Please Don't Be Shrill...

Suppose you want to live in a liberal state where democracy and free speech are valued, how would you deal with people who hate it, who have an agenda that says we are better off without free speech, alternate views and all that as long as we can live the way we want to.

Terry Eagleton at The Guardian  writes,

" The key issue is how the liberal state copes with those who reject its ideological framework. It is fashionable today to speak of being open to the "Other". But what if the Other detests your openness as much as it does your lapdancing clubs?"

And he finds much to moan about with the paragons of rationalism and free-thinking radicals:

"If the test of liberalism is how it confronts its illiberal adversaries, some of the liberal intelligentsia seem to have fallen at the first hurdle. Writers such as Martin Amis and Hitchens do not just want to lock terrorists away. They also tout a brand of western cultural supremacism. Dawkins strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq, but preaches a self-satisfied, old-fashioned Whiggish rationalism that can be wielded against a benighted Islam. The philosopher AC Grayling has an equally starry-eyed view of the stately march of Western Progress. The novelist Ian McEwan is a freshly recruited champion of this militant rationalism. Both Hitchens and Salman Rushdie have defended Amis's slurs on Muslims. Whether they like it or not, Dawkins and his ilk have become weapons in the war on terror. Western supremacism has gravitated from the Bible to atheism."

You might think this has nothing to do with what happens in India, because all the people we have who fight for human rights, liberty, free speech and all that fight not for any freedom, but I find it ironic that all our radical, atheist intellectuals are ranked in support of Islam, and vilify the subscribers of Hindutva.

And then, Eagleton writes, 

" For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization. But such neutrality, once under pressure, can easily slide into superiority, as sitting loose to other people's faith comes to look like rising disdainfully above it. It is then only a short step from superiority to supremacism." 

I think no ideology is more evil or superior than any other. It is how you push it forward, how you peddle it- that is the difference between the liberal and the totalitarian.