Cultural change

Yesterday I saw the Hagia Sophia church for the first time. I think it's hard for any Christian to go into that massive former church and not be nearly overwhelmed by melancholy. I thought about how for nearly a thousand years, Christians prayed and sang and celebrated the Eucharist there, and must have thought it would last forever. Then, in 1453, it ended, with the fall of the city to the Ottomans. Hagia Sophia became a mosque -- and then, under the Turkish Republic in 1935, it was turned into a museum. I'm sure Muslims must feel the same sense of melancholy visiting the cathedral (formerly a mosque) at Cordoba, in Spain. In fact, any sensitive human being seeing the ruins of a once-great civilization cannot fail to be struck by the impermanence of everything human.

We also visited Dolmabahsce Palace, a 19th-century pile built by an Ottoman sultan in the European style. It's shockingly luxurious, and even Eurotrashy. The guide said the sultan wanted badly to be European. He also said that despite the luxury of the palace, the Ottoman Empire was badly decaying at this point in its history. The Ottomans didn't know it, but they were in their last days. Had things gone differently for them, though, we might see this palace today as an expression of a confident culture able to absorb other influences. Today, it looks like a desperate bid to keep up appearances, and even an example of cultural self-loathing.

Over at the Dallas Morning News blog, I'm contending with a colleague over the question of cultural change and immigration. He's a big supporter of the immigration bill, and paints many immigration skeptics as merely fearful of the change that will be brought by Hispanic immigrants. My point, as you will no doubt have guessed, is that it is not at all unreasonable to fear change. Americans are so wedded to the myth of progress, which entails a belief that change is always good, that we moralistically assume that those who wish to resist change surely have discreditable motives (irrational fear, bigotry, etc). This is how the Progressive ideology works, especially in the media (and by "progressive" here, I don't mean only leftists; G.W. Bush is a progressive in this sense).

Dr. Husain Haqqani of Boston University was here the other day, and gave a lecture that dwelled in part on the susceptibility of the Muslim world to rumor-mongering and conspiracy theory. He spoke at one point about how the Ottomans banned the printing press from their realm after it was invented in Europe. They called it "un-Islamic." Thus did they unwittingly condemn Islam to fall far behind the West in terms of technological and economic development -- a catastrophe that the Islamic world is still suffering terribly from. In retrospect, it would appear that the Ottomans made a terrible decision. But credit them this: they understood how revolutionary that technology would be if they welcomed it into their own culture. They made a decision that was defensible in terms of maintaining cultural stability, and certainly understandable.

Don't take me to say that I approve of the decision to ban the printing press! What I'm trying to say, though, is that we today often fail to appreciate what people, and peoples, lose through the process of modernization, which today includes globalization. I told Dr. Haqqani at dinner that I thought that unless the West truly came to terms with the psychological and cultural trauma of modernity on the Islamic world, we would never really understand why they're so afraid of it, and we'd never be able to answer their objections, and help them come to terms with it. He agreed, and said that Westerners have to imagine what the rampant Western materialistic culture celebrating sex and money looks like to a pious Muslim. He thinks, "Is that what will happen to us if we modernize?" and quite understandably fears it.

I mean, look: if you are a Cherokee warrior sitting atop your horse in the 19th century, watching wagon trains of European settlers rolling into your territory, how useful would it be to have your anxiety over what the coming of these immigrants might mean for your culture dismissed as bigoted paranoia? We can answer that question because we know what happened next. We can also come up with historical examples of new immigrants reinvigorating an ossified and decaying culture, or making a vibrant one even more so. Then again, we can only know that these instances worked out well, or didn't, in retrospect. As Kierkegaard said, "Life can only be lived forward, and understood backwards." The experience of history should tell us to tread carefully when it comes to accepting cultural change. There are perils to rejecting it imprudently, and to accepting it imprudently. In the context of American culture, though, we are far more tempted to err on the progressivist side.