It is in vogue today on the multiculturalist Left to speak up for “indigenous” people-giving voice to the voiceless [1]. There are those on the Right who take an expansive view of conservatism who also harbor such sentiments, but they are a distinct minority in their camp [2]. In my xperience, the question is less “is it good for the indigenes?” and more “how did whitey screw up now?” This explains part of the focus on white on non-white oppression (and yes, I know there are many examples) as opposed to inter-non-white conflicts (the body count is probably far higher in the past few years in this category-and yes, part of it is that the same appeals to humanitarianism do not seem to work on such “authentic” peoples as the Indonesians in Irian Jaya-in fact, where is the Indonesian equivalent of the Democrats in apartheid South Africa, who argued for one-man-one-vote against the Nationalists? I know Amien Rais has made some sounds toward federalism, but his party has also flirted with Lakshar Jihad).
Let us turn to the question of missionaries in “underdeveloped” regions of the world (dare we say “primitive”?). Reading The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond years ago I noted clearly the distaste that he felt toward Christian proselytizers in Papua New Guinea. He comes
back to this theme in Guns, Germs and Steel, bemoaning the Papuan tendency to view worship of Christ as a magical elixir that will lead them toward modernity and affluence. I have taken issue with this idea in the past. As an atheist in the Western tradition (I limit myself to the naturalistic assumption and attempt to remain aloof from grand metaphysical claims) but by blood and birth tied both to Islam and India, I have a personal bias in dismissing the importance of a profession of Christian faith in making one a citizen of the West. After all, that stipulation would disqualify me from being able to assert my affiliation with the culture that I do identify with greater fervor than those born-in-the-cradle with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I still do tend to believe that though to be Western does correlate with a Christian cultural background, the reverse may not need to hold, and in the near future, the decoupling of European social mores & historical background from the faith seems at hand.
But though I ingest these views to caution me from being enthusiastic about Christianization of non-Christian cultures in the hope places like “New Britain” and “New Caledonia” will evolve into incarnations of their namesakes in more than word alone, I cannot discount the importance of the faith in Christ in importing portions of the Western cultural outlook. Until Christianization in the 20th century the Naga people of northeast Indian were head-hunters far from the tracks of civilized man, today, they are a Christian and literate people with a
close association with the American Baptist missionaries that converted them. Similarly, the Mizos (Chin in Myanmar) are 90% Christian and 90% literate [3]. The other part of India that is rather literate is Kerala, which is 20% Christian. Of course, the coastal areas of Borneo were being Islamicized while The Philippines was brought into the Catholic Church, and both conversions resulted in the extinction of practices such as head-hunting in these areas a well. Similarly, the Buddhist cultures of mainland Southeast Asia also have long civilized traditions that eschew such grotesque “pagan” practices like human sacrifice despite their heathen character. All the religious civilizations of
the Eurasian oikoumene that emerged from the chrysalis of late-stage paganism during the axial age
tend to share a moralistic outlook that banishes the magic and blood of the pervious epochs to the bins of history and darkness.
Japan is one nation that shows that one can be modern and forward thinking without Christianity. On the other hand, many of the other non-Christian polities
in Asia have a strong Christian presence in their elite. These baptized members of a given ethnos serve as interfaces with the methods and variables of Western cultural thinking which they transmit despite their failures at spreading the gospel to their fellows. To give an example, Taiwan (The Republic of China for sticklers) was ruled by the Chiang family for 40 years. They were pious Methodists who oversaw the development of a pagan country. The first native Taiwanese president was a Presbyterian (Lee Teng Hui and Chiang Kai-Shek were both converts as an aside). And yet there have been periods in the past two generations when Christianity seemed to stagnate and shrink while the Taiwanese themselves were waxing in prosperity. Today the present head of state is a Buddhist and Christians form no more than 10% of the population (more likely 5%, but the numbers I have seen are variable). In fact, like Singapore, South Korea and Japan, Christianity has served to revive Buddhism as a force in public and private life in Taiwan, which has swallowed whole the ideas of Chinese Folk Religion and is rapidly vanquishing Taoism [4]. The particulars differ, as the Japanese are notoriously immune to seduction by Christ while the Koreans are enthusiastic converts who have sent
missionaries to Europe!
