[Discussion] (no subject)
Paksoy, Hb
hb.paksoy@ttu.edu
Thu, 18 Jul 2002 08:39:43 -0500
Foreign Policy Research Institute WIRE
A Catalyst for Ideas
www.fpri.org
THE DIGNITY OF DIFFERENCE:
AVOIDING THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
by Rabbi Professor Jonathan Sacks
Volume 10, Number 3
July 2002
Rabbi Sacks is Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew
Congregations of the British Commonwealth. This essay is
adapted from his speech given for FPRI's 7th Annual
Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs on May 21,
2002, sponsored by a generous contribution from John M.
Templeton, Jr. The full transcript will soon be posted on
FPRI's website (www.fpri.org); in the meantime, you can read
the six previous Templeton Lectures by clicking on:
http://www.fpri.org/education/templetonlecture.html
THE DIGNITY OF DIFFERENCE:
AVOIDING THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
The Templeton Lecture On Religion and World Affairs
by Rabbi Professor Jonathan Sacks
Religion has become a decisive force in the contemporary
world, and it is crucial that it be a force for good -- for
conflict resolution, not conflict creation. If religion is
not part of the solution, then it will surely be part of the
problem. I would like therefore to put forward a simple but
radical idea. I want to offer a new reading, or, more
precisely, a new listening, to some very ancient texts. I do
so because our situation in the 21st century, post-September
11, is new, in three ways.
First, religion has returned, counterintuitively, against
all expectation, in many parts of the world, as a powerful,
even shaping, force.
Second, the presence of religion has been particularly acute
in conflict zones such as Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Kashmir
and the rest of India and Pakistan, Northern Ireland, the
Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Asia.
Third, religion is often at the heart of conflict. It has
been said that in the Balkans, among Catholic Croats,
Orthodox Serbs, and Muslims, all three speak the same
language and share the same race; the only thing that
divides them is religion.
Religion is often the fault-line along which the sides
divide. The reason for this is simple. Whereas the 20th
century was dominated by the politics of ideology, the 21st
century will be dominated by the politics of identity. The
three great Western institutions of modernity -- science,
economics, and politics -- are more procedural than
substantive, answering questions of "What?" and "How?" but
not "Who?" and "Why?" Therefore when politics turns from
ideology to identity, people inevitably turn to religion,
the great repository of human wisdom on the questions "Who
am I?" and "Of what narrative am I a part?"
When any system gives precedence to identity, it does so by
defining an "us" and in contradistinction to a "them."
Identity divides, whether Catholics and Protestants in
Northern Ireland, Jews and Muslims in the Middle East, or
Muslims and Hindus in India. In the past, this was a less
acute issue, because for most of history, most people lived
in fairly constant proximity to people with whom they shared
an identity, a faith, a way of life. Today, whether through
travel, television, the Internet, or the sheer diversity of
our multi-ethnic and multi-faith societies, we live in the
conscious presence of difference. Societies that have lived
with this difference for a long time have learned to cope
with it, but for societies for whom this is new, it presents
great difficulty.
This would not necessarily be problematic. After the great
wars of religion that came in the wake of the Reformation,
this was resolved in Europe in the 17th century by the fact
that diverse religious populations were subject to
overarching state governments with the power to contain
conflict. It was then that nation-states arose, along with
the somewhat different approaches of Britain and America:
John Locke and the doctrine of toleration, and Thomas
Jefferson and the separation of church and state. The
British and American ways of resolving conflict were
different but both effective at permitting a plurality of
religious groups to live together within a state of civil
peace.
What has changed today is the sheer capacity of relatively
small, subnational groups -- through global communications,
porous national borders, and the sheer power of weapons of
mass destruction -- to create havoc and disruption on a
large scale. In the 21st century we obviously need physical
defense against terror, but also a new religious paradigm
equal to the challenge of living in the conscious presence
of difference. What might that paradigm be?
