his own commercial failures had saddled him with.[4]

From the perspective of a “poetics of failure”, then, successful enterprises are suspect of having played it safe from the start. Whatever can be achieved effortlessly, without a critical mass of aspirations, hopes and adversity, cannot claim the title of “project” in the emphatic sense. Somewhere below there runs a line separating projects from things one simply does (admittedly, this line has been drawn absurdly low in recent years, so that today even the most banal tasks in life qualify).

Leo Steinberg in the NYRB blog:

When a Christo project sets out to engage a body of water, as in Surrounded Islands, some prognosticators inevitably foresee an assault upon peaceable, innocent nature. The work completed reveals, on the contrary, acts of homage secured in reverence and affection.

And so Over the River, Christo/Jeanne-Claude’s still fought-over bid to canopy portions of the Arkansas River in Colorado. Once again, we hear the project denounced as an imposition that would deny the river and its dependents access to quickening sunshine and rain; as if the instigators were out to crush whatever under the sun grows, flows, or draws breath. But many among us foresee the river’s planned canopy delivering a benign gesture.

From Christo’s explanations and explicit drawings of what is envisioned, I anticipate certain surprises, among them a welcome revision of the river’s deportment in three-dimensional space. A river tends to be seen and thought of along the horizontality of its stream—a level course which Christo’s parallel canopy seems to confirm. But that canopy—pitched only 8 feet above the water’s surface—is to be of a transparent cloth that keeps sky and cloud always in evidence, and with it (I hope) a sharpened awareness of living under pillars of air. To say nothing of the river’s own depth in unceasing play. In other words, I expect Over the River—more precisely the low thatch overhead—to impart a livelier sense of the river’s participation in verticality.

The word “thatch,” just used, confesses another association. That of roofing for protection from, say, “inclement” weather. Not that a river needs such solicitude; what threatens it is the insidious infusion of industrial waste. But Over the River is not out to indict a pollutant. Its metaphorical idiom is content to assert the immanence of a champion, a protective agent just now engaged in benediction.

Jacob Aron in New Scientist:

During my time as an eager undergraduate mathematician, I'd often wonder what it would feel like to prove a truly new result and have my name immortalised in the mathematical history books. I thought that dream had died when I gave up maths to become a science writer, but Aron's theorem is now a reality – and I've got the certificate to prove it.

While most mathematical theorems result from weeks of hard work and possibly a few broken pencils, mine comes courtesy of TheoryMine, a company selling personalised theorems as novelty gifts for £15 a pop.

Its automated theorem-proving software can churn out a theoretically infinite number of theorems for customers wishing to join the ranks of Pythagoras and Fermat. “We generate new theorems and let people name them after themselves, a friend, a loved one, or whoever they want to name it after,” explains Flaminia Cavallo, managing director of TheoryMine, based in Edinburgh, UK.

You may think this is an elaborate scam, or that you'll just end up with an obscure equation copied from some long-forgotten textbook, but TheoryMine claims to have far more validity than superficially similar companies selling star names.

Hirst talks about the diamond skull almost as if it’s a mythical treasure – something that Indiana Jones might don his fedora for, that criminal gangs might plan to steal. In time, he imagines people fighting over it, dying for it. He sounds almost disappointed that he can’t keep it at home – “The insurance companies would go mental.” He’d evidently like it to end up in an international museum or gallery. As I am about to leave his office, Hirst and his assistants are trying on wigs: there’s a Ramones theme to the office Christmas party; the place rings with laughter. Hirst, in the silliest of wigs, asks whether I fancy some crisps or chocolate, pulling out a drawer stuffed full of both. I help myself to a chocolate bar. It’s a childish treat from someone with a lot of money who remembers what it was like to be born with very little.

more from Nicholas Glass at the FT here.

