The
Slow Suicide Of The West
By Jorge Majfud
05 January, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The
West appears, suddenly, devoid of its greatest virtues, constructed
century after century, preoccupied now only with reproducing its own
defects and with copying the defects of others, such as authoritarianism
and the preemptive persecution of innocents. Virtues like tolerance
and self-criticism have never been a weakness, as some now pretend,
but quite the opposite: it was because of themthat progress, both ethical
and material, were possible. Both the greatest hope and the greatest
danger for the West can be found in its own heart. Those of us who hold
neither "Rage" nor "Pride" for any race or culture
feel nostalgia for times gone by, times that were never especially good,
but were not so bad either.
Currently, some celebrities
from back in the 20th century, demonstrating an irreversible decline
into senility, have taken to propagating the famous ideology of the
"clash of civilizations" – which was already plenty
vulgar all by itself – basing their reasoning on their own conclusions,
in the best style of classical theology. Such is the a priori and 19th
century assertion that "Western culture is superior to all others."
And, if that were not enough, that it is a moral obligation to repeat
it.
From this perspective of
Western Superiority, the very famous Italian journalist Oriana Fallacia
wrote, recently, brilliant observations such as the following: "If
in some countries the women are so stupid as to accept the chador and
even the veil, so much the worse for them. (…) And if their husbands
are so idiotic as to not drink wine or beer, idem." Wow, that is
what I call intellectual rigor. "How disgusting!" –
she continued writing, first in the Corriere della Sera and later in
her best seller The Rage and the Pride (Rizzoli International, 2002),
refering to the Africans who had urinated in a plaza in Italy –
"They piss for a long time these sons of Allah! A race of hypocrits."
"Even if they were absolutely innocent, even if there were not
one among them who wished to destroy the Tower of Pisa or the Tower
of Giotto, nobody who wished to make me wear the chador, nobody who
wished to burn me on the bonfires of a new Inquisition, their presence
alarms me. It makes me uneasy." Summing up: even if these blacks
were completely innocent, their presence makes her uneasy anyway. For
Fallaci, this is not racism, it is "cold, lucid, rational rage."
And, if that were not enough, she offers another ingenious observation
with reference to immigrants in general: "And besides, there is
something else I don't understand. If they are really so poor, who gives
them the money for the trip on the planes or boats that bring them to
Italy? Might Osama bin Laden be paying their way, at least in part?"
…Poor Galileo, poor Camus, poor Simone de Beauvoir, poor Michel
Foucault.
Incidentally, we should remember
that, even though the lady writes without understanding – she
said it herself – these words ended up in a book that has sold
a half million copies, a book with no shortage of reasoning and common
sense, as when she asserts "I am an atheist, thank God." Nor
does it lack in historical curiosities like the following: "How
does one accept polygamy and the principle that women should not allow
photographs to be taken of them? Because this is also in the Q'uran,"
which means that in the 7th century Arabs were extremely advanced in
the area of optics. Nor is the book lacking in repeated doses of humor,
as with these weighty arguments: "And, besides, let's admit it:
our cathedrals are more beautiful than the mosques and sinagogues, yes
or no? Protestant churches are also more beautiful." As Atilio
says, she has the Shine of Brigitte Bardot. As if what we really needed
was to get wrapped up in a discussion of which is more beautiful, the
Tower of Pisa or the Taj Mahal. And once again that European tolerance:
"I am telling you that, precisely because it has been well defined
for centuries, our cultural identity cannot support a wave of immigration
composed of people who, in one form or another, want to change our way
of life. Our values. I am telling you that among us there is no room
for muezzins, for minarets, for false abstinence, for their screwed
up medieval ways, for their damned chador. And if there were, I would
not give it to them." And finally, concluding with a warning to
her editor: "I warn you: do not ask me for anything else ever again.
Least of all that I participate in vain polemics. What I needed to say
I have said. My rage and pride have demanded it of me." Something
which had already been clear to us from the beginning and, as it happens,
denies us one of the basic elements of both democracy and tolerance,
dating to ancient Greece: polemics and the right to respond –
the competition of arguments instead of insults.
But I do not possess a name
as famous as Fallaci – a fame well-deserved, we have no reason
to doubt – and so I cannot settle for insults. Since I am native
to an under-developed country and am not even as famous as Maradona,
I have no other choice than to take recourse to the ancient custom of
using arguments.
