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| Series Theme: "Culture Wars" |
Chapter 23: Specific Battlefronts: 5. Western Civilizations
CONTENTS
PART 23.1 Introduction
PART 23.2 The Political Dimension A hostile QUESTION Some reasonable ANSWERS
PART 23.3 The Spiritual Dimension Beware Ignorance The Testimony to God God's Description, Unique in the World The Results, the Church, Unique in the World
PART 23.1 Introduction
Throughout these investigations two things have become increasingly clear: • There is a political dimension behind the culture wars which is a war against the West. • There is an underlying spiritual dimension in that all that has been going on, whether ideology or behaviour, is very much against everything we might associate with the kingdom of God (even though the theoretical primary concern has been for the welfare of groups in the past who some may consider from their perspective to have been oppressed.)
What follows on this page directly addresses those two issues.
PART 23.2 The Political Dimension
A hostile QUESTION: In the Conclusion of Murray's, ‘The War in the West', he writes of an interview situation with a hostile interviewer who basically asked his prey, “What do you like about being white?” leaving the interviewee the unenviable task of finding words that would not raise the ire of the black community, especially the activists. After pondering a couple of answers to such a question, Murray, in his deliberations after having watched this, came up with the following suggestions, all of which are so good they deserve full quoting. I will number them to divide them out for easier assimilation.
Bear in mind that the purpose of this is to counter the constant demeaning of the West that comes from the culture activists, who claim that the West has done so much wrong that they should be cancelled, and that native indigenous peoples who have so much good are so oppressed by the West, and so on. This isn't to say the West has been perfect, far from it, but it does say that the exceptional number of good things outweigh the bad and cannot be seen anywhere else in the critical world. This we suggest is an admirable repost.
Some reasonable ANSWERS: So, read the achievements of the West and rejoice that you are part of it and have benefitted from it:
1. The good thing about being white includes being born into a tradition that has given the world a disproportionate number, if not most, of the things that the world currently benefits from. The list of things that white people have done may include many bad things, as with all peoples. But the good things are not small in number. They include almost every medical advancement that the world now enjoys. They include almost every scientific advancement that the world now benefits from. No meaningful breakthrough in either of these areas has come for many centuries from anywhere in Africa or from any Native American tribe. No First Nation wisdom ever delivered a vaccine or a cure for cancer.
2. White people founded most of the world's oldest and longest established educational institutions. They led the world in the invention and promotion of the written word. Almost alone among any peoples it was white people who for good or for ill took an interest in other cultures beyond their own, and not only learned from these cultures but revived some of them. Indeed to have taken such an interest in other peoples that they have searched for lost and dead civilizations as well as living ones to understand what these lost people did, in an attempt to learn what they knew. This is not the case with most other peoples. No aboriginal tribe helped make any advance in understanding the lost languages of the Indian subcontinent, Babylon, or ancient Egypt. The curiosity appears to have gone almost entirely one way. In historical terms, it seems to be as unusual as the self-reflection, the self-criticism, and indeed the search for self-improvement that marks out Western culture.
3. White Western peoples happen to have also developed all the world's most successful means of commerce, including the free flow of capital. This system of free market capitalism has lifted more than 1 billion people out of extreme poverty just in the 21st century thus far. It did not originate in Africa or China, although people in those places benefited from it. It originate in the West. So did numerous other things that make the lives of people around the world immeasurably better.
4. It is Western people who developed the principle of representative government, of the people, by the people, for the people. It is the Western world that developed the principles and practice of political liberty, of freedom of thought and conscience, of freedom of speech and expression. It involved the principles of what we call now call civil-rights, rights that do not exist in much of the world, whether their people yearn for them or not. They were developed and are sustained in the West, which though it may often fail in its aspirations, nevertheless tends to them.
