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WHY THE REST HATES THE WEST Understanding the Roots of Global Rage Meic Pearse InterVarsity, 2004, 188 pp. ISBN 0-8308-3202-5 |
“Many in the U.S. are baffled at
the hatred and anti-Western sentiment they see on the international news. Why
are people around the world so resentful of Western cultural values and
ideals? “Historian Meic Pearse unpacks
the deep divides between the West and the rest of the world. He shows how
many of the underlying assumptions of Western civilization directly oppose
and contradict the cultural and religious values of significant people
groups. Those in the Third World, Pearse says, ‘have the sensation that
everything they hold dear and sacred is being rolled over by an economic and
cultural juggernaut that doesn’t even know it’s doing it . . . and wouldn’t
understand why what it’s destroying is important or of value.’”(from the back
cover) While
others have suggested the hatred is because of economic injustice or
political positions or religion, Pearse says it is because of culture,
specifically the Western “anti-culture” and “anti-values.” “Non-Westerners are becoming understandably
anxious about the future of their cultural space, which they feel is being
intolerably threatened by aliens—that is, by us. And to the non-West our culture appears not as a culture at
all, but as an anticulture. Our
values appear not as an alternative to traditional values but as a negation
of them—as anti-values, in fact.”
(28) The book is really about worldview. Much of it is clear and compelling. A few parts are more academic. “Tolerance
is a fine thing—if you can get it.
That, apparently, is what distinguishes us in the West....” (11)
“Where it used to mean the respecting of real, hard differences, it has come
to mean instead a dogmatic abdication of truth-claims and a moralistic
adherence to moral relativism—departure from either of which is stigmatized
as intolerance.” “With it, the
underpinnings of the various subcultures are knocked away.” “The new, intolerant ‘tolerance’ might be
described as an anti-value; it is a disposition of hostility to any
suggestions that one thing is ‘better’ than another, or even that any way of
life needs protected space from its alternatives.” “Anyone who cares about their culture...will feel
threatened.” (12) Tolerance
and its corollary, openness, have become foundational, part of ‘common
sense.’ “If confronted by individuals
or groups who differ from this perception and who behave accordingly, we will
probably consider them to be stupid, crazy or perhaps fanatical.” “Western societies generally are sharply
at odds with those of the non-Western cultures that confront them. Indeed, they are sharply at odds with the
values and ideas of the West’s own history.” (15) “The
assumptions of the Western worldview are more sharply distinguished from
those of other people than has been the case with any other major culture in
history.” “Most contemporary
non-Western experiences, assumptions and values are an incomprehensible
‘closed book’ to them also.” (15) It
is urgent for the West to understand its own ideas of common sense. “Mutual incomprehension is a dangerous
state of affairs.” (16) “This
is the irony and the emptiness of ‘multiculturalism.’ ‘Tolerant,’ ‘open’ Western cosmopolitans
can get along with anyone, anywhere, on one condition: that they be
Westernized cosmopolitans like themselves.
Non-Western values...are simply not welcome at the table of
discourse.” (23) “[Fundamentalism]
has come to signify ‘more religious-than-I-happen-to-like’—and thus to say
more about the speaker than abut the persons, things or phenomena
described.” (27) “Normal
people (that is, the rest of the world), however, cannot exist without real
meaning, without religion anchored in something deeper than existentialism
and bland niceness, without a culture rooted deep in the soil of the place
where they live. Yet it is these things
that globalization threatens to demolish.”
(29) “Our
politicians continue to address the non-West as if all of the world were
Westerners under the skin; everybody wants ‘freedom’ and the consumerist
paradise and, in order to obtain these things, considers the adoption of
Western antivalues and the anticulture to be a price well worth paying.”
