In today's Wall Street Journal (Saturday, May 10, 2008, A11), Abdurrahman Wahid, former president of Indonesia and co-founder of LibForAll Foundation, and Abdul A'la, associate dean of graduate studies at Sunan Amel Islamic State University in Surabaya, Indonesia, invite the world to join them in wishful thinking:
Palestinians and Israelis need the world's support to create a new reality, in which the highest value of religion and humanity are restored to their proper dignity. We must also help Mulsim populations--not only in Palestine, but throughout the Arab world--to rise to embrace a profoundly spiritual and tolerant understanding of Islam, and a humanistic attitude toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that acknowledges the legacy of suffering on all sides. Such an attitude is a necessary precondition for recognizing Israel's unique history and right to exist, while truly advancing the interests of Palestinians as well.
Alas, there is no magic wand in the world with which so easily to change the minds and attitudes of a large portion of the world's population. What in reality exists are extraordinarily profound economic, social, and political forces that are shifting the tectonic plates of history underneath all of us. These changes are generating the conflict and will go on for a lot longer, certainly for longer than the lifetimes of all of us now living.
The first force is economic globalization. Globalization of markets is bringing all nations into economic competition, creating new prosperity for many, while rearranging traditional distributions of wealth and power. A lot of people are much better off; but many people are losing power. Those people are, at the moment, doing very well in their effort to retain power by using police murder, terrorism, and genocide.
Globalization is powering social modernization. Traditional societies, values, and authority are weakening. Modern society doesn't have much to replace these disintegrating social forms. As a consequence, fundamentalist religious values have rapidly risen to fill the void.
The third force is the weakening of the secular nation-state as the predominant political form of organization around the world. The weakness of the nation-state system is especially apparent in the Middle East and Africa. Unhappily, weak nation-states are especially vulnerable to dictatorship, political corruption, and authoritarianism. We see all these negative qualities in these two large regions. Weak nation-states have not been able to control the tribal forces of terrorism.
What is to replace the corrupted, weak nation-state in the Middle East and Africa? The US is trying to generate democracies, but this plan is proving to be difficult to implement. It is difficult, because the political form of rising fundamentalism is a more attractive vehicle for many people displaced in traditional societies.
The rise of fundamentalism in Islam is not a benign force, because of Islam's (historical) theology, which is violent, expansionist, and totalitarian. Christianity has managed to evolve historically away from its early roots in literalism and to interpret the historical context of its sacred texts. Islam has not. And Islam will not so change any time soon, because the people benefitting from the rise of Islamic fundamentalism have little interest in making such an intellectual journey.
For scholars, the paths of modernization have produced several surpises. They expected (largely because of Marxist theory) that the biological family would weaken, even disintegrate, under the force of economic and social individualism. The opposite has happened. Modernization has for 150 years strengthened the family as a social means of adapting to and coping with industrialization, globalization, labor migrations, and so on. In societies where tribes and clans have been basic units of organization of daily life, marriage, and work, the tribal form has also strengthend and reached outward to the West and East. It has been reinvigorated with the money made by tribal members living away from home.
Scholars also thought that religion would fade. Well, religion has certainly changed, but it has not faded. Traditional ecclesiastical forms of Christianity have struggled on, while fundamentalism and pentacostal forms of Christianity have exploded in popularity around the world. Islam has not faded, either; but in this religion, the forces of fundamentalism have gained great strength. In both Christianity and Islam, versions of the religions that organize religious life around the family have become very popular. For instance, both Mormonism and Seventh-Day-Adventism have gained much membership in Latin America, Africa, and Asia in precisely those areas hit hardest by globalization and modernization. Pentacostalism is very popular in South Korea and Southeast Asia.
The forces of change have just begun their work in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The modernization of Europe and North America took over a century; it will take as long or longer for the rest of the world to make the changes that Europe went through, because most of that world doesn't have the historical benefits of the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment that do so much to prepare European culture for the changes modernization brought.
Finally, remember the horrifying wars that occurred during this process in Europe? We likely face wars of equal magnitude and destruction as a result of modernization in the rest of the world. The whole nation-state order of the Middle East needs to be remade. Political change in China will be no easier. The communist dictatorship of China will not exist for much longer. What will replace it? Will its transformation be peaceful? Very unlikely. And we have a much longer process of nation building to go through in most of Africa. Brace yourself. Keep your powder dry and your guard up.
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