Not just Europe

Author: Dr. Asad Zaman, Professor, International Institute of Islamic Economics-IIUI,

Email: asadzaman@alum.mit.edu

The article below has appeared in The News (http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=142730)

Friday, October 24, 2008

Future historians writing on the basis of official US documents would be convinced that the USA selflessly invaded Iraq to bring benefits of democracy and civilisation to a barbarian nation, and to protect the entire world from weapons of mass destruction possessed by a mad dictator. They would not pick any clue in these documents to the fact that the war destroyed the lives of millions of Iraqis so that the USA could control their oil.

For the past few centuries, people of European origin have been telling us about the wonderful effects of the modernisation of Europe. The other side of the story is not well known. The self-centred and self-glorifying point of view of Europeans, which completely disregards the problems and difficulties of modernisation, is implicitly absorbed by anyone who consumes their literary, cinematic or other intellectual or social products – a category to which virtually every reader of this column belongs.

Earlier, Henri Pirenne showed how the attempt to picture themselves at the centre stage of history at all times has led Europeans to a substantially distorted understanding of world civilisations, their close interrelationships, dependency and balances, and their contributions to weaving the fabric of global history and society. Many recent books show how Eurocentric bias has led the West to claim the achievements of other cultures in the invention of (notably) democracy, universities, capitalism, individualism and science. Efforts of such scholars have led to the understanding that much of our common stock of wisdom about human beings and their history in the past few centuries is "Eurocentric."

Deep and valuable insights about ourselves emerge when we try to learn about the achievements of other cultures, and also the failures of Europe, which are all suppressed in European writings.

One of the central themes of the European view of the world is the idea that the whole world was in darkness and ignorance, and the dawn of the age of reason first occurred in Europe. The term "Age of Enlightenment" was used by 18th century European writers, who were "convinced that they were emerging from centuries of darkness and ignorance into a new age enlightened by reason, science, and respect for humanity. The period is also often referred to as the Age of Reason." This led to the "White Man's Burden" to take his civilisation and powers of reasoning to ignorant people living in darkness all over the world. This picture of world history, which ignores the presence of many ancient and advanced civilisations, is embedded deeply into Western intellectual traditions.

All non-Europeans who acquire a Western education automatically imbibe this story, which results in an exaggerated respect for Western traditions and an inferiority complex about one's allegedly savage and primitive ancestors.

In fact, the story of the Western transition to a secular system of politics and thought is not, as we are told, a story of the triumph of reason over superstition. The emergence of secular thought in the West was a consequence of the moral bankruptcy of the upper echelon of the Catholic Church. In The March of Folly, by Barbara Tuchman, the crisis caused by the openly flaunted moral corruption of a sequence of Popes (which involved living extremely luxuriously, legitimising bastard progeny, selling pardons for sins to raise money for supporting lavish lifestyles, etc.) has been termed "the most momentous event in the history of Europe." Tuchman has documented how this directly led to the rise of the Protestants, who attempted to preserve their faith while breaking from the corrupt Catholic Church. The Protestants split into several different Christian sects and factions, which fought among themselves as well as with the Catholics. The intolerance of these sects for each other, and battles, carnage, oppression and injustice, all carried out in the name of Christianity, convinced Europeans that religion could not serve as a basis for ordering a society.

Even religious leaders realised that social harmony required principles which could be agreed to by all members of the society without invoking controversial and conflicting religious principles. Secular thought developed due to the lack of character among religious leaders of Europe, and aimed at development of higher character by using reason and factual knowledge instead of religion. The Enlightenment thinkers hoped to create a more humane and just society which was free from poverty, wars and social evils of all kinds.

Have the hopes of the enlightenment thinkers been borne out by subsequent history? Religion provided the basis for morality, which has gradually become weaker and weaker in Europe. The consequences of this weaking of moral forces in the Western civilisation have been noted by many authors, and are visible for all to see.

For example, Gertrude Himmelfarb, in her book The De-moralisation of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, has documented the increase of violent crimes and illegitimate childbirth as a consequence of the decline of Victorian concepts of morality in England. The resulting breakdown of the family in Europe and the USA has led to an epidemic of social disorder. The Social Justice Foundation in England has documented how the children of single parents, now the majority of all European children, are likely to have poor outcomes in terms of education, mental health, drug abuse and criminal offending.

Julie Reuben, in her book The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalisation of Morality, shows how a university education was aimed at developing character in students up until early twentieth century. However, this mission was abandoned by modern universities in favour of providing a purely technical education, without any spiritual or moral guidance. The results have been disastrous as students learn how to build bombs, but nothing about ethics of killing. About the Nazi gas chambers used to burn millions of innocent men, women and children, Holocaust scholar Franklin Littel writes that "the credibility crisis of the modern university arises from the fact that the death camps were not planned and built by … illiterates, ignorant savages, but were by-products of one of the best university systems in the world. In The Brightest and the Best, David Halberstam has documented how graduates of the best universities ran the Vietnam War on the pattern of an efficient business, with callous disregard for human suffering. Much of Vietnam became, in essence, a free-fire zone -- more than one million civilians died as "collateral damage" in the mass bombings and napalming -- and atrocities and massacres were common. Villages were torched and destroyed in order to "save" them, in the famous words of a US major. Then defence secretary Robert McNamara now repents his role in that slaughter, and urges America's leaders not to repeat a similar history in Iraq.

With the widespread breakdown of family values, and the abandonment of the moral mission by universities, children growing up in Europe and the USA have no place to learn ethics and morality. In single-parent families, now the majority, children do not know their fathers, and do not experience the warmth and love of their working mothers. In addition, Hollywood and TV promote highly immoral lifestyles; for example, people who murder innocent civilians for money are portrayed as normal, decent, loving and kind human beings in Mr and Mrs Smith and many other similar movies. This has resulted in monstrosities such as the public statement in a CBS "Nightline" TV interview by former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright that it was acceptable to kill half-a-million Iraqi children to achieve objectives of US policy. She has a vastly better public relations team than Genghis Khan and Hitler, whose names have been blackened forever in history for far lesser deeds.

Many of our leaders and modernised elites insist on blind imitation of the West as the only route to progress. For example, ministries were established to teach European dancing, music and theatre to the Turkish people, and similar efforts are under way all over the Islamic world. The point of this article is to argue that we must be discriminating. Certainly we must learn from the West, but we need to distinguish between their failures and success, and avoid the former while adopting means to acquire the latter.

The writer teaches economics at the International Islamic University of Islamabad. Email: asadzaman @alum.mit.edu