As the placard reads: Treat it like a globe, not an empire



Globalization: The Religion of Moneyism vs. The Fundamentalism of Islam (excerpts) ,
David R. Loy

...Religions unite civilizations by providing people with a common identity, which they are often willing to die and kill for. Religions are also the source and repository for our most cherished values; except perhaps in the modern West, where traditional religion has been losing a war of attrition with this-worldly values such as Enlightenment rationalism, secular nationalism, "moneytheism" and consumerism. For Huntington the social scientist and foreign policy mandarin, what is most important about religions is that the identity they provide is irreconcilable with other religious identities. A Jew is a Jew, a Muslim is a Muslim, and ne'er the twain shall meet. That is why religious differences are at the heart of the civilizational clash.

Again, things look rather different from a perspective more sensitive to religious values than to "realist" foreign policy (i.e., nationalist) values. The struggle over globalization is, at its heart, not just a clash of identities but a clash of values: the values which people of different cultures want to live by. In order to understand the contemporary conflicts that religions are involved in, we must also realize that the secular culture of the modern West does not really offer an alternative to religious values; rather, it offers this-worldly versions of them. Religion is notoriously difficult to define, but if we understand it functionally; as teaching us what is really important about the world, and therefore how to live in it; modern identities such as secular nationalism and modern values such as consumerism are not so much alternatives to religion as secular religions. They offer this-worldly solutions to the problem of ultimate meaning in life: for example, patriotic identification with one's nation (a poor impersonal substitute for genuine community) or the promise of a more sensuous salvation in consumerism (the next thing you buy will make you happy!).

The Cold War victory of the West means that capitalism now reigns unchallenged and so has been able to remove its velvet gloves. Because capitalism evolved within a Christian culture, they have been able to make peace with each other, more or less, in the contemporary West. Christ's kingdom is not of this world, we should render to Caesar what is Caesar's, and as long as we go to church on Sunday we can devote the rest of the week to this-worldly pursuits. From some other more traditional religious perspectives, however, the values of globalizing capitalism are more problematical....

...Tensions do not arise simply because of a clash of fissured, irreconcilable value systems, in which we need to focus on promoting our own. In the contemporary world all religions are under tremendous pressure to adapt to new circumstances, including new world-views and new values, for globalization means that re-negotiation with modern developments is constant. Fundamentalism -- clinging to old verities and customs -- is a common response, but the fact that some fundamentalists are willing to die and kill for their cause does not quite disguise the reality that the fundamentalist reaction to modernity is defensive, cramped and in the long run untenable in a fast-shrinking world where all civilizations are increasingly interconnected.

This does not mean that religious beliefs and values are incompatible with globalization. It means that the struggle between globalization and anti-globalization is in part an on-going negotiation between traditional religious concerns; most importantly, love and responsibility to something greater than our own egos; and the corrosive effects of a secular modernity that, when unchecked, tends to become nihilistic. For either side to "win" this struggle would be disastrous. Traditional religions need the challenge of modernity to wake them from their dogmas and institutional sclerosis. On the other side, the unrestrained dominance of corporate capitalism and its commodifying values would be catastrophic not only for human communities but for the entire biosphere.

The real test-case for their negotiation is Islam. Huntington discusses many clashes between civilizations, and most of them involve Islam. "Islam has bloody borders" (5). Without Islam, it would be difficult for him to make his case; thanks to Islam, it is easy, since the Islamic world seems to have trouble getting along with any other world.

Or so it seems from a Western perspective. That perspective, however, is hardly a neutral one. For most of their histories, the Christian West and the Islamic world have been each other's chief rivals. At first Islam had the edge, culturally as well as militarily. Medieval Christian theology and philosophy were revived by the rediscovery of classical Greek texts preserved by Islamic scholars; European science developed on an Arabic foundation. That is part of Islam's burden today: in contrast to early Christianity, which had to endure centuries of Roman persecution, Islam was immediately triumphant, establishing a mythic legacy that makes eclipse (including colonial and now economic subordination) by the modern West all the more difficult to bear.

There are other ways in which Islam stands out from other missionary religions such as Christianity and Buddhism. Unlike Jesus and Shakyamuni Buddha, Mohammed was not only a spiritual teacher but a political and military leader, in ways which were often quite progressive for his time, but some of which have become problematical as the world has changed. Because neither Jesus nor Shakyamuni provided a detailed political or economic program, it has been easier to adapt their teachings to radically different cultural conditions, including secular modernity. Today a Christian can pray in church on Sunday and more or less serve Mammon the rest of the week. A Muslim prays five times a day and follows more than a few customs from seventh-century Arabia, including studying and memorizing the Koran in Arabic.

