The Problem with Multiculturalism

The Uniqueness and Universality of Western Civilization

John M. Headley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351476287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

The horrors of the past century have done little to advance appreciation for the virtues of Western civilization. Criticism of the West has mounted and the West itself has lost sight of its uniqueness. Westerners tend to endow other societies with liberal philosophy and practices. While politically profitable, this fails to educate these societies about their own civilizations' contributions to the idea of a common humanity, human rights, and the legitimacy of dissent and diversity. John M. Headley argues for the West's uniqueness and universality, while critiquing multiculturalism's failure to recognize these special characteristics. He looks to civilization rather than to the nation-state as the source of the West's achievements, arguing that its uniqueness was evident from its beginnings. Headley also seeks to advance the ever-contentious discussion about secularization. He sees secularization as a neutralizing force regarding the religions of other civilizations, allowing them to accept Western influence, which thus becomes universal. To understand secularization and how it operates from a naturalistic perspective, one must see civilization itself as a defining element in world affairs.

1
Of Civilization: Origin and Development of the Term and the Idea

What is civilization? What constitutes that construct which we recognize as the total complex of an advanced social culture—its institutions and material organization as well as its arts, sciences, and learning? Did the concept always exist from the earliest stages of human society, or did aspects of it lie scattered about, waiting to be selected and assembled?

Looking backward through time at the distinct social complexes we call civilizations, one can ask what the relationship is between the substance of the thing and the minting of the concept in a single word, “civilization.” For in historical development res precedes verbum—the substance precedes the term itself. Indeed the French term civilisation first appeared in 1757 during the course of the Enlightenment from the pen of the marquis de Mirabeau, father of the better-known statesman of the French Revolution’s early years.¹ But many of the features that characterize a civilization were already in existence.

One place to seek the origins of civilization is in descriptive and political geography. Geographers provided that expanded exposure and comprehensive engagement with other peoples and their ways that stimulated a more general, comprehensive, sociopolitical understanding of human organization. Two such geographers offer themselves— the Greek Strabo (63 BCE–24 CE), living at the very beginning of the Roman Empire, and the Jesuit-turned-humanist Giovanni Botero (1544–1617), whose Global Reports (Le Relationi Universali, 1596) assessed the complex variety of peoples and societies that recent discoveries had opened up to Catholicism, as well as the opportunities afforded the Catholic Church in both the Old World and the New.

In his Geography Strabo introduced the reader to a global appreciation of the oikoumene, the inhabited world.² The nature and quality of human life in its many varieties inevitably became an integral part of his study. He used such terms as to hemeron (the cultivated or gentle) and to politikon (the commonwealth, civil, or public) to describe the more advanced societies, which he associated with the idea of the courteous and polite (to astereion). To hemeron suggests an advanced material culture and moral cultivation; to politikon conveys the sense of city life. Material cultivation together with the civil, both begetting politeness or courteousness of deportment, enter at the outset into the begetting of our term civilization, though Strabo never used this one-word term for a composite notion. The evolution from a rustic state to semirusticity in a process of gradual improvement, the highest stage of which was the urban or, better, civic, promoted that civility becoming to a citizen. Although he emphasized the urban, civil context, for Strabo the most important aspects of civilization were the physical, material environment. The environments he favored included the temperate, nonmountainous parts of Europe, the North African littoral, and the Indus Valley. Provided that they worked in a disciplined, organized fashion, the inhabitants of a favorable climate with fertile soil and adequate natural resources could achieve a cultivated level of existence. The elements involved drove Strabo to a comparison of the Ethiopians with the Egyptians, whose society he especially admired. The important notion of cultivation, both material and personal, coupled Strabo’s appreciation of a favorable physical environment with human application, care, and diligence (epimeleia).

Like a modern social scientist, Strabo understood that it was essential for a favorable physical environment to be in place before the specifically human element of diligence or care could be applied. His predecessor Herodotus (ca. 484–425 BCE) had warned that “soft countries breed soft men.” But the challenge provided by the environment had to be one that could be met by human effort. Thus, the civilized condition was possible only given a certain degree of material support, neither so slight as to make existence impossibly difficult nor so great as to smother human initiative. At the same time, it had to leave space for the degree of moral and social cultivation expressed in sophisticated public and private buildings and civic amenities as indicative of the civilized condition.