(32-3) “The
truth is that Westerners are perceived by non-Westerners...as rich,
technologically sophisticated, economically and politically dominant, morally
contemptible barbarians.” (34) “Why
barbarians? For despising tradition,
the ancestors and the dead. For
despising religion, or at least for treating it lightly. For the shallowness and triviality of
their culture. For their sexual
shamelessness. For their loose
adherence to family and, sometimes, also to tribe. For their absence of any sense of honor.” (34) According
to Huntington, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or
values or religion...but rather by its superiority in applying organized
violence. Westerners often forget
this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
(36) “‘Justifiable’
actions by Western powers look very different from a non-Western...point of
view.” “Quite obviously, violence is
the only way to get the West’s attention.” (37) “Even
consciously committed religious believers in Western countries live highly
secularized lives....” (41)
“Religious doctrine as a guide to action in the world and to the shape
of ultimate reality is considered crazy, even dangerous.” (42) Traditionally,
such things as wisdom, religion, honor, and the creation of solid or
beautiful artifacts were prized. The West is obsessed with appearance,
ephemerality and the commercialization of sex. (43) “The fragility of
families is an obvious corollary of sexual freedom. Family has been a principal focus of values and devotion in
every culture. (45-6) Honor is scarcely understood by
Westerners. “The concepts of shame
can only have a strong hold where there is an ingrained sense of right and
wrong. This is absent from the West
where shamelessness is extended to sexual matters and taken for granted most
everywhere else. (48) We
who have a high value on a pain-free life are aroused by cruelty, but are
desensitized to many other evils that all cultures but ours have considered
offensive. “That their offensiveness
eludes us is no small measure of our own barbarism.” (50) “By
absolutizing the unique—not to say historically aberrant—culture of the
post-Enlightenment West, we have become the ultimate cultural
imperialists. And then we wonder why
we’re hated.” (51) The
Reformation shifted the rule of behavior from external works to inner
conscience. This “internal policeman”
allowed unimagined political freedoms. In the 20th century the internal moral
dynamic shifted to “being true to oneself.”
Integrity at one time meant conformity of the inward person to outward
morality. But it has gradually come
to mean a congruity between the inner and outer person, regardless of the
one’s beliefs, morals or ideals. This
“idealizes the self and discards all notion of external fixed points.”(57)
“The results...have transferred any feelings of moral superiority from
Westerners to non-Westerners.” Because postmodern Westerners do not (even in
principle) practice traditional morality, they appear as barbarians to much
of the world. (58) Postmoderns
beat their ancestors with the sticks of oppression and hypocrisy. After the 1960s there was no more need for
hypocrisy. “For hypocrisy can only
subsist in societies that uphold ‘the good’—a good to which sinful human
beings cannot fully and consistently attain.
And the more enthusiastically and successfully the good is upheld and
observed, the more hypocrisy is necessary as a cover for those who do not achieve
it....” (61) “People
behaving hypocritically is, of course, a bad thing—but the existence of the
phenomenon is a sign of a good thing.
One can only be guilty of it if one aspires—or at least feels one
ought to aspire—to high moral standards.”
“If postmoderns are guiltless of this failing, however, it is not
because they are above hypocrisy—but because they are beneath it.” “To be guilty of hypocrisy, one has first
to accept the validity of the morals upon which it is predicated—and our
culture, uniquely, does not.” (63) “Human
rights have increasingly become the defining idea in Western morality over
the past two centuries. They have
changed our conceptions of right and wrong...” “...human rights are essentially an invention of the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment.”
(64) Once
revelation is discarded, “morality, then, does not come to us as a series of
commands from on high, or from outside human society at all. It emanates outward from the human person,
with his or her needs. It does not consist
of duties, therefore, but of rights.” (66) As
responsibilities pile up on “the system,” “...the traditional needs for
self-restraint and the acceptance of responsibility for one’s own actions are
likely, in the long term at least, to wither to the merest vestige.” (69) “The
sentence beginning ‘I have a right to’ is now, more often than not, ‘I want’
dressed up in a tuxedo and palming itself off as a moral claim....” (72) “By
the turn of the century, the triumph of the left...was the triumph of individualism
and of the individualistic understanding of human rights.” (74) “Christians...wish
to buy the Western worldview while subtracting the elements that we do not
like. But those elements are the
fruit of the poisoned tree. And a bad
tree, as someone once observed, will not yield good fruit. To resist the conclusions of our
opponents, we would be well advised to reject their premises as well, or else
we will lose every argument. Indeed,
we are, observably, doing so.” (77) Human
rights is “a moral right that is claimed simply by virtue of one’s
existence. This, we have observed, is
a concept foreign to Scripture, and indeed to the entire world before the
eighteenth century.” (78) “The
only obligations, in human rights discourse, are corporate, not
personal. If the poor are starving,
we need a new law or a new tax, not more generous individuals....” (79) “But
people with no sense of obligations are people with no sense of personal
sin.” “If I have no obligations, then
there are no duties that I have failed to fulfill, no forbidden acts that I
should feel guilty about having done.
