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1. AMERICA'S MORAL-SPIRITUAL INHERITANCE

WESTERN CULTURE AND THE WORLD

CONTENTS

The heart of the "Western" social ethic

The Hindu social ethic

Buddhist Asia

Islam

The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
        America's Story – A Spiritual Journey © 2021, pages 12-16.
THE HEART OF THE "WESTERN" SOCIAL ETHIC

America was not founded outside of some kind of larger social context.  In fact, quite the opposite was the case.  Although America seemed to have been built "from scratch" beginning in the early 1600s, it did so with a full understanding of the cultural legacy it had inherited from the motherland back in England, and England's own larger European context.  In fact, it was deeply motivated by the desire to build in America a much purer form of exactly that very social inheritance, especially in the setting up of New England.

That social inheritance was not universal, but was – in the setting of the larger world and its many different civilizations – quite unique.  And that very uniqueness is what we will be looking at in this chapter.

The heart of the "Western" social ethic.  Westerners, unless they have lived and worked substantially in other non-Western cultures, tend to suppose that what they understand to be true about life is something of a "universal" for all humankind.  This is hardly the case.  In fact, this naïve supposition has been the source of major problems for Westerners – and for America in particular, ever since it took leadership of Western civilization after World War Two.<

Because of its development via the Jewish, Greek and Roman experience – synthesized beautifully in the Christian religion – Westerners see life as shaped by deep personal involvement of adventuresome individuals.  Western individualism is in fact a key component of Western civilization, found in everything from capitalism, to Darwinism, to Humanism, to modern science, to democracy (and much more).  But it is summed up most perfectly in Christianity, which, through the teachings and example of Jesus, makes the bold assumption that we all are potentially sons and daughters of God Himself, divinely empowered individuals able to take on life personally because of this empowerment.  There are huge moral and spiritual responsibilities placed on the shoulders of those who rise to this understanding, which could be (even should be) any of us.  But we have the wise guidance of holy scripture to help us make the right choices in taking up these personal responsibilities freely.

Of course this understanding allows the option of not following such divine guidance, because Westerners are not God's puppet but instead fully free agents.  Indeed it is God Himself who ordained our human nature, wanting us to choose freely to join him in celebrating His awesome Creation.  If we did not have the option not to do so, it would cheat the decision to actually do so of its real significance.

Westerners, especially recent scientists such as Schrödinger, Bohr, Polkinghorne, etc. in fact have made it quite clear that human life exists in the midst of this universal vastness specifically for this purpose:  to join the Creator of it all in celebrating with Him (Einstein's "Herr Gott" or "Lord God") the beauty of it all.  As far as we know, we are the only part of Creation that is fully aware of its own existence!  This indeed is the very purpose of quite conscious or "awake" human life itself.

And thus it is that we freely design societies that allow the people themselves to use this special human talent to observe, to learn, to design even their own lives, as they themselves personally choose to do so.  Personal "freedom" that allows this dynamic to flourish thus comes to be a Western value of supreme importance.

Of course, freedom raises its own problems, because there is at the same time a primal instinct in humans to want to control the world we live in,to remove its obstacles, its complexities, in order to make it more understandable, more predictable, more manageable.  And that includes the world of others, because other people can become quite problematic for us.   Dominance, even dictatorship, is a possible result of such human impulse.  But supposedly, this is why we have Scripture to warn us, to guide us, to keep us within workable social boundaries.  Otherwise either pure chaos or pure dictatorship would come of the full use of absolute human freedom.  And there are plenty of examples of this in human history, especially in Western history.  And some of these are quite recent, in fact even very operative among us today.

THE HINDU SOCIAL ETHIC

Other cultures have gone at life in ways quite different from this Western pattern.  For instance, Hinduism, which has long dominated the Indian subcontinent, sees life resulting from what we Westerners might term "fate."  All of life is shaped by a cumulative record of actions, good and bad, that result from our behavior. In fact it is this record that shapes our destiny, not just in this life but in lives to come – just as the present has been shaped by the record of human action in previous lives.  And how do we come to understand the source of our personal fate?  It is clearly shaped by the social position we found ourselves born to.  We take on a new life as members of a particular sub-caste or jati (India has thousands of just such different social groups or jatis), a community shaped by very clear rules that will determine our social record (and how well or poorly we perform accordingly), and whether we advance or retreat over the flow of many rebirths to a higher or lower social status.

This is a quite compelling social system.  There is no room for personal negotiation, no opportunity for an individual to come up against some very serious cosmic judgments that lie beyond his or her control.  You must obey, or you suffer.

Interestingly you can build a very strong social order on just such an approach to life.  The rules of Hinduism are so fixed that Indian society needs no dictator to make the whole thing work.  Social responsibility is completely that of the individual Hindu – to obey and prosper – or otherwise suffer, if not in this life at least in the lives to come.

