In a comment on Jim Belshaw’s blog a couple of weeks ago Ramana,
one of his regular readers, commented:
‘Surely, words like civilisation and progress themselves
need acceptable definitions before we can arrive at a consensus?
These two words have gained a lot of notoriety because of
the heavy slant towards the Western idea of them. That other parts of the world
could have different ideas need to be recognised and accommodated.’
Jim drew attention to the comment in a later post in which
he also referred to my post: ‘Is Enlightenment humanism a coherent world view?’
A spirited discussion ensued.
My response to Ramana, influenced by Steven Pinker’s ‘Better
Angels …’ book (which I still haven’t
finished reading) was that the civilizing process is about widespread adoption
of an attitude that violence is unacceptable, accompanied by a reduction in
violence within societies. I suggested that such a view of the civilizing
process should have appeal all over the world. I noted that the societies in
which rates of internal violence have fallen over the last couple of centuries
are certainly not all in the West and the process doesn't have much, if
anything, to do with the 'westernization' of culture. I was making a distinction
between western culture and the social norms associated with classical liberalism
and humanism.
Wolfgang Kasper’s monograph, ‘The Merits of Western
Civilization’ (IPA, 2011) is directly relevant to the questions we have been discussing.
Wolfgang discusses the evolution of western civilization in a particularly thoughtful
manner.
In discussing the tendency of people to feel that their own
civilization is superior to others, Wolfgang acknowledges that there could be a
kernel of truth in such claims. They
make sense because each individual ‘has to become habituated to his community’s
given rule-set, and many institutions have to be internalized to the extent
that they are obeyed unthinkingly’.
Wolfgang makes the point, however, that ‘not all rule-sets … are
objectively of equal value in terms of attaining such fundamental goals as
freedom, justice, security and peace’.
Wolfgang also discusses the importance of rule-sets -
particularly informal institutions or social norms - being able to evolve in
response to changing circumstances, in harmony with accepted cultural values.
He notes that civilizations tend to decline culturally and materially when they
are based on rigid rule systems. On this
basis, he argues that the most outstanding feature of western civilization is
that it has remained adaptive and open to new challenges and opportunities as
well as sufficiently open to allow other civilizations to borrow from it.
The openness of western civilization to influence from other
cultures, along with strong historical influences from Western Asia, make the
task of defining western civilization somewhat difficult. In his discussion of
how to define ‘the West’, Wolfgang provides a fairly supportive critique of the
views of Philippe Nemo, in his book ‘What is the West?’ Nemo argues that a
common cultural heritage is shared by Western Europeans and North Americans, as
well as outliers such as Australians. He
asserts that the values on which western civilization are built stem from the
invention of the city and rational science in ancient Greece, Roman invention
of the law, the addition of compassion by Judaeo-Christian thinkers, a papal
revolution between the 11th and 13th centuries (which
apparently introduced the concept that individual initiative and good deeds can
redeem humanity) and the Enlightenment from the 17th to the early 19th
centuries.
Nemo ‘fails to completely convince’ Wolfgang that a medieval
papal revolution acted as ‘a stepping stone to modernity’. He suggests that
Nemo ‘almost forgets’ the role of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th
Century, which gave religious endorsement to innovation and material progress ‘and
distinguished European civilization from the many others that made a virtue of
a fatalistic outlook on life’.
The intellectual, political and economic liberalism of the
Enlightenment is viewed by Wolfgang as the ‘crowning achievement’ of western
civilization. Since the Enlightenment happened in the West, it seems to me that
it certainly makes sense to identify the emergence of modern western
civilization with Enlightenment humanism and intellectual pluralism.
Does this mean that Enlightenment humanism and intellectual
pluralism should be equated with western civilization? I don’t think so. I think
it is an exaggeration to assert, as Wolfgang does, that ‘no civilization
outside the West has turned intellectual pluralism into a value of its own’. It
seems to me that recognition of the merits of intellectual pluralism has spread
outside the West to such an extent that it is no longer appropriate to identify these
values solely with western civilization. In my view Enlightenment humanism and intellectual
pluralism should be seen as cosmopolitan values that tend to be reflected
in social norms to the extent that a society is open to influence from other cultures.
Wolfgang Kasper ends his monograph with the assertion that
the history of civilizations and the role of cultural evolution are among the
most fascinating fields of study. In my view his monograph makes a useful
contribution in demonstrating that to be so.
3 comments:
Here is another word that we can debate about. Enlightenment. In the Eastern traditions, what this means is completely different to what it means in the West, and that adds to the confusion.
Should civilisation be devoid of a desire for enlightenment in the Eastern sense of the word? All discussions on the subject ignore this aspect.
I do not quarrel with the definition and would very much like to see the world get civilised that way, but excluding other approaches as being primitive is what I object to.
You raise an interesting point, Ramana. If a friend told me that a son or daughter had gone overseas to seek enlightenment, my immediate thought would be that this person had gone to Asian to meditate, rather than to Europe or America to pursue higher education.
I will try to respond to your comment more fully in my next post. Your comment reminds me that I had also intended to respond to Wolfgang Kasper's suggestion that 'adulation of Tibetan wisdom' among some 'elites' in the West reflects 'a certain cultural ennui'.
That quote from Kasper is lovely! Ennui, I could not help but laugh out loud!
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