[Nettime-bold] Umberto Eco: Reason in the Age of Terrorism

["Kermit Snelson" <ksnelson@subjectivity.com>]

Passion and Reason by Umberto Eco
from Der Spiegel
http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/0,1518,163907-3,00.html
(original Italian; re-translation from German by Kermit Snelson)

The religious wars that have drenched the world in blood for centuries all
arose from a passionate attachment to simplifying binaries: we vs. they,
good vs. evil, black vs. white.  If Western culture has proven fruitful, it
is because it has been forced to "liberate" itself from such damaging
simplifications through the spirit of inquiry and criticism.

Of course, this has not been invariably the case.  Hitler burned books,
condemned "degenerate art" and killed members of "inferior races", but he
too belongs to the history of Western culture.  But if we are to prevent new
towers from collapsing, even those that will come after us, it is the best
aspects of our culture which we must discuss with young people of every skin
color.

What often causes confusion is not distinguishing between what are different
things: one's identification with one's own roots, understanding those with
different roots, and the judgment of what is good and bad.

As far as roots are concerned:  if someone were to ask me whether I would
rather spend my retirement years in a small village in Monferrato, in the
majestic mountain world of Abruzzi National Park or in the rolling hills of
Siena, I would vote for Monferrato.  But this doesn't mean that I consider
the Piedmont to be superior to the rest of Italy.

When our Prime Minister [Berlusconi, of Italy] said (in words spoken in the
West and not directed at Arabs) that he'd rather live near Milan rather than
Kabul, and that he'd rather be treated in a Milan hospital than one in
Baghdad, I'm prepared to agree with him.  And this would be the case even if
somebody were to tell me that Baghdad's hospital is the best-equipped in the
world.  The point is that Milan is my home, and home is where my native
powers of healing can flourish.  Roots can also extend beyond the purely
regional or national.  For example, I'd rather live in Limoges than Moscow.
Does that mean that Moscow isn't a beautiful city?  Certainly not, but in
Limoges I'd be able to understand the language.  The point is that everybody
identifies with the culture they grew up in.  There are certainly cases of
transplants, but they are in the minority.  Lawrence of Arabia dressed
exactly like an Arab, but he eventually returned home.

Now let's turn to the conflict of civilizations, because it concerns this
point.  The West, even if primarily for reasons of economic expansion, has
always been curious about other civilizations.  This interest has often been
scornfully dismissive; the Greeks described those who could not speak Greek
as "Barbarians", i.e. babblers, implying that they could not speak at all.

But more advanced Greeks, such as the Stoics (perhaps because some of them
were of Phoenician descent) soon noticed that the barbarians indeed spoke
coherently and in fact expressed thoughts similar to their own, but simply
in a language other than Greek.  Marco Polo tried to describe the customs
and dress of the Chinese with great respect.  The great Doctors of the
Church, the medieval theologians, devoted much effort to translating the
texts of the Arab philosophers, medical writers and astrologers.  The men of
the Renaissance even strained to find in these writings a forgotten Wisdom
of the East, transmitted from the Chaldeans and the Egyptians.  Montesquieu
attempted to demonstrate how well a Persian would have understood French,
and modern anthropologists today continue the mission of the Salesian order,
who traveled among the Bororo; certainly with the intention of converting
them to Christianity, but also to understand how they thought and lived.

In mentioning the anthropologists, I would be saying nothing new by pointing
out that since the middle of the 19th century, cultural anthropology
developed as the attempt to ease the sting of conscience felt by the West
with respect to other cultures, especially those viewed as "primitive
peoples" or "societies without history."  For the West did not always deal
tenderly with such peoples.  It "discovered" them, tried to convert them,
exploited them and enslaved many of them.  This was done with the help of
the Arabs, because the slaves who were unloaded in New Orleans by cultivated
aristocrats of French origin were shipped from the African coasts by Muslim
traders.

