Michał R.

“Consider, for example, the image of a young Palestinian soldier that a reporter I know saw standing guard in the hills of Lebanon. He was fighting to preserve his ancient culture and its identity. He wore sneakers, blue jeans, and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. He carried an Uzi.”
― Walter Truet Anderson, Reality Isn't What It Used to Be: Theatrical Politics, Ready-to-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic, and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World

“So in the moment the Lord of Mianaai bestowed citizenship on the Shis’urnans, in that very instant they became civilized.” The sentence was a circular one—the question Lieutenant Awn was asking is a difficult one in that language. “I mean, one day your Issas are shooting people for failing to speak respectfully enough—don’t tell me it didn’t happen, because I know it did, and worse—and it doesn’t matter because they’re not Radchaai, not civilized.” Lieutenant Awn had switched momentarily into the bit of the local Orsian language she knew, because the Radchaai words refused to let her mean what she wished to say. “And any measures are justified in the name of civilization.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“In a way, the fearful fundamentalists are right: globalism does undermine systems of absolute value and belief. But in a way they are wrong: the systems of value and belief do not immediately disappear—people simply inhabit them in a different fashion, and sometimes the old ways turn out to have a surprising amount of life left in them. The human mind has a great repertoire of ways to accept and honor social constructions of reality without swallowing them whole. Globalizing processes require us to renegotiate our relationships with familiar cultural forms, and remind us that they are things made by people: human, fallible things, subject to revision. Globalism”
― Walter Truet Anderson, Reality Isn't What It Used to Be: Theatrical Politics, Ready-to-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic, and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World

“The new polarization is a split between different kinds of belief, not between different beliefs. It divides those who believe from those who have beliefs. It pits fundamentalists—who may be fundamentalists of religion, science, ideology, or cultural tradition—against an opposition called relativists here, secular humanists there, religious liberals somewhere else.”
― Walter Truet Anderson, Reality Isn't What It Used to Be: Theatrical Politics, Ready-to-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic, and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World