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{"id":18676,"date":"2017-02-10T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-02-10T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=399"},"modified":"2017-02-10T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-02-10T00:00:00","slug":"the-new-secular-pragmatism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2017\/02\/the-new-secular-pragmatism\/","title":{"rendered":"The New (Secular) Pragmatism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

P<\/span>aul Collier devotes a long, provocative, stimulating TLS<\/em> review<\/a> to a sketch of a \u201cnew pragmatism.\u201d The review doubles as an essay on the \u201cfuture of capitalism.\u201d Along the way, Collier discusses the problems of multiculturalism and gives qualified endorsement to nationalism. <\/p>\n

Multiculturalism must be \u201cbounded,\u201d partly because Western culture deserves \u201csupport in the face of less functional rivals.\u201d Partly too because multiculturalism encourages a rootless detachment that is far from utopian: \u201cA world composed of \u2018global citizens\u2019 would not be the universalist utilitarian paradise that liberals lazily imagine, but the brutally atomistic world of unchecked individualism. Shared national identities have permitted a globally unprecedented degree of generosity of the affluent to the poor. Beyond a point multiculturalism undermines that generosity and so threatens the poor.\u201d<\/p>\n

National identity, he argues, is \u201cthe only force that has proved to be sufficiently powerful to bind millions of people together in a sense of shared identity. Although a nation is an \u2018imagined community,\u2019 its fictional basis does not invalidate it: on the contrary, being \u2018imagined\u2019 makes shared identity a fragile miracle.\u201d Critiques of the dangers of nationalism are overwrought, he thinks, and undermine the one structure that provides a sense of common purpose.<\/p>\n

That may be true, so long as \u201conly force\u201d is qualified as \u201conly secular force.\u201d After all, for all their raucous upheavals, the Anglican Communion, the Catholic Church, and Orthodoxy bind millions of people together in a sense of shared identity; the church constitutes a real multiculture that does not dissolve into atomistic individualism. <\/p>\n

Put aside questions of faith. Any plan for the world as it actually is<\/em>, any consideration of \u201cthe future of capitalism\u201d or \u201cthe new pragmatism,\u201d has to take account of the political and economic weight of religious institutions.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"