Cultural crisis

  • Con­tin­u­ing the series that I might title “Is all hell going to break loose or what?” here’s the prophecy of doom that touches on the global war going on between cul­tures. That could be almost any cul­tures, but everyone’s favorite if you’re talk­ing about some­thing really apoc­a­lyp­tic in scope isn’t Sunni vs. Shi­ite or Hindu vs. Mus­lim but (big cap­i­tal ‘W’) West­ern soci­ety vs. … well, any­one really, includ­ing many toxic ele­ments inside West­ern society.

    Here’s how this one is pur­ported to unfold:

    The bad guy: “West­ern soci­ety,” by which we mean the Chris­tian­ized, Enlightenment-educated soci­ety that would like to trace its roots back to the Roman Empire, but could prob­a­bly only plau­si­bly trace it back to the Renais­sance. This is the soci­ety that coa­lesced in West­ern Europe and jumped to the New World, where it was re-invented with some changes for the bet­ter and some for the worse.

    Why they’re (we’re) so bad: This changes depend­ing on who’s doing the proph­esy­ing. It could be because we’re deca­dent and don’t wor­ship the right God (Mus­lim ver­sion), or because we’re not pro­gres­sive enough and wor­ship God at all (West­ern elit­ist ver­sion). It could be because we’re hog­ging all the cov­ers (Euro­pean ver­sion when speak­ing about Amer­ica), or that we have become weak panty­waists who couldn’t find our army and navy with both hands (Amer­i­can ver­sion when talk­ing about the Europeans).

    The biggest rea­son that West­ern soci­ety is such a big bad guy is sim­ply that it has become the dom­i­nant world cul­ture of the First World (the “rich” nations). That doesn’t mean it’s the best or that it’s God’s idea of a crack­ing good cul­ture — it just means that it is the best one any­one has stum­bled on so far at pro­vid­ing the high­est qual­ity of life to the most peo­ple. The extreme dis­like of the pri­macy of this one cul­ture ignites pas­sions of the many other nations who aren’t that sure they want to have a Star­bucks on every cor­ner and of a great many West­ern­ers, who just feel like it’s unfair some­how and we should give some­one else a turn.

    The prob­lem for both the out­siders and insid­ers who want West­ern cul­ture taken down a peg is that that’s eas­ier said than done. It’s not the mil­i­tary might that holds West­ern­ers in power these days, and no one is inter­ested in col­o­niza­tion any­more. But the access of afford­able goods, a higher qual­ity of ser­vices and indi­vid­ual free­dom to enjoy them proves irre­sistible for any­one except the most reli­giously zeal­ous. They might want to filet out the parts of West­ern cul­ture that they like (democ­racy, a free mar­ket, McDonald’s) and leave the part they don’t (Chris­t­ian ethos, bratty teenagers, McDonald’s), but once you open that door, things have a way of tak­ing care of them­selves. Appar­ently, those of Euro­pean descent aren’t the only ones who have a hard time with materialism.

    The cri­sis: There are many cul­tures that feel like they are about to be sub­sumed into West­ern cul­ture, and they don’t want to be (for which you can hardly blame them). They have dif­fer­ent attack plans:

