Editors' Introduction

Abstract

Editors' Introduction Ann Larabee and Arthur Versluis A growing body of literature has called into question what for some time was a given among many scholars—the "secularization hypothesis" that, as a motivating force in modernity, religion inexorably was giving way to secularity. What we have seen instead is that religion, far from disappearing, continues to shape modern and antimodern perspectives and movements, sometimes in obvious, sometimes in not immediately visible ways. Is a "counterculture" radical? Is a countercultural community religiously motivated? How does a "radical" community define itself "against" what is "mainstream," and how does a "mainstream" community define itself against what is deemed radical or a threat? These are the kinds of questions that the authors in this issue seek to answer. Our lead article, by the well-known U.K. legal scholar Ian Cram, addresses the "war on terror" of the early twenty-first century primarily in the United Kingdom (and to some extent, in the United States) with a particular focus on free speech issues on campus and antiradicalism policies. He details the recent history connecting Islamism and related acts of violence in the United Kingdom, and subsequent efforts to monitor and prevent the kind of violent rhetoric that inflames acts of violence. "A cynic," he notes, "might argue that the official focus upon the radicalizing tendencies of universities serves to deflect attention away from the impetus to violent extremism generated by the United Kingdom's involvement in military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan." But in any case, free speech protections are limited in the [End Page vii] United Kingdom to begin with, and counter-radicalization measures tend to erode those protections even further. Cram's article investigates some consequences of the state's defining and protecting against Islamist radicalism, and leaves to the reader the question of whether the erosion of free speech protections in the United Kingdom and the United States represent an erosion of fundamental Western values. Our second article, by Jade Aguilar, investigates high turnover rates in two intentional communities, both multiple decades old. Both groups are members of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, which describes itself as a "union of egalitarian communities [that] have joined together in our common struggle to create a lifestyle based on equality, cooperation, and harmony with the earth." To what extent these goals are secular is, of course, open to interpretation. Members of the two communities she studied describe themselves as "counter-cultural," that is, as belonging to the legacy of the 1960s, and seek to remain out of the public eye. To what extent are these groups and their members really radical? In fact, Aguilar implies, to the extent that they survive as groups long-term, paradoxically, they must have a conservative aspect to their counterculturalism as they define themselves against mainstream individualism. And one more point: Theodore Roszak argued already in 1968 that the counterculture was fundamentally, if not always explicitly, religious in motivation. Is this true? And if so, is such a group, forty years on, truly secular? In her article on Sri Aurobindo, Auroville, and the dream of a postcolonial utopia in India, Jessica Namakkal discusses the history of Auroville as an intentional community, and the complex relations between Indians and Tamil natives on the one hand, and Western intellectuals on the other, with Auroville as the contested ground. She describes how Auroville became a kind of Western colony in India, and how this in turn generated a "universal city" that, for all its members' efforts to be universal, tended to ignore the Tamil communities right around them. Auroville became a gravitational center for European, English, and American hippies, but here too, there were conflicts between the community of Auroville and the predilections of the seekers who came to visit or to stay. Different religious motivations and approaches both came together and clashed at Auroville, an unusual admixture of Western millennial utopianism and Hinduism, with countercultural aspects as well. Who are the insiders and who are the outsiders, how radical is this is a [End Page viii] community, and how does it negotiate with the "outside," both immediate (in India), and internationally? And we include a conversation between Arthur Versluis and Jeffrey...