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October
15, 2001
Marwan
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Clash
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Patrick
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Modern
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October
13, 2001
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Molly
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War:
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Alexander
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War
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October
12, 2001
Imran
Khan
Try
Them in Court
Vijay
Prashad
War
in a Passive Voice
Patrick
Cockburn
Bombing
the Taliban
October
11, 2001
David
Vest
Bob
Dylan and 9/11
Amb.
Edward Peck
Bush
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Hani
Shukrallah
West
Is As West Does
Patrick
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Looming
Humanitarian Crisis
October
10, 2001
Tom
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Earth
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Steve
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What
Is To Be Done?
Simon
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The
Dumbest Weapon
Tariq
Ali
The
Pakistan Maelstrom
Cockburn/St.
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The
Empire Strikes Back
October
9, 2001
David
Vest
The
Rout That Wasn't
Michael
Mandel
This
War Is Illegal
Patrick
Cockburn
Bombs
Weaken Taliban
Lenni
Brenner
Powell
the Owl
Zha
Marginalization
and Terror
Steve
Perry
It
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October 15,
2001
The Roots of Conflict
By Umberto Eco
All the religious wars that have caused
blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings
and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad,
white and black. If western culture is shown to be rich it is
because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to "dissolve"
harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind.
Of course it did not always do this. Hitler, who burned books,
condemned "degenerate" art and killed those belonging
to "inferior" races; and the fascism which taught me
at school to recite "May God Curse the English" because
they were "the people who eat five meals a day" and
were therefore greedy and inferior to thrifty Italians, are also
part of the history of western culture.
It is sometimes hard to grasp
the difference between identifying with one's own roots, understanding
people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad. Should
I prefer to live in Limoges rather than, say, Moscow? Moscow
is certainly a beautiful city. But in Limoges I would understand
the language. Everyone identifies with the culture in which he
grew up and the cases of root transplants, while they do occur,
are in the minority: Lawrence of Arabia dressed as an Arab, but
he ended up back home in England.
The west, often for reasons
of economic expansion, has been curious about other civilisations.
The Greeks referred to those who did not speak their language
as barbarians, that is stammerers, as if they did not speak at
all. But a few more mature Greeks, like the Stoics, noticed that
although the barbarians used different words, they referred to
the same thoughts.
From the second half of the
19th century, cultural anthropology developed as an attempt to
assuage the guilt of the west towards others, and particularly
those others who had been defined as savages; societies without
a history, primitive peoples. The task of the cultural anthropologist
was to demonstrate that beliefs which differed from western ones
existed, and should be taken seriously, not disdained and repressed.
In order to say - as Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi
did, controversially, this month - whether any one culture is
superior to another, parameters have to be established.
A culture can be described
objectively - these people behave like this; believe in spirits
or in a single divine being that pervades the whole of nature;
meet in family clans according to these rules; consider it beautiful
to pierce their noses with rings (this could be a description
of western youth culture); consider pork to be impure; circumcise
themselves; raise dogs for the pot on public holidays or, as
the English and Americans still say of the French, eat frogs.
Obviously, the anthropologist
knows that objectivity is always limited by many factors. The
criteria of judgment depend on our own roots, preferences, habits,
passions, our system of values. For example: do we consider that
the prolonging of the average life span from 40 to 80 years is
worthwhile? I personally believe so, but many mystics could tell
me that, between a glutton who lives for 80 years and Saint Luigi
Gonzaga, who only survived for 23, it was the latter who had
the fuller life.
Do we believe that technological
development, the expansion of trade, and faster transport is
worthwhile? Many think so, and judge our technological civilisation
as superior. But, within the western world itself, there are
those who primarily wish to live in harmony with an uncorrupted
environment, and are willing to relinquish air travel, cars and
refrigerators, to weave baskets and travel on foot from one village
to another, as long as the ozone hole isn't there.
So in order to define one culture
as better than another, it is not enough to describe it (as the
anthropologist does), but it is advisable to have recourse to
a system of values which we do not feel we can relinquish. Only
at this point can we say that our culture is better, for us.
How absolute is the parameter
of technological development? Pakistan has the atom bomb, not
Italy. So is Italy an inferior civilisation? Better to live in
Islamabad than Arcore? Shouldn't we respect the Islamic world
by being reminded that it has given us men like Avicenna (who
was actually born in Buchara, not far from Afghanistan) and Averroes,
as well as Al-Kindi, Avenpace, Avicebron, Ibn Tufayl, or that
great historian of the 14th century Ibn Khaldoun, whom the west
considers as the father of the social sciences. The Arabs of
Spain cultivated geography, astronomy, mathematics or medicine
when the Christian world was lagging far behind in those subjects.
We might recall that those
Arabs of Spain were fairly tolerant of Christians and Jews, while
we gave rise to the ghettoes, and that Saladin, when he reconquered
Jerusalem, was more merciful to the Christians than the Christians
had been to the Saracens when they took over Jerusalem. All very
true, but in the Islamic world there are fundamentalist and theocratic
regimes today which the Christians do not tolerate, and Bin Laden
was not merciful to New York. The Taliban destroyed the great
stone Buddhas with their cannon: conversely, the French carried
out the St Bartholomew's day massacre, but this gives no one
the right to say they are barbarians today.