In any case, my focus is less on the cultures that have felt the touch of the three great civilizations, Western, Indian and Chinese, but to those peoples who
are outside the stream of history that has been formed by the co-mingling and cross-fertilization of the great traditions. My point in the preceding section
was to show that Christianity is not the only touchstone of civility, but it can also have a salubrious effect through competition with a sophisticated but indolent native intellectual tradition. So it is no surprise that many would assert that faith in Jesus uplifts and transforms (positively) those from genuinely insular and
primitive backgrounds. The spirit of the anti-clerical Enlightenment has spawned those, such as Jared Diamond, and many anti-Christian, but Western,
intellectuals, who disparage Christianity and hold up Rousseau’s ideal of the “noble savage.” Unfortunately, try as they might to portray them as
such, many pre-Christian pagan cultures outside the oikoumene only display the latter tendency of Rousseau’s archetype. A common pattern among pagan people upon meeting missionaries of the “True Faith,” past and present, is to bifurcate between heathens and Christians. Among the “civilized” ones, such as ancient Rome, the heathens would bring to bear their own complex theoretical superstructure, though Christian zeal and organization tended to win the day, often by co-option of what was right and good in the eyes of the new faith in the old [5]. On the other hand, pagan cultures that do not develop their own literate cultures and metaphysical systems are often brutal, bloody and anti-intellectual in their outlook, defending sacrifice of flesh and cruel customs, while the Christian camp tends to be formed by “progressives” who espouse literacy and gentility (the means toward a placid and religiously homogenous culture under Christ can be traumatic- for instance, the Russian princes of the Rurikid dynasty tore the idols of the god Perun from their pedestals and had them dragged about Kiev and dumped in rivers and destroyed & defaced, sacrilege to believers in the old religion). While India or China had deep and rich wells of intellectual sophistication and nuance to bring to the modern world, the cultures of Polynesia or ancient Scandinavia simply could not resist Christianization because the pagans were silent in the halls of the mind and less stalwart in strength of spirit [6]. Just as the last pagan regions of
Sweden were isolated from the invigorating influence of the pan-European Christian civilization while Norway and Denmark were being unified by baptized kings and taking their seats in the halls of power, isolated pagan groups embedded in “higher” civilizations cut themselves off from the trappings of modernity and maintain a continuity with the past only
through grinding poverty and ignorance [7].
Are there reasons that intellectuals scoff at Christianity among the pagans besides partisan bias? Reading Diamond’s works I certainly get the feeling that fascinating study subjects are being replaced by false Westerners in Papuan guise. Certainly, the rampant destruction of native artifacts and the rebellion against the elders and their rich histories and traditions can only horrify Western intellectuals who prize human diversity in all its panoply as a higher good worthy of study and praise. Of course, this is in its own way patronizing and dehumanizing, as it seems that scientists and scholars are interested in the authentic indigenous cultures are relics and fossils that will illustrate their own
paradigms and models about universal human nature and deviations from it [8]. Yes, Christianity might mean that the old ways have to go, some that are even adaptive-who wants to dress like a Utah Mormon in Samoa after all? But kowtowing to missionaries probably means that bright kids have a chance at literacy, and reading the Bible might just be a necessary prerequisite for getting to all the good stuff that’s out there once the world of books unlocked with letters that lead through the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. In my perfect world, I wish that Africans wouldn’t have to trade their juju witchdoctors for quaking Pentecostal droolers, but if the Holy Rollers are the price they have to pay to replace chicken sacrifices & native medicine with schools & hospitals, well, I’m sure any boy or girl in Botswana or Congo would be happy to pay it. The power and awe that the ancestors inspire and the fear native priests and witchdoctors demand is a great and mighty thing, and have sustained myriad cultures from time immemorial-but they seem to whither in the face of the power of the Word and the fire & brimstone rained down upon the imaginations of the enraptured [9].
