Easternization of the West

A Thematic Account of Cultural Change in the Modern Era

Colin Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594512230
• eBook ISBN: 9781317260905
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this provocative and groundbreaking book, Colin Campbell shows that the civilization of the West is undergoing a revolutionary process of change, one in which features that have characterized the West for two thousand years are in the process of being marginalized, to be replaced by those more often associated with the civilizations of the East. Moving far beyond popular trends, Campbell assembles a powerful range of evidence to show how "Easternization" has been building throughout the last century, especially since the 1960s. Campbell demonstrates how it was largely in the 1960s that new interpretations in theology, political thought, and science were widely adopted by a new generation of young "culture carriers." This highly original and wide-ranging book advances a thesis that will be of interest to scholars in many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

PART I

The Thesis

CHAPTER 1

NEGOTIATING TERMS

This book is about cultural change in the West, and especially the nature, direction, and dynamics of that change. It is not, as the title might suggest, about the West and its relationship with “the East.” Nor is it about “the West and the rest” (to use a phrase of Samuel Huntington’s), and certainly not about a “clash of civilizations” (to use an even better-known phrase of his), which is to say the scenario that presents the West as pitted against rival civilizations. Nor is it a contribution to a dialogue between East and West or to the debate over globalization. Rather it is purely and simply about the West and, taking the characteristic features of this civilization as a starting point, is an attempt to chart the manner in which these have changed dramatically in recent history, which is to say in roughly the period since the end of World War II (although the roots of these changes go back much further in time). The conclusion being that the cultural change in question is so dramatic as to suggest that the West is now no longer “the West” as it has been constituted for most of its history. Such an ambitious thesis clearly requires that a number of difficult issues be resolved. What, for example, are we to understand by the West, or indeed, a “civilization”? Then again to what precisely does the term culture refer, and how should we understand the manner in which cultural change occurs? These issues will be tackled at length in the pages that follow, but first it seemed advisable, in order to avoid unnecessary confusion in the mind of the reader, to say something about the general approach to be taken in tackling them in the introduction.

CIVILIZATION

As John Rundell and Stephen Mennell observe, in common usage the terms civilization and culture are “often used interchangeably,” usually to refer to a “particular level[s] of material and intellectual development and artistic expression” (Rundell and Mennell, 1998, p. 2); it is, however, the use of the first of these terms in the plural, that is, civilizations, that is of concern here, and in the sense of a set of normative principles, values, and ideas, rather than in its meaning as a developed material infrastructure (such as roads and cities). For, as they suggest, its use in this context emphasizes the multiplicity of different developed human communities, rather than the general contrast between civilization and barbarism. Why this is significant is that it relates to the difficulty faced by the sociologist who is interested in cultural change concerning what to take as the principal unit of study. At the micro level this is not an especially difficult problem since it is still possible to discern what are labelled subcultural entities such as youth groups, or even the cultures of class and ethnic communities. But when attention is turned to the larger cultural units of which these are but components, the problem becomes more intractable. For the nation-state no longer appears to correspond very closely (if indeed it ever did) to a clearly defined cultural unit. Today cultural material of all kinds, whether it consists of news and current affairs or relates to fashion, sport, films, music, or even science and religion, spreads rapidly via a global system of near-instant communication, from country to country and from continent to continent. This makes it difficult to take national units as one’s point of reference, pointing instead to supranational units and, among these, those that because of the deeply ingrained and shared nature of the cultural presuppositions that delineate them, ones that are not so easily affected by this rapid and ever-increasing global flow of information, ideas, and opinion. The concept of civilization tends to meet this requirement since it corresponds to differences in cultural meanings that are formulated at the highest level of generality, entities that can be described as worldviews. For attachment to such overarching systems of meaning is not normally confined to those people who live within given state or national boundaries, nor are they usually the specific possession of any one given linguistic or ethnic group. At the same time they are not spread universally around the globe as the common possession of all mankind, but are still connected, via an acknowledgment of a common history and shared cultural heritage, to specific, if sometimes rather vague, geopolitical entities. In that respect the term civilization tends to correspond to the most general cultural grouping one can identify short of that comprised by the human race as a whole. Such a definition certainly appears to ft that civilization known as the West, which although now found in various parts of the globe (mainly as a result of conquest and colonization), is still generally considered to have its principal location in Europe and North America. Consequently the position adopted here is that outlined as long ago as 1978 by Franklin L. Baumer, the historian of ideas, who observed that it was no longer possible to take the nation as the unit of historical study for this was “part of a much larger cultural whole” (Baumer, 1978, p. 9), and that while national cultural differences among Europeans and North Americans were real enough, they all participated nonetheless “in a wider cultural community traditionally known as the West.” Consequently he concluded that “the West then is our unit of historical study” (ibid.). Baumer then proceeds to identify and describe the central features of this civilization in some detail. Given that this is no simple task, this is a topic that is best deferred until later (see the discussion in chapter 3). However, since the term the West has a widespread popular currency, being commonly encountered in the media, it is necessary to say something about this matter here in the introduction. This is because acquaintance with this popular usage could easily lead the reader to have serious misconceptions concerning what precisely might be included (and consequently excluded) from this work. It is therefore necessary to stress that the manner in which the term the West is employed in the pages that follow is rather different from that in popular usage.