When Americans look at India, they see "democracy" in action, or at least that is what they think they are seeing.  India indeed has governing institutions quite familiar to Westerners – part of the British inheritance, which Gandhi, the "father" of modern India, himself disliked intensely!  He himself as a young man tried very hard to become "English," to escape the fate of being Hindu.  But he found that his brown skin was very much a problem in this endeavor to enter fully (in high social standing) in English society.  He eventually turned bitterly against things English, but could not bring himself to support the Indian caste system on which Indian society rested.

In the end, India came under the industrial modernizer Nehru (and his family) and India managed to move into a world that accepted some of the Western legacy, while keeping the Hindu legacy still intact.  Tragically however, it took the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Indians (including Gandhi himself) to make the transition (1947-1948). But India seems to enjoy a quite workable system today.

BUDDHIST ASIA

Buddhism was born in India centuries before even Christ entered the picture, as something of a reaction to the inflexible social restrictions of Hinduism.  Buddha, as an Indian prince-turned-guru (teacher or prophet), tried to create a social system that would be fairer to those who suffered the most socially, economically and politically from the rigidness of the Hindu system.  He failed in this socio-political enterprise.  However he did end up discovering a way of escaping the rigid Indian caste system, by simply quieting, even deadening, one's concerns over life's many obstacles.  He discovered that a deep spiritual passivity would not only remove the frustrations of this life, but in letting go of the hold of the Hindu social ethic, offer even freedom from the problem of having to be reborn, of having to have another go at life in order to improve a person's place in the scheme of life!  No more rebirths meant freedom or Nirvana.  But Buddha's Nirvana was a freedom that resulted not from activity (Western style) but from passivity.

For a while (several centuries) Buddhism spread widely across India.  But theological splits within the religious community, plus the determination of the Hindu priests or Brahmans to retake control of Indian life slowly drove Buddhism from its homeland in India.  But by then it had spread eastward into Southeast Asia (Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc.), into Nepal and Tibet, and ultimately into China, Korea and Japan.

Buddhism provided spiritual comfort to the masses of farmers or peasants across the land as they dealt with the many challenges of nature, of insects, disease, floods, droughts, and raiders and plunderers, all of which so often made life very difficult.  This tendency toward passivity also made it easier for certain warlords to take command over their region, some even becoming emperors, rulers able to offer protection against the larger threats to local life.  And out of this arrangement, life in Asia could take on civilized ways, as long as emperors were able to carry off their responsibilities and as long as the challenges did not become overwhelming (which they could indeed become from time to time).

Democracy was not what the people wanted ... or even understood.  They simply expected that those that took responsibility for life's larger issues (ones that Buddhism could not take on personally) would do their job.  And if so, then Heaven itself would bless the people and the land.  They did not ask to be part of the decisional structure.  That was the role of the rulers.  But they did have their expectations that their world would be served wisely and well by those in charge.

Basically this is what guides China today.  This is also what Johnson was up against in Vietnam in the 1960s when he tried to encourage the South Vietnamese to take up the responsibilities of democracy, democracy conducted in the same manner that Americans supposedly governed their lives.  But Johnson was working entirely outside of the Asian (largely Buddhist) social context, and had no idea at the time of how problematic that would be for him and his grand plans.  For instance, when in the early 1960s Buddhist monks took to the streets to protest against outside intrusions into their culture – one monk even burning himself to death – they were not clamoring for democracy, nor for Communism.  They just wanted everyone to go away and let them get back to the kind of life they well understood.

ISLAM

Islam is a first-cousin of Christianity, but forged out of a very different social metal than the deeply Westernized Christianity.Muhammad was completely fascinated by Christianity, and thought of himself as actually someone operating along the lines of the Judeo-Christian prophets.  But he was Semitic in mentality, meaning, he saw life as a tightly structured social realm.  Social authority was necessarily very strict (the desert environment in which he lived offered little room for social error), and very hierarchical.  In fact, Islam conveys the meaning not of freedom, but of submission, submission to those standing in authority above you.  A son obeyed his father, a father obeyed his clan chief, who in turn obeyed his prince, who in turn obeyed God.  And there was also a strong element of religious authority in the mix.  In fact, Muhammad's successors (caliphs) carried in their all-important political-social governance both secular and theological authority.

Thus to a true Muslim, all this talk of Westerners about personal freedom seems to derive from Satan himself, for such freedom would, in the thinking of a typical Muslim, be entirely disruptive of the Muslim social order.  Indeed, the efforts of Westerners to get the Islamic world to take on Western democratic ways is about as appealing to "true" Muslims as, for instance, Communism is to most Americans.  It's just not going to happen.  The Muslim world has its own ways of governance – patterns established long ago – and still dictated by the commands of the Qur'an (Islam’s holy book), a grand work derived from the supposedly divinely-inspired pronouncements of Muhammad – and thus not negotiable!  Period.



Go on to the next section:  Jewish, Greek and Roman Cultures

  Miles H. Hodges