Hawel, Marcus

The supposed irreconcilability of the “Islamic world” and the “modern West” is often held responsible for the conflict between them. Yet the development of and the relations between cultures are far more complex than that and dialogue can prevent tensions and mutual rejection.

Now that political conflicts are increasingly interpreted under the aspect of culture, the dialogue between the West and societies shaped by Islam has been placed before a difficult challenge. It consists in this: not to let the cultural conflict topple into the “clash of civilisations” which Samuel Huntington forecast at the beginning of the 1990’s. The relations between the two cultures have been charged to a particularly high degree since the large-scale attacks of Islamic terrorists in the U.S.A. and Europe. This was again demonstrated by the recent so-called caricature controversy. But if politics is to be forced through the needle’s eye of culture on the one hand (and in just this lies a potential escalation), cultural work can on the other hand offer solutions to the problems if it, as a counter-move, takes up the challenge and becomes political.

Dialogue presupposes two equal sides which enter into discourse with one another. Mutual tolerance and readiness to open oneself to the other for the sake of learning are inalienable marks of dialogue and at the same time presuppositions for the vitality of every culture. Both cultures themselves and the interaction between cultures live from such an exchange which prevents them from rigidifying and becoming paralysed. Openness and tolerance belong, moreover, to a modern culture, which has been made the object of hostility by fundamentalist traditionalism. It is feared that modern culture could destroy traditional culture, which is brought to bear as a shield against the anonymous powers of globalisation.

Cultural engagement on both sides

Not only traditional cultures incline to sealing themselves off and developing prejudices against strangers. Among the populations of the West as of the East, prejudices against the other culture are hardening and increasingly poisoning their relations. Many people in the West tend sweepingly to make Islam, and many people in the East modernity, responsible for the misguided deeds of individual groups or governments. Particularly in polarised Islamic countries like Egypt or Morocco, the continued enmities threaten to tear the societies asunder.

An intensified cultural engagement on both sides is therefore urgently needed in order to defuse reciprocal prejudices in common. The inner-social dialogue is just as important as the understanding between alien cultures if further polarisation and the failure of modernisation in Islamic societies is to be averted. The unhindered continuation of these trends would lead to a conflict which could no longer be resolved by peaceful means and from which, in the end, only fundamentalist Islamists would profit. When, however, Fundamentalists show themselves prepared to enter into conversation, that is, when a decisive limit of the Enlightenment has not been crossed, they should be included in the dialogue.

Tradition as the soundboard of modernity

Dialogue and cultural understanding have to take place among the people of each culture and should not be conducted only by specialists. As a rule, the specialists are already persuaded of the necessity of modernisation. Political cultural work is, as it were, a struggle for the consciousness of people, which should not be left to the fundamentalist camp.

It is the clearly recognisable fear of many people in Islamic societies that modernity is an import and at the same time a dictate of the West and leads to the dissolution of traditional culture. It is therefore important to enter into the question about how far the culture of modernity is identical with Western culture. Also important is the question about what distinguishes modern from traditional societies and whether every culture possesses its own potential for modernity, which thrives in the soil of each cultural tradition (that serves as its sounding board), but which stands in interaction with modern cultures in other parts of the world through globalisation.

Democracy rests on acceptance

Modernity cannot be imposed from outside (by, for instance, economic extortion or war) without provoking rejection; it cannot be spread if people refuse it their acceptance. Military intervention can only remove the “villains”; this alone, however, does not create modern conditions. “Nation building” has proved to be a dead-end when it is preceded by military force. Democracy and human rights cannot be achieved through compulsion. The war against terrorism cuts off one of the Hydra’s head, but in its place immediately grow several new ones. The war against terrorism burdens cultural efforts, covers everything like radioactive fall-out and poisons every attempt at cultural understanding. Government, and quite especially democracy, rests on acceptance. A population that experiences democracy and the culture of modernity as an invasion or a dictate of the West cannot give them its acceptance, but responds instead with rejection and resistance, and is threatened with a stiffening into traditionalism and fundamentalism.

The effect of cultural work cannot be estimated highly enough. It can self-critically contribute to the result that the culture of modernity is not understood as the property of the West which appears either as an import, a Trojan horse, a dictate or an invasion.

The culture of modernity gives traditional culture a framework

The culture of modernity developed on the soil of Western culture because of a deep-reaching process of transformation: the emergence of capitalism. Western culture, in turn, had already developed in the eighth and ninth centuries from the roots of ancient Greek and Roman culture and the Christian religion. Since then, social and political institutions have slowly developed that regulate common life – in essence, a measure of the rule of law, the separation of Church and State, representative political organs for the interests of heterogeneous groups and an individualism which was already present in Christianity. What developed during the waning of the ancient world was first of all only individual components that were not yet joined together into a social whole. It should also not be overlooked that the Middle Ages were shaped by an authoritarian system. In the course of the social absorption of the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, which had plunged old Europe into a profound political crisis, modernity at last gained acceptance; that is, the individual components were assembled into a whole. A civil society arose, which asserted itself politically first in England and France in revolutions. Ever since, modernity has been marked by a secular state that shares its power democratically, that invests civil rights with the force of law, and looks upon traditional culture as an affair not of the state but of society, which it unites into a national public.

In contrast to every traditional culture, including traditional Western cultures, the culture of modernity understands itself to be universal. Its power of dissemination lies in its abstraction and in the idea that it does not repress traditional culture, but rather provides it with a framework within which it can further develop and stamp the culture of modernity in a particular manner.

The promise of modernity

Yet modernity is not above criticism. Every prejudice is a syncretism, that is, a mixture of rational and irrational. It is therefore appropriate to discuss how far a discontent with certain aspects of modernity is rational, yet takes a disastrous course in the form of syncretisms. The annoyance with modernity can and should be canalised if the armoured prejudices are to be cracked. Justified criticism should not therefore be repulsed. Modernity makes the promise of a blessed Paradise on earth that it cannot keep. It is anything but beneficial to suppress the destructive side of modernity: objectively, the modern world is capable of providing all the people on earth with food, but every year it allows a new million to starve to death.

At the level of its norms, of its ideals and of the market, the culture of modernity is a culture of reciprocal recognition, tolerance and the acceptance of differences. But in its conditions and relations of exchange it harbours the destructive and nihilistic force that generates mass misery and apathy. This destructive force wreaked havoc throughout the entire 20th century. It is still in the world – not as a pre-modern trait, but as a dialectic of modernity.

Thus the outcry against modernity is entirely rational as long as it is addressed to its nihilistic tendency, its mechanism of reification, and its inherent bourgeois coldness (Adorno) – but not when it turns against modernity in general. It is the difference between the absolute rejection of modernity and the determinate negation of aspects of modernity that distinguishes the criticism of modernity from fundamentalist anti-modernism. Whereas the latter wants to flee modernity back into tradition understood in a reactionary sense, the former wants neither to go back before modernity nor beyond it, but rather to sublate it in the dialectical sense: to negate the mechanisms of reification and pauperisation and thus raise modernity to a new qualitative level.