In the dawn of civilization, the first human response to
difference was tribalism: my tribe against yours, my nation
against yours, my god against yours. In this pre-
monotheistic world, gods were local. They belonged to a
particular place and had "local jurisdiction," watching over
the destinies of particular people. So the Mesopotamians had
Marduk and the Moabites Chamosh, the Egyptians their
pantheon and the ancient Greeks theirs. The tribal,
polytheistic world was a world of conflict and war. In some
respects that world lasted in Europe until 1914, under the
name of nationalism. In 1914 young men -- Rupert Brooke and
First World War poets throughout Europe -- were actually
eager to go to war, restless for it, before they saw carnage
on a massive scale. It took two world wars and 100 million
deaths to cure us of that temptation.
However, for almost 2,500 years, in Western civilization,
there was an alternative to tribalism, offered by one of the
great philosophers of all time: Plato. I am going to call
this universalism. My thesis will be that universalism is
also inadequate to our human condition. What Plato argued in
The Republic is that this world of the senses, of things we
can see and hear and feel, the world of particular things,
isn't the source of knowledge or truth or reality. How is
one to understand what a tree is, if trees are always
changing from day to day and there are so many different
kinds of them? How can one define a table if tables come in
all shapes and sizes -- big, small, old, new, wood, other
materials? How does one understand reality in this world of
messy particulars? Plato said that all these particulars are
just shadows on a wall. What is real is the world of forms
and ideas: the idea of a table, the form of a tree. Those
are the things that are universal. Truth is the move from
particularity to universality. Truth is the same for
everyone, everywhere, at all times. Whatever is local,
particular, and unique is insubstantial, even illusory.
This is a dangerous idea, because it suggests that all
differences lead to tribalism and then to war, and that the
best alternative therefore is to eliminate differences and
impose on the world a single, universal truth. If this is
true, then when you and I disagree, if I am right, you are
wrong. If I care about truth, I must convert you from your
error. If I can't convert you, maybe I can conquer you. And
if I can't conquer you, then maybe I have to kill you, in
the name of that truth. From this flows the blood of human
sacrifice through the ages.
September 11 happened when two universal civilizations --
global capitalism and medieval Islam -- met and clashed.
When universal civilizations meet and clash, the world
shakes and lives are lost. Is there an alternative, not only
to tribalism, which we all know is a danger, but also to
universalism?
Let us read the Bible again and hear in it a message that is
both simple and profound, and, I believe, an important one
for our time. We will start with what the Bible is about:
one man, Abraham, and one woman, Sarah, who have children
and become a family and then in turn a tribe, a collection
of tribes, a nation, a particular people, and a people of
the covenant.
What is striking is that the Bible doesn't begin with that
story. For the first eleven chapters, it tells the universal
story of humanity: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the
flood, Babel and the builders, universal archetypes living
in a global culture. In the opening words of Genesis 11,
"The whole world was of one language and shared speech."
Then in Genesis 12, God's call to Abraham, the Bible moves
to the particular. This exactly inverts Plato's order. Plato
begins with the particular and then aspires to the
universal. The Bible begins with the universal and then
aspires to the particular. That is the opposite direction.
It makes the Bible the great counter-Platonic narrative in
Western civilization.
The Bible begins with two universal, fundamental statements.
First, in Genesis 1, "Let us make man in our image, in our
likeness." In the ancient world it was not unknown for human
beings to be in the image of God: that's what Mesopotamian
kings and the Egyptian pharaoh were. The Bible was
revolutionary for saying that every human being is in the
image of God.
The second epic statement is in Genesis 9, the covenant with
Noah, the first covenant with all mankind, the first
statement that God asks all humanity to construct societies
based on the rule of law, the sovereignty of justice and the
non-negotiable dignity of human life.
It is surely those two passages that inspire the words "We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable Rights. . . ." The irony is that these
truths are anything but self-evident. Plato or Aristotle
wouldn't know what the words meant. Plato believed
profoundly that human beings are created unequal, and
Aristotle believed that some people are born to be free,
other to be slaves.
