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Neilster's avatar

Good article. I agree that "the great challenge of the future is how to provide people with a sense of meaning and purpose in something more useful and transcendent than nationalism, violence and conquest”.

Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory states that liberals and conservatives share four basic values i.e. caring for each other, fairness, personal liberty, and loyalty. But conservatives share two further values i.e. respect for authority and the need for transcendence in our lives. According to Haidt, liberals typically revile those two values, while conservatives recognize the legitimate role that they have to play.

Unfortunately, the hard right has always understood the appeal that authority and transcendence have for many of us, and they’ve been very effective at perverting and weaponizing them. If our Western societies are ever to regain any sense of a common purpose, one of the things we need to do is find a way to accommodate and respect those impulses.

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Eric Onderwater's avatar

Excellent take on the 'malaise of modernity.' There is a moral and spiritual vacuum in the West, and it's being filled in increasingly unhealthy ways. Both the right and the left keep spawning and promoting toxic ideologies as a way to fill this moral and spiritual vacuum. As a Christian, I do feel a spiritual purpose in life, and my faith gives me moral meaning. But I understand that many Canadians don't have that, and are therefore searching for something like it.

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