Event
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by The Most Reverend Dr Peter Carnley AO, Anglican Archbishop of Perth and Primate of Australia.
Presented at the Perth Day of Ideas, 2 July 2004
You may have noticed in the course of Ronald Reagan's funeral, if you watched the ceremony as it was telecast from the National Cathedral in Washington the other day, that Ronald Reagan was credited with 'winning the Cold War'. It struck me at the time that the Cold War was probably not the kind of war that can really be said to have been won, but what seemed to be in the mind of the eulogists was Reagan's firm but very warm and friendly approach to Mikhail Gorbachev. I am sure that friendliness did contribute in some way to end the Cold War, though I myself think that some other forces may also have been at work, something more than just Ronald Reagan's benign smile.
In any event, I want to begin what I have to say this evening by referring to Samuel Huntington's 1993 thesis that after the end of the Cold War, the collapse of communism signalled the end of ideological battles of a political kind, and that the next great world conflict would involve a clash of civilizations, East and West, Islam and Christianity. For it seems to me that, just as wrong as the crediting of Reagan with 'winning of the Cold War' almost single-handedly, is Huntington's thesis about the subsequent clash of civilizations. I think this is a wrong analysis of what is currently going on all around us for a number of reasons.
For a start, given the contemporary reality of politically radicalized and fundamentalist inspired terrorism, which of course is not to be underestimated, there is nevertheless today a huge amount of dialogue going on between Christians and Moslems. In an attempt to isolate and neutralize the influence of politically radicalized extremist elements within Islam, inter-faith dialogue has never been pursued with such urgent commitment and energy, particularly since 9/11. In my own tradition, the contribution of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey who initiated a number of Christian-Moslem contacts, has to be acknowledged; George Carey in fact has openly challenged British Moslems to be more forthright in distancing themselves from radical elements. Certainly, far from a clash of civilizations, there has probably never been such an intense and serious engagement of these two cultures as there is today. And this is happening at all levels, international, national and local. The Anglican Communion now has a formal dialogue with Al Azhar Al Sharif, the most esteemed centre of Islamic learning and culture in Cairo, and almost certainly, the oldest university in the world, for example. In February I myself spoke at an International Colloquium on Managing Moslem-Christian relations in the University of Melbourne. The National Council of Churches here in Australia has a new three way dialogue going on between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Here in Perth the WA Council of Churches has initiated a dialogue on values in Australian Society in which the Moslem Community is fully involved ' the next meeting is to be hosted by the Islamic Council of WA. All this speaks, not of a clash of civilizations but of an intense and serious engagement. Indeed, at one of our recent Anglican-Moslem international dialogues Prince Hassan of Jordan helpfully pointed out that there are really not two somehow self-contained civilizations; rather, in a highly globalised environment there is really only one civilization, human civilization - there may be different and complementary linguistic groups and cultures within it, but today there is really only one world civilization.
Moreover, a clash of civilizations may be a far too simplistic way of looking at things; for, the current social and political tensions that we experience around the world may certainly be understood differently. In what I think is a very interesting book called The Revenge of God (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994), a French researcher from the Institute of Political Studies in Paris called Gilles Kepel, argues that at the end of the 1970s something profoundly significant began to happen on the world stage. What began to happen involved all three of the great monotheistic religions simultaneously. The significant years are the years 1977, 1978, and 1979. Let me remind you of what happened at that time.
In May 1977 for the first time in the history of the State of Israel, Labour failed to win enough seats in the election of that year to form a government. Menachem Begin, a religious conservative became prime minister. This election signaled a breakthrough for Zionist religious movements, which had suffered a long eclipse; and as a result Jewish settlements in the occupied territories were stepped up. Prime Minister Sharon has not wavered from the same policy that appears to be designed to make life so uncomfortable for Palestinians (by building walls and blowing up houses) as to pressure a mass migration out of the region. All this is in accordance with a policy driven by the religious belief that God looked with favour on his Chosen People and that a special covenant prevailed over the land of Israel. That began in 1977.
It was in the following year, in September 1978, that the Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, was elected Pope. Without doubt this strengthened the resolve of the Roman Catholic people of Eastern Europe in a religious revival that challenged an already ailing Communism. The saying of mass in the Warsaw shipyards as a sign of protest was, when you think about it, in the world of industrial relations a very remarkable phenomenon. But the Solidarity Movement in Poland, led by Lech Walesa, was only one of a number of similar developments across Europe. By 1989 the Berlin wall had fallen.
