[Scpg] Traditional Culture Strikes Back

[John Calvert]

"...Deregulation and the globalization of the world economy casually 
destroyed what already was there: self-sufficient economies functioning 
within traditional trading patterns, artisanal manufacturing for local 
or neighboring markets, subsistence agriculture - and the cultural 
assumptions that went along with all of this...."


Published on Thursday, July 21, 2005 by the International Herald Tribune
Traditional Culture Strikes Back
by William Pfaff

RETHYMNON, Crete - The war of civilizations, as Samuel Huntington 
unfortunately phrased it, takes place in time rather than space.

The bombers in London and the insurgents in Iraq may think that they 
are avenging themselves on Western civilization. Some in Washington, 
London and Tel Aviv may think that they are blocking the ambition of 
radical Muslims to create some marvelous new caliphate to rule the 
world. Both are wrong.

The civilizations at war are modernity on the one hand and the 
traditional world on the other. The Islamic fundamentalists' terrorist 
attacks on the West are merely a sideshow - a bitter but doomed 
reaction to a war that modern society has already largely won, with 
liberals and conservatives united in their battle against the values, 
assumptions and mode of life of the vast majority of non-modern 
mankind.

We Westerners believe we are creating, as Roger Cohen recently wrote in 
The International Herald Tribune, "a century that will make a diverse 
world more unified, prosperous and free than ever before."

The liberals and the conservatives of modern Western society firmly 
believe that. It is inconceivable to them that the traditional world, 
in which everyone except themselves lives, remains a valid choice for 
those who live in it.

The modern world is the aggressor, determined - without even seriously 
thinking about it - to destroy the backward civilizations of everyone 
else, which it sees as discredited remnants of the past. To destroy 
them is progress. Progress leads - where?

Here we run into the problem of utopia.

Utopia in a world dominated by religion is a reward for a worthy life, 
and is enjoyed in an afterlife. It exists outside of time. Or after 
time has come to a stop, in a timeless paradise.

Modern civilization has substituted a material utopia for religious 
salvation. Since the Enlightenment and the modern scientific revolution 
unseated religion as our society's dominant intellectual force, 
material and social progress has replaced religious salvation as the 
goal of life.

To take an obvious political example of modern utopianism, the American 
campaign to deregulate global finance and open the world to U.S. 
business investment may have American material interest behind it but 
it was accepted by the Clinton administration and nearly everyone else 
in America and Western Europe as a progressive idea that would make 
societies everywhere richer by bringing them into the international 
trading system.

However, deregulation and the globalization of the world economy 
casually destroyed what already was there: self-sufficient economies 
functioning within traditional trading patterns, artisanal 
manufacturing for local or neighboring markets, subsistence agriculture 
- and the cultural assumptions that went along with all of this.

No Westerner gave much thought to the damage being done. The West was 
bringing progress. Progress was membership in the world trading system 
and participation in a global consumer market with cheap goods and 
mass-produced food promoted by globalized communications.

The downside - destruction of self-sufficient societies and the 
uprooting and proletarianization of their people - simply seemed 
inevitable, bringing these people into the modern world and putting 
them on the road of progress.

 From this perspective, invading Iraq was a regrettable necessity, 
making a New Middle East and setting it on the way toward a better 
world. But where is this better world?

Since traditional society is held together by traditional religion, the 
modern West has in fact been waging war against traditional religion. 
Why should it be surprised when the defenders of traditional religion 
strike back?

More to the point, when there are young men whose fate has been to be 
born between modern and traditional worlds - in ghettos in or around 
London, Madrid, Paris - without any possibility of living fully inside 
either of those worlds, who should be surprised when they attack what 
they see as the source of their distress?

Islam now includes tens of millions of young people either born in 
Western ghettos or sent out of traditional societies to study 
hyper-modern subjects in what their own civilizations would regard as 
godless societies.

There is a crucial factor in this that few in the West understand. 
Modern Western civilization is the product of Western history and 
culture. The West is what it is because of its past. Nobody imposed 
foreign ideas on the West. Hence the West is at home in the modern 
world. The modern world was created by, and belongs to, the West.

But the West is trying to impose not only foreign ideas on everyone 
else, but ideas that contradict and would destroy the fundamental 
values and assumptions of non-Western societies.

It says: This is progress. Our progress is your destabilization, the 
destruction of your cultures, the creation of millions of culturally 
alienated, deracinated, displaced persons, ripped from their own past 
to become integrated into a radically materialistic ethic.

It should hardly be surprising that the reaction to this is nihilistic 
violence.

William Pfaff addresses the latest issues and long-term ramifications 
of current events, often before other political observers take note. 
Original and provocative, Pfaff studies European, Middle Eastern, Asian 
and American concerns through a prism shaped by the experiences of an 
American living abroad. Pfaff is a columnist for the International 
Herald Tribune based in Paris.

© 2005 IHT

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0721-28.htm


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