The Western world is composed of those who derive their roots in Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian or Hellenistic and modern culture, which includes Christianity as the predominant religion, democracy and is technologically advanced. By now almost the whole world is westernized to some degree. The rest of the world accepts Western technological ideology and practice, uses the Gregorian calendar and wears blue jeans, once a symbol of rebellion and banded in the Soviet Union. Y2K panic in the late 1990’s was a good example of how dominate and integrated Western culture is with the rest of the world and how dangerous it could be. Another defining characteristic is that the Western world in many ways hosted and defended the Jews. The Italian word “ghetto” described the Jewish people living in isolated − tolerated by the powers that be − sections of the city apart from the Catholic Italians. However ambiguous the relationship, it was through this arrangement that Jewish culture was preserved for posterity. In return for this tolerant reception Jewish society produced great thinkers, scientists, philosophers and comedians: Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Einstein, Teller, the Marx Brothers and Oppenheimer all came from Jewish backgrounds, albeit, secularized.
Today the Jews still thrive in Gentile cities in education, academics, the arts business, as well as medicine and the legal profession. We can think of the stereotypical Jewish rabbi, lawyer or professor. The Jews are good with money and have lent funds to kings, with interest, to pay for their wars. These are stereotypes, but they are images that have resonance with Gentiles and they are not all negative. The Jews have prospered in Western society. Contemporary historian Niall Ferguson notes the Jewish contribution to American society,
The Jewish role in Western intellectual life in the twentieth century − especially in the United States – was indeed disproportionate, suggesting a genetic as much as a cultural advantage. Accounting for around 0.2 per cent of the world’s population and 2 per cent of the American population, Jews won 22 per cent of all Nobel Prizes, 20 per cent of all Fields Medals for mathematics and 67 per cent of the John Clarke Bates Medals for economists under the age of forty. Jews also won 38 per cent of the Oscars for Best Director, 20 per cent of the Pulitzer Prizes for non-fiction and 13 per cent of Grammy Lifetime Achievement Awards.
Jews have in fact outperformed Protestants in the United States over the past century, with significantly higher earnings and rates of self-employment. Of the chief executive officers of Fortune magazine’s 100 largest companies in 2003, at least 10 per cent were Jews as were no fewer than 23 per cent of CEO’s of the Forbes 400. Not only have Jews been disproportionately successful in starting financial firms; they were also founders or co-founders of some of the world’s biggest technology companies, for example Dell, Google, Intel and Oracle.[1]
The Western world was, at least in part, founded upon the idea of tolerance for minorities, namely, the Jews, who we may say represent all minorities. The Romans were by no means hostile to older traditions. The Jews were a protected people under Roman law, because of their predominate place in Roman society and ancient history. They were devout supporters of Rome, albeit, including slavery. They paid for foreign wars and were exempt from hailing Caesar−instead of praying to a false god−they prayed for the well-being of the emperor. This was how they circumvented saying, “Caesar Is Lord!” They affirmed their allegiance to Rome without hailing Caesar, nobody else was able to do that. We can add to this that these ancient people were also the progenitors of the Christian faith and have given us the founding document of our culture: the bible, which stresses the value and responsibility of each individual person.