Some years ago, I began spending time in the rural Southern town where my father had been raised, and I often found myself wishing for a decoder ring. Squirrels had longer tails, wisteria bloomed off schedule, and with all the diphthongs and dropped syllables, I had no idea what people were saying. The local language sprouted from the literal and cultural landscape that informed it — its racial history and disappearing farms, the coexistence of deer festivals and meth busts, the households where people wore Carhartts without irony and put “Queer Eye” on TiVo. How to understand all this? An atlas would have helped. Not any atlas, mind you, but one as inventive and affectionate as Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (University of California; cloth, $49.95; paper, $24.95), a collection of 22 maps and accompanying essays paying homage to the city where the author lives. “Infinite City” started as a commissioned project for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which turned to Solnit as it geared up for its 75th anniversary this year.

more from Lise Funderburg at the NYT here.

Not a short story, not quite a novella — wasn’t that a Britney Spears song? — the oxymoronic long short story is an underemployed literary form. (For argument’s sake, let’s say the long short story ranges from 30 to 60 pages.) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (1922) is a perfect example of the length’s virtues: the story, covering the whole of a character’s life, is ample enough to be divided into chapters, yet the execution retains an antic swiftness that lofts the bizarre premise. Contemporary practitioners who thrive at this length include Alice Munro, Ethan Canin and the underread Rachel Ingalls. To this list must be added Ted Chiang, whose “Stories of Your Life and Others” (Small Beer Press: 320 pp., $16 paper) contains a half-dozen such specimens, along with a regulation-length short story and a three-pager, commissioned by the magazine Nature, in the form of a letter to the editor of a science magazine. Originally published in 2002 by Tor and newly reissued by Small Beer Press, the stories range widely in time, subject and style but are united by a patient but ruthless fascination with the limits of knowledge.

more from Ed Park at the LA Times here.

From Spiked:

If you thought it was only uneducated Muslims in dusty towns ‘over there’ who burnt things that upset them, think again. In 2006, The Dartmouth, the student newspaper of Dartmouth College, a liberal arts college in New Hampshire, published a cartoon showing Nietzsche conversing with a male student. The student was with a very drunk girl after a night of boozing and schmoozing and was wondering whether or not he should have sex with her. ‘Will to power’, Nietzsche tells him. The cartoonist said it was intended as a pisstake of Nietzsche, and more broadly of his rehabilitation in liberal academic circles, but some Dartmouth students saw things differently – in their eyes the cartoon was effectively okaying date rape. So they did what any well-educated, privileged students at a liberal arts college would do – gathered outside the offices of The Dartmouth and publicly burned copies of the offending newspaper. Like fascists.

Greg Lukianoff’s mouth is agape as he recounts the incident four years on, clearly still shocked by the demented censoriousness and humourlessness of the Dartmouth book-burners. Lukianoff is president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE, ironically), which was founded in 1999 to defend ‘freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty and sanctity of conscience’ on American campuses, those ‘essential qualities of liberty and dignity’. ‘There was a time when people believed free speech on campus should be as wild and freewheeling as possible’, he tells me in his garden in the Italian part of Brooklyn, New York City. ‘Not anymore. Today students are apparently too sensitive to be able to deal with hard ideas or outrageous humour.’

More here.

A Homeless Sindhi Woman

In Akbar the Great’s durbar,
Anarkali, Queen of Beauty, reigned.
Yet
even she was buried alive.

Delhi, India’s pride, and I,
inheritor of the marvels of Indus architecture.
Yet
even I have been buried alive

homeless in history’s graveyard.

by Popati Hiranandani
from Man Sindhin
publisher: Lok-Sur, Mumbai, 1988
translation 1998, Anju Makhija and Menka Shivdasani,
with Arjan Shad

From The New York Times:

In his trenchant, unsettling, darkly hilarious “Fame,” Tom Payne also examines the murky pact that binds stars to their public. For him, this relationship stands to reveal “grim truths about humanity that we would struggle to express otherwise — those desires so unspeakable that we have to evolve a kind of code.” But where Dickinson uses the language of sparks and fire to rewrite this code, Payne, a former deputy literary editor for The Daily Telegraph in England, works to decipher it, uncovering clues in the foundational texts of Western culture. Moving seamlessly between yesterday’s great literature — Greek, Roman, early Christian, Enlightenment and Romantic — and today’s trashy tabloids, Payne advances a persuasive, if disturbing, definition of what fame is now, and what it has ever been. Above all else, it is “a systematic cycle of celebration, consecration and sacrifice,” in which cultures create gods and goddesses in order to kill them.