Partly as a result of these differences, Islam has remained more traditionalist than either Christianity or Buddhism. No religion is monolithic, and all major religions have deep fissures of their own, including an unavoidable one between literal interpretations of scriptures and more adaptable metaphorical readings. There have been rationalist movements in Islam such as the Mutazilists in the ninth century, and more recently many other attempts at modernist reform, but they have generally been less successful than similar movements in Christianity and Buddhism. As a result, the contemporary image of Islam among most non-Muslims is of an extremely conservative, ritualistic and literalistic faith. Among the major religions, Islam is having the most difficulty adjusting to the modern distinction between an enervated sacred sphere and a more dynamic secular sphere. There are also political problems due to the legacy of Western colonialism (including the imposition of a nation-state structure that evolved in Europe and has not often grafted well onto non-Western cultures) and economic problems due to the neo-colonialism of Western-led globalization.

Yet there is another way to look at Muslim difficulties today. Of the world's missionary religions, Islam is the one most deeply concerned with social justice; and social justice is an increasingly important issue in the struggles over what kind of globalization we shall have. That is the other side of Muhammad's legacy as a political leader as well as a spiritual one. This theme is missing in Huntington, but we cannot understand Islamic values and present concerns without it. That is why it is not sufficient to emphasize the fissure between Islam and the West, a clash between their values and ours. A demand for social justice has become essential in a world where, according to the United Nations Development Report for 1999, almost a billion people in 70 countries consume less today than they did 25 years ago; where the richest twenty percent of the world's population now account for 86% of private consumption, the poorest twenty percent only 1.3% (a gap that globalization so far is aggravating); where, as a result, a quarter million children die of malnutrition or infection every week, while hundreds of millions more survive in hunger and deteriorating health.

Allah is a merciful God but He is also a God of justice and will judge us harshly if we do not accept personal and collective responsibility for the less fortunate. The third pillar of Islam is zakat, alms. Zakat is not so much charity as an essential expression of the compassion that all Muslims are called upon to show to those who need it. Muslims believe that everything really belongs to God, and material things should be used as God wishes them to be used. This means not hoarding but sharing with others who need them. That is why the capitalist idea of using capital to gain ever more capital; you can never have too much! ; is foreign, even reprehensible, to many devout Muslims.

By adapting so well to the modern world of secular nationalism, capitalism and consumerism, most Christians in the West have learned to finesse such concerns. The Bible tells us that the poor will always be among us, and in any case we must accept what the "social science" of economics tells us are laws of supply and demand, the importance of free trade, etc. Admittedly, the main effect of transnational capitalism so far has been to make the rich richer, but we must have faith that a rising tide of worldwide wealth will eventually lift all boats.

Islam is less willing to accept such equivocations, because it recognizes no God above Allah. The need to "have faith" that corporate globalization will eventually work to benefit almost everyone points to what is increasingly apparent: as Western culture has lost faith in any afterlife salvation, the West's economic system has also become its religion, because it now has to fulfil a religious function for us. Economics today is less a social science than the theology of that moneytheistic religion, and its god, the Market, has been able to become a vicious circle of ever-increasing production and consumption by pretending to provide us with a this-worldly salvation. Western-led globalization means that the Market is becoming the first truly world religion, rapidly converting all corners of the globe to a worldview and set of values whose religious role we overlook only because we insist on seeing them as secular.

Few people yet understand pro- versus anti-globalization struggles in such spiritual terms, but many instinctively feel what is at stake....the West is imposing new "religious" values on other civilizations in the economic guise of "free trade....

David R. Loy, Professor, Faculty of International Studies, Bunkyo University, Japan



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Friday, June 30
A New Vision: The West Against The Rest? (excerpts) , David R. Loy

When he wrote "The Clash of Civilizations," Samuel P. Huntington was the Eaton Professor of Government and Director of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. His now-famous essay was originally written for an Olin Institute project on "The Changing Security Environment and American National Interests," published in Foreign Affairs in 1993, and then expanded into a book.* As this genesis suggests, what it offers us is not some impartial overview of global civilization but the post-war world as perceived by the U.S. foreign-policy elite &endash; the "best and brightest" that previously gave us the Vietnam War and the "domino theory" that also rationalized U.S. support for Pinochet, the Shah of Iran, Marcos, Suharto, etc. Huntington himself was a consultant for the State Department in 1967, when he wrote a long position paper that supported U.S. goals in Vietnam but criticized the military strategy for attaining them.

