Perhaps it is the darkness that swallows the Scandinavian sun come November of every year. Perhaps it is the snow, which blankets a landscape as threatening and rugged as it is beautiful. Perhaps it is his own personal tragedy, but whatever the cause, few modern authors can so eloquently, so simply, and so hauntingly write about death in a manner that is both as timeless and as profoundly pertinent to our present circumstance as Per Petterson. In a recent interview conducted by James Campbell of England’s The Guardian, Petterson recounts part of his final conversation with his mother, in which she stated—referring to his recently published novel Ekkoland— “Well, I hope the next one won’t be that childish.” A week later she, along with Petterson’s younger brother and father, were counted among the 159 passengers who lost their lives when the ferry Scandinavian Star caught fire. That was in 1990. Not surprisingly, a pall hangs over much of Petterson’s subsequent work. Happiness is sparse. When it appears, it is bittersweet, and though his world is not hopeless, it’s certainly bleak, as if overseen by a greedy Old Testament god eager to make his wrath known.

more from Adam Gallari at The Quarterly Conversation here.

Alexander Cooley in Foreign Policy:

The Kyrgyz political opposition has also grown to resent Washington's single-minded focus on Manas at the expense of human rights issues. The opposition was stunned when President Barack Obama personally courted Bakiyev last year in an effort to rescind the decision to close Manas; Obama was criticized for jettisoning his democratic values in order to curry favor with the repressive Kyrgyz regime.

The conspicuous U.S. refusal to condemn Bakiyev's July 2009 presidential re-election, an election harshly criticized by international observers, further alienated Bakiyev's critics. Ironically, Washington's silence can be contrasted with the Russian media's denunciations of Bakiyev's corruption and nepotism. Of course, Russia's accusations come out of rivalry rather than genuine concern for human rights, but the attacks have nevertheless played well among the Kyrgyz public.

For now, Otunbayeva has indicated that status quo operational arrangements will remain in effect for the duration of the basing contract. However, as the base's lease comes up for renegotiation this summer, it is now a certainty that Bishkek will demand to restructure the contracts and change the base's legal provisions, if only to demonstrate to a suspicious public that all is not “business as usual” at Manas.

In response, Washington might be tempted to throw even more money at Bishkek: After all, it worked in the past.

But paying off the Kyrgyz is a short-term solution that will backfire in the long term. Instead, to protect Manas further down the road, the United States must convince the Kyrgyz people that it is interested in more than a transactional relationship. For example, the United States can publicly encourage the Kyrgyz interim government to nationalize the distribution of fuel to the base, as it has announced it will do with Bakiyev's private banks, and to make more transparent base-related payments to the national budget, as opposed to paying out to opaque companies with offshore registrations. Of course, U.S. officials — having just witnessed how chronic incompetence can generate the rapid collapse of a government — would also do well to re-engage on issues of governance and democracy.

In Edge:

CLAY SHIRKY: Evgeny, I think this may be a frustrating hour, because I think you and I disagree with each other less than you disagree with a lot of the people you’re calling internet utopians. For instance, you recently picked on the John Perry Barlow piece A Declaration of the Rights of Cyberspace, which is so over-the-top Libertarian, and which presents cyberspace as a separate sphere unconnected to the rest of the planet, that it didn’t really have much effect on practical matters like foreign policy.

EVGENY MOROZOV: I guess we’re talking about a recent essay of mine that appeared in Wall Street Journal in February. It was published a week after yet another overhyped wave of Iranian protests came to nothing. But this time something was different in how that failure was explained in the media. Suddenly, I could sense some public frustration — even in The New York Times — about how the Internet could have actually thwarted the protests, making them more disorganized. That’s something I really wanted to play with in that essay. But since the Wall Street Journal wanted me to offer a critique of techno-utopianianism, I had to venture beyond recent events and see what kind of ideas are guiding governments in this space. Thus, the real objective was not to pick on John Perry Barlow — who in 1996 wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” — which is one of the seminal texts of cyber-libertarianism, or any of the other early thinkers. It was more to reveal that we are currently facing a huge intellectual void with the regards to the Internet’s impact on global politics.

