Several correspondents have alleged, that when I use such terms as “the West,” or (with greater drollness) “Western Civ,” it is a secret code for a secret agenda and that what I really mean by them is “Christendom.” One self-declared discerning reader goes so far as to say that I sometimes mean this when I write “America.”
But no, that reader has over-discerned. I generally use “America” to distinguish from “Europe,” which is to say, one part of “the West” from another. I might also confess to sometimes subtly distinguishing the West in the sense of “Western Christendom” (the Catholic West plus the Protestant West that sprang from Rome through schism), from “Eastern Christendom.” Russia, today, based on Moscow, “the third Rome” (after Rome itself, and Constantinople the “New Rome”) belongs to that realm, and likewise such countries as Serbia and Greece. They share in an indisputably Christian past, but they are not “Western” except by external influence. “Western” necessarily means, “formatively Catholic.”
I hope my reader is bearing with me. I am putting him through hoops today. I think it is actually worth pondering these “deep-historical” things, especially at a time, like today, when various deep-historical forces are operating visibly on current events. For to try to understand, e.g., the war that is being waged against “Christendom” (as they call it) by those who claim to speak for Islam, it is useful to grasp what THEY mean. Even useful for “liberals” in the West, who exempt themselves from any religious heritage. For if you are going to die the way e.g. Theo van Gogh died in Holland, you might as well know why you’re being killed.
But back to the starting question. Am I alluding to a secret-agenda “Christendom,” when I say “the West”? And the answer is half-way to “yes.”
For I refer to things which, having common origins, are likely to have much in common. Through centuries, Protestants, for instance, imagined themselves the opposite of Catholics, from whom they’d split away, and yet if we move the camera back, they have so much in common that, to many Eastern minds, they might as well be one and the same. And likewise, practising Christians and “post-Christians” (people who never went to church in their lives) have so much in common that, to many Muslims, there is little to choose between them.
Reciprocally, we may sometimes discern a horizon line for our own understanding. The behaviour of a practising Catholic is not entirely a puzzle to a practising Protestant (and vice versa). The behaviour of a Coptic Christian in Cairo would be more of a puzzle, though not entirely. Consciously or unconsciously, we share biblical and many traditional sources. And even the “post-Christian” in many, many ways “speaks the same language.” For so many of the once-revolutionary ideas of the Gospels and St. Paul (and of the Old Testament they built upon) continue to be taken for granted, long after the texts have been consciously discarded. The irreligious might want to attribute this to some law of cultural neguentropy, working against cultural entropy. Or as momentum: things continue in the same direction until they are deflected or stopped.
Such that, whether we are “post” or practising Christians, the civilization that was founded on Christian belief makes more sense to us than any other. And the behaviour of people raised from birth without any Christian assumptions, and instead on other religious assumptions, must often seem strange. Entirely strange, if we do not make a conscious effort to understand them on their own terms.
This is not to say that it is impossible to understand the complete stranger. There is much truth in President George W. Bush’s assertion that all human beings want the same things, or in the biologist’s observation that, at the animal level, we are driven by the same instincts and impulses. But there is also much to mislead us in that, for a religious or cultural outlook can turn the same instincts many different ways.
Notice I have avoided making a single “value judgment” to this point. For the point I am trying to make today is, I think, prior to any value judgment. It is nevertheless an important one, if any “we” is going to survive in the world.
We must acknowledge our roots, to understand ourselves. And only then can we begin to understand people with different roots. The person who denies his own origins can understand nothing.
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