The task of cultural anthropology is to show that a logic exists that is not
Western logic, but that has to be taken seriously and is not to be despised
or suppressed.  This does not mean that anthropologists, having described
the logic of others, must choose to adopt it.  With few exceptions, they
return from their years of field work back to their homes in Devonshire or
Picardy to enjoy the rest of their lives in leisure.  From reading their
books, one could conclude that cultural anthropology adopts a relativist
position and asserts that one culture is as good as any other.  But I don't
think that conclusion is valid.  At the most, anthropologists tell us that
the lifestyle of others must be respected, at least as long as the others
stay at home.

Part II

But the real lesson that one must learn from cultural anthropology is that
one must adopt criteria if one is to say that one culture is superior to
another.  It is one thing to say what a culture is, and another to assert
the criteria by which it is to be judged.  A culture may be objectively
described: these people behave in such a way, believe in spirits or in a
single God that alone permeates all of nature; observe such and such rules
in their family units, consider it attractive to wear rings in their nose
(this observation could be applied to current Western youth culture),
consider pork to be unclean, practice circumcision, fatten dogs for the
table on feast days, or -- as Americans say about the French -- eat frogs.
But asserting the criterion by which a culture may be judged is another
thing altogether.  That depends on our roots, our preferences, our customs,
our passions, and our value systems.

For example: Do we consider the extension of human life expectancy from 40
to 80 years to be of value?  I am personally convinced, although mystics
might argue with me on this, that between some bon vivant who lived to be 80
and Saint Luigi of Gonzaga, who lived to be only 23, the latter lived a more
fulfilled life.  But let's assume that a greater life expectancy is a good
thing per se.  If so, then Western medicine and science are certainly
superior to many other forms of scientific and medical practice.  Do we
believe that technological development, the expansion of commerce, the speed
of our transportation to be values?  Many are convinced of that and are thus
justified in considering our technical civilization to be superior.

But the Western world also includes those who believe that life in harmony
with an unspoiled environment conforms to a higher value and are therefore
prepared to do without air travel, automobiles and refrigerators.  They are
prepared to weave baskets and to travel from village to village on foot in
order to avoid holes in the ozone layer.

And so you see that if one is to say one culture is superior to another,
then it doesn't suffice merely to describe it (as the anthropologists do,)
but one must also assert a value system that is indispensable.  Only then
can we say that one culture is better than another.

The advocate of dialogue would demand our respect for the Islamic world and
remind us that it produced figures such as Avicenna (who was born in
Bukhara, not far from present-day Afghanistan) and Averroes -- and that it
would be a sin to come back again and again to those two as if they were the
only such individuals.  There were also Al Kindi, Avempace, Avicebron, Ibn
Tufail and that great historian of the 14th century, Ibn Khaldun, regarded
by the West as the actual founder of the social sciences.  We remind
ourselves that the Arabs of Spain had already cultivated geography,
astronomy, mathematics and medicine at a time when the Christian world
lagged far behind.

This is all true, but it doesn't constitute an argument.  Those who argue
this way might as well say that Vinci, an admirable parish in Tuscany, is
superior to New York City because it produced Leonardo de Vinci at a time
when Manhattan was occupied by four Indians who sat on the ground and had
still 150 years ahead of them to wait before the Dutch arrived so they could
sell the peninsula [sic] to them for sixty guilders.  That isn't exactly the
point, however.  And besides--and in saying so I have no desire to offend
anybody--that the center of the world today is New York, not Vinci.  Times
have changed.

It also doesn't do much good to point out that the Arabs of Spain were
tolerant of Christians and Jews at a time in we were attacking the ghettos,
or that Saladin after the reconquest of Jerusalem showed much more mercy to
Christians than the Christians did to the Saracens after they conquered
Jerusalem.  All this is true, but it is also true that in today's Arab world
there are fundamentalist and theocratic regimes in which Christians are not
tolerated.  And Osama bin Laden has not exactly shown mercy to New York
City.  On the other hand, the French were guilty of the St. Bartholomew's
Day Massacre, yet nobody today describes the French as barbarians.