But the lack of a coherent framework does not really prevent us from embracing the power of the Internet. There is certainly a lot of excitement within governments — both democratic and authoritarian ones — about using the Internet to advance their political agendas, both at home and abroad. The kind of assumptions that politicians need in order to decide their policies all have to come from somewhere. And much of what has been said about the Internet in the past seems intellectually invalid today. Still, most of the assumptions made by politicians seem to be rooted in early cyber-libertarian discourses about the Internet and politics. A lot of those early discourses took shape in particular (and very different) contexts. If you look at John Perry Barlow’s declaration, it was produced in the context of attempts to regulate the Internet in America, in 1996. It had nothing to do with Iran and only very little with the world outside of the US. We do need a new theory to guide us through all of this, for old theories are no good.

SHIRKY: Yes, I agree with that, and with regard to Declaration of the Rights of Cyberspace — ten years ago I was teaching that at NYU classes as an example of sloppy political thinking, so I think we’ve known that those theories were no good for a while now.

You end your Journal essay with a fairly evocative paragraph saying, “The State Department can’t abandon ideas of trying to harness the Internet for democracy, but it should come up with a policy that’s more in line with what’s possible, or what works.”

Beau Willimon in Malibu Magazine:

While winning the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Midnight Express (1978), it was the critically acclaimed Platoon (1986) that proved to be Stone’s big breakthrough, earning him his second Academy Award, this time for Best Director. He built on Platoon’s success the following year with Wall Street, solidifying his reputation as one of America’s most exciting new directors. Wall Street told the tale of stockbroker Bud Fox’s (Charlie Sheen) rise and fall during the ’80s’ bull market at the hands of uber-tycoon Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). The film immortalized Gekko’s proclamation that “Greed is good” and has since become a modern classic. That was 23 years and 15 movies ago. So why a sequel now?

I posed that question to one of the film’s producers, Eric Kopeloff, who also worked with Stone on the Bush Jr. biopic W. “I think that the crash of the economy and the aftermath was inspirational in deciding to want to push forward and make a project like this,” said Kopeloff. “It was clear to Oliver and myself that it was an amazing time to actually go and make a film that will mirror what’s going on in the system and help people understand what happened … at the same time make it entertaining and make a Wall Street film that everybody knows and loves.”

The more cynical among movie goers might speculate that Stone and his fellow producers are merely exploiting the recent financial crisis to cash in on a past glory. But Stone wouldn’t characterize the film as a sequel at all. Early on during our interview, he admonished me for calling the movie Wall Street II. “That’s not the title,” he said. “The actual title is Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” In fact, Stone has quite a track record of revisiting certain subject matters: Vietnam (Platoon, Heaven and Earth, Born on the Fourth of July), U.S. presidents (JFK, Nixon, W.), the media (Talk Radio, Natural Born Killers), Latin America (Salvador, South of the Border, the script for Scarface) and Fidel Castro (Commandante, Looking for Fidel and an upcoming third Castro documentary). One could even cite his period epic Alexander as an example. After the movie’s initial box-office disappointment, Stone re-edited the film before it was released on DVD in 2005. Unsatisfied with his own director’s cut, Stone released yet a third DVD version in 2007 titled Alexander Revisited: The Final Unrated Cut. “It’s three hours and 45 minutes with an intermission. It’s the correct version. It’s the one I should have done, fought for. It’s the whole kit and kaboodle,” said Stone. “I always struggled with that film because we were rushed. But it’s my fault and I accepted it.”

David Carmel in The Browser's Five Books:

our first choice, Introducing Consciousness by David Papineau and Howard Selina, is presumably trying to make a very complex topic accessible by presenting it using graphic art?

Yes, it’s part of the Introducing… series that presents various topics in graphic form, a bit like a comic book. What I liked about this one is that it takes a very complex issue and shows that you do not need to be a great philosopher, or have a very deep understanding of the science, to understand why it’s a complex issue and what the fundamental questions we’re dealing with are. And the truth is that with consciousness we’re still at the point of raising the interesting questions, as philosophers have done for the last 2,000 years, rather than at the interesting, complex, answers stage. Despite being highly approachable, this book is a serious piece of work that gives a great overview of past and current thinking about consciousness, especially from the philosophical perspective. Most books or articles will look at the issue of consciousness from a different angle, and I’ve tried to balance that out in my choices. This particular book was written by a professor of philosophy, David Papineau, in conjunction with an illustrator. So it’s mostly about the philosophy of mind, with particular reference to consciousness, and while it mentions science here and there, that’s really not the main focus: where it mentions the science, this is done to describe potential methodologies with which to address the philosophical questions that have been raised.