HOW MANY “ANTI-WESTERNERS” ARE REALLY “WESTERN”?

The term the West is more widely employed in contemporary media coverage of current affairs than at any time since the height of the cold war in the 1950s, when the two superpowers of the USSR and the United States (together with their allies)—commonly referred to at the time as East and West—confronted each other in a global standoff that threatened the destruction of the human race. The fact that the term is in widespread use again now is similarly because the West is once more seen to be facing a serious external threat, one posed this time not by another superpower but by global terrorism. Indeed it is noticeable that the American president George Bush, together with British prime minister Tony Blair, and indeed many other political figures in Western Europe, make it very clear in their public pronouncements that they consider that it is not simply their own countries but the West in general that they consider to be under attack. For they frequently refer to Osama bin Laden, together with those who associate themselves with or lend support to Al Qaeda, as people who are opposed to Western values and the Western way of life. Whilst Osama’s own statements, together with those who share his beliefs and aspirations, seem to offer confirmation of this claim by including warnings and threats against Western powers, while deploring what is referred to as the West’s occupation of Islamic countries. In light of this apparent agreement between sworn enemies concerning who and what is under attack, it might seem unquestionable that, however the West is defined, it must exclude the culture of those modern-day Islamic jihadists who are its self-declared mortal enemies. An assumption that seems to lead to the conclusion that not only must the civilization of the West exclude that extreme and uncompromising “literalist” version of Islam that is espoused by Al Qaeda, but also (at least according to some commentators) the religion of Islam in general. Yet such a conclusion would be misleading, and is certainly at odds with the manner in which the West is conceived of in this work.

There are two main reasons why this conclusion is misleading. The first is that for the purpose of the discussion and analysis that forms the body of this work the West is conceived exclusively in cultural terms; hence the fact that this term is also commonly used to refer to a geopolitical entity, often interpreted to mean the United States and its allies (including critically from the perspective of the Islamists, Israel), is largely irrelevant. As too is that associated usage that stresses the extent to which the United States government, either acting alone or in conjunction with the European Union, exercises economic power over other nations through the intermediary agency of international organizations or multinational corporations. For it is only with respect to its meaning as a distinctive set of beliefs and values, as embodied in a particular worldview, that the term the West is employed in this context. This means that to the extent that Osama bin Laden and those who share his beliefs are opposed to the United States or other Western governments in their capacity as military powers, or even as organizations that exert power indirectly (through international agencies, for example), then that hostility is irrelevant to the issues to be discussed here. Now at first sight this qualification would seem to make little difference since, as noted above, the Islamists are seen to be as opposed to the Western way of life as to Western colonial powers. However, this is to overlook a second important consideration. This is that the West, even when considered as a cultural entity, is not to be confused with “modernity.” However, before exploring this important distinction it is worth pausing to consider, in a little more detail, quite what cultural elements go to make up the hostile attitude that is typically displayed by those people in the Middle East (and indeed elsewhere in the world, such as Indonesia) whom Western politicians, and indeed the Western media, have a habit of dubbing insurgents or terrorists.

