Without Roots

Relativism, Christianity, and the West

MARCELLO PERA

A Symptom

At the beginning of his famous essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber raised the following question: “A product of modern European civilization, studying any problem of universal history, is bound to ask himself to what combination of circumstances the fact should be attributed that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value.”¹

Weber was speaking in particular about “the most fateful force in our modern life, capitalism,” but the same question might be asked of quite a few institutions not included on his list. Modern science, for example, is a Western invention that has a universal value. So, too, are liberalism, separation of civil society and state or church and state, the rule of law, the welfare state, democracy, as well as the “universal” conventions, declarations, and bills of rights. These and other institutions originate in and are characteristic of the West, particularly Western Europe. They belong to specific periods of Western history, have spread and imposed themselves in other parts of the world, and claim to have universal value.

The explanations that have been offered for these unique phenomena diverge, sometimes markedly. I will not enter into the merits of the solutions, although I feel obliged to mention that no serious attempt to account for these great moments in history has ignored the contribution of Christianity—direct or indirect, causal or concomitant, determinant or auxiliary, supportive or critical—thereby confirming that Christianity has been the greatest force in Western history. Instead I wish to focus on a new and paradoxical fact.

While the explanations have varied widely, the basic validity of the question has always been upheld. Today, by contrast, exactly one hundred years after the publication of Weber’s essay, the question itself is the first thing to be questioned, criticized, and ultimately refuted. The thinking that currently prevails in the West regarding the universal features of the West is that none of them has universal value. According to the proponents of these ideas, the universality of Western institutions is an illusion, because in reality they are only one particularity among many, with a dignity equal to that of others, and without any intrinsic value superior to that of others. Consequently to recommend these institutions as universal would be a gesture of intellectual arrogance or an attempt at cultural hegemony, imposed by arms, politics, economics, or propaganda. Moreover it only goes to follow that seeking to export these same institutions to cultures or traditions that are different from our own would be an act of imperialism.

Samuel Huntington summarized this widespread Western trend in his celebrated book, more reviled than read, on the clash of civilizations. He summarizes his political thesis as follows: “In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.”²

One case in point is the question of “exporting” democracy. This issue has been the subject of extensive debate in relation to the second Iraq war and the “Greater Middle East” initiative launched by the President of the United States, George W. Bush. Opponents of these two initiatives have argued that democracy should not be exported. They do so not because the social, economic, legal, and institutional conditions of the countries affected are still backward, which would make the entire operation premature. Not because the institutions typical of democracy—the vote, equality, laws, parliaments, courts, and so forth—inevitably undergo sometimes profound modifications when they are grafted to different cultures (from England to India, for example, or from France to Algeria), which would make the operation unilateral. Instead they argue that exporting democracy would amount to imposing one form of life on other equally legitimate, worthy, respectable forms of life, which would make the operation violent.

One particularly revealing symptom shows the extent to which this mixture of timidity, prudence, convenience, reluctance, and fear has penetrated the fiber of the West. I refer to the form of self-censorship and self-repression that goes by the name of political correctness. “P.C.” is the newspeak that the West uses nowadays to imply, allude to, or insinuate rather than to affirm or maintain.

We read and hear this newspeak every day. According to its dictates, everything can be compared and evaluated within the confines of Western culture—be it Coca-Cola with Chianti, Gaudν with Le Corbusier, Darwinism with intelligent design—and many comparisons can be made between aspects of Western culture and their counterparts in other cultures, such as hospitality, social customs, individual behavior, clothing, and so forth. Yet should one attempt to place in a hierarchical order these cultures or civilizations—such as the ones that Max Weber described in the past and Samuel Huntington describes in the present—or to simply organize them according to a scale of preferences, from better to worse, out pop self-censorship, prohibitions, and linguistic restraints. Consequently, as one can easily document in today’s newspeak, whenever a culture lacks or flatly rejects our institutions, we are not allowed to say that our own culture is better or simply preferable. The only thing that politeness allows us to say is that cultures and civilizations are different.

To me this form of linguistic re-education is unacceptable. I reject it on moral grounds, which are the ultimate reason for refuting an intellectual position.³ To justify this rejection, I will outline my argument in the following manner.

First, by way of introduction, I will refer to a concrete application of newspeak: our relationship with Islam. Then I will move from the political symptom to the cultural cause, and attempt to refute this cause—relativism—in the two philosophical embodiments of relativism that the West has served up for many years now. Finally I will examine three practical consequences of this philosophy: the negative influence of post-conciliar relativism on Christian theology, which helps to explain the current weakness of the Church and the failure to obtain recognition of the Christian roots of Europe in the new (and now defunct) European Constitutional Treaty; the malaise of Europe, a rich continent that is unsure of its identity and its future and powerless to solve the resulting problems; and finally, the West’s boredom with its own principles and values, at the very moment in which it has been targeted by a deadly war declared and conducted by Islamic fundamentalism.