We shouldn't belabor history, because it is a double-edged sword.  The Turks
impaled people (and that's bad), but the Byzantine Orthodox ripped out the
eyes of their dangerous kinsmen, and the Catholic Church burned Giordano
Bruno.  The Saracen pirates made "The Raw and the Cooked" out of their
victims while the corsairs torched the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean at
the bidding of the British Crown; bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are certainly
sworn enemies of Western civilization, but that civilization has featured
leaders with names like Hitler and Stalin (Stalin's evil was so great that
it has been called "Oriental", even though Stalin went to graduate school
and read Marx.)

No, the problem of criteria is one of contemporary categories, not
historical.  One of the praiseworthy aspects of Western cultures (free and
pluralistic, and these are values that we consider inalienable) is that
today we have known for a long time that one and the same person can deal
with different problems using diverse and even contradictory criteria.  For
example, we consider the extension of life expectancy to be good and
environmental pollution to be bad, even though the same energetic
communications and support networks that enabled the great collaborative
work necessary for the former also brought the latter in its wake.

Western culture has developed the capacity to freely admit its contradictory
foundations.  Perhaps these contradictions have not been resolved, but they
are acknowledged and discussed.  Ultimately, this is the very locus of the
entire debate over globalisation: what level of positive globalisation
should be allowed without incurring the risk and injustice of perverse
globalization?  How can the lives of millions of Africans with AIDS (and
perhaps our own) be prolonged without accepting a global economy that
permits those with AIDS to die of hunger instead, and leaves us with only
contaminated food to swallow?

Part III

But exactly this critique of criteria that the West pursues and encourages
makes us understand that the questions of criteria are delicate.  Is it
correct and civilized to protect banking secrecy?  Many are convinced that
it is.  But what if this allows terrorists to avail themselves of London's
finest financial services?  Is the protection of so-called privacy a
positive or a doubtful value?

We are constantly submitting our values to examination.  The Western world
does this so much that it allows its own citizens to reject technological
development and to become Buddhists instead, or to live in a community that
doesn't use tires, not even for horse-drawn carriages.  Our schools are
required to teach that even the criteria at the heart of our most passionate
convictions must be analyzed and discussed.

The problem that cultural anthropology has not yet solved is what do we do
when somebody from another culture, whose principles we have duly learned to
respect, wants to come live with us?  The reality is that most of the racist
backlash in the West stems not from the fact that there are animists in
Mali, but that those animists are coming to live with us.  What do we do
when they wear the chador, practice infibulation (i.e., sew their girls'
vaginas shut until marriage) or refuse blood transfusions (as do some
Western sects) for their sick children?  What if the last remaining
cannibals from New Guinea (if there are any) emigrate to our country and
want to barbecue a little boy at least every Sunday?

With respect to the cannibals, we are all agreed: we throw them in jail.  As
far as the girls who wear a chador to school, I see no reason to raise a
fuss if that's what they want to do.  But as far as infibulation goes, that
raises a question (even for those who are so tolerant that insist at least
that local medical facilities be made available to ensure that the operation
is sterile.)  But what do we do, for example, with the demand that Muslim
women be allowed to be photographed for passport photos while wearing their
veils?

We have laws that are applicable to everybody and established so that
citizens may be identified.  I believe that these laws cannot be dispensed
with.  If I visit a mosque, I take my shoes off in order to respect the laws
and customs of my host country.  How do we deal, then, with a photo with a
veil?  I believe that a solution in such cases can be negotiated.  At the
end of the day, passport photos are only conditionally suitable anyway.  In
these cases, the passport can also possibly include fingerprints.  If Muslim
women wish to follow their own rules of dress, but also wish to attend our
schools, they can learn to obey to rules that are not their own, just as the
many Westerners do who enroll in Koranic schools and have decided of their
own free will to become Muslims.

For some years there has been an international organization called
"Transcultura" which advocates an "alternative anthropology."  It has
encouraged African researchers who have never been in the West to describe
provincial France and the society of Bologna.  Having learned from their
writings that the two most remarkable things about European culture are that
we walk our dogs and frolic naked on the beach, I can assure you that
two-way cultural observation has begun and that many interesting discussions
have resulted.