Although he emphasized the civilizing effect of the Greco-Roman presence in various parts of the oikoumene, Strabo included other peoples and societies in his notion of the civilized. The distinctive to politikos of a civilization’s composition was not something peculiar to the Greco-Roman achievement; rather, it was notably present among other peoples and societies. The term for political endowment was applied to some “barbarians”—non-Greek-speaking peoples—including the Carthaginians, the Egyptians, and the Indians. Other peoples at the time of Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE) also possessed some traits associated with civilized life: respect for the law, education, and especially eloquent speech, qualities demanded by city life.

This last-named quality is in fact an essential ingredient of the civic condition. The emphasis upon communication and intercourse was quite natural in the Classical world, where education was dominated by rhetoric. Strabo faulted some Indus Valley communities for their ostensible habit of allowing themselves to dine alone and at no regular time, because it ran counter to social intercourse. (This to politikos, he hinted, was lacking in the matriarchal societies of the Upper Nile.)

Three features, then, distinguish for Strabo the advent of civilized life. First, there must be a favorable environment—but not too favorable, if human ingenuity is to emerge and enable a basic control of nature. The second feature is the political element, which for Classical man meant the polis or civitas. This civil existence engenders the third feature: the ability to live together in a meaningful, orderly fashion. It tempers human society to civility, a measure of moderation, which, however, falls short of politeness. That would seem to require another source, another tradition.

More than fifteen hundred years separate Strabo from Botero. No need here to trifle with the decline of the Roman Empire or with the tortuous transformation of the Mediterranean world into three distinct civilizations—Islamic, Byzantine, and Latin Christian. But if civilization requires an urban, civic base, what exactly was medieval civilization? Certainly after 1100 the West experienced the recovery and reemergence of towns and city life—economically productive, socially turbulent, some additionally populated by students. Politically speaking, the city, in terms of its function as an administrative center, was now generally the seat of a bishop. These urban concentrations, although immensely important, did not ultimately define culture, which belonged, inevitably, to the First Estate—to the clerical and the ecclesiastical. In the absence of a central authority, and given the realities of a way of life shaped by warriors, the emerging Third Estate—the mercantile city or town—lacked a specific culture. Its greatest single expense was its walls; they announced a limited contact with the outside world and were built to ensure the city’s own survival in a world struggling for order. What civility and moderation were to be found in this largely feudal context derived not from municipal existence itself, but from the First Estate, specifically the monastery, and from the emerging Second Estate—the nobility.

Between Strabo and Botero comes an element that for a thousand years, after the collapse of Classical culture and before the emergence of the High Renaissance, embodied the essentials of a Christian civilization, in which the religious was intimately enmeshed in the recognizably civilizational. The monastery was the consolidated center of rationality, order, and discipline—an engine of concentrated enterprise and practicality in a barbarian world, still to be realized as European, that stretched eastward. It was in the course of the remarkably creative twelfth century that manuals of deportment and pleasing comportment emerged, written by the monastic, clerical clergy for their own and for the laity, specifically the nobility. The dominant impulse that lay behind their content was Ecclesiastes 19:26–27: “A man is known by his appearance:” On Manners by the Dutch humanist Erasmus (De Civilitate, 1530) followed later. This explained the extension of politeness and decorum to a larger, specifically lay public, and soon afterward to the peoples of the New World, to prepare the Amerindian for Europeanization and for Christianity. Civility was to be both Christian and European, yet by the sixteenth century applicable to all of humankind.³

Concomitantly, the Second Estate—the nobility—in the emerging culture of the court added a further dimension to the idea of cultivated existence and pleasing deportment. One speaks not so much of civility in the Middle Ages as of courtliness (curialitas)—think of the courtly love extolled in the poetry of the troubadour, the knight’s service to his lady, and the art forms and patronage stemming from the courts of chivalry. These were associated also with the curialitas and courtesy of princely courts that would be displaced in their influence by those of the enterprising new monarchs of late medieval Western Europe. In The Book of the Courtier (Il cortegiano, 1528), the outstanding statement on the culture of the Renaissance, the diplomat and author Baldassare Castiglione (1479–1529) fixed for his ideal not upon the era’s self-made men, but upon its reshaped military nobility. Indeed, from 1000 to 1500 the vast literature of the High and Late Middle Ages documented the courtliness, chivalry, and courtesy that found their home in the princely courts. The High Middle Ages (1000–1300) thus provides a new dimension to the notion of personal cultivation that lies at the root of the idea of civilization—a courtly refinement (courtois) whose institutional base, in the court rather than the city, spoke to a new sort of knightly aristocracy. It was the medieval princely court, not the city, that served as the salient institution for the ongoing process of civilization.⁴