More here.

Navtej Sarna in The Hindu:

Things left half done tend to nag. Last year, I recounted the meetings of the Oxford Don Isaiah Berlin with Boris Pasternak but left for another time the story of his dramatic night conversation with the poetess Anna Akhmatova which she, with some artistic exaggeration, identified as the cause of the Cold War. To set matters at rest, I turned to the biography, Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet, by Roberta Reeder.

Berlin enters the scene only on Page 286, more than half way through. Akhmatova was in her mid-fifties, having been born in 1889, in the twilight of Imperial Russia. She had already been the toast of literary Petersburg to the extent that she appears as a defining detail in a contemporary memoir of the city: “Fog, streets, bronze horses, triumphal arches over the gates, Akhmatova, sailors and academics, the Neva, railings, murmuring lines at the bread shops, stray bullets of light from broken street lamps have settled in my memory…of the past, like love, like a disease, like the years.”

She had also been condemned as a “half nun, half harlot” after the revolution and regarded as a relic of a bygone corrupt age, a selfish poetess obsessed with personal feelings and not sufficiently starry-eyed about the revolution. The Literary Encyclopaedia of 1929 described her as “a poetess of the aristocracy who has not found a new function in capitalist society, but has already lost her old function in feudal society.” She was not permitted to publish for 15 years until one day in 1939 Stalin asked: “Where is Akhmatova? Why isn't she writing?” Evidently, her collection From Six Books was allowed to come out because Stalin's daughter loved her poetry; the book was nick-named “Papa's gift to Svetlana.”

Akhmatova had already loved, and been loved by, many men; including the painter Modigliani, then unknown and poor. Together, they walked the streets of Paris in the moonlight and he drew her enigmatic features. As she wrote, the relationship was a turning point in their artistic lives: “Everything that had happened to us up until that point was the prehistory of our lives…it was the hour just before the dawn.” She had also seen many loved ones become victims to Stalinist terror in the years of the dreaded midnight knock including her first husband Gumilyov and the poet Osip Mandelstam.

Browsing in a Leningrad bookstore in the autumn of 1945, Berlin — then functioning as a First Secretary in the British embassy — met the literary scholar, V.N. Orlov. The two went to see Akhmatova the same afternoon.

Kevin O'Rourke on Ireland's financial crisis:

It is one thing to know that someone you love is terminally ill; their death still comes as a shock.

I certainly don’t want to compare the arrival of the EU-IMF team in Dublin last week to a bereavement. But I was surprised at how upsetting I found it, given that it came as no surprise. It had been clear for a long time that the blanket guarantee given to the liabilities of Ireland’s rotten banks, in September 2008, had saddled the State with a debt that was too big for it to handle. Ten successive quarters of declining real GNP, and one attempt too many to draw a line under the losses of our banks, made our exclusion from international capital markets inevitable. But to know something is one thing; to see it actually happen is something entirely different.

I am not alone in feeling this way, it seems. The economics editor of the Irish Times, Dan O’Brien, wrote that

“nothing quite symbolised this State’s loss of sovereignty than the press conference at which the ECB man spoke along with two IMF men and a European Commission official. It was held in the Government press centre beneath the Taoiseach’s office. I am a xenophile and cosmopolitan by nature, but to see foreign technocrats take over the very heart of the apparatus of this State to tell the media how the State will be run into the foreseeable future caused a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach.

This is not to say that we would be happy to have our country’s affairs managed by the current, disgraced, government. I yield to no-one in my loathing of the men and women who have done this to my country. What has been the intellectual low-point of the last couple of years? Was it the cash-for-clunkers stimulus package (Ireland does not produce any cars)? Or the statement by our Finance Minister that Ireland need not fear a bank run, since Ireland is an island? Or the biggest Irish joke of them all, which underpinned the bank guarantee in the first place: that if we wanted investors to retain confidence in the creditworthiness of the Irish State, we needed to make sure that nobody who invested in our (private sector) banks ever lost a penny?”