These words are self-evident only in a culture saturated in
the universal vision of the Bible. However, that vision is
only the foundation. From then on, starting with Babel and
the confusion of languages and God's call to Abraham, the
Bible moves from the universal to the particular, from all
mankind to one family. The Hebrew Bible is the first
document in civilization to proclaim monotheism, that God is
not only the God of this people and that place but of all
people and every place. Why then does the Bible deliver an
anti-Platonic, particularistic message from Genesis 12
onwards? The paradox is that the God of Abraham is the God
of all mankind, but the faith of Abraham is not the faith of
all mankind.
In the Bible you don't have to be Jewish to be a man or
woman of God. Melchizedek, Abraham's contemporary, was not a
member of the covenantal family, but the Bible calls him "a
priest of God Most High." Moses' father-in-law, Jethro, a
Midianite, gives Israel its first system of governance. And
one of the most courageous heroines of the Exodus -- the one
who gives Moses his name and rescues him -- is an Egyptian
princess. We call her Batya or Bithiah, the Daughter of God.
Melchizedek, Jethro, and Pharaoh's daughter are not part of
the Abrahamic covenant, yet God is with them and they are
with God. As the rabbis put it two thousand years ago, "The
righteous of every faith, of every nation, have a share in
the world to come." Why, if God is the God of all humanity,
is there not one faith, one truth, one way for all humanity?
My reading is this: that after the collapse of Babel, the
first global project, God calls on one person, Abraham, one
woman, Sarah, and says "Be different." In fact, the word
"holy" in the Hebrew Bible, kadosh, actually means
"different, distinctive, set apart." Why did God tell
Abraham and Sarah to be different? To teach all of us the
dignity of difference. That God is to be found in someone
who is different from us. As the great rabbis observed some
1,800 years ago, when a human being makes many coins in the
same mint, they all come out the same. God makes every human
being in the same mint, in the same image, his own, and yet
we all come out differently. The religious challenge is to
find God's image in someone who is not in our image, in
someone whose color is different, whose culture is
different, who speaks a different language, tells a
different story, and worships God in a different way.
This is a paradigm shift in understanding monotheism. And we
are in a position to hear this message in a way that perhaps
previous generations were not. Because we have now acquired
a general understanding of the world that is significantly
different from our ancestors'. I will give just two
instances of this among many: one from the world of natural
science and one from economics.
The first is from biology. There was a time in the European
Enlightenment when it was thought that all of nature was one
giant machine with many interlocking parts, all harmonized
in the service of mankind. We now know that nature is quite
different, that its real miracle is its diversity. Nature is
a complex ecology in which every animal, plant, bird, every
single species has its own part to play and the whole has
its own independent integrity.
We know even more than this thanks to the discovery of DNA
and our decoding of the genome. Science writer Matt Ridley
points out that the three-letter words of the genetic code
are the same in every creature. "CGA means arginine, GCG
means alanine, in bats, in beetles, in bacteria. Wherever
you go in the world, whatever animal, plant, bug, or blob
you look at, if it is alive, it will use the same dictionary
and know the same code. All life is one." The genetic code,
bar a few tiny local aberrations, is the same in every
creature. We all use exactly the same language. This means
that there was only one creation, one single event when life
was born. This is what the Bible is hinting at. The real
miracle of this created world is not the Platonic form of
the leaf, it's the 250,000 different kinds of leaf there
are. It's not the idea of a bird, but the 9,000 species that
exist. It is not a universal language, it is the 6,000
languages actually spoken. The miracle is that unity creates
diversity, that unity up there creates diversity down here.
One can look at the same phenomenon from the perspective of
economics. We are all different, and each of us has certain
skills and lacks others. What I lack, you have, and what you
lack, I have. Because we are all different we specialize, we
trade, and we all gain. The economist David Ricardo put
forward a fascinating proposition, the Law of Comparative
Advantage, in the early 19th century. This says that if you
are better at making axe heads than fishing, and I am better
at fishing than making axe heads, we gain by trade even if
you're better than me at both fishing and making axe heads.
You can be better than me at everything, and yet we still
benefit if you specialize at what you're best at and I
specialize at what I'm best at. The law of comparative
advantage tells us that every one of us has something unique
to contribute, and by contributing we benefit not only
ourselves but other people as well.
