Light On Dark Water

I had thought I would write a brief post about this interview with Yale computer scientist and cultural critic David Gelernter, but have been too busy, and that's likely to continue through tomorrow, so I think I'll just throw it out for discussion. This is another of those things, like the Heather King piece I linked to last week, that I don't entirely agree with, but which has some striking points with which I do agree. For instance, this bit, which relates to what I was saying yesterday about the two religions in America–they are not Christianity and atheism, but two much vaguer things, one with roots in Christianity, the other with roots in the Enlightenment.

Post-religious thinkers don’t even live on the same spiritual planet as Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish Americans. Old-time atheists struggled with biblical religion and rejected it; modern post-religious thinkers struggled with nothing. Since the Bible and biblical religion underlie the invention of America, it’s hard (unsurprisingly) for post-religious people to understand America sympathetically…. Expecting post-religious, Bible-ignorant thinkers to grasp America is like expecting a gerbil to sing Pagliacci.

People keep struggling to find a single term for what generally gets crudely pigeonholed as "liberalism." Gelernter's contribution is not likely to catch on, but it's accurate: the "Post-Religious Globalist Intellectual" establishment. Well, here's the interview.