Secularism in decline
Tom Holland points out how secularism in increasingly being rejected by ruling elites in Turkey and India. He sees this as being one dimension of the decline of the West. Here are the key quotes:
All of which should serve as a wake-up call to the West that it is not only its financial, economic and military muscle that is currently atrophying. So too is its ability to market its culturally conditioned assumptions as universal.
That there existed things called ‘religions’ — ‘Hinduism’, ‘Islam’, ‘Judaism’ — and that these functioned in a dimension distinct from entire spheres of human activity — spheres called ‘secular’ in English — was not a conviction native to anywhere except for Western Europe.
Yet if the West, over the duration of its global hegemony, had proven itself skilled in the art of repackaging Christian concepts for non-Christian audiences, then the spread of secularism inevitably depended for its success upon the care with which it covered its tracks.
Countries perceived as successful are imitated; when they stop being successful, then others no longer look to them for inspiration or models of governance. Demonstration of power rather than persuasion is what really convinces.
A related article here by Ashutosh Bhardwaj examined one of this arugments for why secularism failed in India:
The proposition is that the RSS has succeeded because it communicates with people in Indian languages they understand; whereas the English-speaking liberal intellectuals have failed to connect with people.
The author disagrees with this for two reasons, one of which I think has some lessons for the EU:
One of the reasons secularism is in crisis today is because although India boasts of being a multilingual society, we have stopped producing bilingual, let alone multilingual, writers in the last few decades. Many Indian writers born before Independence were effortless polyglots, but the eminent ones from the last few decades seem cocooned in their own languages. Surprisingly, as well as ironically, writers of a multilingual nation find little intellectual stimulation to work in more than one language.
Bilingualism is pretty common among most European elites. But even in a country like the Netherlands, where English is widely spoken, the national debate is still insular and self-referential. More people learning English won’t change that. A common language is probably only a strong centripetal force when it is a common first language. That’s not an option for the EU, so we need other methods.