Trash, treasure and Western culture

Nobody is right all the time, and probably nobody is wrong all the time either. But you wouldn't know it by the way people talk. The subtitle of a book by Christopher Hitchens “How religion poisons everything” illustrates my point. I mean “everything”? I could (and do) buy “Religion poisons some things,” even “many things,” but “everything”? Similarly with haters of all that is Western (many of whom seem to live in our midst), there seems to be this need to trash the whole kit and caboodle. Please don't misunderstand me, there are many things that do need to be trashed. Cooperate greed is one of them, capitalism has been confused with Christianity, as has the mix of politics and Christianity. This seems to poison both of them. So I am not by any means saying that Hitchens does not have a point in some of the things that he is saying, but is absolutely everything wrong? Do we not rather need to learn to “separate the precious from the vile,” the trash from the treasure? In the end we may not be able to agree about what is trash and what is treasure, but we do need to see the good as well as the bad. Do we not need to think and consider and to debate these things, and do we not we need to listen to each other?

It seems to be a quirk of human nature that we do not seem to really appreciate what we have until we no longer have it. Since we are all a mixture of truth and error, right and wrong, we can be pretty sure that any view that completely trashes a culture or people group, or religion is not balanced. To be sure when we have been deeply hurt it is hard to see the good, we can't see the treasure for seeing the trash. But when we operate out of bitterness, we are not always seeing things clearly, and tolerance surly dictates that we should try. Last day we were discussing the total nonintervention that some anthropologists advocate. Let me reiterate that cultural anthropology does have a point about our need for humility. But surely we should not willingly turn a blind eye to oppression wherever it occurs. What to do about such things is another question.

I realize that it is not politically correct to compare cultures, and we do indeed need to display humility cultural sensitivity and appropriate tolerance, but surely we go too far! Taken to the extreme we would have to condemn all war. Is there is no such thing as a just war, have there never been megalomaniacs who some how or other manged to finish up in power? Moral relativism, if it were consistent would exclude not only war, but reform of any kind. This is because we would not be able to say anything was wrong. But not one of us can live consistently with this. We all want to affirm that murder and a lot of other things are wrong (especially when they are close to home!).

The other thing that happens when under the pressure of political correctness we refuse to discern right and wrong, is that we fail to see what is good both outside and closer to home. So then in order to more fully appreciate the treasure (among the trash) that we have been handed down in Western culture, I want us to look, see and understand what is missing from cultures that have not been heavily influenced (or have turned their back on) Judeo Christian values. In this post I will not be able to do anything more than scratch the surface of what I want to say, and in any case most of what I say will be anecdotal. In fact in order to fully see the point I am wanting to make you probably would need to have been born and raised in one of those cultures. What I am saying is that looking at other cultures from inside our own, we may be better able to see the good other cultures have to offer. And this is why the omission of the perspective of indigenous leaders from the Nightline report, mentioned in my August 24th post was so very very wrong! But I digress (slightly).

This point about the positive opinions of our culture from those born outside is important, and if you are willing to have your eyes opened, I can thoroughly recommend a book by Vishal Mangalwadi entitled “The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization.” Mangalwadi's hails originally from India, and his book is eyeopening for me, even after spending 10 months in Africa with my family in the early 90's. That experience was eye opening in and of itself! I was arrested three times during that period. Each time the point was to persuade me to bribe the police. One of those times the whole police station was involved in the attempt. As I said to my wife at the time, we would be shocked and disappointed if this had happened in Canada, but having lived in Africa for that ten months we would almost have been surprised if it had not happened.

There is a phrase that is used frequently over there, it is T.I.A. “this is Africa.” It is spoken as though nothing more need to be said by way of explanation. Nothing should surprise you T.I.A. Uganda had earlier been devastated under the terror of Idi Amin. At the time of our visit (relative) law and order had been restored under Museveni. In any case I had been assured that this was so (or we would not have gone). I was spending most of my sabbatical year at the University in Kampala in Uganda. I went in one morning parked my car, and went to the administration building. The place was deserted and I felt a tension in the air. I learned later that 10 minutes before I had arrived, the police had gone in and shot three students to death, then carted them off. Well I mean they were striking against the government, so what did they expect? T.I.A!

I immediately contacted friends and relatives back home because I “knew” that they would be worried. But nobody had even heard of the incident. Imagine the reaction to this sort of thing happening in North America (or recall the Kent State massacre)! I learned later that this way of dealing with student unrest was standard practice in neighbouring Kenya. You know Kenya, the African country that was held up as a model for how successful the post colonization of Africa could be, that Kenya. What I am saying is that this sort of thing was widely ignored by the Western media. It's not really news, not in Africa (T.I.A!).

I came back home realizing that democracy would not work in Africa, in particular it would not work in Uganda. I am convinced that what would happen is that the majority tribe there would gain power and then simply wipe out the other tribes. If you think I am exaggerating, witness what happened later in neighbouring Rwanda! It's all part of the culture. For hundred's perhaps thousands of years, one of the northern Ugandan tribes had the tradition of raiding other tribes. They would steal a cow or two from each other, and the raids would go on back and forth. It was “relatively harmless,” not too many people lost their lives! Now introduce AK 47's into the game! Not that anybody would do that, right? We would have heard about it right? What can I say? T.I.A!

No doubt some will explain away what I am saying as exaggeration, or at the very least not widespread. Sitting home in relatively safe environments (yes I know many part of the States are far from being safe) it is hard to imagine that such things exist or things that are as bad or worse being widespread and continuing to exist in our modern world. But we need to open our eyes. As I said even knowing what I knew, I found Mangalwadi's book eye opening. As bad as things are at times in the West, we still have very little idea what it would be like not to be able to take all sorts of positive traditional Western values for granted. I am thinking of such things as right of appeal, right to due process of Law, the possibility of blowing the whistle on corruption, basic human rights, freedom of speech etc. etc. All these things are in place as a direct result of our Judeo Christian heritage. So what is being used here is an integral part of the very things that are being trashed. On top of this, when moral relativists say things like “We must not impose our values on others, because to do so is to be repressive, insensitive and intolerant,” they are calling upon the virtues of sensitivity, tolerance and freedom which are in fact unique to the very Judeo Christian teachings the are seeking to dismiss!

I am not saying Western culture is perfect, it is not, and it is less and less so as time goes on. As I said above there are many places that are not safe as gangs run more and more amok in our cities, and prison populations grow and grow. But is this not a direct result of our having turned, and continuing to turn, our backs on the high value our ancestors placed on integrity, faithfulness, marriage and the family? As I blogged in July in “Harmless, wholesome and healthy?” there are traceable relationships between relaxing the divorce laws and fatherlessness, and between fatherlessness and crime, in other words between our increasing malaise and our increasing acceptance of moral relativism.

These things should be telling us something, but the big question is “are we listening?” The story of the camel and the Sheik is well known. Starting with the tip of it's nose, the camel inch by inch got it's whole body into the tent, then kicked out the Sheik. In the same way the well documented, militant, in your face, highly organized, well funded liberal agenda is content with nothing less than the total demise of traditional values. But as Mangalwadi argues very eloquently in his book, to do this is to undermine the very things that made Western Civilization great. Indeed, the ideas and the behaviours that flow from this militant liberalism are lemming like. Author James Burnham put this well even in the title of his book “Suicide of the West.” In other words by all of this we are slowly but surely heading towards our own demise, as we increasingly choose to trash everything, including our treasure!