History is a two-edged sword.
The Turks were impalers (and that's bad) but the orthodox Byzantines
put out the eyes of their dangerous relatives and the Catholics
burned Giordano Bruno; Saracen pirates did many wicked things,
but the buccaneers of his British majesty set fire to the Spanish
colonies in the Caribbean; Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are ferocious
enemies of western civilisation, but within western civilisation
there were men like Hitler and Stalin.
No, the problem of parameters
is not set within history, but in our times. One of the praiseworthy
aspects of western culture (free and pluralistic, and these are
values which we consider basic and essential) is that it has
been long held that the same person can employ different parameters
which may be mutually contradictory on different matters. For
example, the prolonging of life is considered good, and atmospheric
pollution bad, but we can very well see that maybe in big laboratories
where they study how to prolong life, there might be power systems
which themselves produce pollution.
Western culture has developed
the capacity to freely lay bare its own contradictions. Maybe
they remain unresolved, but they are well known and admitted:
how can we manage some positive globalisation while avoiding
the risks and injustices that follow; how can we prolong life
for the millions of Africans dying of Aids (while at the same
time prolonging our own lives) without accepting a planetary
economy which causes people to die of hunger and Aids, and makes
us eat polluted food?
But it is just this criticism
of parameters, pursued and encouraged by the west, that makes
us understand how delicate the matter is. Is it just and proper
to protect bank secrets? Many people think so. But if this secrecy
allows terrorists to keep their accounts in the City of London
then is this defence of so-called privacy a positive value or
a doubtful one? We are always calling our parameters into question.
The western world does so to such an extent as to allow its own
citizens to turn down technological development and become Buddhists,
or go and live in communities where no tyres are used, not even
for horse-drawn carts.
The west has decided to channel
money and effort into studying other customs and practices, but
no one has really given other people the chance to study western
customs and practices, except at schools maintained by white
expatriates, or by allowing the rich from other cultures to study
in Oxford or Paris. What happens then is that they return home
to organise fundamentalist movements, because they feel solidarity
with those of their compatriots who lack the opportunity for
such education.
An international organisation
called Transcultura has been campaigning for an "alternative
anthropology" for some years. It has taken African researchers,
who have never been to the west before, to describe provincial
France and society in Bologna. Both sides started to take a genuine
look at each other, and some interesting discussions took place.
At present, three Chinese - a philosopher, an anthropologist
and an artist - are completing a Marco Polo voyage in reverse,
culminating in a conference in Brussels in November. Imagine
Muslim fundamentalists being invited to research Christian fundamentalism
(not the Catholics this time, but American Protestants, more
fanatical than ayatollahs, who try to expunge all reference to
Darwin from schools). In my opinion the anthropological study
of other people's fundamentalism leads to a better understanding
of one's own. Let them come and study our concept of holy war
(I could commend many interesting texts to them, including some
quite recent ones). They might then take a more critical view
of the idea of holy war back home.
We are a pluralist civilisation
because we allow mosques to be built in our countries, and we
are not going to stop simply because Christian missionaries are
thrown into prison in Kabul. If we did so, we too would become
Taliban. The parameter of tolerating diversity is certainly one
of the strongest and least open to argument. We consider our
culture mature because it can tolerate diversity, and those who
share our culture, while rejecting diversity to be uncivilised,
period. We hope that, if we allow mosques in our countries, one
day there will be Christian churches in their countries, or at
least Buddhas won't get blown up there. If we believe we have
got our parameters right, that is.
But there is a great deal of
confusion. Funny things happen these days. It seems that defending
western values has become a rightwing prerogative, while the
Left, as ever, is pro-Islamic. Now, apart from the pro-third
world, pro-Arab stance of some rightwing and Catholic activist
circles, and so on, this ignores a historical phenomenon which
is there for all to see.
The defence of scientific values,
of technological development and modern western culture in general,
has always been characteristic of secular and progressive political
circles. Indeed, all communist regimes have relied on an ideology
of technological and scientific progress. The 1848 Communist
Manifesto opens with a dispassionate eulogy on the expansion
of the bourgeoisie. Marx does not say it is necessary to change
direction and go over to Asian means of production. He merely
says that the proletariat must learn to master these values and
successes.
Conversely it has always been
reactionary thought (in the best sense of the word), at least
starting from the rejection of the French revolution, which has
opposed the secular ideology of progress and propounded a return
to traditional values. Only a few neo-Nazi groups have a mythical
notion of the west and would be ready to slit the throats of
all Muslims at Stonehenge. The more serious traditionalist thinkers
have always looked to Islam as a source of alternative spirituality,
in addition to the rites and myths of primitive peoples and the
teachings of Buddhism. They have always made a point of reminding
us that we are not superior, but impoverished by our ideology
of progress, and that we must seek the truth among the Sufi mystics
or the whirling dervishes. Thus a strange dichotomy is now opening
on the right. But perhaps it is only a sign that, at times of
great bewilderment (such as the present), no one knows quite
where they stand any more.
But it is at times of bewilderment
that the weapon of analysis and criticism comes into its own,
to be applied to our own superstitions and those of others.
Umberto Eco is the author of The
Name of the Rose, Kant
and the Platypus and many other books. This essay was originally
published in the Italian daily La Repubblica.
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