Generally speaking we can say that this typically comprises three main ingredients, ones that though analytically distinct, frequently overlap in reality. The first of these is a straightforward anticolonialism; that is, an attitude that perceives the presence of foreign troops as constituting an occupying power, and therefore one’s own actions in opposing those troops as the actions of “a resistance fighter” engaged in a “war of independence” against a “colonial oppressor.”¹ Now of course this is unlikely to be the way that the colonial powers in question see themselves. Indeed they are likely to regard themselves not as occupiers but rather as liberators, and what is more, liberators who are engaged in the task of bringing the Western values of democracy and individual freedom to a people who have been denied them. This of course is irrelevant since what matters is not how such troops view themselves but rather how they are viewed by those who oppose them, and the important thing to note here is that this attitude, even though it is directed against troops from a Western country or countries, is still nonetheless clearly an outlook that derives from what are quintessentially Western values and beliefs. For placing a high value on freedom from foreign oppression is itself a very Western idea, originating with the ancient Greeks’ opposition to the threat of Persian dominance, and receiving its most forceful expression in modern times in the eruption of nationalistic feeling in Europe that accompanied the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In that respect the demand by ordinary Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, or Chechens for independence and freedom from foreign rule stems from an outlook that is unmistakably Western, being shared in the modern world by such self-evidently Western groups as the Catholics in Northern Ireland or the Basques in Spain, while it could be said that the United States only came into existence as a consequence of the strength of anticolonial feeling on the part of its citizens. Finally it is worth noting that the idea of anticolonialism finds its most elaborate and sophisticated expression in a very Western ideology indeed, that of Marxist-Leninism.

The second of the ingredients that can be detected in the Islamist hostility toward the West is that of straightforward religious rivalry and opposition. This is very apparent in the use by bin Laden and associates of terms such as crusaders, or Zionist-crusader coalition, to refer to the forces they oppose. For such terms are clearly intended to cause people to associate present-day conflicts with the long history of warfare between Christian and Islamic forces that began with the struggle for control of the holy places in Palestine in the twelfth century. However, here, as with the previous example, it is important to distinguish between the object toward which the attitude is expressed and the nature of the attitude itself. Because although it is very clear that hostility is expressed toward what the Islamists identify as Western religions (principally Christianity but also, of course, Judaism), an attitude of fierce and utterly uncompromising hostility toward “the heathen” or “the infdel” is an outlook that has been only too prevalent throughout the long history of the West, while being a much less prominent feature of such oriental or Far Eastern civilizations as those of India and China. In that respect the idea of the holy war has to be judged a distinctly Western idea, with the not unsurprising result that religious wars, sectarian persecution, and merciless campaigns against heresy, apostasy, and those identified as heathens or infidels have all been marked features of Western history throughout the centuries, even if these do not feature so prominently in the West of today.²

This last observation brings us back to the issue, noted above, of the difference between the culture of the West and the culture of modernity, and the fact that the third and final ingredient in that hostile attitude toward the West typical of the Islamic jihadists is a deep suspicion of modernity, and especially the moral decadence with which they judge it to be associated. Here the sentiments expressed focus not so much on the accusation that the West is heretical in its religiosity as that it is secular and atheistic (or, at the very least, weakly and ineffectively religious) and, largely in consequence, morally decadent. This attitude, although frequently closely associated with religious piety, is one that can also stem from a deep traditionalism that, in its rejection of the modern, is not necessarily linked to any specifically religious concerns. In either case, whether arising from an explicit religious commitment or merely from a deep valuation of traditional norms, it is in association with concerns of this kind that one finds the attitude of hostility linked to expressions of outrage concerning such matters as the freedom accorded to women in Western societies, together with the toleration of homosexuality, public displays of nudity, and the high degree of sexual license. However, once again we are forced to recognize that such traditionalism, not to say puritanism, is hardly foreign to the civilization of the West, being yet again a recurrent theme throughout its history. Indeed it is not as if similar sentiments cannot be found today within the civilization of the West itself, echoed as they are—and not always in any less muted tones—by, for example the Religious Right in the United States. Indeed it is not clear that, as far as underlying values are concerned, there is that much to separate those religious fanatics in Baghdad who firebomb the salons of barbers who shave off men’s beards and the religious extremists in the United States who plan the murder of those doctors who perform abortions.