In the market economy throughout all of history, differences
between cultures and nations have led to one of two possible
consequences. When different nations meet, they either make
war or they trade. The difference is that from war at the
very least one side loses, and in the long run, both sides
lose. From trade, both sides gain. When we value difference
the way the market values difference, we create a non-zero
sum scenario of human interaction. We turn the narrative of
tragedy, of war, into a script of hope.
So whether we look at biology or economics, difference is
the precondition of the complex ecology in which we live.
And by turning to the Bible we arrive at a new paradigm, one
that is neither universalism nor tribalism, but a third
option, which I call the dignity of difference. This option
values our shared humanity as the image of God, and creates
that shared humanity in terms like the American Declaration
of Independence or the UN Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. But it also values our differences, just as loving
parents love all their children not for what makes them the
same but for what makes each of them unique. That is what
the Bible means when it calls God a parent.
This religious paradigm can be mapped onto the political map
of the 21st century. With the end of the Cold War, there
were two famous scenarios about where the world would go:
Francis Fukuyama's End of History (1989) and Samuel
Huntington's Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of
World Order (1996).
Fukuyama envisaged an eventual, gradual spread first of
global capitalism, then of liberal democracy, with the
result being a new universalism, a single culture that would
embrace the world.
Huntington saw something quite different. He saw that
modernization did not mean Westernization, that the spread
of global capitalism would run up against countermovements,
the resurgence of older and deeper loyalties, a clash of
cultures, or what he called civilizations -- in short, a new
tribalism.
And to a considerable extent, that is where we are. Even as
the global economy binds us ever more closely together,
spreading a universal culture across the world -- what
Benjamin Barber calls "McWorld" -- civilizations and
religious differences are forcing us ever more angrily and
dangerously apart. That is what you get when the only two
scenarios you have are tribalism and universalism.
There is no instant solution, but there is a responsibility
that rests with us all, particularly with religious leaders,
to envision a different and more gracious future. As noted
earlier, faced with intense religious conflict and
persecution, John Locke and Thomas Jefferson devised their
particular versions of how different religious groups might
live together peaceably. These two leaps of the imagination
provided, each in their own way, bridges over the abyss of
confrontation across which future generations could walk to
a better world.
I have gone rather further than Locke's doctrine of
toleration or the American doctrine of separation of church
and state because these no longer suffice for a situation of
global conflict without global governance. I have made my
case on secular grounds, but note that the secular terms of
today--pluralism, liberalism--will never persuade a deeply
passionate, indeed fanatically passionate religious believer
to subscribe to them, because they are secular ideas. I have
therefore given a religious idea, based on the story of
Abraham, from which all three great monotheisms--Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam--descend. A message of the dignity
of difference can be found that is religious and profoundly
healing. That is the real miracle of monotheism: not that
there is one God and therefore one truth, one faith, one
way, but that unity above creates diversity here on earth.
Nothing has proved harder in civilization than seeing God or
good or dignity in those unlike ourselves. There are surely
many ways of arriving at that generosity of spirit, and each
faith may need to find its own way. I propose that the truth
at the heart of monotheism is that God is greater than
religion, that he is only partially comprehended by any one
faith. He is my God, but he is also your God. That is not to
say that there are many gods: that is polytheism. And it is
not to say that God endorses every act done in his name: a
God of yours and mine must be a God of justice standing
above both of us, teaching us to make space for one another,
to hear one another's claims, and to resolve them equitably.
Only such a God would be truly transcendent. Only such a God
could teach mankind to make peace other than by conquest or
conversion and as something nobler than practical necessity.
What would such a faith be like? It would be like being
secure in my own home and yet moved by the beauty of a
foreign place knowing that while it is not my home, it is
still part of the glory of the world that is ours. It would
be knowing that we are sentences in the story of our people
but that there are other stories, each written by God out of
the letters of lives bound together in community. Those who
are confident of their faith are not threatened but enlarged
by the different faiths of others. In the midst of our
multiple insecurities, we need now the confidence to
recognize the irreducible, glorious dignity of difference.
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