MODERNITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

THE ABDUCTION OF MODERNITY: Part 1: The race toward barbarism (Henry C K Liu, 7/09/03, Asia Times)

The United States defines its global "war on terrorism" as a defensive effort to protect its way of life, beyond attacks from enemies with alien cultural and religious motives, to attacks from those who reject modernity itself. This definition is derived from the views of historian Bernard Lewis, a scholar of Islamic culture at Princeton University, who traces Islamic opposition to the West beyond hostility to specific interests or actions or policies or even countries, to rejection of Western civilization for what it is. To
Lewis, Western civilization stands for modernity. This anti-modernity attitude, he warns, is what lends support to the ready use of terror by Islamic fundamentalists.

Samuel Huntington in his The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order argues that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War will bring neither peace nor worldwide acceptance of liberal democracy. Huntington rejects Francis Fukuyama's prematurely optimistic "end of history" theme that the collapse of communism means Western civilization is destined to spread as people elsewhere seek the benefits of technology, wealth, and personal freedom it offers. Instead, because technology has been reserved for exploitation, wealth obscenely maldistributed, and freedom selectively denied to the powerless, narrow ideological conflict will transform into conflicts among people with different religions, values, ethnicities, and historical memories. These cultural factors define civilizations. Nations will increasingly base alliances on common civilization rather than common ideology; and wars will tend to occur along the fault lines between major civilizations.

Huntington points out that embracing materialist science, industrial production, technical education, rootless urbanization, and capitalistic trade does not mean the rest of the world will embrace the culture of the West. On the contrary, he argues that economic growth is likely to increase the aspiration for cultural sovereignty, breeding a new commitment to the values, customs, traditions, and religions of native cultures. The struggle is not capitalism against communism, but backward civilization against modern civilization.

The fault in both these views is the assumption that modernity is an exclusive characteristic of the West. On the surface, such views appear self-evident, since science and technology have been the enabling factors behind Western ascendance and dominance. But the "modern world" can be viewed as a brief aberration on the long path of human destiny, a brief period of a few centuries when narcissistic Western thinkers mistake technological development as moral progress in human civilization. Many barbaric notions, racism being the most obvious, appear under the label of modernity, rationalized by a barbaric doctrine of pseudo-science. The West takes advantage of the overwhelming power it has derived from its barbaric values to set itself up as a superior civilization. The West views its technical prowess as a predatory license for intolerance of the values and traditions of other advanced cultures.

Part 2: That old time religion (Henry C K Liu , 7/10/03, Asia Times)

Promoters of this Western version of modernity see its birth in the West through a radical transformation of its past. [...]

Yet this view of modernity misreads history. Thomas Aquinas (1225-71) benefited intellectually from his exposure to translations of works of Aristotle from Greek into Latin by Arab scholars to whose world view he became much indebted. He also profited intellectually from the rise of universities in Europe during 12th and 13th centuries, notably the University of Bologna (1088), known for its studies in law, the University of Padua (founded by dissidents from Bologna), the University of Paris, and Oxford University, all founded as centers of learning in theology, not science. In this new intellectual milieu in Europe, Aquinas applied Aristotelian syllogism as interpreted by Arab minds to medieval mysticism of revelation. His Summa Theologica (1267-73) was a systematic exposition of theology on rational philosophical principles worked out by the ancient Greeks as modified by Arab precision and algebra, which pioneered the use of variables in problem-solving in logic. [...]

St Thomas Aquinas, nicknamed Dumb Ox because of his slow and deliberate manner of speech, brilliant father of Neo-Scholasticism, aiming to resolve the dispute between Averroists and Augustinians, would hold that reason and faith constitute two harmonious realms in which the truth of faith complements that of reason, both being gifts of God, but reason having an autonomy of its own. The existence of God could therefore be discovered through reason, with the grace of God.

The theological significance of this momentous claim by Thomas Aquinas cannot be over-emphasized. It would save Christianity from falling into irrelevance in the Age of Reason, sometimes referred to as the Enlightenment, and preserve tolerance for faith among rational thinkers in the scientific world. The Thomist claim remained unchallenged for five centuries until David Hume (1711-86) pointed out in his Inquiry into Human Understanding that since the conclusion of a valid inference could contain no information not found in the premise, there could be no valid conclusion from observed to unobserved phenomena.

Hume let the logic air out of the Thomist natural-theology balloon, and in the process showed that even general laws of science could not be logically justified beyond their own limits, perhaps even including his own sweeping conclusion. Hume, the empiricist, would logically determine that logic is circular and goes nowhere: a classic position of Taoist skepticism.

Yet what Hume ultimately does, whether intentionally or not, is accomplish a reunification, establishing that reason and religion are equally valid, or invalid as the case may be, and that our every understanding of ourselves and the world around us is ultimately rooted in nothing but faith, of one kind or another. And so the two can be preserved in the West, provided that we refuse to be as skeptical as logic insists we should be and opt instead to take the leap of faith. If we fail to recognize that all is faith, and insist instead that all is material and yields to reason; if we basically confine our skepticism to the spiritual realm, from which we derive our ideas about humnan dignity and the resulting morality, while insisting on complete credulousness for the rational world, thereby cutting ourselves off from any notion of transcendent ideals; if this is what modernity is; then by all means let the anti-moderns win. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 12, 2003 12:19 PM