Let's see. The very expression
"Western culture" is just as mistaken as the terms "Eastern
culture" or "Islamic culture," because each one of them
is made up of a diverse and often contradictory collection of other
"cultures." One need only think of the fact that within "Western
culture" one can fit not only countries as different as the United
States and Cuba, but also irreconcilable historical periods within the
same geographic region, such as tiny Europe and the even tinier Germany,
where Goethe and Adolf Hitler, Bach and the skin-heads, have all walked
the earth. On the other hand, let's not forget also that Hitler and
the Ku Klux Klan (in the name of Christ and the White Race), Stalin
(in the name of Reason and atheism), Pinochet (in the name of Democracy
and Liberty), and Mussolini (in his own name), were typical recent products
and representatives of the self-proclaimed "Western culture."
What is more Western than democracy and concentration camps? What could
be more Western that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the
dictatorships in Spain and Latin America, bloody and degenerate beyond
the imagination? What is more Western than Christianity, which cured,
saved and assassinated thanks to the Holy Office? What is more Western
than the modern military academies or the ancient monasteries where
the art of torture was taught, with the most refined sadism, and by
the initiative of Pope Innocent IV and based on Roman Law? Or did Marco
Polo bring all of that back from the Middle East? What could be more
Western than the atomic bomb and the millions of dead and disappeared
under the fascist, communist and, even, "democratic" regimes?
What more Western than the military invasions and suppression of entire
peoples under the so-called "preemptive bombings"?
All of this is the dark side
of the West and there is no guarantee that we have escaped any of it,
simply because we haven't been able to communicate with our neighbors,
who have been there for more than 1400 years, with the only difference
that now the world has been globalized (the West has globalized it)
and the neighbors possess the main source of energy that moves the world's
economy – at least for the moment - in addition to the same hatred
and the same rencor as Oriana Fallaci. Let's not forget that the Spanish
Inquisition, more of a state-run affair than the others, originated
from a hostility to the moors and jews and did not end with the Progress
and Salvation of Spain but with the burning of thousands of human beings.
Nevertheless, the West also
represents Democracy, Freedom, Human Rights and the struggle for women's
rights. At least the effort to attain them, and the most that humanity
has achieved so far. And what has always been the basis of those four
pillars, if not tolerance?
Fallaci would have us believe
that "Western culture" is a unique and pure product, without
the Other's participation. But if anything characterizes the West, it
has been precisely the opposite: we are the result of countless cultures,
beginning with the Hebrew culture (to say nothing of Amenophis IV) and
continuing through almost all the rest: through the Caldeans, the Greeks,
the Chinese, the Hindus, the southern Africans, the northern Africans
and the rest of the cultures that today are uniformly described as "Islamic."
Until recently, it would not have been necessary to remember that, while
in Europe – in all of Europe – the Christian Church, in
the name of Love, was persecuting, torturing and burning alive those
who disagreed with the ecclesiastical authorities or committed the sin
of engaging in some kind of research (or simply because they were single
women, which is to say, witches), in the Islamic world the arts and
sciences were being promoted, and not only those of the Islamic region
but of the Chinese, Hindus, Jews and Greeks. And nor does this mean
that butterflies flew and violins played everywhere. Between Baghdad
and Córdoba the geographical distance was, at the time, almost
astronomical.
But Oriana Fallacia not
only denies the diverse and contradictory compositioon of any of the
cultures in conflict, but also, in fact, refuses to acknowledge the
Eastern counterpart as a culture at all. "It bothers me even to
speak of two cultures," she writes. And then she dispatches the
matter with an incredible display of historical ignorance: "Placing
them on the same level, as if they were parallel realities, of equal
weight and equal measure. Because behind our civilization are Homer,
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Phidias, among many others. There is
ancient Greece with its Parthenon and its discovery of Democracy. There
is ancient Rome with its grandeur, its laws and its conception of the
Law. With its sculpture, its literature and its architecture. Its palaces
and its amphitheaters, its aqueducts, its bridges and its roads."
Is it really necessary to
remind Fallaci that among all of that and all of us one finds the ancient
Islamic Empire, without which everything would have burned – I
am talking about the books and the people, not the Colliseum –
thanks to centuries of ecclesiastical terrorism, quite European and
quite Western? And with regard to the grandeur of Rome and "its
conception of the Law" we will talk another day, because here there
is indeed some black and white worth remembering. Let's also set aside
for the moment Islamic literature and architecture, which have nothing
to envy in Fallaci's Rome, as any half-way educated person knows.
Let's see, and lastly? "Lastly
– writes Fallaci – there is science. A science that has
discovered many illnesses and cures them. I am alive today, for the
time being, thanks to our science, not Mohammed's. A science that has
changed the face of this planet with electricity, the radio, the telephone,
the television… Well then, let us ask now the fatal question:
and behind the other culture, what is there?"
