The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself

Why They Hate Us
Cultural Reform or Resurgent Culture?

Week of Monday, October 21, 2002

In late September I was channel surfing when I came across C-Span's coverage of the sometimes violent protests that accompanied the annual meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC. On one day the capitol police arrested 649 people. Organized by the Mobilization for Global Justice, the event ostensibly protested the policies of the two groups which, they argued, benefit wealthy countries at the expense of poor countries. In fact, speakers protested a whole litany of issues including global trade policies, transnational corporations, the environment, price gouging by pharmaceutical companies, AIDS, globalization, and America's threat of war with Iraq.

The protests were a good example of a virulent anti-westernism with which we have become familiar. In a recent faculty fellowship meeting, a physician who had been on sabbatical showed us a photo of a bridge in a remote town in Ecuador; spray paint graffiti declared that Americans were “terrorista.” Why do so many people seem to hate the west in general and America in particular?

One view suggests that there is nothing in principle wrong with the west and its values of democracy, the rule of law, a free press, free markets, pluralism, the separation of church and state, the separation of powers, the full equality of women, the primacy of the individual over the state or society, the freedom, toleration and privacy to live and express yourself however you want, and so on. Furthermore, with due regard for the cultures, values and practices of other countries, people in this camp see nothing wrong with the west exporting our values around the globe, which is another way of saying that we understand our values to be universal and not merely western. The protests like the ones above are not matters of principle but matters of practice. In other words, there are extremists, isolated but powerful people and groups on both sides, who exacerbate and even exploit these admittedly complex issues, but they do not or need not represent the broad, mainstream of their cultures.

For example, it's true that there really are greedy western capitalists who would exploit cheap labor in the third world, American politicians who are frighteningly isolationist, or drug companies who will do anything to make billions even if it means pricing poor countries out of the market, but these people do not represent the best of the west. Or again, the Islamic extremists are just that, extremists who do not represent the majority mainstream of liberal, open-minded Arabs. The Islamic terrorists are products of the failed economic and social policies of their own governments, not the result of an inherently violent religion. All around the world, the argument goes, there are people who truly desire and are committed to western values, and want them for their own country. Modernize but not westernize, might be the slogan of this camp (although some countries even want to westernize). If we could somehow control these excesses of practice, found in both the west and all around the world, the world would be a much better place.

Thomas Friedman illustrates this position in his last two books. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree he paints a rather rosy picture of the juggernaut of globalization. He is well aware of its many problems, but by and large he is an optimist, and something of a fatalist in the sense that he believes that globalization is headed in one direction, integrating us all together whether we like it or not—in economics, media, culture, etc., with no turning back possible. Countries that do not get with it get left behind, way behind.

Similarly, in his most recent book Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 (2002), Friedman argues that there is no clash of civilizations. There is nothing in principle that should keep us apart. He particularly rejects the “blame America first and most” crowd exemplified at the IMF protests mentioned above (p. 309ff). No, “the real clash is actually not between civilizations, but within them—between those Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Jews with a modern and progressive outlook and those with a medieval one” (pp. 50–51, 157, 377). If there is a silver lining in the dark cloud of the September 11 tragedy, it is that some liberal Arabs, to take one example, have begun to see that they cannot keep blaming the west as a matter of principle, but that they must accept their own responsibility for failed economies, repressive tyrants, poverty, illiteracy, suppression of women, and the like. These exceptional and brave people are calling for reforms in their culture. As Jordan's King Abdullah told Friedman, “I have no intention of putting Jordan's modernization program on hold. We are moving ahead, but I cannot do this by myself. I need the public with me” (p. 238).

Samuel Huntington believes otherwise. He thinks that the challenge of global relations does not rest with a few bad apples, with replacing the Osama bin Ladens of the world with more King Abdullahs. No, he believes that what we face is, in the words of his book title, The Clash of Civilizations (1996). The Cold War era was a bipolar world, with countries generally siding with the west or the Soviets. Today, however, our fault lines run much deeper. Huntington suggests that our problems emanate not from bad practices (be they by the west or the rest of the world), bad people like bin Laden, or even from differences in political or economic ideology (that one might hope to change), but in the very fabric of cultures themselves: “the rivalry of the superpowers is replaced by the clash of civilizations” (p. 28).

When we think of the world we should not imagine that the world is heading toward one, primary, globalized system epitomized by western, liberal and universal values (Friedman and Fukuyama). What we thus understand as universally good the rest of the world experiences as imperialistically bad. Nor should we even think in terms of the modern nation-state, that is, thinking of the world in terms of the 200 or so separate countries. No, in Huntington's view, when we think of the world we should think of eight major cultures, cultures which, however much they share some similarities with each other, are, at the end of the day, founded upon deep differences in principle. The eight major civilizations, he suggests, are as follows: Sinic or Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox, Western, Latin American, and African. Rather than the reform of cultures toward western values, what we are witnessing is the indigenization, resurgence and assertiveness of these eight cultures.

Asia and Islam are the best examples of this cultural resurgence and increasing assertiveness against the west. In principle, Islam could never admit the separation of church and state. There could never be such a thing, then, as a secular, Islamic society, despite the lone, struggling and precarious experiment in Turkey (p. 175). As for Asia and its fundamental cultural differences with the west, consider its emphases on authority, hierarchy, the subordination of the individual to the group, the importance of consensus, and the avoidance of confrontation. Contrast these with western values of freedom, equality, democracy, individualism, human rights, and so on. Says Huntington, “the sources of conflict are in fundamental differences in society and culture” (p. 225).

The disturbing thing about Huntington's view is that what is mainstream in many societies is this indigenous, assertive resurgence of cultural values, many of which are fundamentally opposed to western values. Liberal reformists like King Abdullah, in his view, are the extreme exception. This is scary, not because these cultural values are necessarily bad or inferior to western values, or that western values are always better. Rather, it is troubling because it seems to indicate that our global differences are based in deep matters of principle and not just in the bad practices of a few extremists. For the most part, says Huntington, these deep differences will continue to have a destabilizing effect on our world. In this view the resurgence of indigenous cultures will always vanquish whatever hopes there are for cultural reforms that are more in line with the west.

In the end, Huntington takes a swipe at western multiculturalism (305ff). Herein lies our own clash within our own western civilization, between those who affirm our broad political and economic traditions, and those who blame the world's problems on the same. The only way the west will survive, he thinks, is for us to unapologetically reaffirm our western values, even as we are careful not to assume that the rest of the world wants them or even needs them. To do that, he thinks, would at any rate be false, immoral, and even dangerous.

The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself Copyright ©2002 by Dan Clendenin. All Rights Reserved.