{"id":7035,"date":"2012-03-05T21:42:59","date_gmt":"2012-03-05T21:42:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=7035"},"modified":"2012-03-05T21:50:54","modified_gmt":"2012-03-05T21:50:54","slug":"notes-from-moving-secularism-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/notes-from-moving-secularism-forward\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes from “Moving Secularism Forward”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the wake of the conference<\/a>, where I presented my own vision for conservatism from the perspective of an atheist\/secular humanist:<\/p>\n

– The audience was overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, Left-liberal<\/p>\n

– The age distribution was bimodal. There was a minority of students around the age of ~20, and many older people around the age of ~65.<\/p>\n

– The attendees were overwhelmingly white. There were a smattering of African Americans, I was one of two South Asians, and both of us had to represent all of Asia from what I could tell.<\/p>\n

– These demographic notes are of interest because secularism increases monotonically down the age distribution. So the bimodality is peculiar, though explainable (e.g., these are the two age groups with the most time to go to conferences).<\/p>\n

– Additionally, Asian Americans are more secular than white Americans. In particular East Asian Americans. But none attended the conference.<\/p>\n

– After my presentation several people approached me, some of relative prominence within the “secular community,” and admitted that they agreed with the “conservative position on immigration.” Some from a population growth perspective, and some from a law & order perspective.<\/p>\n

– The talk was well received, and to my surprise Ron Bailey’s argument for libertarianism drew more audience ire<\/a>. My surprise was due to the fact that I positioned myself as firmly not<\/em> a liberal, while Ron implicitly argued that libertarianism is just a variant of liberalism.<\/p>\n

– I had great discussions with young progressive\/liberal students who were totally amazed to meet someone outlining conservative positions (e.g., the coherency of the nation-state, the value of collective identities, etc.) in a manner comprehensible to them. There are two major things that I think are notable in this:<\/p>\n

1) A great deal of elite mainstream political discussion is not Left\/Right but insider\/outsider. I tend to take an outsider position, and this is appealing to populist progressives. When viewing the “other side” people naturally emphasize the insider aspects of their enemies and the outsider aspects of their own coalition. Both the main street Left and Right therefore have a selective hostility toward elites.<\/p>\n

2) But at the level of the masses the discussion tends to be cartoonish. Many of the people I met only knew non-elite conservatives in the context of their family, and political arguments obviously degenerated into insults which are easy to dismiss (many of them were dissenters from the religious and political norms of their extended families).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the wake of the conference, where I presented my own vision for conservatism from the perspective of an atheist\/secular humanist: – The audience was overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, Left-liberal – The age distribution was bimodal. There was a minority … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7035"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7035"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7037,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7035\/revisions\/7037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}