Forward thinkers such as Marx have hurled contempt at non-Western civilizations as dead-ends, and James Mill was a progressive who wanted to bring equality and modernity to the benighted lower castes of India no matter the cost to the indigenous cultural matrix (as did another Mill, John Stuart, pupil of Bentham who debated Burke on the question of civilizing India, and argued in the affirmative) [10]. Today many liberals and Leftists have turned their backs on the white man’s burden and it is the missionaries of Christ who seem to be driven by the zeal to tear down the old so that the new may arise (NGOs of the non-religious variety act as a secular form of this of course-but they tend to be more solicitous of indigenous ways from what I gather). Their primary aim is perhaps to save souls for Christ, but if they bring hospitals, schools and lift the status of women, can any right-thinking liberal who espouses universal values and dignity of individual life rather than group integrity deny them their just results? It is known that in many regions of the world one incentive for conversion to world religions is to do away with costly sacrifices to propitiate capricious gods and replace such means of setting fate right with prayer. From a materialistic perspective it seems proper and utilitarian that prayer to a god that many consider ancient and outmoded beyond its years is a lesser evil than to waste flesh and libation on demons in the darkness that haunt the dreams men in all cultures. So that the Papuan may become post-Christian, the secular intellectual might have to accept that they will become intoxicated by the Christ of his forbears, before the long hangover after religious frenzy turns their spirituality inward and evinces the quietism and private contemplation more common in the modern West.
The savage must be civilized. Choice must be given to the choiceless, and lacking an education replete with Hume, Kant and the great cathedral of science that stands before one in all its glory, the untutored pagan must often choose between the Bible and the dark gods of the forest and the false promises of the past. What choice would you make? Is vaccination worth a Mass? Literacy? Cotton clothing? Purpose and belief in a future that promises hope and salvation rather than an expectation of squalid stasis? We seculars that wander among the ruins of civilizations, races and religions a thousand-years-old rely upon the wisdom accumulated from the errors of the ages gone by-but we must understand that to err is human and each individual, each culture, might have to stumble through mistakes that we believe we see because of our heightened powers of reason when in fact it is simply historical hindsight that we are gifted by the grace of the god(s) or nature.
I was thrown upon this path by a movie I saw today- Rabbit-Proof Fence, the story of three “half-caste” girls who were stolen from their aboriginal mothers in 1931 Australia. Though the topic is grim and difficult to approach- showing us the horror that the “stolen generation” had to endure- the performance of the young actresses, ages 8 to 14, made it rather a joy to watch. The youngest in particular was very cute and her smile brought a curl to my lips every time. Kenneth Branagh plays Mr. Neville, the man who is charged to civilizing half-caste children, and orders the kidnapping of the adorable protagonists. The aboriginals know him humorously (and more seriously) as “Mr. Devil.” Though he is clearly the antagonist who is portrayed as lacking in some element of humanity that would show his heart the cruelty that he is condoning, the film also makes clear that “Mr. Devil” quite believed he was doing a good deed, that the natives of his nation simply did not comprehend
that it was “all for their good.” At one point Branagh shows some respectable ladies a slide that illustrates 3 generations, “half-caste,” “quatroon,” and “octoroon,” where the “black is bred out of them.” Unlike the racialists of the American South who wished to expel the least taint of the colored, Branagh wishes to absorb the half-castes into the bosom of the Anglo-Saxon race and make them white Christians who are full citizens in the Australian nation. His greatest fear is that these mixed-race children will augment the blacks of the bush and so fester and grow in numbers to remain a thorn in the side of the white nation. The implementation of the policy of assimilation and absorbing the half-castes was brutal in the best and genocidal at the worst. Nevertheless, unlike the Nazis of his day, “Mr. Devil” did not seem to believe that his charges were lives not worth living, unredeemable and forever beyond the outer gates of the universal civilization, in this case, white and Christian. The movies ends with the girls reuniting with their mothers and running for the bush where they escape their pursuers. A desert is a harsh place to live, and no doubt many died and suffered for living in the shadows of their Paleolithic ancestors. Certainly this was done freely and of their free choice. The children of the aboriginal peoples rightly wanted to be with their parents, and likely reveled in the freedom under the wide blue sky, and yet what choice did they truly have? They were given a binary-a brutal cold shower of civilization or the same dangers and freedoms of their ancestors. The answers are so often more
complex than the questions. What great artists and scientists were lost to humanity deep in the jungles and out in the deserts these past 300 years? It might be true that art and science are normative values, but certainly one should have a choice between differential equations and hewing wood, no? We
live in a world constrained by our paternity and history, hemmed in spatially and limited in our horizons by the visions that our parents impart to us. Western
political philosophers and ethicists often live in a world of abstract, shorn of the messy realities of nature and instinctive man.