I mention this not to make an ad hominem attack on Huntington's ideas but to clarify the purpose for his essay: determining the new security needs of the United States in the post-Cold War world. This becomes apparent in its second half, which is more obviously concerned about defending "the values and interests of the West" against those of other civilizations. This subtext is not always explicit but it determines what Huntington sees, and what he is unable to see.

What he sees is a new global paradigm that brings the new global mess into focus. The era of struggle between nation-states and rival ideologies is over. Democratic societies, in particular, do not go to war against each other. The new conflicts are between civilizations, which have different languages, histories, institutions, and &endash; most importantly &endash; different religions. Huntington lists seven or eight civilizations: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin-American, "and possibly African" (3). The differences between them are more fundamental than the old differences between political regimes or ideologies. Huntington claims that increasing interaction among people of different civilizations is enhancing the historical "civilization-consciousness" of peoples in ways that "invigorate differences and animosities stretching or thought to stretch back deep into history".

This challenges the usual and more irenic perception that increasing contact tends to decrease tensions. Today, more than ever, people from different parts of the world not only buy each other's commodities and consume each other's products but enjoy each other's music, films and TV shows, fashions and food; when they have the opportunity, many are eager to travel to far-away countries, to meet other people, and sometimes even to intermarry. Is this increasing contact and awareness also increasing inter-civilizational intolerance and strife, or decreasing it? Or does that question miss the point because the effects of all this interaction are too complicated to generalize about in either simpleminded way?

Civilizations, Huntington tells us, are the broadest level of cultural identity that people have, "short of that which distinguishes humans from other species". Why such cultural differences should be emphasized more than our similarities as fellow humans is not immediately obvious, except perhaps for the unfortunate but common tendency to identify ourselves by distinguishing our own interests from those of some other "out group." This is no minor point, if the subtext of Huntington's argument &endash; U.S. national security &endash; itself exemplifies such an "in group" defending its own interests at the cost of other groups. U.S. relations with Latin America is an obvious example: history suggests that the Monroe Doctrine (1823) was promulgated not so much to protect Central and South American countries from European interference as to monopolize U.S. interference....

We have supported constitutionalism, human rights, liberty, the rule of law and democracy in other countries when those values have produced leaders amenable to our own national interests. Those same values evidently resonate less loudly for us when they produce leaders who have different ideas. In 1954, for example, the U.S. sponsored a coup against the democratically elected government of Guatemala, which over the following years led to the deaths of over 100,000 peasants. In 1965 the U.S. overthrew the government of the Dominican Republic and helped to kill some 3000 people in the process. In 1973, the U.S. sponsored a coup against the democratic government of Chile that murdered or "disappeared" several thousand people. In the 1980s the U.S. sponsored a terrorist contra war against the government of Nicaragua, which led to the deaths of over 30,000 innocent people and to a World Court declaration that the U.S. government was a war criminal for mining Nicaragua's harbors. Another U.S.-supported war in the 1980s against El Salvador resulted in the deaths of 80,000 more innocent people. Lots of "collateral damage."

All those recent examples are from Latin America alone. Also in 1965, the U.S. sponsored or assisted a military coup in Indonesia that led to the deaths of well over half a million people. When President Bush declares that Iran is part of a new "axis of evil," we should remember why many Iranians return the compliment, viewing the U.S. government as "the Great Satan." Why? When Western oil interests were threatened, the CIA helped to sponsor a brutal coup that installed the widely detested Shah of Iran, whose notorious Savak secret service then proceeded to torture and kill over 70,000 Iranians between 1952 and 1979.

There are many more examples, unfortunately, but the point is made. Clearly, the problem here is something more than not living up to our own ideals. Nor do we just keep making mistakes, such as innocently backing the wrong sort of people. Once can be a mistake, twice may be stupidity, but this pattern of repeated violations of our own self-declared values amounts to something more sinister. "By their fruits shall you know them," as someone once put it. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that our so-called values are not really our values, at least not when it comes to international relations. The basic problem is not a clash between our values and theirs, but between our (declared) values and our (short-term) interests....[tbc]

David R. Loy, Professor, Faculty of International Studies, Bunkyo University, Japan