The latter decision is the one that sank the country. It was the last great act of hubris of the Celtic Bubble, and was immediately denounced by one of the heroes of the crisis, my old UCD colleague Morgan Kelly. On the night the guarantee was announced, Kelly pointed out that while it was the right policy if the Irish banks were facing a liquidity crisis, it was a terrible policy if they were insolvent, which was in fact the case. As they always do when confronted with someone smarter than them, the Dublin establishment circled the wagons, and Kelly was dismissed as an irresponsible young troublemaker of no consequence.

Emma Brockes in The Guardian:

Nadine Gordimer is 87 this year and as resistant to autobiography as ever. The Nobel prize winner, small, chic, straight-backed as a dancer, says “my private life is my private life” – a practical as well as a moral concern: what she calls the “jealous hoarding of private experience for transmutation into fiction”.

It makes reading her non-fiction, collected earlier this year in a single volume and plain to the point of snappish, an exercise in sifting for lapses: the “bun-faced” nuns who taught her at school; her early “talent for showing off”. The only thing that could deflect her from work, she once wrote, was “being in love”, whereupon everything else flew out the window. She smiles indulgently. “Yes, I used to make bargains. I used to say I don't care if that book's published or not, it's the man that I want.”

It is, for Gordimer, a year of collections; on the heels of the non-fiction, an equally large volume of collected stories, both covering a period from the early 1950s, when she started writing, to the present. It is a huge amount of work – “you're surprised that you've worked so hard” – and not even the main event. “That's nothing,” she says, of the essays. “That was just on the side. Fiction is what really matters.” Her writings about politics served a purpose, surely?

Over at new deal 2.0:

In the next few weeks, the United States will be focused on deficit reduction. Analytically, the task of deficit reduction is simple: cu!ing expenditures and raising taxes. Politically, the task of deficit reduction is enormously difficult, for each cut in expenditure or increase in taxes hurts someone, and typically, some powerful group. Each, pursuing its own interests, has led the country into what is widely viewed as an untenable position. The hope is that a National Commission would devise an acceptable framework for shared sacrifice. It is more likely that that will be the case if there is an enunciated set of criteria against which we can judge proposals.

Different individuals may put more or less weight on different criteria, but behind them all is one core principle: at the head of the list of reforms are measures which increase both efficiency and equity; unacceptable are measures which decrease efficiency and equity.

A few statistics provide some guidance to these deliberations. Median income has declined by some 5% over the past decade—and was even in decline before the recession. Poverty has increased from 11.9% in 1999 to 14.3% in 2009. Median income of males with only a high school education has decreased some 13.5% from 1999 to 2009, as measured in 2009 dollars. The upper 1% of Americans accounted for an average of some 22% of the nation’s taxed income during 2004-2008. 65% of the income growth during the Bush expansion was captured by the top 1% of families.

Given the enormous increase in inequality that has occurred in the United States over the past three decades, any measure that harms those at the boom should also be unacceptable, and measures that impose undue burdens on the middle class should receive careful scrutiny.

There is a further principle which should guide deliberations: what matters is not the deficit itself or the short-run national debt, but long-run levels of the national debt. The country should be looking at its national balance sheet. Debt reflects only the liability side. In assessing the economic strength of a firm, no one would look just at its liabilities; they would also look at its assets. The single-minded focus on deficits and short-run debt is thus fundamentally misguided.

The root of the word ‘pseudonym’ is ‘pseudos’, which means a lie. Romain Gary (1914-80) acted out his life and published his writing via a welter of pseudonyms. He called himself Shatan Bogat, René Deville, Fosco Sinibaldi (after Count Fosco in The Woman in White, a novel he adored), John Markham Beach and, most famously, Emile Ajar. Why use a pseudonym? Always, or almost always, it means you have something to hide. Many eighteenth-century novels were published anonymously, but to publish as Anon, as Jane Austen did in her lifetime, is not the same thing as adopting another identity or gender different from your own. George Eliot could be a respectable clergyman whereas Marian Evans was a public scandal, and the careful sexual ambiguity of some contemporary writers – J K Rowling, A L Kennedy, A S Byatt – suggests that being read as a woman is still perceived as a disadvantage. Gary’s problem was literary success. Writing as Romain Gary he became a bestselling author in France and the Anglo-Saxon countries, translating his own work and writing both in French and in English, during the Forties, Fifties and Sixties. He won the Prix des Critiques in 1945 for his first novel Education européenne (A European Education ), and the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1956 for Les Racines du ciel (The Roots of Heaven ). Towards the end of his life he reinvented himself as Emile Ajar and sent the manuscript of Gros-Câlin (French publication 1974) to his publishers, arranging for the work to be sent from Brazil.

more from Patricia Duncker at Literary Review here.

