Reply #26: You Are Right, My Friend, That It Is A Complex Matter

[The Magistrate]

My most basic point in this question is not simply that an "Islamic Rennaisance or Reformation" would have been immensely helpful to that culture, but that there are some inherent elements of that cultural complex, and its history, that have rendered such a thing particularly difficult for it, and seem to be hampering it even today, in its response to the challenge of Western power. This does not seem to me a question of blame: if one were to observe that rats had driven mice off the bounty of a new-sown field, owing to their superior capabilities for agression stemming from their greater size, it would be perverse to charge the observer with blaming mice for their lesser bulk.

The late Prof. Gould's likening of competion between human cultures to a Lamarkian system of evolution, with descent of acquired traits, and an element of self-direction in their acquisition, has always struck me as a wise and useful one, for this seem to be both the field and style in which competion between human groups occurs: other living things have their beings shaped to particular requirements in particular environments; humans shape their cultural arrangements and techniques to particular environments. To some degree, of course, humans alter the environments that surround them by doing so, both by direct manipulation of their surroundings, and by doing things differently than other humans who may come to be a part of their surroundings. Any alteration of the surrounding environment is always both a threat and opportunity to any existing form of life, because its adaptions and behaviors may suit the new conditions more or less well, and there will be consequences that follow from this. The capability to adapt in new circumstances is of great potential value, therefore. Wherever there is a degree of self selection in what adaptations are or are not made, there must always arise the possibilty that judgement will be exercised well or poorly, whether it is exercised collectively or by a single mind, but this can be examined without the lense of blame or credit, it seems to me, and it seems difficult to examine human behaviors without doing so to some degree.

The overwhelming majority of human cultures that have ever existed have been based on the premise that the ancestors got it right, and have therefore devoted the greater portion of their energies to preserving the ways of the ancestors. This has not prevented the development and spread of such novelties as herding and farming and metal tools and an increasing complexity of social arrangements, but with each such great inovation, the original pattern has tended to reassert itself, and the culture that incorporated such developments has come to view them as something the ancestors got right, that must be preserved accordingly. The radical difference of the modern West is that it is a cultural complex that depends on novelty, that discards not just the ways of the ancestors, but even of the grandparents and parents who still are breathing. It creates the novelties that it needs to thrive, and imposes them willy-nilly, by the power it has thus acquired, on all others, because it alters the conditions in which all others exist, whether they, or it, wish this particularly or not.

Even where the ancestors are deified to some degree, as has been the most common human cultural practice, they retain a basically human character. There is a great difference between what has been ordained by a recognizably human agency, however hoary and awe-inspiring, and what is ordained by a transcendant, universal, omnipotent diety. Clearly, a culture rooted in the former will prove much more susceptible to alteration, whether in crisis or simply for possibilty of great gain. A culture based on the latter will provide far more potent tools to prevent alteration of its ways, providing belief in the postulated diety remains dominant. It seems obvious to me one of these patterns will be better able to adjust to changed circumtances, particularly where that change consists in being placed at a relative disadvantage to another human group in the ability to exercise power.

An examination of the impacts of Western imperialism on China and on the Islamic heartland would seem to bear this out. Serious modern Western depredation on both began about the same time, the early portion of the nineteenth century; both operated at a serious technical deficeit relative to the West; and the rapacious intent of the West towards both was interchangeable in degree. Yet it is clear that China was more difficult for the West to penetrate, and threw off the degree of control the West was able to exert more quickly and completely. China today could hardly be considered to be subject to neo-colonial control, and is indeed emerging as a serious competitor to the Western powers in many respects, in ways only a dreamer could imagine the Islamic heartland actually doing in any forseeable near term future.

Not all of the reasons for this, of course, are directly rooted in a contrast between Islam and the Imperial Confucianism of Ch'ing China. The centralized political organization of Imperial China was a great factor. Western ambitions had to recognize the possibility that the whole human mass of China might be mobilized by an efficient bureaucracy, while in the Islamic heartland, though the population in toto might be similarly daunting, this was not a serious risk. That polity was far too fractionated into ethnic, tribal, clan, and sectarian motley, and the Great Turk's ability to direct it, whether as Sultan or Caliph, was a pale reflection of the Son of Heaven's institutional capabilities. Yet structural characteristics of Islam did make some important contributions to this debility. Islam is an acephalous religion, which tends to militate against any other form of centralization in a culture it dominates. By viewing the original community of believers under Mohammed as the perfect model of Islam, it lent a sacred aura to the political forms of tribe and clan, which militated further against political centralization.

China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made a far better job of modernizing itself than did the Islamic heartland. The debate was not whether to adopt the mechanical innovations of the West, but whether to use them to strengthen the Confucian pattern, or to alter this as well. Even the most conservative of the literatii supported the "Self-Strengthening" movement in the military sphere in the latter days of the Imperium. By the late nineteenth century the idea that redoubling energies towards the ways of the past utopia as a means of dealing with present difficulties was dwindling politically. Both the Nationalists and the Communists emerged with radical prescriptions of modernization in all spheres, and gained in turn predominant support from the country. Their success was greatly aided by there being a cultural impress of central rule, that once gained could sway the allegiance of the great majority to the new course of the new ruler.

The predominant response in the Islamic heartland, in the same period, remained that of redoubled effort to recreate the past utopia of the ideal community of original believers. Ataturk's modernization extended no further than the Turkish heartland; everywhere else modernization occured in any degree, whether intellectually or otherwise, it did so only under the aegis of Western Imperialism itself, where traditional structures were set at naught by the foreign invader. As control by the West has grown less direct, at least over-all, the result seems to have been only increased perseverance in the same failed course. It will suffice no better now, it seems to me, than it has managed to do already.