The fatal answer: behind
our science one finds the Egyptians, the Caldeans, the Hindus, the Greeks,
the Chinese, the Arabs, the Jews and the Africans. Or does Fallaci believe
that everything arose through spontaneous generation in the last fifty
years? She needs to be reminded that Pythagoras took his philosophy
from Egypt and Caldea (Iraq) – including his famous mathemetical
formula, which we use not only in architecture but also in the proof
of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity – as did that other
wise man and mathematician Thales. Both of them travelled through the
Middle East with their minds more open than Fallaci's when she made
the trip. The hypothetical-deductive method – the basis for scientific
epistemology – originated among Egyptian priests (start with Klimovsky,
please), zero and the extraction of square roots, as well as innumerable
mathematical and astronomical discoveries, which we teach today in grade
school, were born in India and Iraq; the alphabet was invented by the
Phoenicians (ancient Lebanese), who were also responsible for the first
form of globalization known to the world. The zero was not an invention
of the Arabs, but of the Hindus, but it was the former who brought it
to the West. By contrast, the advanced Roman Empire not only was unfamaliar
with zero – without which it would be impossible to imagine modern
mathematics and space travel – but in fact possessed an unwieldy
systemof counting and calculation that endured until the late Middle
Ages. Through to the early Renaissance there were still businessmen
who used the Roman system, refusing to exchange it for Arabic numerals,
due to racial and religious prejudices, resulting in all kinds of mathematical
erros and social disputes. Meanwhile, perhaps it is better to not even
mention that the birth of the Modern Era began with European cultural
contact – after long centuries of religious repression –
first with Islamic culture and then with Greek culture. Or did anyone
think that the rationalism of the Scholastics was a consequence of the
practice of torture in the holy dungeons? In the early 12th century,
the Englishman Adelard of Bath undertook an extensive voyage of study
through the south of Europe, Syria and Palestine. Upon returning from
his trip, Adelard introduced into under-developed England a paradigm
that even today is upheld by famous scientists like Stephen Hawking:
God had created Nature in such a way that it could be studied and explained
without His intervention. (Behold the other pillar of the sciences,
rejected historically by the Roman Church.) Indeed, Adelard reproached
the thinkers of his time for having allowed themselves to be enthralled
by the prestige of the authorities – beginning with Aristotle,
clearly. Because of them he made use of the slogan "reason against
authority," and insisted he be called "modernus." "I
have learned from my Arab teachers to take reason as a guide –
he wrote – but you only adhere to what authority says." A
compatriot of Fallaci, Gerardo de Cremona, introduced to Europe the
writings of the "Iraqi" astronomer and mathematician Al-Jwarizmi,
inventor of algebra, of algorithms, of Arabic and decimal calculus;
translated Ptolemy from the Arabic – since even the astsronomical
theory of an official Greek like Ptolemy could not be found in Christian
Europe – as well as dozens of medical treatises, like those of
Ibn Sina and Irani al-Razi, author of the first scientific treatise
on smallpox and measles, for which today he might have been the object
of some kind of persecution.
We could continue listing
examples such as these, which the Italian journalist ignores, but that
would require an entire book and is not the most important thing at
the moment.
What is at stake today is
not only protecting the West against the terrorists, home-grown and
foreign, but – and perhaps above all – protecting the West
from itself. The reproduction of any one of its most monstrous events
would be enough to lose everything that has been attained to date with
respect to Human Rights. Beginning with respect for diversity. And it
is highly probable that such a thing could occur in the next ten years,
if we do not react in time.
The seed is there and it
only requires a little water. I have heard dozens of times the following
expression: "the only good thing that Hitler did was kill all those
Jews." Nothing more and nothing less. And I have not heard it from
the mouth of any muslim – perhaps because I live in a country
where they practically do not exist – nor even from anyone of
Arab descent. I have heard it from neutral creoles and from people of
European descent. Each time I hear it I need only respond in the following
manner in order to silence my interlocutor: "What is your last
name? Gutiérrez, Pauletti, Wilson, Marceau… Then, sir,
you are not German, much less a pure Aryan. Which means that long before
Hitler would have finished off the Jews he would have started by killing
your grandparents and everyone else with a profile and skin color like
yours." We run the same risk today: if we set about persecuting
Arabs or Muslims we will not only be proving that we have learned nothing,
but we will also wind up persecuting those like them: Bedouins, North
Africans, Gypsies, Southern Spaniards, Spanish Jews, Latin American
Jews, Central Americans, Southern Mexicans, Northern Mormons, Hawaiians,
Chinese, Hindus, and so on.
