One of the comments to the Feser article in TCS, by "Mark Plus," makes an empirical observation gleaned from the World Values Survey, that points out some serious flaws in Feser's approach:
Protestant European countries, followed closely by Britain and the more developed Catholic European countries (not to mention Confucian Japan) have all converged towards a set of values that the social scientists who have conducted the survey describe as both 'secular/rational' and pro 'self expression,' a luxury available to people who feel secure from want (thanks to European social democracy).Muslim societies, by contrast, have clustered around the exact opposite set of values, namely, traditional (especially authoritarian and religious) and survival-centered.
Given the empirical evidence of two radically different social outcomes, I don't see how anyone could argue that Protestantism and Islam are fundamentally similar. If anything, conservative Catholic values tend more to resemble Islamic ones.
According to the extremely coherent literature of "American Exceptionalism" that began with Tocqueville, the American Ideology possesses three core institutional beliefs that render it different from European societies, including the mother country. These involve the role of anti-statism and individual sovereignty, religious sectarianism, and a belief in equality of opportunity. Those are clearly elements that derive from the experience as well as the belief system of Protestantism. The issue is whether beliefs created or followed experience. If the latter, then there is considerable hope for a profound change in the Islamic world.
Another empirical strategy that might have helped to inform this debate about a reformed, or "tamed" Islam, would have been to look at the dimension of the decentralization of religious authority within Christendom, before looking at Islam. Such a strategy has the virtue of holding the core religious orientation constant, and allowing the variation of the instrumental variable, and thereby avoid the mistake of confounding the role of one religious belief with another. It's quite clear that as you move from the Protestant nations (US, England, Holland, etc.) to the Roman Catholic nations of Western Europe, and finally to the Eastern Orthodox nations of Eastern Europe and Russia, you are moving from less to more centralized authority, and from more to less prosperity and freedom.
And while it is true that, as Feser observes, Islam is sectarian, the ground of competition between the Muslim sects is not the same as in Protestantism. It is not a competition of ideas and their ability to render "religious service" more satisfying to the client than the competition, where believers have the consumer sovereignty to leave by the back door as quickly as they walk in by the front. The Muslim sectarian competition, including the ancient competion between Persia and Arabia, (now manifested as the competition between Sunni Wahabbism and the Ayatollahs of Iranian Shiism) rests on the ability to dominate by force. And that, in turn derives ultimately from a radically different belief in predestination... which in Islam applies to the events of this world, while it applies primarily to the events of the next world in Calvinism. The other Protestant sects exist on a continuum of belief in "worldly asceticism," but the ultimate emphasis of destination belief is, non-rationally, on the next world while the emphasis of everyday practice is, rationally, on this world. In the Muslim sects the relative emphais between ultimate destination and everyday practice is reversed. Protestantism is a rebellion against fate, motivated primarily by fear. Islam is an attempt to compel the larger currents of history to surrender to fate. The former takes the form of acquisition, and success in a "calling;" the latter the form of warrior cults.
The difference between the world of Christendom and Islam in general, therefore, has to do with the nature of the competition between decentralized sects, which in turn is either a function of the specific beliefs, or a response to foreclosing the force option of sectarian competition. Is there room for Islam to adopt beliefs compatible with "worldly asceticism" and voluntary conversion? That, I think, remains an open question.
Posted by Demosophist at December 5, 2003 01:16 PM | TrackBack