Whereas you would say there is actually more to the science than that?

Not necessarily. I’m a scientist, and my own approach to these questions is scientific. But I got interested in consciousness because of the philosophical issues. What is consciousness? How can we possibly understand it? One of the frustrating things for scientists who deal with consciousness is that nowadays we have lots of great methodologies to look at the brain and at complex forms of behaviour. But we still lack a conceptual framework with which we could recognise an answer if it came along. The answer might be all around us: we may just not see it yet.

Ewa Hess and Hennric Jokeit in Merkur, translated in Eurozine:

Today, the phenomenology of the mind is stepping indignantly aside for a host of hyphenated disciplines such as neuro-anthropology, neuro-pedagogy, neuro-theology, neuro-aesthetics and neuro-economics. Their self-assurance reveals the neurosciences’ usurpatory tendency to become not only the humanities of science, but the leading science of the twenty-first century. The legitimacy, impetus and promise of this claim derive from the maxim that all human behaviour is determined by the laws governing neuronal activity and the way it is organised in the brain.

Whether or not one accepts the universal validity of this maxim, it is fair to assume that a science that aggressively seeks to establish hermeneutic supremacy will change everyday capitalist reality via its discoveries and products. Or, to put it more cautiously, that its triumph is legitimated, if not enabled, by a significant shift in the capitalist world order.

There is good reason to assert the existence, or at least the emergence, of a new type of capitalism: neurocapitalism. After all, the capitalist economy, as the foundation of modern liberal societies, has shown itself to be not only exceptionally adaptable and crisis-resistant, but also, in every phase of its dominance, capable of producing the scientific and technological wherewithal to analyse and mitigate the self-generated “malfunctioning” to which its constituent subjects are prone. In doing so – and this too is one of capitalism’s algorithms – it involves them in the inexorably effective cycle of supply and demand.

Just as globalisation is a consequence of optimising the means of production and paths of communication (as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels predicted), so the brain, as the command centre of the modern human being, finally appears to be within reach of the humanities, a field closely associated with capitalism.

David Runciman reviews Avishai Margalit's On Compromise and Rotten Compromises, in The National:

The idea that the Second World War was the definitive “good” war, in which radical evil was confronted and vanquished, has always run up against the problem of what happened on the Eastern Front. As the British historian Max Hastings has put it, the story of how Stalin’s Red Army defeated Hitler’s Third Reich is “not for anyone with a weak stomach”. Stalin was utterly ruthless in his disregard for the lives of his own subjects, which he tossed away by the million. The only people who fared worse were his enemies (which included many of his own subjects) against whom he unleashed campaigns of unimaginable vindictiveness. His was a truly horrible regime. So what does it say about the moral integrity of the western democracies that they were only able to defeat someone as unspeakable as Hitler by throwing in their lot with someone as vile as Stalin?

This is the question that underpins Avishai Margalit’s important and troubling new book about the nature of political compromise. Margalit keeps coming back to the great laboratory of wickedness that was the Second World War, which he describes as being to morality “what the supercollider is to physics: extreme moral experiences and observations emerged out of the high energy clashes”. He thinks we need to have an answer to the question of why it is acceptable to choose Stalin over Hitler – or, as he puts it, why Munich was a “rotten” compromise, but siding with Stalin was a necessary one. The answer he provides is unashamedly grounded in morality. He believes that it is a mistake to try to distinguish between these two regimes in terms of how evil they were in degree (this invariably leads to the futile and miserable business of counting up their dead). Instead, he argues that Stalin’s evil was of a different kind from Hitler’s. The reason it is never acceptable to compromise with someone like Hitler is because Nazism negated the very idea of morality, by repudiating the notion of a shared humanity. The Nazis wanted to dismiss great swathes of the human race from moral consideration altogether. Stalin, by contrast, believed in a shared human future, even if his route for getting there was monstrously callous. So any compromise with Hitler is a rotten compromise, because it contaminates everything it touches. Getting into bed with Stalin, for all the squeamishness it provokes, belongs to a world in which morality at least remains a possibility.