In the next year, in 1979, Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in America, and embarked upon an agenda designed to achieve social and political ends in the New World of God's promise, especially in relation to abortion law; and ever since the born again New Christian Right has exercised an increasing influence in US elections. Following upon Jimmy Carter's moral and religious purging of 1976, after the Watergate-weakened Nixon era, the statistics show that an increased evangelical and fundamentalist vote certainly contributed to the Regan victories of 1980 and 1984, and is said to underpin the more recent success of George W. Bush as well. I am sure we would all support the continuing existence of the State of Israel, while supporting a similar right for Palestinian self-determination. But we note that George Bush's somewhat unbalanced stance pro-Israel at the expense of the Palestinians is said to be motivated not by a desire to keep the support of New York Jewry, so much as to sustain the electoral sympathy of the fundamentalists of the far Christian Right, particularly in the American South.
Earlier in the same year, in February 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile to Teheran and proclaimed an Islamic republic, and in November of that year the Great Mosque in Mecca was attacked by an armed group opposed to Saudi control of Holy Places. These events opened the eyes of the world to the social and political potential of Islam, long since imagined by most of us in the West to be a picturesquely turbaned religious curiosity. The assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981 and Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion quickly followed, not to mention subsequent deeds of politically radicalized Islam, whose horrendously unforgettable images are burned into our memories.
Now, Kepel argues that the simultaneous occurrence of these religiously motivated movements within all three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, indicates that something significant was happening across the world towards the end of the 1970s. He speaks of it as the re-Judaization of Judaism, the re-Christianization of Christianity, and the re-Islamization of Islam, and describes it as a shared religious development fed in each case by a growing sense of the futility of secular forces alone, without religious faith, both to give adequate shape to community or to be capable of supplying the values necessary for a community to hold together. Thus from the late 1970s onwards, he says, 'The aspiration for a better world changed register and passed from the secular domain to the religious.' (Kepel p. 17). In other words, far from a clash of civilizations, Islam and Christianity, East and West, Kepel argues that what became increasingly evident within all three Abrahamic religions at the very same time was a growing sense of the futility of the prevailing secular forces and ideologies alone to produce the good society. The clash is not between East and West, Islam and Christianity, but between religion and purely secular forces and ideologies. In relation to this, the Soviet collapse was not the single-handed work of Ronald Reagan and his benign smile, as much as a combination of the new-found confidence behind the Iron Curtain triggered by the election of a Polish Pope, and very importantly, the creeping awareness from within Soviet Union itself that it had become little more than a struggling third world power with nuclear weapons. It lost its belief in itself and in its secular ideology. In the decade following, miraculously, after seventy years of very severe repression, the Patriarch of Moscow opened 12,000 churches across Russia.
So Kepel's thesis is that around 1977, 78 and 79 the aspiration for a better world changed register and passed from the purely secular domain to the religious, very broadly conceived across all three monotheistic faiths. I think it is obvious that today the international political agenda is being conditioned and even determined by religion in a way that has not been the case for at least 300 years. Perhaps there has never been a time in the history of the world, when religion has been such a public force, whether for good or ill, as it is in our time. Indeed, while most of us imagined that the challenge to religion in the late twentieth century was to modernize, to bring the Church into the modern world, for example, (remember 'aggiornamento' or up-dating of the Second Vatican Council of the late 1960s), what has happened is not so much the modernization of religion as the religion-isation of modernity. When you think about it, this may well be a signal that the European Enlightenment of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century may be over.
Now what has this to say to us in Australia right now? Well, the Cold War may have been won, the threat of communism is over, interest rates are low and so is unemployment (if you are prepared to over-look those in only part-time jobs), there is a housing boom, and so on, and you might think that things have never been so good, at least in an economic sense. But in another sense there are indications that there may have never been a time in our history when things have been so bad. Indeed, I am of the view that most liberal democratic societies are really in big trouble, more trouble than we are usually prepared to admit. I am thinking of youth suicide in our society on an unprecedented scale, and burgeoning rates of depression, the popping of loads of Prozac, family breakdown and disintegration and the apparent inability of people to sustain relationships, even a reluctance to commit to relationships in the first place; the increasing social problems we have with drugs, excessive consumption of alcohol, gambling, and now obesity, even amongst children, the increasing levels of violence in our society and, despite inherited talk of mateship, increasing levels of litigation even to the point of making it impossible to get professional indemnity insurance, and the need for security systems everywhere, not to protect us from terrorists but to protect us from ourselves.
Given this darker side of our social life I think it is understandable why, despite our attempts to commend our democratic freedoms to the rest of the world, our society, particularly with its morally permissive face, is despised as a threatening and corrupting force to be resisted at all costs in the Islamic world. My hunch is that in the next decade of dialogue with Islam we may well find ourselves on the back foot, as we are forced into a kind apologetic for all of western society's ills.
