Sentimentality, honesty, and the writings of Charles Taylor

SENTIMENTALITY VS. HONESTY: Mark Oppenheimer explores the work of Charles Taylor, the religious philosopher. Money quote:

The tension between liberal democracy and certain kinds of preference—whether the preference is construed as ethnic, religious, national or all three—at times feels unbearable for the Western liberal. Americans, as it happens, are particularly ill suited to dealing with the claims of religious and ethnic pride. We get to eat our cake in a country that is basically nice to us all, Scientologist and Sikh alike. The United States, for all its paroxysms of xenophobia, is unusual for being a country where ethnic chauvinism has basically no popular support or institutional sanction. (Representative Peter King’s recent hearings on American Muslim support for terrorism are a shameful exception.) Here, even outright bigots tend not to think anymore that their bigotry should be written into the law. With two possible exceptions—affirmative action and the case of self-governing Indian reservations—America pretty uniformly sides with liberal democracy, one adult/one vote, hedged by colorblind constitutional rights. Yet this is decidedly not the case for many other countries, even our closest cousins: Britain contends with Scottish nationalism and, of course, the once-violent conflict in Ireland; while Canada has, in addition to its native peoples, the far more politically charged issue of Québécois nationalism.

Also makes mention of the Nietzschean idea that our highest goal as humanity is not to preserve life and prevent suffering. Worth a read.