Let me start by noting that, while the secular body may remain something of an enigma, we do know quite a lot about the techniques that different religious traditions have developed in order to hone a pious sensorium, i.e., the embodied aptitudes and affects necessary for the achievement of a virtuous life as defined by those traditions. One of the richest and most influential examples of such scholarship is Asad’s own pioneering work on techniques of the body practiced by medieval Christian monks. Extending insights from Marcel Mauss’s writings on body techniques and Foucault’s inquiries into Greek and Christian arts of self-cultivation, Asad examined a variety of disciplinary exercises and techniques of self-cultivation (in short, ritual practices) by which medieval Christians sought to reshape their wills, desires, and emotions in accord with authoritative standards of virtue. I mention this work here because it provides an extremely useful model for thinking about the interrelation of knowledge, practice, and embodiment within a tradition, directing us to forms of collective and individual discipline and to the concepts of self and body that inform them. It is interesting, therefore to note at the outset that, despite an emphasis on embodied modes of appraisal in both Asad’s Formations and Connolly’s Why I am not a Secularist, descriptions of self-cultivation or practices of self-discipline are largely (though not entirely, as I note below) absent from both texts. That is, we find very little in these works in regard, not only to how the sensibilities and visceral modes of judgment of secular subjects are cultivated, but to how they give shape to and find expression in a secular life? Admittedly, a cautious approach to this issue is entirely warranted in light of how new and unfamiliar the secular is as a research problem. Nonetheless, I want to look at certain points in these texts where this question is most directly addressed. One word of warning: the few comments I will make on Asad’s and Connolly’s writings barely scratch the surface of these immensely rich books.

more from Charles Hirschkind at Immanent Frame here.

So 271 “new” Picassos have been discovered. They were living with a former electrician of Picasso’s, who claimed that, near the end of his life, the artist gave the works to him as gifts and as payment. Picasso’s heirs, of course, are suing and charging the man with theft. Two hundred seventy-one new works by Pablo Picasso, ranging from 1900 to 1932. New works from his blue period, a new portrait of his first wife, Olga. You can hear the auction houses warming up their gavels, can’t you? Scholars lining up to recalibrate the Picasso timeline. It’s unclear so far who has been wronged here — the heirs, who possibly should have inherited these works after Picasso’s death? The electrician and his wife, who apparently never tried to sell and profit from these pieces, despite their value reaching the tens of millions? The public — historians, museum-goers, scholars, art lovers — who were not even aware they were missing such a large part of Picasso’s oeuvre? The elderly electrician has been arrested and shamed by the heirs for “concealing” these great works. The works have been confiscated from the electrician’s home as everyone debates where their new home should be. When it comes to art, “private” and “public” take on confused, tangled meanings.

more from Jessa Crispin at The Smart Set here.

Before the Word

Corn is great, on the cob or otherwise,
but before corn in the ear there was life.
Fire is holy especially for Zoroastrians,
but before fire too there was life.
Before the bowstring and the flint arrow sang,
there was life.

The word is great,
yet there was life before the word.
We can’t turn romantic and say
we were into bird speech or river-roar then,
into the silence of frost
or the language of rain.
But forest speech and swamp speech
came through easier to us.
When lightning crashed,
the cry of the marsh bird was our cry,
and we flung ourselves to the other branch
like any other baboon.

As winter whined on windy cliff,
we shivered with the yellow grass.
In winter-dark a hundred eyes
flared yellow in the jungle scrub.
When seasons changed, blood coursed with sap
and flowered in meadows. We were at home.
Nor eyes nor bat cries bothered us.
What if we didn’t know
a bat assessed reality
from the ricochet of its cry?

