Popularity is certainly potential power; it mobilises the masses and makes money. After all, democracy functions on rewarding popularity just as the free market does, and who'd argue against democracy except those who seek to disenfranchise others? And if certain political ideas prove enduring enough through their popularity to become enshrined as the guiding principles of nations, they must have worth because they originated in free expression of thought and choice.
Except that there are the human mind will always be tempted by the easy way out, the comfortable, the simple to explain, particularly when under external pressure. And so the popularity of the lowest common denominator, a bland base level of no upsetting or demanding extremes. The Vicar of Dibley, a white medium-sliced loaf of a sitcom, is hugely popular amongst British TV viewers. This is because it ventures nothing so risqué as a joke.
Now, you'd assume that both the Editor-in-Chief and Washington correspondent positions at The Economist would require individuals of intellectual rigour who were at least able to build a case for an argument, whether meritorious or not, on a solid foundation. What, then are they doing with this twaddle? I'm only picking on them because every so often someone manages to weave so many strands of disparate phenomena into a tapestry they then present as a picture of the way things really are that it becomes rewardingly easy to tug just one strand and watch it all unravel. The strand here, of course, is a variation on popularity = merit. It's an insistence that increased pluralism and the growth in absolute numbers of adherents to various religious factions must mean that religion is far from dead and that this rise in its societal relevance imbues it with some kind of merit.
The trouble is, all this growth is built on false premises. Of course there are more openly practising Christians in Eastern Europe or China than before. It happened to be illegal to practise there before, and Russia's poor are now up the creek without a paddle, which is when you turn to demagogues and pipedreams. As for the boom in the developing world, that would be a population boom you're looking at. Dear God, has it come to this that I have to explain demographic change to writers at The Economist? Next they'll be saying that the most powerful country in the world is imbued with some kind of ideological greatness, which explains its dominance...ah, they already sloppily call the States "the most advanced country on the planet". Advanced how? Anything else apart from a lot of Nobel prizes won by immigrants, Stealth bombers and more TV channels? There's no helping them.
At least that stout yeoman of sanity, David Aaronovitch, weighed in with a riposte in the same paper a few days after. But it's shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Most readers will retain only one key idea from any article, and in this case it was that religion shouldn't be dismissed. No fear, I wasn't intending to. I've still got one eye on the swine flu situation too - viruses pluralise as well.
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