This is an admirably forthright answer, but it is fraught with difficulties.

Her Longing

Before this longing,
I lived serene as a fish,
At one with the plants in the pond,
The mare's tail, the floating frogbit,
Among the eight-legged friends,
Open like a pool, a lesser parsnip,
Like a leech, looping myself along,
A bug-eyed edible one,
A mouth like a stickleback,—
A thing quiescent!

But now—
The wild stream, the sea itself cannot contain me:
I dive with the black hag, the cormorant,
Or walk the pebbly shore with the humpbacked heron,
Shaking out my catch in the morning sunlight,
Or rise with the gar-eagle, the great-winged condor,
Floating over the mountains,
Pitting my breast against the rushing air,
A phoenix, sure of my body,
Perpetually rising out of myself,
My wings hovering over the shorebirds,
Or beating against the black clouds of the storm,
Protecting the sea-cliffs.

by Theodore Roethke

from News of the Universe;
Sierra Club Books, 1995

From Nature:

Prejudice may seem inescapable, but scientists now report the first group of people who seem not to form racial stereotypes. Children with a neurodevelopmental disorder called Williams syndrome (WS) are overly friendly because they do not fear strangers. Now, a study shows that these children also do not develop negative attitudes about other ethnic groups, even though they show patterns of gender stereotyping found in other children. “This is the first evidence that different forms of stereotypes are biologically dissociable,” says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, director of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, who led the study published today in Current Biology.

Adults with WS show abnormal activity in a brain structure called the amygdala, which is involved in responding to social threats and triggering unconscious negative emotional reactions to other races. Racial bias has been tied to fear: adults are more likely to associate negative objects and events, such as electric shocks, with people of other ethnic groups compared with those of their own group. But according to Meyer-Lindenberg, his latest study offers the strongest evidence so far that social fear leads to racial stereotyping.

More here.

Henry Fountain in The New York Times:

SALT LAKE CITY — Along one wall of Russell J. Stewart’s laboratory at the University of Utah sits a saltwater tank containing a strange object: a rock-hard lump the size of a soccer ball, riddled with hundreds of small holes. It has the look of something that fell from outer space, but its origins are earthly, the intertidal waters of the California coast. It’s a home of sorts, occupied by a colony of Phragmatopoma californica, otherwise known as the sandcastle worm. Actually, it’s more of a condominium complex. Each hole is the entrance to a separate tube, built one upon another by worm after worm.

P. californica is a master mason, fashioning its tube, a shelter that it never leaves, from grains of sand and tiny bits of scavenged shell. But it doesn’t slather on the mortar like a bricklayer. Rather, using a specialized organ on its head, it produces a microscopic dab or two of glue that it places, just so, on the existing structure. Then it wiggles a new grain into place and lets it set. What is most remarkable — and the reason these worms are in Dr. Stewart’s lab, far from their native habitat — is that it does all this underwater. “Man-made adhesives are very impressive,” said Dr. Stewart, an associate professor of bioengineering at the university. “You can glue airplanes together with them. But this animal has been gluing things together underwater for several hundred million years, which we still can’t do.”

More here.

Sughra Raza. More on Karachi. March 2010.

Digital photograph.

Hello,

In 2007, the annual lecture in memory of my sister Azra's late husband, Harvey David Preisler, was delivered by Medicine Nobel laureate Craig Mello. I wrote about that lecture here.

In 2008, Richard Dawkins was the invited guest. I interviewed him here.

This year, the lecture will be delivered by Steven Pinker.

