For purposes of my thesis I was delighted to discover a comment by Charles Taylor on the Rushdie controversy of the late 80s. What Taylor rightly observes is that The Satanic Verses 'is a profoundly Western book', whatever its exotic subject matter.
In Rushdie's book, one has the comfortable sense that exactly the things which repel him from religion...are the things its devotees cherish. They experience exactly the same spiritual realities, and just reverse the sign. Rushdie's book is comforting to the western liberal mind, which shares one feature with that of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the belief that there is nothing outside their world-view which needs deeper understanding, just a perverse refection of the obviously right. To live in this difficult world, the western liberal mind will have to learn to reach out more.
Quite. But, can it? The western liberal mind always already has ordered views other than its own, either by means of a progressivist narration ('oh, they are so primitive, we got over that years ago') or by demonising it as 'intolerant'. So, why will the western liberal even see the need to reach out? Isn't it rather a matter of teaching the world to behave in the right way?
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If w may borrow from General Maximus, "I have seen much of this world and it is dark and brutal; Rome is the light." Richard Dawkins could have said the same words in "The God Delusion."
At least at the popular level there's another way of categorising views other than one's own: the one taken with Buddhism, spiritual native american figures and so on. Other and Better, but greatly disconnected from us and for that reason not really an open option: there's no way to get from "here" to "there".
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