When we as Westerners venture outside our fortresses of civilization, we are beset by paradoxes and conundrums, realities outside the axioms of our world. Women who campaign for clitorectomy and against the vote, poor dispossessed Dalits killing poor dispossessed Muslims, persecuted majorities wreaking horrible vengeance once power is theirs, and so forth. We face nations that are prisoners in their states, individuals that are prisoners in their ethnos
or family and religions that seek to liberate on one level and shackle on another. Self-determination wars against universal rights, authentic traditions against progressive revelations. The first step we must take is be realistic, and throw up our hands in ignorance now and then, and admit that the effort in and of itself is sometimes the success we crave but cannot satisfy with the ends. Perhaps Islam is the cause of Arab despotism, but perhaps it isn’t. For every
generalization, there is a counter-example which is undermined by another generalization. We deal in the paradox of fundamentalist and austere democracies and liberal autocracies.
Liberals fail to repudiate the great lie of Rousseau’s noble savage, primitives and persecuted are not angels by virtue of their suffering. Let us not forget that
the molested become the molesters, that from privation can come a distortion of values, or lack there of. Conservatives swim in the decadence of the West, and in the ancient and reactionary patterns of the past reflected in the cultures of the non-West see kin. Christians believe that the saving grace of the gospel
can make a Papuan a wooly haired black-skinned Westerner, while secularists pray at the alter of micro-credit & NGO-thinking that always from the
material progresses the cultural (give women money, and they shall liberate!).
We try to do good in the world, but perhaps first we should try and shore up our own house, admit that we muddle through the rest of the world and that the
intention, is better than the outcome. The language of morality, of right and wrong, is far clearer and more powerful in an internal context, but projected
outward it can garble beyond recognition. Isolationists (and I was one) and Imperialists both are utopians in a fashion, denying the cruel realities of their position and the shortfalls in execution each principle would entail. Cultural universalists often do little good and undermine their own good name by tearing asunder organically constructed horror-houses (’tis better to live in a terrible home than be exposed to the elements naked of comfort and familiarity). Multiculturalists of the Leftist kind often reject the reality before their eyes and imagine that all people are Westerners that dress differently and pepper their cuisine to different degrees. The reality is far less heartening.
What do I suggest? Well, for starters, skip Newsweek and get a monograph from the local college library 🙂 The quest to understand might be
futile, but at least you’ll get further along the track….
I suppose I come not bringing answers, but muddling the waters with uncertainty. But that’s good sometimes, it’s best to have one’s feet firmly on the
deck, even if it is shaking.
For me, I try to think on the separate levels. The individual is the atomic unit of law and recognition. But it is the greater sum of its parts, race, religion, family as well as personal experience. All these variables are interdependent, and attempting to parse them might be difficult, hazardous. Somehow,
the individualistic experiment, bold and exceptional, in the West has succeeded beyond the wildest expectations of its initiators. But to generalize this success to the world can be dangerous. And yet, the converse, to view everything through the lens of groups, undifferentiated, deterministic molecular units bonded together covalently can be dangerous because it may reflect back to ourselves, and me begin to become hyphenated once more. Before the law, we
are men and women, equal, inalienable and precious. It was not always so, and is not always so, and it does not have to be so. We should not forget.
[1] What exactly “indigenous” is can be difficult to define. If the indigenes are non-white and the non-indigenes white, there is a
rather simple allocation of priority and authenticity. On the other hand, there is less attention paid to situations where non-whites clash-for instance, the wholesale settlement of the Chittagong Hill Tracts by Bengalis in Bangladesh-and the decimation and expulsion of the Buddhist Chakmas from their “ancestral land.” Of course, the Chakmas themselves came into this corner of the subcontinent in historic times from southeast Asia, absorbing and displacing the previous “indigenous” people.
[2] Edmund Burke argued on behalf of the Hindu elite against the “progressives” of his day who would wish to “civilize” the orient. A more contemporary example of this tradition on the Right is the neo-pagan movement-in the United States the main force for organized Asatru (Norse Paganism), Steve McNallen, has campaigned on behalf of tribal religions and peoples the world over, while Alain de Benoist who is often portrayed as a fellow traveler with Jean Marie Le Pen has also expressed similar opinions of
support for local ways and traditions in the face of homogenizing globalization. The thinkers at The American
Conservative also give some homage to this position for a variety of reasons.