    • The Mus­lim model is to stave off West­ern­ers by declar­ing a holy war. That’s all well and good, except it’s not really going all that well — the many dis­parate Mus­lim fun­da­men­tal­ists can’t agree with each other long enough to put together great armies, and with­out those they can’t really hope to con­quer and hold all the West­ern and West­ern­ized peo­ples. Their cul­ture may be the most preva­lent and cohe­sive through­out the world — maybe more so than the West­ern cul­ture — but that’s not all that hard to be these days. Ulti­mately, you have to be able to win the war of ideas as well as the war of brute force. The prob­lem for jihadists is that they’re only address­ing the brute force part, and not with that much over­whelm­ing success.
    • The non-Muslim non-Western model is usu­ally to really, really, really despise West­ern cul­ture and teach every­one you know to hate it too. Which is a sassy game-plan, for sure, but ulti­mately it doesn’t lead to any sig­nif­i­cant change and doesn’t con­sti­tute much of a cri­sis, except maybe to give every­one heart­burn and to con­vince squishy West­ern­ers that we just aren’t pop­u­lar enough.
    • The West­ern dis­en­fran­chised model is to advo­cate a rev­o­lu­tion of some kind. (“Up against the wall, rich sub­ur­ban­ites or white slave-holders’ off­spring or Yan­kee impe­ri­al­ist dogs!”) The model holds that when the out­raged masses rise up against those in power, they will pre­vail because (a) jus­tice is on their side, (b) those in power have been for­ever tainted by the sins of their ances­tors © the new emerg­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary cul­ture is pure and unadul­ter­ated. This seemed like it was going to hap­pen sev­eral times in the 20th cen­tury. Now talk like this usu­ally just makes peo­ple roll their eyes, espe­cially since it’s hard not to notice that the pure, unadul­ter­ated cul­ture still wants to have the big-screen TV and the dol­lar menu at Hardee’s. So the bat­tle is fought by con­stantly try­ing to make moun­tains out of mole­hills, flog­ging any­thing that remotely resem­bles the real­ity that you’ve been push­ing and fil­ing for law­suits like there’s no tomor­row. Again, sassy but hardly the thing that sea changes are made of.
    • The West­ern elit­ist model actu­ally goes quite a bit like the West­ern dis­en­fran­chised model. What they haven’t quite noticed is that they’re declar­ing war against them­selves. West­ern elit­ists think that Mus­lims, non-Muslims and the dis­en­fran­chised are entirely right to blame them for every­thing and want no part of their cul­ture (even though they have to over­look a lot of data to sup­port that con­clu­sion). They think that these antag­o­nists are per­fectly cor­rect to accuse us of being greedy bul­lies (though they choose to skip the part where we’re accused of being immoral, deca­dent and impi­ous). The West­ern elit­ists are look­ing and pray­ing for some­one who wants to declare war on Wal­mart, Rush Lim­baugh and Chris­t­ian evan­gel­i­cals, but not on The Gap, Howard Stern or Sci­en­tol­ogy. In short, they can’t really cre­ate the cul­tural cri­sis from scratch, but they would be very, very happy to show the invad­ing hordes where the sil­ver is kept. A cleans­ing rev­o­lu­tion is the glint in the eye of human­i­ties pro­fes­sors and super-rich illuminati.

    Suc­cess means:

    • Rad­i­cal Mus­lim model – a world that’s Mus­lim. Surely noth­ing else quite qual­i­fies. When Islam is the only reli­gion and Mus­lim cul­ture is the only cul­ture, then all will be as it should be and all the peo­ples will be enlight­ened and glad.
    • Non-Muslim, non-Western model – West­ern­ers will shove off once and for all but leave the key to Starbucks.
    • West­ern dis­en­fran­chised model – They will no longer feel dis­en­fran­chised. They will be able to pur­sue excel­lence. They will be own­ers and not renters or shar­ers. They will feel every bit as supe­rior, happy and all-powerful as they imag­ine the enfran­chised peo­ple are now.
    • West­ern elite – We just! plain! won’t be the dom­i­nant cul­ture any­more. Some­how, some way, this has to hap­pen in order for that venti half-caf latte to taste quite as good. It’s not fair that other cul­tures can’t com­pete against us and win, and so we have to keep hand­i­cap­ping our­selves until every­one catches up. In the mean­time, the mantra is: West­ern cul­ture: bad — non-Western cul­ture: good. Repeat until enlight­en­ment hap­pens, or at least till Iran nukes Israel.

    From time to time, these look likely. Then they always seem to have a way of peter­ing out. I think that the biggest prob­lem that other cul­tures have when cal­cu­lat­ing their abil­ity to over­come us is that they fail to take man’s sin­ful­ness into account. As I said, it’s not the army or the Chris­t­ian churches (unfor­tu­nately) that are keep­ing West­ern cul­ture preva­lent — it’s cheap food, untainted water, qual­i­fied med­ical care and a chance to have a Social Secu­rity card and wel­fare check in your wal­let. Would that that weren’t the case.

    Not to be com­pletely cyn­i­cal, though. I don’t think it’s an acci­dent that the envi­ron­ment cre­ated by West­ern cul­ture is suit­able for sup­port­ing active, intel­li­gent Chris­tian­ity. I don’t think the Idea of other reli­gions can com­pete with the Idea of Chris­tian­ity. But then, there are quite a few Chris­tians right now that posit a loom­ing cri­sis as well. Which I think takes me to the next installment.


    Related posts:

    1. Is there a cri­sis looming?
    2. Is this what the [bleep] is going on?
    3. Mus­lim cul­ture clash — what hap­pens now?
    4. More new martyrs
    5. John Mark Reynolds set­ting it straight

    April 21st, 2007 | Grace | 1 Comment |

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