Now, apart from these practical matters, what is concerning to me is that when you examine the ideological underpinning of our kind of society, I think there is also some cause for concern. The roots of our society, as of all western liberal democratic societies, lie, of course, in the European Enlightenment of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the risk of over-simplification, in the short time that I have, I think it is nevertheless fair to say that the key characteristic of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on individual autonomy and independence, the power of reason and the questioning of received authorities, is its individualism. The individual is free in our kind of society; politically free in the sense that the individual has democratic rights and freedoms, but also free in matters of religion and personal morality. So long as you do not encroach on my personal space and I do not intrude into yours we get along just fine. The resultant diversity of religious and moral viewpoint is then held together by the primary Enlightenment value of tolerance. Society becomes a kind of fragile consensus, an uneasy truce of potentially conflicting moral and religious viewpoints. If we are wise we don't discuss politics, religion or morality at dinner parties for fear of breaking up the group. If we are lucky, when we pull the resulting diversity of moral, political and religious viewpoint together in a reasonably coherent way, we call it multiculturalism.
But there are some clear negatives attaching to all this, which I think can be stated as five points:
First, the tolerance of a diversity of potentially conflicting viewpoints means that moral truth tends to go out the window. The idea of public truth or an agreed set of community standards is shelved in favour of the tolerance of a wide range of alternative individual viewpoints, which we tolerate as though one is as good as another. 'You do your thing and I'll do mine'. So public truth gives way to private truth, what is true 'for me'.
Second, this naturally means that we have become somewhat reticent when it comes to commending moral and religious values to the young: Johnny is left to decide such things for himself when he grows up - and who are you to tell me that your values are better than mine anyway. The near collapse of an education in religious and moral values of the world most of us grew up in is probably something we will all live to regret.
But, third, this also means that as a community we tend to put less and less energy into community conversation and debate about religious and moral matters: we do not really believe in the possibility of an agreed outcome or moral consensus any more. The slogan 'You do your thing and I'll do mine' is a conversation stopper. Under pressure of our commitment to the mere tolerance of a wide diversity of individual viewpoints, we do not even pursue the idea of an agreed communitarian approach to the clarification and commendation of values for the living of life well in community.
Fourth, we tend to get hooked as a consequence on a morality of individual rights, and we become involved in the protection of our rights against the erosion of those rights by society at large. This is by way of contrast with an ethic of the virtues (Aristotle). Formerly we relied on the virtues to move us from where we happen to be to what we might become, in what was a very dynamic approach to our understanding of humanity. But an ethic of rights is very static. You either have rights or you don't. If you do, you work defensively to protect those rights from being eroded. It is of a piece with the basic individualism of western liberal democracies that society tends always to be portrayed negatively as a threat to individual rights and freedoms ' even to the point of Mrs. Thatcher's famous remark that there is no such things a society, only individuals and their families.
And (fifth) this means that in our kind of society 'protest' tends to become the characteristic way of expressing a moral or religious viewpoint - rather than a genuine community conversation and debate as together we try to work out the best ways for living life well in community. The closest to a genuine communitarian approach to a moral issue that I can recall in recent history, since John Howard so successfully shut down the reconciliation and republican debates, was the national debate about stem cell research last year; and even in this rationality was maintained only by the skin of its teeth in amongst all the sectarian protesting and name-calling.
So, I have a very basic question about whether the Enlightenment value of tolerance alone is really capable of giving adequate shape to community or capable of supplying the values necessary for a community to hold together. This is essentially the same question that Kepel believes led to the cataclysmic events of 1977, 1978, and 1979 to which I have already referred. In our case this is a question about whether the mere tolerance of a diversity of individual viewpoint bordering on a kind of mutual indifference can lead to a positively healthy and robust sense of shared purpose, to a genuine sense of social cohesion and of mutual well-being in community. This has become for me somewhat problematic. I would not dare to allow myself to think (it would be far too melodramatic) that somewhere down the track the time could come when, like the Soviet Union, we will lose confidence in the ability of our own society to sustain itself as an inter-dependent community of neighbourly care and support. (Though I do note that even the great Roman Empire lost its nerve and broke up from within). But, clearly, a society based upon the mere tolerance of individual diversity, can lead to a stand-offish attitude of indifference and the virtual shutting down of any interest in sitting down together to work out what might be most desirable for the living of live well in community
And that is why a day of ideas, such as we will participate in tomorrow, is so important. It is important because in the context of our kind of society it is really so rare. In Australia, politics has tended in recent times to become a kind of low grade subversive activity in which those on both sides of the political spectrum simply seek to destabilize the other by lobbing the occasional distracting hand grenade or exploiting some gaff or administrative deficit in order to gain some small electoral advantage. But, where are the policies based on values that might move us from where we happen to be to what we might become? Where are the policies informed by a vision of a future - a future that could be so much more just and equitable and positively and creatively enriching, harmonious and peaceful? So, where is the big picture vision for the Australia of the future?
Perhaps the rest of us have to get on with the business of thinking big.