5. All this is before you even get onto the cultural achievements that the West has gifted the world. The Mathura sculptures excavated at Jamalpur Tila are works of exceptional refinements, but no sculpture had ever surpassed Bernini or Michelangelo. Baghdad in the 8th century produced scholars of note, but no one ever produced another Leonardo da Vinci. There have been artistic flourishings around the world, but none so intense or productive as that which emerged around just a few square miles of Florence from the 14th century onwards. Of course there have been great music and culture produced from many civilizations, but it is the music of the West as well as its philosophy, art, literature, poetry, and drama that have reached such heights that the world wants to participate in them. Outside China, Chinese culture is a matter for scholars an aficionados of Chinese culture. Whereas the culture created by white people in the West belongs to the world and a disproportionate swath of the world wants to be part of it.
6. When you ask what the West has produced, I am reminded of the groups of professors assigned to agree on what should be sent in a space pod into orbit in outer space to be discovered by another race, if any such there be. When it came to agreeing on what one musical piece might be sent to represent that part of human accomplishment one of the professors said, “Well obviously it will be Bach's Mass in B minor.” “No”, averred another, “To send the B Minor Mass would be like showing off. To talk about the history of the western accomplishment is to be put at great risk of showing off. Do we stay just with buildings, or cities, or laws, or great men and women? How do we restrict the list that we put up as a preliminary offer?”
7. Of course you may dispute some of these details, or you may dispute whole swathes of it, think its tone is wrong, does not show enough humility or self-deprecation. You may even say that this understated homily sounds ‘triumphalist' or otherwise in bad taste. But what cannot be disputed is the most devastating proof of all, which is the simple matter of foot-fall: a foot-fall that is entirely one-directional. For there is, even today, no serious movement of peoples in the world struggling to get into modern China. For all its financial prowess, the world does not wish to move to that country. It does want to move to America and will go to extraordinary lengths - even the risk of life - to reach that goal. Similarly there is no serious global effort to break into any of the countries of Africa. Indeed a third of Sub-Saharan Africans polled in the last decade said that they wanted to move. Where they wanted to move to is clear.
8. The migrant ships across the Mediterranean go only in One Direction - north. The people-smuggling gangs' boats do not - halfway across the Mediterranean - meet white Europeans heading south desperate to escape France, Spain, or Italy in order to enjoy the freedoms and opportunities of Africa. No significant number of people wish to participate in life among the tribes of Africa or the Middle East. There is no mass movement of people wishing to live with the social norms of the Aboriginals or assimilate into the lifestyle of the Inuit, whether these groups will allow them in or not. Despite everything that is said against it, America is still the world's number one destination for migrants worldwide. And the next most desirable countries for people wanting to move to are Canada, Germany, France, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The West must have done something right for this to be the case.
9. And while we're at it, one final thing. This culture that it is now so fashionable to deprecate, and which people across the West have been encouraged and incentivised to deprecate, remains the only culture in the world that not only tolerates but encourages such a dialogue against itself. It is the only culture that actually rewards its critics.
10. And there is one final oddity here worth noting. For the countries and cultures about which the worst things are now said are also the only countries demonstrably capable of producing the governing class unlike all the others. It is not possible today for a non-Indian to rise the top of Indian politics. If a white person moved to Bangladesh, they would not be able to become a cabinet minister. If a white westerner moved to China, neither they nor the next generation of their family nor the one after that would be able to break through the layers of government and become supreme leader in due course. It is America that has twice elected a black president, the son of a father from Kenya. It is America whose current vice president is the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica. It is the cabinet of the United Kingdom that includes the children of immigrants from Kenya, Tanzania, Pakistan, Uganda, and Ghana, and an immigrant who was born in India. The cabinets of countries across Africa and Asia do not reciprocate this diversity but it is no matter. The West is happy to accept the benefits this brings even if others are not.
Put like that it makes one freshly appreciative of the Western world we are part of!
PART 23.3 The Spiritual Dimension
Beware Ignorance: Now, of course Murray doesn't do the Christian thing, so we must do our own. The first thing we must do is put aside the major ignorance that prevails in the world in respect of the Bible – how it came to be (and thus its veracity – its authenticity, its integrity) and even more actually what it says. I am always surprised by those who risk speaking against it while having read hardly any of it.
The Testimony to God: As one who has worked on it in great detail in recent years (apart from a lifetime – well, since age 21 – of reading and studying it), the more I read it, the more I study it, the more I marvel at what is there, both good and bad. And that is a point in its favour, it tells the bad side of humanity as well as the good.