It should be clear from the above discussion that, insofar as the West is envisaged as a cultural entity with an identity that persists through time, it is fundamentally mistaken to presume that those individuals who today so vociferously declare themselves to be anti-Western are therefore not holding to Western values and beliefs. In particular it is crucial to distinguish between the expression of antimodern and antisecular sentiments on the one hand and anti-Western feelings on the other, given that the West itself long predates the emergence of a secular modernity. For, as Huntington notes, “The West was the West long before it was modern. The central characteristics of the West, those which distinguish it from other civilizations, antedate the modernization of the West” (1996, p. 69).³ But perhaps the best way to illustrate the crucial difference between an antimodern and a genuine anti-Western position is to consider the policies, together with the nature of the beliefs that inspired them, of the Taliban when they were in control of Afghanistan. For no matter how “dark, dim, and backward” the Taliban’s beliefs and practices may appear to be to modern Westerners (the words are those of President Bush when reacting to Ay-man al-Zawahiri’s comments on the London bombs of July, 2005), they do have clear precedents in the history of the West. Indeed—just to take one obvious example—they closely resemble those espoused by Calvin when he gained control of the city of Geneva in the sixteenth century. Indeed in both places (Afghanistan and Geneva) there was a similar attempt to establish a theocracy (or more properly a hierocracy) on the basis of the literal truths revealed in a holy book, a theocracy in which not only were almost all forms of entertainment banned, but the harshest of penalties were meted out for quite minor offenses, while the death penalty was the punishment for adulterers, which was also likely to be the fate of any fellow religionists who disagreed with those in power over matters of doctrine and dogma. But then such similarities should not be surprising, given that at root Christianity and Islam are in effect simply different branches of the same religious tradition. It follows from this that if contemporary inhabitants of the West are prone to judge a medieval and barbaric regime run by religious fanatics to be “un-Western,” then they can only be suffering from a case of historical amnesia. One occasioned perhaps by a subconscious desire to erase from the collective memory those similar episodes that marked the history of the West. For, although the Taliban’s regime in Afghanistan may not have been modern, it was most certainly not un-Western. But then this conclusion is most likely to prompt the reader to ask precisely what kind of civilization or culture it is that, in that case, is being contrasted with the West, if not something as backward and “medieval” as that which characterized the Taliban’s regime. The simple answer is “the civilization of the East.” But then this, in turn, raises as many questions as it answers; yet before these can be tackled it is necessary to explore another of the key terms mentioned above, that of culture.

CULTURE AS A WORLDVIEW

The noun culture has a variety of meanings within the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, meanings that have varied both over time and between different national and theoretical traditions. The one common feature being that the usage has always been broader than that in everyday speech, where it is usually restricted not merely to literature and the arts but also to those products generally considered to be among the best in these fields. By contrast social scientists tend to use the term to refer to all that in human society is transferred from one generation to the next socially rather than biologically, not simply literature and the arts but symbolic meaning of all kinds. However, within this general agreement sociologists and anthropologists have disagreed over what precisely should be covered by this term, and especially over whether it should include artifacts and actual behavior in addition to symbolic meanings. These debates will not be rehearsed here. However, these differences mean that it is necessary to state precisely how this term is to be used in this work, and this is in a restricted sense that is at odds not merely with traditional anthropological usage, but also with ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I The Thesis
• Part II The Explanation
• Afterword: Science and the Loss of Theodical Meaning
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index