The Eighth

HARVEY PREISLER

Memorial Symposium

Saturday, May 8, 2010

9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

New York Academy of Sciences

250 Greenwich Street, 40^th Floor, New York, NY 10007

RSVP: Dr. Azra Raza

[email protected]

9:00 a.m: Reception/Breakfast

9:30 a.m: Welcome of the honored guests and Tribute to Harvey Preisler by Sheherzad Raza Preisler

9:45 a.m: Introduction of Dr. Steven Pinker by Azra Raza

10:00 a.m: Dr. Steven Pinker

Title of Lecture: Language as a Window into Human Nature

Dr. Steven Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Until 2003, he taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of seven books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and most recently, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. Pinker is the Chair of the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary and has served as editor or advisor for numerous scientific, scholarly, media, and humanist organizations, including the American Association the Advancement of Science, the National Science Foundation, the American Academyof Arts and Sciences, the American Psychological Association, and the Linguistics Society of America. He has won many prizes for his books (including the William James Book Prize three times, the Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize, and the Eleanor Maccoby Book Prize), his research (including the Troland Research Prize from the National Academy of Sciences, the Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association, and the Henry Dale Prize from the Royal Institution of Great Britain), and his graduate and undergraduate teaching. He is also a Humanist Laureate, the 2006 Humanist of the Year, recipient of the 2008 Innovations for Humanity Award from La Ciudad de las Ideas in Mexico, the 2008 Honorary President of the Canadian Psychological Association, and the recipient of six honorary doctorates. Pinker lives in Boston and in Truro with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. The other authors in the family are his sister Susan Pinker and Rebecca’s daughter Yael Goldstein.

Professor Pinker will make himself available for a question/answer period afterward. If you are in the New York City area (or can be on Saturday), I urge you to attend.

RSVP in the comments section to me to be put on a complimentary list, courtesy of my sister. Please note that only the first 50 responders will be able to attend.

Yours,

Abbas

(h/t Alex Ross)

Andrew Sullivan makes the case against Pope Benedict XVI and his handling of the child rape scandal:

The AP's story on Joseph Ratzinger's direct involvement in delaying for six years the defrocking of a priest who had confessed to tying up and raping minors ends any doubt that the future Pope is as implicated in the sex abuse crisis as much as any other official in the church.

The facts are as clear as they are damning. From the documents, the priest fits exactly the model of arrested development I sketched out here. He seems to have been pressured by a bossy mother to become a priest, and was interested only in hanging out with children around the ages of 11 to 13 (the age of the boys he raped). He had no genuine impulse to ordination, but the church was so desperate for priests he was acceptable.

When confronted with the charges, the priest pleaded no contest to tying up and raping two pre-teen boys in 1978 in the rectory of Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Union City. There were, apparently, several more victims. There was no dispute as to his guilt. The priest, Stephen Kiesle, personally requested he be defrocked. His legacy is horrifying:

Kiesle, now 63 and recently released from prison, lives in the Rossmoor senior community in Walnut Creek and wears a Global Positioning System anklet. He is on parole for a different sex crime against a child. Numerous accusers have said he abused them as children at Our Lady of the Rosary, Santa Paula (now Our Lady of Guadalupe) in Fremont and Saint Joseph in Pinole, where he served in the mid-1970s, then returned in 1985 to volunteer as a youth minister.

Yes, this rapist was subsequently allowed back into the parish where he tied up and raped children seven years later as a volunteer youth minister. Even after his eventual defrocking, in 1987, he continued to work with children at the parish for another year.

Whose fault was this? In this case, it is absolutely clear that his remaining a priest was entirely the fault of the Vatican, and the person directly responsible for the delay in defrocking him was Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Kiesle himself requested he be defrocked. The local bishop desperately wanted him to be defrocked and petitioned Raztinger first in 1981 that it happen expeditiously. The bishop, knowing that what the hierarchy cared about was bad press, not the protection and welfare of children, argued that there would be more “scandal” if the priest were kept in ministry than if he were fired…

Over at Room for Debate in the NYT:

A recent Times article described the use of neurological research and cognitive science in the field of literary theory.

“At a time when university literature departments are confronting painful budget cuts, a moribund job market and pointed scrutiny about the purpose and value of an education in the humanities, the cross-pollination of English and psychology is providing a revitalizing lift,” the article said.

Does this research — “neuro lit” is one of its nicknames — energize literature departments, and, more broadly, generate excitement for the humanities? Is it yet another passing fad in liberal arts education? If the answer is both, why does theory matter, even if we sometimes don’t understand what the scholars are saying?

William M. Chace, English professor at Emory College, Elif Batuman, author, “The Possessed”, William Pannapacker, English professor at Hope College, Marco Roth, founding editor of n+1, Blakey Vermeule, English professor at Stanford, and Michael Holquist, comparative literature professor emeritus at Yale dicuss.