Though there were no words,
fear had a voice with many echoes.
Worship was quieter, adoration
spoke only through the eyes or knees.

What was it like before language dropped like dew,
covering the scuffed grass of our lives?

by Keki Daruwalla
2004

From The Independent:

Last week, a report revealed how female students at Kabul University lived in fear of predatory male lecturers demanding sexual favours for good grades. This week, an evolutionary psychologist published his “discoveries” into, among other things, the dangerous sexual desires that motivate Muslim men to become suicide bombers.

Next week, a provocatively titled book, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle-East, by John R Bradley intends to take us on a “riveting journey” (his publisher's words) through the “underbelly of the region to expose its sexual mores”. Much of this coverage seeks to highlight the degree of sexual perversion arising from the practice, or malpractice of Islam and while such sexual abuses endemic to various cultures should be brought to attention, it is worth admitting to our own unhealthy cultural obsessions too. The plethora of reports on murky sexual customs in the Arab worlds are shocking, but also reflect our fixation with the Muslim male libido, which appears to be feared, loathed and fetishised, and which, it is intimated, must be urgently civilised by the liberal West. Zena Al Khalil, author of the memoir, Beirut, I Love You, feels it should not be assumed that Muslim women always end up as victims. Just as in the West, it is the rich who are the all-powerful consumers of the sex trade, be they women or men. “There are Saudi princesses who come to Lebanon to buy sex, as well as Saudi princes,” she says.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Scientists have found the first known living organism that incorporates arsenic into the working parts of its cells. What's more, the arsenic replaces phosphorus, an element long thought essential for life. Staff scientist Sam Webb led the research undertaken at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource located at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

…

The latest discovery is all about a bacterium – strain GFAJ-1 of the Halomonadaceae family of Gammaproteobacteria – scooped from sediments of eastern California's Mono Lake, which is extremely salty with naturally high levels of arsenic. In the laboratory, the researchers successfully grew microbes from the lake on a diet that was very lean on phosphorus, but included generous helpings of arsenic. Key issues that the researchers needed to address were the levels of arsenic and phosphorus in the experiments and whether arsenic actually became incorporated into the organisms' vital biochemical machinery, such as DNA, proteins and the cell membranes. A variety of sophisticated laboratory techniques was used to nail down where the arsenic went, including mass spectrometry measurements by Gordon at the W.M. Keck Foundation Laboratory for Environmental Biogeochemistry at ASU. Commenting on the significance of the discovery, Davies says: “This organism has dual capability. It can grow with either phosphorous or arsenic. That makes it very peculiar, though it falls short of being some form of truly 'alien' life belonging to a different tree of life with a separate origin. However, GFAJ-1 may be a pointer to even weirder organisms. The holy grail would be a microbe that contained no phosphorus at all.”

More here.

We have seen how this strongly motivated move to fetishize our historical arrangements can prevent us from seeing our secular regime in a more fruitful light, which foregrounds the basic goals we are seeking, and which allows us to recognize and reason about the dilemmas which we face. But this connects to the other main cause of confusion I cited above, our fixation on religion as the problem. In fact, we have moved in many Western countries from an original phase in which secularism was a hard-won achievement warding off some form of religious domination, to a phase of such widespread diversity of basic beliefs, religious and areligious, that only clear focus on the need to balance freedom of conscience and equality of respect can allow us to take the measure of the situation. Otherwise we risk needlessly limiting the religious freedom of immigrant minorities, on the strength of our historic institutional arrangements, while sending a message to these same minorities that they by no means enjoy equal status with the long-established mainstream. This whole matter deserves much further consideration, more than I can give it here, but I am convinced that this further examination would lend even more credibility to the revisionary ideal I am proposing here, which amounts to this: what deserve to be called “secularist” regimes in contemporary democracy have to be conceived not primarily as bulwarks against religion but as good faith attempts to secure the three (or four) basic goals I outlined above. And this means that they attempt to shape their institutional arrangements, not to remain true to hallowed tradition, but to maximize the basic goals of liberty and equality between basic beliefs.

more from Charles Taylor at The Hedgehog Review here.