Giovanni Botero carries us forward into an age of discovery and the European engagement with the earth’s many peoples. The most outstanding later sixteenth-century Italian analyst of America, Botero is usually understood as one of the great second-rate minds of the period, although modern scholarship may grant that he was the first demographer—and even more, the first oceanographer. Best known today through his earlier publications, On the Greatness of Cities (Delle cause della grandezza delle città, 1588) and The Reason of State (Della ragione di stato, 1589), in his own day he was better recognized for having been assigned by Federico Cardinal Borromeo to assess the prospects for the Christian Church in an expanded global arena—an assignment Botero realized in his Global Reports.

The universal, comprehensive inquiry expected in this report figured as part of a burst of evangelical energies evinced by Catholicism. In the 1590s, the great groundswell of Catholic revival led to vast numbers of programs for world evangelization, cresting at the end of the century. The global opportunities presented by vistas that stretched all the way to Rome of extra-Christian peoples to be fitted into the Adamic inheritance led to the establishment of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation on How the Faith Is to Be Propagated) in 1622.

The challenge of advancing Christianity in the New World thus was pressing. In the fourth part of his Reports, Botero addressed the disposition of the newly discovered American peoples toward the gospel, couching his answer in terms of a broadly sustained peace, growing out of empire, that promoted the Classical values of civic polity:

Peace and quiet usually flourish primarily under a great monarch.… Peace opens the portals of kingdoms and cities, giving access to commerce, exchange, the mutual communication of peoples and consequently to the expansion of the word and the name of God. With peace flourish right teaching [la dottrina], uprightness, civility, order, good customs, and the arts devised to render man more pleasing, hospitable, kind, and cultivated. Without them there is nothing.… The greatness of empire then signifies much for the preaching of the gospel of peace, for to empire alone is peace conjoined. And for this reason in the primitive church Christians prayed assiduously to God for the preservation of the Roman Empire.⁵

Botero, like many of his contemporaries, preached up the implicit parallel between the Roman imperial order and the emerging global order of the Catholic King, Philip II: each sought to provide a stable ground into which religious instruction and civic virtues (virtù, civiltà, policía) might be tilled.

Botero identified three resources that would be essential in this immense project of conversion: arms, language, and the relative political unity achieved through empire, prior to which there had been neither laws nor social harmony. The former apostle of the medium-sized administrable kingdom, which made sense for the European context presented in The Reason of State, now, in the context of the Americas, became an advocate for empire and a world ruler. He related the greatness of dominion to the cultivation of the sciences, industry, and study—the level of which was never higher, according to Botero, than it was under Alexander the Great and Augustus. He correlated evangelization with the well-organized external power of a great ruler as the channel for civility and gentle—and genteel—behavior. In fact, he readily granted that the great pre-Columbian monarchies of the “Mexicans” (by which he probably meant the Aztecs) and the Inca were an important preparation for evangelization. First, he observed, an empire served to promote a common currency of language: just as the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Portuguese spread a unifying language, likewise the power of the Mexicans and Incans went far to reduce a welter of languages to a common one. Furthermore, the expansiveness of the political order in empire (grandezza dell’imperio) served to bring its varied peoples together into one place. Botero perceived that in contrast with the seminomadic Brazilian Indians, Chichimeca, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Of Civilization: Origin and Development of the Term and the Idea
• 2 Secularization and the Universalizing Process
• 3 Christianitas/Civilization
• 4 New Meanings for the Renaissance and the Reformation
• 5 Multiculturalism Reconsidered
• 6 Conclusion: On the Meaning of America
• Bibliography
• Index