{"id":226,"date":"2008-11-03T01:10:42","date_gmt":"2008-11-03T05:10:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.therowboat.com\/?p=226"},"modified":"2022-04-11T23:51:30","modified_gmt":"2022-04-12T03:51:30","slug":"all-in-moderation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/2008\/11\/all-in-moderation\/","title":{"rendered":"All in Moderation?"},"content":{"rendered":"
I could be frantically live-blogging from this year’s American Academy of Religion meeting in Chicago. I won’t, per se. But in a number of places here I have been hearing lots of talk about religious “extremists” and “moderates.” It goes without saying that nearly all of the thousands of AAR attendees\u2014mostly academics in religious studies and theology departments\u2014identify as the latter and, with the exception of certain “radical” social justice causes to which we might belong, consider the former as the “them” that we study or seek to undermine.<\/p>\n
But then there is a catch. As anybody subjected to at least a name-dropping familiarity with Hegel (or more sexy contemporary exponents like Zizek and Derrida) knows, the two sides of any such binary imply each other, and indeed, rely on each other to know themselves. Moderation, that is, only makes sense to talk about when we have some idea of extremism to distinguish it against. This is a nice point to make in critical theory discussions, but it immediately gets lost in every other context, particularly when there is a scary extremism (e.g., terrorists) to be ruthlessly eliminated by well-meaning moderates.<\/p>\n
The new atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett gave a short talk yesterday called “Public Education, Knowledge, and Visions for Non-toxic Religion.” Despite the Templeton Foundation-sponsored glossy fliers and the booking of a massive ballroom, there were far more empty seats than peopled ones. He took the opportunity to make his proposal for compulsory teaching about world religions in K-12 curricula, including home schools. The idea is that if everyone has to be aware of the basic facts of other religions, extreme forms of religion will disappear, since they can’t abide even knowledge of other religions. What Dennett didn’t say at the AAR but is clear from his books is that he hopes this proposal will spell the end of religion as a whole.<\/p>\n
To most AAR folks, this last step would be a counterintuitive one. What many (of us) dream of, in fact, is a world populated lovingly by nice religious moderates who abhor violence and intolerance while emphasizing love, sustainable lifestyles, and diversity. They are educated about each other and revel in difference as well as the cosmopolitan values everybody holds in common.<\/p>\n