RISING TIDE

National Review ^ | 22 December 2009 | Mark Steyn

[JLS]

The Swiss minaret ban and the leaked climate e-mails are really the same story — or, more precisely, are symptoms of the same disease. In the Times of London, Oliver Kamm deplored the results of Switzerland’s referendum, consigned it to the garbage can of right-wing populism, and for good measure dismissed my analysis of Euro-demographics (“This is nonsense,” he pronounced magisterially). Instead, Mr. Kamm called for a “secularist and liberal defense of the principles of a pluralist society.”

That’s not the solution to the problem, but one of the causes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for liberalism and pluralism and whatnot. And, in the hands of a combative old bruiser like Christopher Hitchens, they’re powerful weapons. But most people are not like Mr. Hitchens. And so in much of the post-Christian West “a pluralist society” has subsided into a vast gaping nullity too weak to have any purchase on large numbers of the citizenry. In practice, the “secularist and liberal defense” is the vacuum in which a resurgent globalized Islam has incubated.

[JLS]

Steyn discusses why ClimateGate and the Swiss minaret ban are symptoms of the same problem.

[JLS]

Here is another Steyn ping opportunity.

[TheThinker]

Pluralism shouldn’t be about accepting any cultural idea without accessing its merit or its impact on the lives of a country’s citizens. Some cultural ideas and attitudes are suicide to democracy and freedom.

[cricket]

Kudos, again to Mark. He is a hero to ideas, and the words so necessary to express them. Sad, today; it takes a hero to express what are ugly truths. We know anything less than a ‘brave soul’ will not venture for long in our revered, reasoned, ‘pluralistic’ culture.