Aziz comments on the civilizational gap between “the West” (defined as the cultures who worship the One True God of Abraham) and those of “the East” (in particular, the Confucian East). Though I think Aziz highlights a real difference, the article which he references about the wrath that the recent Japanese hostages found when they returned to the home islands is shocking in its contrast with American culture, for I think that the dichotomy is not between those who worship the One True God and the people of the East, but between the Anglosphere and the rest of the world. More specifically, I believe the argument laid out in The Geography of Thought a proper descriptive framework, that the Anglospheric countries are the most “individualistic,” while most of the world behaves on the principles of group conformity and “shame” (with Continental Europe somewhere in the middle). The reality of Arab “honor killings” (and the past of Anglospheric culture, that is, the Victorian era) shows the importance of shame, and conformity to group norms (or the perception of conformity), even when a people putatively have a personal relationship to God (one might assert that American culture makes such a fetish of non-conformity that they conform to non-conformism!?!).

But there is an underlying problem with these civilizational categories-it neglects the internal dynamics of a society, and takes the perception of one slice as the norm. For instance, when it comes to religion (often the marker used to delineate civilizational boundaries), I think this rough diagram illustrates what I mean:

At the center of religious belief are basic hard-wired “human universals.” These are elaborated into complex rationalized faith systems by those who are prone toward rationalization. But there is a spectrum of belief, not just in intensity, but in conception. The intellectual class works out explicit axioms, rules and norms, and it is this class that serves as the clerics and thinkers who act as religious and civilizational spokesmen. But on the level of of the “common man” things are much simpler, and the religious practice and core beliefs of Muslim, Hindu and Japanese peasants might be more similar to each other than they are to the elite practioners of these cultures. To illustrate of what I speak, the filioque controversy helped spark the rift between the Eastern and Western Churches during the Dark Ages, but on the level of the common European, this had little impact (and in the grand tradition of rationalization, it almost certainly was rooted in political machinations rather than a genuine theological disagreement that could brook no compromise). Though Hinduism is “officially” pantheistic, the devotion of Indian peasants to their local godesses resembles that of Chinese peasants to Guaynin or Latin American peasants to the Virgin.

The counter-intuitive implication here is that the chasm between civilizations is on some level increasing as literacy and “elite values” spread throughout the world. But, the elite values that are spreading are particular to any given region, rather than trans-cultural “McWorld” ideals. This explains the rise of “reformism” and the decline of “traditionalist” beliefs among the Javanese urban class, and the coalescence of lay movements like Muhammadiyah and the expansion of the santri (orthodox) segment of Indonesian Islam. In a similar fashion, portions of the “paganized” elements of Roman Catholic Latin American peasantry are converting to a more “rigorous” Protestant Christianity, while many Japanese are shedding religion in general and simply becoming “Secular.”

What is implicit and instinctive is common to humans as a whole, and local custom, ritual and tradition will often reflect this (that is, local peculiarities often reside within set parameters that define the conventional human range of practice and belief). But, what is explicit and rational is more likely to be dictated by its own internal logic, and once man cedes his will to reason, we may drift from the “equilibrium channel of religious practice” that characterizes most human cultures (and wander into strange territory like the “Death of God” theology). One tension that surfaces with this spread of elite values is that much of the populace can not master the rationalized systems that undergird elite religious formulations, ergo, the rise of hyper-simplistic messages and “fundamentals” that can communicate a few basic axioms without taxing intellectual capacities. Because these “rational” systems of belief are based on a chain of propositions that might be disputed, they drift into very different directions even though core human spirituality might be rather similar from person to person, and this diversity is preserved as the various Truths in the debased “fundamentalisms” that are proliferating in the modern world. The final result seems to be the rise of the possibility of a genuine “Clash of Civilizations,” as opposed to the mobilization of societies on behalf of the selfish interests of the elites under self-serving ideological banners. It is no surprise that there is a contrast between the The City of God, written for the educated Christian and pagan elite of the 5th century, as opposed to Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict, written for the broad evangelical masses in the late the 20th century.

Posted by razib at 01:23 PM