November 27, 2008
FROM THE ARCHIVES: IS CULTURE HOW YOU THINK OR WHAT YOU DRINK?
What is American culture? (SPENGLER, 11/18/03, Asia Times)
Man thinks with his entire being, not with mere abstract powers of ratiocination. Tactile, gustatory, olfactory and sentimental habits bear on our view of the world more than the philosophers we might have read in school. Culture is the glue that holds generations together; paradoxically, American culture makes a virtue of the ephemeral. Americans in consequence cannot imagine the frame of mind of those for whom a cultural connection to the past has become a matter of life and death. This sometimes charming, usually harmless trait of American culture turns into a tragic flaw in the context of America's encounter with Islam.
We're normally big fans of Spengler, but his last two columns--this one and the last, on America losing the intelligence side of the war on terror--have been pretty silly. He's certainly correct here, that people in the Middle East may eat and smell more like their ancestors did than Americans do--the Pilgrims certainly didn't run for the border to grab a sack of tacos too often. And he was right last week, that we have no intelligence assets within extremist Islam and rather little comprehension of its inner workings. But he's quite wrong that clandestine operations are the key to the intelligence war or that a static diet is the key to culture.
If you want to see a culture that is being radically transformed or check out who is winning the all-important propaganda phase of the intelligence war, you need look no further than the recent Pew survey:
Despite soaring anti-Americanism and substantial support for Osama bin Laden, there is considerable appetite in the Muslim world for democratic freedoms. The broader, 44-nation survey shows that people in Muslim countries place a high value on freedom of expression, freedom of the press, multi-party systems and equal treatment under the law. This includes people living in kingdoms such as Jordan and Kuwait, as well as those in authoritarian states like Uzbekistan and Pakistan. In fact, many of the Muslim publics polled expressed a stronger desire for democratic freedoms than the publics in some nations of Eastern Europe, notably Russia and Bulgaria.The postwar update finds that in most Muslim populations, large majorities continue to believe that Western-style democracy can work in their countries. This is the case in predominantly Muslim countries like Kuwait (83%) and Bangladesh (57%), but also in religiously diverse
countries like Nigeria (75%). There are no substantive differences between Muslims and non-Muslims in Nigeria on this point. Only in Indonesia and Turkey do substantial percentages say democracy is a Western way of doing things that would not work in their countries (53%, 37%).
Americans are not only among the most religious people in the world--adhering to faiths (Judaism and Christianity) that are even older than Islam--but are relentlessly democratic and abide in the longest-lived democratic republic in the world, perhaps the longest lived regime of any kind extant. In effect, we've stood still, while the rest of mankind has gravitated towards us, politically and/or religiously. There's something absurd about the notion that because a Muslim has couscous the way his great-great-great-grandfather did or a Frenchman has crepes, their culture is more conservative than yours and mine which still has the same Constitution and Congress that our great-great-great-grandfather's did. Invite John Winthrop for dinner tonight and you probably will have to spend some considerable time explaining the point of the tiaramasu, but he'll recognize the political system in a heartbeat, and be rather proud you've made so few alterations.
[originally posted: 11/17/03]