The West: Unique, not universal

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The West: Unique, not universal 
Foreign Affairs; New York; Nov/Dec 1996; ;

Abstract:
Many in the West believe the world is moving toward a single, global culture that is basically Western. This belief is arrogant, false, and dangerous. The spread of Western consumer goods is not the spread of Western culture. Drinking Coca-Cola makes a Russian no more Western than eating sushi makes an US citizen Japanese. As countries modernize, they may westernize in superficial ways, but not in the most important measures of culture - language, religion, values. In fact, as countries modernize, they seek refuge from the modern world in their traditional, parochial cultures and religions. Around the globe, education and democracy are leading to indigenization. As the power of the West ebbs, the rest will become more and more assertive. For the West to survive as a vibrant and powerful civilization, it must abandon the pretense of universality and close ranks. Its future depends on its unity. The people of the West must hang together, or they will hang separately.

MODERNITY IS NOT ENOUGH

IN RECENT years Westerners have reassured themselves and irritated others by expounding the notion that the culture of the West is and ought to be the culture of the world. This conceit takes two forms. One is the Coca-colonization thesis. Its proponents claim that Western, and more specifically American, popular culture is enveloping the world: American food, clothing, pop music, movies, and consumer goods are more and more enthusiastically embraced by people on every continent. The other has to do with modernization. It claims not only that the West has led the world to modern society, but that as people in other civilizations modernize they also westernize, abandoning their traditional values, institutions, and customs and adopting those that prevail in the West. Both theses project the image of an emerging homogeneous, universally Western world-and both are to varying degrees misguided, arrogant, false, and dangerous.

Advocates of the Coca-colonization thesis identify culture with the consumption of material goods. The heart of a culture, however, involves language, religion, values, traditions, and customs. Drinking Coca-Cola does not make Russians think like Americans any more than eating sushi makes Americans think like Japanese. Throughout human history, fads and material goods have spread from one society to another without significantly altering the basic culture of the recipient society. Enthusiasms for various items of Chinese, Hindu, and other cultures have periodically swept the Western world, with no discernible lasting spillover. The argument that the spread of pop culture and consumer goods around the world represents the triumph of Western civilization depreciates the strength of other cultures while trivializing Western culture by identifying it with fatty foods, faded pants, and fizzy drinks. The essence of Western culture is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac.

The modernization argument is intellectually more serious than the Coca-colonization thesis, but equally flawed. The tremendous expansion of scientific and engineering knowledge that occurred in the nineteenth century allowed humans to control and shape their environment in unprecedented ways. Modernization involves industrialization; urbanization; increasing levels of literacy, education, wealth, and social mobilization; and more complex and diverse occupational structures. It is a revolutionary process comparable to the shift from primitive to civilized societies that began in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, and the Indus about 5ooo B.c. The attitudes, values, knowledge, and culture of people in a modern society differ greatly from those in a traditional society. As the first civilization to modernize, the West is the first to have fully acquired the culture of modernity. As other societies take on similar patterns of education, work, wealth, and class structure, the modernization argument runs, this Western culture will become the universal culture of the world.

That there are significant differences between modern and traditional cultures is beyond dispute. A world in which some societies are highly modern and others still traditional will obviously be less homogeneous than a world in which all societies are comparably modern. It does not necessarily follow, however, that societies with modern cultures should be any more similar than are societies with traditional cultures. Only a few hundred years ago all societies were traditional. Was that world any less homogeneous than a future world of universal modernity is likely to be? Probably not. "Ming China . . . was assuredly closer to the France of the Valois," Fernand

Braudel observes, "than the China of Mao Tse-tung is to the France of the Fifth Republic."' Modern societies have much in common, but they do not necessarily merge into homogeneity. The argument that they do rests on the assumption that modern society must approximate a single type, the Western type; that modern civilization is Western civilization, and Western civilization is modern civilization. This, however, is a false identification. Virtually all scholars of civilization agree that Western civilization emerged in the eighth and ninth centuries and developed its distinctive characteristics in the centuries that followed. It did not begin to modernize until the eighteenth century. The West, in short, was Western long before it was modern.

WHAT MAKES THE WEST WESTERN?

WHAT WERE the distinguishing characteristics of Western civilization during the hundreds of years before it modernized? The various scholars who have answered this question differ on some specifics but agree on a number of institutions, practices, and beliefs that may be legitimately identified as the core of Western civilization. They include:

The Classical legacy. As a third-generation civilization, the West inherited much from earlier civilizations, including most notably Classical civilization. Classical legacies in Western civilization are many, and include Greek philosophy and rationalism, Roman law, Latin, and Christianity. Islamic and Orthodox civilizations also inherited from Classical civilization, but to nowhere near the same degree as the West.

Western Christianity. Western Christianity, first Catholicism and then Protestantism, is the single most important historical characteristic of Western civilization. Indeed, during most of its first millennium, what is now known as Western civilization was called Western Christendom. There was a well-developed sense of community among Western Christian peoples, one that made them feel distinct from Turks, Moors, Byzantines, and others. When Westerners went out to conquer the world in the sixteenth century, they did so for God as well as gold. The Reformation and Counter Reformation and the division of Western Christendom into Protestantism and Catholicismand the political and intellectual consequences of that rift-are also distinctive features of Western history, totally absent from Eastern Orthodoxy and removed from the Latin American experience.

European languages. Language is second only to religion as a factor distinguishing people of one culture from those of another. The West differs from most other civilizations in its multiplicity of languages. Japanese, Hindi, Mandarin, Russian, and even Arabic are recognized as the core languages of other civilizations. The West inherited Latin, but a variety of nations emerged in the West, and with them developed national languages grouped loosely into the broad categories of Romance and Germanic. By the sixteenth century these languages had generally assumed their contemporary forms. Latin gave way to French as a common international language for the West, and in the twentieth century French succumbed to English.

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Separation of spiritual and temporal authority. Throughout Western history, first the Church and then many churches existed separate from the state. God and Caesar, church and state, spiritual authority and temporal authority had been a prevailing dualism in Western culture. Only in Hindu civilization were religion and politics as clearly separated. In Islam, God is caesar; in China and Japan, caesar is God; in Orthodoxy, God is caesar's junior partner. The separation and recurbetween church and state that typify Western civilization have occurred in no other civilization. This division of authority contributed immeasurably to the development of freedom in the ...

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