Imagine if Islamic fundamentalists were invited to study Christian
fundamentalism.  Not Catholics, but the American Protestants whose
fanaticism exceeds an Ayatollah's and who want to erase all references to
Darwin from school textbooks.  I believe that such an anthropological study
of another kind of fundamentalism would enable them better to understand
their own.  They would come to understand our own concept of a Holy War (I
could recommend to them many interesting texts and recent dates) and perhaps
learn to view their own with a critical eye.  After all, we in the West have
learned much about the limits of our own thinking by attempting to
understand that of the "savage."

One of the much-discussed values of Western civilization is acceptance of
differences.  Theoretically, we all agree that it is "politically correct"
to refer to somebody in public as gay.  But in private, we still giggle when
we talk about a homosexual.  How are we teaching acceptance of differences?
The "Académie universelle des cultures" has a Web site which posts material
on various themes (skin color, religion, mores, customs, etc.)  for the use
of teachers who live in countries that want to teach their pupils to accept
those who are different from themselves.

Next it is decided to dish up to our children no lies, all the while
asserting that all men are created equal.  But children notice quite well
that some neighbors or classmates aren't like themselves.  Their skin color
may differ, they may have slanted eyes, they may have smoother or fuller
hair, they may eat strange things or not take communion.  It also doesn't
suffice to say to them that we are all creatures of God.  Animals, after
all, are also creatures of God.  But children will never see goats sitting
beside them in the classroom during spelling class.

So instead, children must be taught that human beings are indeed very
different.  And we must explain to them exactly what these differences are,
so that they can be shown how such diversity can be enriching.  A teacher in
an Italian school must help Italian pupils understand why other children
pray to a different God or play music that isn't rock-n-roll.  And of
course, a Chinese teacher must teach Chinese children, who live next to a
Christian community, the same thing.  The next step would be to show that
our music has much in common with theirs, and that their God also has good
things to teach us.

A possible objection: why do this in Florence when they don't do it in
Kabul?  But this objection couldn't be further from the values of Western
civilization.  We constitute ourselves as a pluralistic society because we
allow mosques to be built among us, and we can't dispense with this just
because in Kabul they throw Christian missionaries in jail.  Doing so would
turn us into the Taliban.  Rather, we should hope that by permitting mosques
in our country, that some day Christian churches will be allowed there and
that the Buddhist statues there will not be bombed.

In recent days, several odd things have come to light.  One is that the
defense of Western values has apparently become the exclusive property of
the Right, while the Left is acting, as usual, pro-Islamic.  But the defense
of scientific values, technological progress and modern Western culture in
general has always been hallmark of the secular and progressive wing.  All
Communist regimes have invoked the ideology of technical and scientific
progress.  The Communist Manifesto of 1848 begins with an impartial
justification of bourgeois expansion.  Marx doesn't say that we should
reinvent the wheel and return to Asiatic modes of production.  Rather, he
asserts that the proletariat must adopt certain values and achievements of
the bourgeoisie.

On the other hand, is precisely reactionary thought (in the highest sense of
the word), that has historically, at least since its rejection of the French
Revolution, opposed the secular ideology of progress by advocating instead a
return to traditional values.  The more serious among these thinkers of
tradition have always, along with the rituals and myths of primitive peoples
and Buddhist doctrine, turned to Islam as a still-living source of
alternative spirituality.  It was the reactionary thinkers who have always
reminded us that we -- dried-up as we are by the ideology of progress -- are
not superior and that we must seek the truth among the mystical Sufis or
whirling dervishes.

So in this sense, a strange rift has recently opened up.  But this is
perhaps only a sign that in an age of great revaluation of values (and the
age we're living in is certainly one of these) that nobody is sure any more
what side he's on.  But it is precisely in times like these that we must
understand that our own superstitions must be fought exactly like those of
others: with the weapons of analysis and criticism.  I hope that these
themes will be addressed not only in press conferences, but also in the
schools.

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