[3] These people were Christianized partially by sealing the permeable cultural border between the Mongoloid tribal lands and the Hindu civilization of the lowlands in Indian’s northeast. Prior to British colonization, groups like the Naga and Mizos tended to enter into the Hindu caste system and overtime become part of Indian civilization both culturally and biologically. The Hindu kings of Assam who defended the indigenous faith from the Mughals were of the Ahom dynasty- which had its origins in Myanmar and among a people who did not share the ancestry of most of their subjects. The assimilative power of the Indian culture in the northeast probably meant that were it not for the conscious British policy of creating a wall toward Indianization the Nagas and the Mizos would be far more well integrated in the life of the modern Indian state. But they would probably be of low status and less literate.
[4] Many of the reformist movements in Hinduism during the 19th century were explicit responses and syntheses with the Christianity of the missionaries. While Brahmo Samaj was a “Unitarianism in saffron robes” Arya Samaj was the “Muscular Hinduism” of its day. Hindu fundamentalists should pray to Jesus Christ for the strength of their faith as much as Ram or Krishna-and due to the broad nature of the religion, they certainly do. Many of the “New Religions” among the Chinese & Chinese-tinged cultures of the East also owe a debt of gratitude to the vigor that Christianity showed as an organized religion that could free itself from state sponsorship and challenge the temporal powers to be.
[5] The Prefect of Rome, Symmachus, pleaded the pagan case to Theodosius the Great with an eloquence and sentiment that mirrored that of great liberal pluralists 2,000 years in the future.
[6] Please do not take this as a disparagement of the pagan contribution to our common humanity. The pagans of Scandinavia for instance, and likely the “primitives” of much of Polynesia, have diverse histories, but they are those recorded and recounted by Christians, and this cannot but help cloud and stain the roll of achievements. Additionally, I have assented and agree with the assertion that pre-Christian Europ
ean contributions,
even those neglected ones outside the Classical Mediterranean sources, have been important in the shaping of modernity. Nevertheless, all of Europe did bend the knee to Christ, and though I do not take this as a sign of the validity of the faith, I do take it as a sign of the hunger for morality and intellectual flexibility that the monotheistic faith introduced.
[7] This is true not only for pagans among Christians, but among other groups as well. For instance, there are isolated communities of pagans in the Javanese highlands. Cut off from the rich Hindu civilization of Bali they have become distant from the stream of progress and distrusting of the outside world and the Muslims that surround them. These isolated pagan people in the Javanese highlands keep illiteracy and ignorance as virtues because it prevents their children from becoming familiar with the outside world-namely, Islam. Similarly, the last Kafir-Kalash of Pakistan, the pagans who were preserved by the British conquest, are converting to Islam simply because in such a fashion they will as individuals benefit from being part of the ainstream of world civilization. Some groups, such as the Hmong of Southeast Asia often convert to Christianity to contrast themselves with the Buddhist owlanders of Thai/Dai origin so as not to be ethnically absorbed, but also gain allies of power and prestige in the outside world. I’m afraid entrance to the modern world means that one must join a side in one of the world religions-though there are isolated groups such as the people of Siberia that jumped from primitive paganism toward atheism under the Soviet Union. Let us hope that the morality of the axial age has percolated into their cultures even if it was mediated at some remove by the secularized dialectic of Communism.
[8] This is most obvious to me in the case of linguists that bemoan the disappearance of the thousands of languages that are spoken only by a few hundred. Certainly it is great to speak multiple languages, but can you blame a youth for wanting to learn English, or even the dominant language of his or her country of citizenship, especially if their “mother tongue” has no literate tradition and is ill-suited as far as vocabulary goes in modern professions?
[9] Various cultures have preserved the “way of the ancestors” to different degrees. The Chinese still revere their ancestors with a level of piety probably alien to Muslims and Christians who view the ancients as lost pagans mired in darkness-even if they were well meaning ones. The Japanese Shinto religion preserves elements of “animism” (for want of a better definition) and pre-scientific worldviews in the international headquarters of advanced robotics. Unfortunately, isolated groups like Papuans, Amazonian tribals and the peoples of innermost India have not the time to accrue sophistication and eloquence to the shades of their past.
[10] Mill was scathing in his indictment of the native power structure and the revulsion he felt for the caste system was drawn from the same wellspring of moral certainty and concern that drove the British to drive slavery from the face of the earth so much as the power of their Empire allowed. Mill was also instrumental of the abolishment of the practice of suttee.