Your wish is our command, Part II

The Cosmopolitan Globalists live to serve. We answer all of your questions.

Moving right along …

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By Rachel Motte

Question:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.—John Adams

Liberal democracy is an invention of the West though it is now practiced in some nations not in the West. As an ideology it derives from the European enlightenment.

Postwar Europe was run by Christian Democratic political parties. Mid 20th-century decolonization efforts were inspired by Enlightenment values in the West and it was those same values that motivated the colonized to demand their freedom.

The United States (until recently) has been a profoundly religious nation; its precursor was originally established by immigrants with Calvinist ideas.

Here’s the question for the Cosmopolitan Globalists: With the ascendency of secularism and the decline of religiosity in the West, do you believe the values you articulate as being important can survive?

Answer: In a word, no.

Mel McGowan, President of Visioneering Studios and a designer of Anaheim, California’s Downtown Disney, told a story once that will show what I mean.

Downtown Disney is designed to symbolize a return to paradise, a meeting of the old archetypes of the garden and the city. A beautiful movie theater anchors the space and attracts enormous crowds.

Traditionally, Mel told me, this space would be filled by a church. The life of a lively city ought to revolve around communal worship, rather than communal entertainment. When he realized he’d built a theater in place of a house of worship in his miniature city, he left his job at Disney to design churches.

The Church has traditionally acted as an intermediary between the elite, well-educated classes and the common people. (I assume this is also true of the mosque and the temple, but I am less familiar with those.) Ideally, it provides a place for the upper crust to mingle with the barely educated. We all benefit when we have leaders who can converse with both the elite and the common man, and priests and pastors have traditionally been well-placed to assume this role. This is essential in a healthy democracy.

As religious life becomes less important to public life all over the globe, a media oligarchy fills the void, and democracy suffers for it. The theater continues to replace the Church in cities all over the globe, and communal entertainment is insufficient to sustain a democracy.

Cosmopolitan Globalist ideals require robust democracies – and robust democracies require a thriving religious life.

Rachel Motte is a freelance writer, journalist, and editor. Her work has appeared at CNN.com, The Evangelical Outpost, and in numerous other print and internet publications. You may follow her @RachelMotte

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By John Oxley

My thinking on this largely follows Larry Siedentop and Tom Holland: ultimately, Western secular values remain heavily influenced by Christian thinking and values. Some Islamic extremists in fact refer to “Christian secularism” as the enemy. The development of human rights discourse has largely followed this. I don’t think there is anything in common between modern atheism and pre-Christian values.

I think the bigger worry is the rise of strong international powers that are not anchored in this thinking and do not even feel the need to pay it lip service. Even the Soviet Union was influenced by this intellectual background and (for all its horrors) at least maintained the façade of a desire to ascribe to such values as human rights, and, of course, equality.

For the latter part of the 20th century and early 21st, many in the West thought the rest of the world would eventually catch up with our desire for democratic, liberal government, without realizing how much these were linked to our intellectual and religious heritage. Now, countries outside of this tradition are increasingly powerful, and show no drift toward that thinking.

John Oxley is a barrister in London and a commentator on politics, law, and history.

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By Anonymous

Secularism is a religion too. Religion is a lot like philosophy in the old Ayn Rand quote: you have no choice but to have one. Whether you believe according to the Catholic Magisterium, or to the Jeffersonian Enlightenment, or the vacuous cult of wokeness, you have a faith in some sort of eschaton. (This is a bit difficult to swallow for our militant-atheist friends, most of whom actually do believe in God: they just hate His guts.) To that end, America isn’t going to become irreligious. All that’s happening is a changeover of America’s culturally dominant religion, from Christianity to whatever creed unites pious progressives and their useful elites. Do I think the values I believe in will survive? In no way. Do I think America will thereby decline? Also in no way. The world may well find out what a malevolent, transactional, and/or cruelly messianic America looks like in full, and Godspeed to you all when you do.

Don’t use my name as always. 

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By Casey Handmer

Question: What practical plan is there for eventually pruning the invasive species homo sapiens back to strictly limited and severely patrolled environmental niches, restoring as many as possible myriad species to their pre-homo ecological balances?

Answer: This question seems to contain hidden assumptions that humans are a net negative and their coexistence with a vibrant, healthy ecosystem is impossible. I do not share this point of view. Overpopulation is often a canard for genocide, usually of the other guys, though some new age environmentalist types manage to internalize a lot of hatred too. Policy on birth control is relatively pointless, as even China’s experiment shows. The end of poverty brings the end of large families, and already in nearly all industrialized, developed nations the overwhelming problem is birth rates that are too low, not too high, to be sustainable. I advocate strong environmental protection and remediation regulation, but I see it as explicitly compatible with lifting the remaining 10 percent of humanity out of poverty and continuing on the path to better, less wasteful technological emancipation from our evolutionary legacy of hunger, disease, and premature death.

Theoretical physicist Casey Handmer is a software system architect at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His wife is driving the new rover on Mars.

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By Claire Berlinski

Question: Do you think our biggest problems are related to our small worldviews?

Answer: For sure.

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By Vivek Y. Kelkar

Question: I’d like your team’s view on what posture the US should take on the India/Pakistan relationship. Should it take any position? Should we treat India and Pakistan individually without regard for their enmity? Should we try to broker common interests like water supply, global warming, pandemic response, whatever?

Answer: I’m already working on a story about India. It fits right into the questions asked. 

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Question: What’s next for India? Apocalypse, success, both—or something more low key?

Answer: See above.

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Question: Terrific! Is it going to be ready today?

Answer: Not yet! Please. Give me a couple of days. 

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Question: What’s TCG’s assessment of the Biden administration roughly six weeks in? Particular (but not exclusive) attention to:

• The administration’s foreign policy performance, and separately, who’s in charge of American foreign policy among the nominal heads in the American formal governance structure, the vice president, and the ad hoc interagency coordination group

• The administration’s view of borders and national sovereignty, particularly (but not exclusively) in light of Biden’s having reconstituted, in large part, the Obama staff and policy.

Answer: It’s a little early, we think, for this. We could fake it. But we think we would be more serious, all things considered, if we assessed Biden’s performance closer to the traditional 100-day mark, or after about three months in office. By then, given the nature of the job, he’ll have made a few more significant decisions and faced a few more provocations. Patterns by then will be a bit more clear.

It’s reasonable to expect to see accomplishments after three months. It’s perhaps not reasonable to expect them after six weeks. After another month or two, the honeymoon period will be fading, giving everyone a clearer perspective.

So we’re going to save this one for April 25. Put it in your calendar.

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Question: How does what y’all are doing differ from the mission of the Economist magazine?

Answer: When you write to the Economist, does it write back?

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Claire—Have we answered everyone? Did we miss anyone? If you have any further questions (or if, God forbid, we overlooked your question), please wave at us in the comments, below. We live to make you happy, so just tell us what you’d like us to write about.

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Also, if you haven’t already, subscribe! We’ll do another Ask us Anything soon.

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