Caroline Baum in the Sydney Morning Herald:

WHEN I get a text message from Elif Shafak that reads “Meet me at Starbucks”, my heart sinks. Not just because of the coffee but because it’s such an un-Turkish place for an encounter in Istanbul with the country’s best-selling female author. I had hoped for something more exotic. A steamy hamam (bath house), perhaps?

Luckily, Starbucks is too busy to accommodate us and Shafak leads me instead to a cafe inside a department store where shoppers whirl around us with dervish-like frenzy. “This is where I write,” she says, settling at the communal table. “Here with the noise, the music, the bustle. I find it stimulating.”

It makes sense. Her writing throbs with vitality on the page. Her stories are social. In her novel The Bastard of Istanbul, published in English three years ago, families and friends eat, argue and love. But they do so mostly in the domestic, private sphere, not in public places. Which is why it’s a surprise to hear that Shafak considers Istanbul a feminine city. In the week I have been here, I have noticed groups of men on street corners talking, men in cafes playing backgammon, men fishing on the Galata bridge. It does not feel like a feminine city to me.

“In old Ottoman poetry, Istanbul is always referred to as ‘she’ – the virgin who has been married a thousand times. Ankara is masculine, geometrical, straight but Istanbul is curvy, round, mysterious, a labyrinth,” insists Shafak, who is a confirmed feminist. “Women are claiming the public space more and more. Secularisation and modernisation have been taken to the furthest point, through the abolition of polygamy and other legislation. Ataturk was good for women but now we have to go further still.”

Noticing groups of young women laughing and talking together, some veiled and some not, I ask about her attitude to the veil. She hesitates. “There are six or seven words for ‘veil’ in our language, so it has a different nuance or emphasis. Its meaning can be religious, cultural or political but you can’t lump all those together. Some women here and abroad get very tense and strident about this question but we need to find a way not to generalise or simplify. Not just about the present but also about the past.

Brotherhood
…..Homage to Claudius Ptolemy

I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
The stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.

by Octavio Paz

from The Collected Poems 1957-1987;
Carcanet Press, Manchester, 1988

………………………..

Hermandad
….Homenaje a Claudio Ptolomeo

Soy hombre: duro poco
y es enorme la noche.
Pero miro hacia arriba:
las estrellas escriben.
Sin entender comprendo:
también soy escritura
y en este mismo instante
alguien me deletrea.

From The New Humanist:

Whenever demography is the subject a panicky headline usually follows. Generally these take the form of anxieties about overpopulation. “Are there just too many people in the world?” asks Johann Hari in the Independent. “The World’s population is still exploding,” confirms the Optimum Population Trust (patron David Attenborough). Though equally they could be about the opposite. “Is Europe Dying?” queries Catholic apologist George Weigel (before answering his own question: “The brute fact is that Europe is depopulating itself”). “Falling birth rate is killing Europe says Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks” is the Guardian’s offering. To these hysterical headlines let’s add another, especially for you secular folk: with birth rates of seven babies per women fundamentalists will take over the world. And here is the kicker: it’s all secularism’s fault.This grim prognostication comes courtesy of political scientist Eric Kaufmann, a reader in politics at London’s Birkbeck College, and the author of the new book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, out in March from Profile Books. If, like me, you skip the six dense chapters of politico-demographic analysis, in the very last line of the book you can find his answer: “The religious shall inherit the earth.” There is, of course, an “unless” and we’ll get to that later, but let’s just let the idea sink in first.

What Kaufmann is arguing is that the secularisation thesis, the assumption that modernity leads inexorably to a lessening of religious belief and a day when we are all rational humanists, is wrong – at one point Kaufmann approvingly quotes Rodney Stark and Roger Finke’s view that this is “a failed prophecy”. Further he is saying that there is something about our current form of liberal secularism that contains (here’s another headline) the seeds of its own destruction. Since the birth rate of individualistic secular people the world over is way below replacement level (2.1 in the West), and the birth rate of religious fundamentalists is way above (between 5 and 7.5 depending on sect), then through the sheer force of demography religious fundamentalism is going to become a much bigger force in the world and gain considerable political muscle. Literalist religious conservatism is being reborn and we secular liberals are the midwives.

More here.