I cannot envision myself as a sinner—not even before a holy God. The central thrust of Christian evangelism
is thereby rendered ridiculous.” (81) “Human
beings have been ducking responsibility since Eden; it is only our own
generation that has had the ingenuity to reject it as a category!” (81) “In
almost all traditional cultures, including our own before the modern period,
wisdom and right behavior consisted in following tradition.... In this view, the world is not our own but
a trust from our forebears....” (82) “Innovation and initiative were not
prized qualities but serious faults.” (83)
“The
ideal of progress was born, along with its counterpart, the rejection of
tradition.” (88) “Darwin’s
evolutionism propagated the idea that our ancestors were apes. (89)
“Christian
belief located authority in a past tradition and in an ancient text speaking
of historical events.” (90) However, “...modernizing Westerners saw
religion in general, and Roman Catholicism in particular, as obstructionist
and obscurantist, dangerous if powerful, simply irrelevant otherwise.” Most people mindlessly refer to fundamentalism,
by which they mean religious believers who fundamentally believe in their
religion as an alternative worldview to Western secularity. (91) “Progress
ceased to be common sense sometime between the First World War and the
1960s.” “What remains is an ingrained
alienation from tradition and the authority of the past.” That Westerners
have liberated themselves from their own past is, from the standpoint of
non-Westerners, a measure of barbarism.
(95-6) “The
strong egalitarianism of the West cannot exist in the absence of Western
hyperprosperity and the security that that hyperprosperity provides. In its absence, security has to be
provided by order. Western
subversions of that order, through the cultural influences of film and television,
for example, seem to threaten anarchy.” (108) “Radical
Islamists often consider the states in which they actually live to be
illegitimate and intrinsically secular....”
(124) “Third World states are
unlikely to remain democracies in anything but the most formal of
senses.... If Mubarak or the house of
ibn Sa’ud are overthrown, as looks entirely likely, it will not be because of
their ‘failure to respect human rights,’ but because they have failed
sufficiently to reflect the Islamist sentiments of their teeming urban
populations.” (125) “It
is the failure of the Western imagination to confront the most obvious
cultural realities about the world on its doorstep—or even about its own
past—that is driving its relationship with the remaining 90 percent of the
global population into a corner. By
refusing—or at any rate, failing—to understand, coexistence becomes
impossible, and the only possible bases for relationship between West and
non-West are those of domination or collision.” (125) “The
long-term path away from catastrophic conflict is to be sought
elsewhere. It is to be found by
refraining from the cultural imperialism presently being inflicted on the
non-West by our anticulture and its antivalues. And you know, to stop it happening there, we really have to
tackle it here.” (126) “As
the Western antivalues have impinged ever more upon their lives and begun to
undermine their own cultures, so their relative impotence vis-à-vis
Westerners has become ever more irksome to them.” (155) “Our
global domination and stratospheric living standards have confirmed us in an
unfounded confidence in the rightness of these attitudes. They have also deluded us into an
over-haughty rejection of the wisdom of the ages that was enshrined in
societies all around us.” (156) “It
is Western amorality that has brought about both the demographic decline and
the conflict with traditional cultures.”
“Morality is built into the fabric of the universe itself; it cannot
be expunged, be our technical wizardry never so clever.” “Nothing less than a massive cultural
reversal is necessary. We need to
rejoin the rest of the human race.” (166) There
is quite a bit more in here about worldview, lifestyle, and moral discourse
in the public square that could be very enlightening and helpful for
Christians. [dlm] *
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