Not long ago another Italian,
Umberto Eco, summed up a sage piece of advice thusly: "We are a
plural civilization because we permit mosques to be built in our countries,
and we cannot renounce them simply because in Kabul they throw Christian
propagandists in jail (…) We believe that our culture is mature
because it knows how to tolerate diversity, and members of our culture
who don't tolerate it are barbarians."
As Freud and Jung used to
say, that act which nobody would desire to commit is never the object
of a prohibition; and as Boudrillard said, rights are established when
they have been lost. The Islamic terrorists have achieved what they
wanted, twice over. The West appears, suddenly, devoid of its greatest
virtues, constructed century after century, preoccupied now only with
reproducing its own defects and with copying the defects of others,
such as authoritarianism and the preemptive persecution of innocents.
So much time imposing its culture on the other regions of the planet,
to allow itself now to impose a morality that in its better moments
was not even its own. Virtues like tolerance and self-criticism never
represented its weakness, as some would now have it, but quite the opposite:
only because of them was any kind of progress possible, whether ethical
or material. Democracy and Science never developed out of the narcissistic
reverence for its own culture but from critical opposition within it.
And in this enterprise were engaged, until recently, not only the "damned
intellectuals" but many activist and social resistance groups,
like the bourgeoisie in the 18th century, the unions in the 20th century,
investigative journalism until a short time ago, now replaced by propaganda
in these miserable times of ours. Even the rapid destruction of privacy
is another symptom of that moral colonization. Only instead of religious
control we will be controlled by Military Security. The Big Brother
who hears all and sees all will end up forcing upon us masks similar
to those we see in the East, with the sole objective of not being recognized
when we walk down the street or when we make love.
The struggle is not –
nor should it be – between Easterners and Westerners; the struggle
is between tolerance and imposition, between diversity and homogenization,
between respect for the other and scorn and his annihilation. Writings
like Fallaci's The Rage and the Pride are not a defense of Western culture
but a cunning attack, an insulting broadside against the best of what
Western culture has to offer. Proof of this is that it would be sufficient
to swap the word Eastern for Western, and a geographical locale or two,
in order to recognize the position of a Taliban fanatic. Those of us
who have neither Rage nor Pride for any particular race or culture are
nostalgic for times gone by, which were never especially good or especially
bad.
A few years ago I was in
the United States and I saw there a beautiful mural in the United Nations
building in New York, if I remember correctly, where men and women from
distinct races and religions were visually represented – I think
the composition was based on a somewhat arbitrary pyramid, but that
is neither here nor there. Below, with gilded letters, one could read
a commandment taught by Confucius in China and repeated for millenia
by men and women throughout the East, until it came to constitute a
Western principle: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto
you." In English it sounds musical, and even those who do not know
the language sense that it refers to a certain reciprocity between oneself
and others. I do not understand why we should scratch that commandment
from our walls - founding principle for any democracy and for the rule
of law, founding principle for the best dreams of the West – simply
because others have suddenly forgotten it. Or they have exchanged it
for an ancient biblical principle that Christ took it upon himself to
abolish: "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." Which
at present translates as an inversion of the Confucian maxim, something
like: do unto others everything that they have done to you – the
well-known, endless story.
Translated by Bruce Campbell
Originally publish in La
República, Montevideo, January 8, 2003
Jorge Majfud, Uruguayan writer, 1969. From an early age he read and
wrote fictions, but he chose to major in architecture and graduated
from the Universidad de la República in Montevideo, Uruguay in
1996. He taught mathematics and art at the Universidad Hispanoamericana
de Costa Rica and Escuela Técnica del Uruguay. He currently teaches
Latin American literature at the University of Georgia. He has traveled
to more than forty countries, whose impressions have become part of
his novels and essays. His publications include Hacia qué patrias
del silencio/memorias de un desaparecido (novel, 1996); Crítica
de la pasión pura (essays, 1998); La reina de América
(novel, 2001), El tiempo que me tocó vivir (essays, 2004) and
La narración de lo invisible/Significados ideológicos
de América Latina (essay, 2006). His stories and articles have
been published in various newspapers, magazines, and readers, such as
El País and La República of Uruguay, Milenio of México,
Jornada of Bolivia, Tiempos del Mundo of Washingtonn, Monthly Review
of New York, Resource Center of The Americas de Minnesota, Rebelión,
and Hispanic Culture Review of George Mason University. He is a regular
contributor to Bitácora, the weekly publication of La República.
He is a member of the International Scientific Committee of the magazine
Araucaria in Spain. He was distinguished with Mention Premio Casa de
las Américas, in Habana, Cuba in 2001, for the novel La Reina
de América and Excellence in Research Award, UGA, United States
2006. His essays and articles have been translated into Portuguese,
French, English and German.
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