Wonderful quote about the way things are, and the way Americans see them:

Yet the rise of China means more than the emergence of a new great power. Its deeper import is that the ideologies of the past century — neoliberalism just as much as Communism — are obsolete. Belief systems in which the categories of Western religion are reproduced in the guise of pseudo-science, they are redundant in a world where the most rapidly advancing nation state has never been monotheist. Western societies are well worth defending, but they are not a model for all of humankind. In future they will be only one of several versions of tolerable modernity.

via Reading File – NYTimes.com.

tags: modernity | ny times | religion