But it is what it says about God that is astounding. Completely contrary to the tirade against God by a well-known atheist a few years ago (which only went to display his utter ignorance and closed mind) the picture of God is – and bearing in mind it is spread over 66 books, thought to have been written by over 40 authors –amazingly uniform in describing His attributes and His character, a God of love, mercy and compassion who, from beginning to end is seen to be working on behalf of sinful humanity, to save them from themselves and bring them into a glorious eternity.
But this is not the place to pour out pages of detail of what the Bible says about Him, but to summarise what He does for mankind, and how part of mankind (the Church) has responded in the two thousand years of church history. So, we will consider: • His activity on behalf of sinful mankind, • The specific claims about His Son, Jesus Christ, • The people He has changed and their effect on this world.
God's Description, Unique in the World: Consider what the Bible says about God and His Son, Jesus Christ, and ponder where else in the world one finds anything approaching this: 1. God is the unique Creator of the world who is love, is perfect and epitomises goodness. 2. Having given mankind free will, He knew that it would be misused (Sin) and mankind would be separated by their Sin from God. He thus planned before Creation itself, for redemption to be built into history, by - the raising up of the unique nation, Israel, to reveal His love, good purpose, mercy and goodness in respect of mankind, and then - the coming from heaven of His own Son, Jesus Christ, to both reveal His nature to mankind through three years of ministry in Israel, and then - to die as a sacrificial lamb to take the punishment for the sins of the world so that any and every individual in the world might have the chance of turning back to Him and be forgiven and enter into a new loving relationship with Him. It is a picture of a loving God who seeks to draw sinful mankind back to Himself, not by being religious or by working to do good works, but simply by believing in His Son.
The Results, the Church, Unique in the World: The Church simply comprises every believer in the person and work of the Son of God. For almost two thousand years the world has witnessed these people who, 1. Although imperfect, come to belief, and submit themselves to God's guidance and gifting and know a life of love and joy and peace. 2. Having said that the Church has known right up to the present moment immense persecution and strife and martyrs have not been uncommon. 3. Nevertheless these people, who form the largest religious group in the world, play witness to God's love and goodness and act as salt and light in the world, expressing good deeds to bless the rest of mankind. 4. History records abundant testimony to these people, despite sometimes getting it wrong, nevertheless working for the good of mankind in the areas of education, health provision and care in ways that go beyond the bounds of human goodness, leading the way in the world to bring good change for the blessing of others. 5. Part of that history suggests that the very good that the West has done, noted by Douglas Murray above, actually had as its foundation and origin the Christian faith. Where that faith prevailed, the things in the previous section prevailed, even if not always by those who might be considered ‘good followers of Christ', but those who were such, created the environment and instigated the health-care, science and education that was able to flourish in such an environment.
Without being negative about others, it should be noted that no other religion has had the same influence on the civilizations of the last two thousand years that Christianity has had. Although there are temporary declines in some outward expressions of ‘church' in the West at the present time, the Church worldwide still maintains an active presence and force for good.
At one point in his writings, Douglas Murray deplores the ignorance that abounds in respect of history and nowhere is this more true than in respect of the history of the Church and the good effects it has had on the world.
Again we refer the reader back to Chapter 22.1, ‘Christians and History' and note the number of eminent historians who have been remedying this in recent years. If only the modern Church would teach this, we would be better armed to refute the ignorance and cynicism that is often found in the modern world.
In his concluding chapter of his book, ‘Understanding The Culture – A Survey of Social Engagement', Jeff Myers summarises as follows:
“Throughout this book, we've seen how Christians, acting on their biblical beliefs. As if that wasn't sufficient, he adds, “Christians have wielded a weighty influence in nearly every aspect of western culture - and other cultures as well. The Christians who exerted an influence probably didn't realise how their contribution would shape things for generations to come, but it has been clear throughout this book that history's culture shapers influenced the world because of their Christian faith, not in spite of it.” We need to remember these things, read more about them and be able to speak up when the atheistic culture activists are derogatory about the Faith.
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