I am well aware that Western culture has been guilty of empire, genocide and slavery around the world in the past 500 years, religious wars, Anti-Semitism and intolerance of primitive, less advanced, indigenous peoples, and people of color, but such a track record should not detract from the fact that today in most Western cities minorities of all faiths and races live side by side. However, uncomfortable at times this maybe. This would not be the case if the Axis Powers won the Second World War or if the Soviet Union won the Cold War. The West has also given us the novel concept of civil rights, equality, democracy, freedom of religion, free speech, the discovery of the individual and technological progress, ideas latent with the seeds of pluralism. What other civilization has allowed its young people to openly criticize the government, or allowed for free speech, certainly not China, Russia or Islam. We can compare the Tiananmen Square massacre (1989) to the anti-war protest movements in the 1960’s, most of which were peaceful. Kent State was an exception (1970). We should give credit where credit is due and blame to where blame is due. We can think of Iran’s brutal crackdown on student protest movements or the Chinese Communist Party’s repression of civil rights in Hong Kong, which is a Western stronghold in the heart of Asia. China, Russia and Islam are just as guilty of oppression and slavery in their long histories as anyone else. It is estimated that Genghis Kahn murdered up to 30 million people in his conquest across Asia. Today all three Eastern powers remain antagonistic to the West. Islamic countries do not allow freedom of conscience or recognize the equality of women, which is perhaps the linchpin of the entire system and makes it woefully inadequate as a world religion and alternative society. Democracy means majority rule but also minority rights. The triumph of one political faction over the other does not lead to the loser’s eradication; winners share power with losers. Martin Luther King, Jr. appealed to The Declaration of Independence (1776) as a defense for minority rights; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
When we speak of a bi-polar world between East and West, “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet” as Rudyard Kipling has said we are not simply referring to geography, although it certainly began that way. In the ancient world the West was defined by Alexander the Great bringing Greek culture to the Eastern world namely by defeating Persia and making his way as far East as India. The Romans held back the Parthians who were limited by the Euphrates River, the traditional boundary line between East and West. The bible even mentions the Kings of the Rising Sun or the East pouring across the Euphrates River in great hoards to invade the Roman Empire (Revelation 9:13-19; 16:12). The Romans held a deep dread that the Parthians would attack from the East in the same way today we fear a Russian or Chinese invasion. The enemies of Israel, beyond the Euphrates, such as Assyria and Babylon always threatened to invade the holy land. Today East and West represents something more than geography, race or even religion, but is defined by ideas, namely democracy verses totalitarianism. The famous German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) defined Oriental Despotism as the knowledge that only one man is free: the Emperor, Tsar, Sultan, Kahn or Mogul. “Orientals do not yet know Spirit − Man as such − is free. And because they do not know it, they are not free. They only know that one is free; but for this reason, such freedom is mere caprice . . . This one is therefore only a despot [a ruler with absolute power], not a free man.”[2] The notion that the Emperor was divine best exemplified by Japanese Shintoism only entered the West when Alexander conquered the Persians and imitated their style until then the West was little inclined to the idea including the Roman and Greek Republics. Some emperors were embarrassed by it, even down played it, such as Tiberius. The kings of Israel were not considered absolute but limited by the prophets and the Word of God, such as when Samuel confronted King Saul for not annihilating Amalek and keeping the best of his flocks for himself (1 Samuel 15:10-23) and when Nathan rebuked King David for his sin of adultery and murder (2 Samuel 12:1-12). In the days of Samuel the prophet the Israelites rejected the rule of the Judges because it was akin to anarchy, where everyone did what was right in his own eyes and desired a king who would tell them what to do. The desire for an absolute monarch was an affront to God who said to Samuel that the people had rejected him as their king. Samuel warned the people that a king would reduce them to penury, slavery and war (1 Samuel 8:6-22; cf. Judges 17:6; 21:25). Jesus likewise rejected the temptation by Satan to kingship (Matthew 4:8, 9; Luke 4:5-7; John 6:15). The text makes it perfectly clear that the kingdoms of the world are ruled by the god of this age. This leads us to suspicion and mistrust of authority. This position allows us to put limits on the state’s power, such as with a Constitution and Bill of Rights. Jesus introduced the notion of the separation of church and state when he said “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and render to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:15; Mark 12:13-17; Luke 20:20-26). The government cannot tell us what to believe. This is diametrically opposed to Islam and dictatorship.
Jewish culture may well guide Western life, such as Moses, Maimonides, Mendelssohn, the bible, the 12 Apostles, Mary and Jesus Christ, were all Jewish. Zionism is therefore central to Western thinking. Ferguson makes an other pertinent comment, “For some reason, beginning in the late fifteenth century, the little states of Western Europe, with their bastardized linguistic borrowing from Latin (and a little Greek), their religion derived from the teaching of a Jew from Nazareth and their intellectual debts to Oriental mathematics, astronomy and technology, produced a civilization capable not only of conquering the great Oriental empires and subjugating Africa, the Americas and Australasia, but also of converting peoples all over the world to the Western way of life – a conversion achieved ultimately more by the word than by the sword.”[3]
The West either protected the Jews or conversely tried to destroy them, agreed! History is ambiguous, it does not proceed in a straight line and is full of contradictions, we can all admit to that. Hegel called this process “the cunning of reason” where the opposite ends of intentions are established, such as instead of saving democracy by dictatorship it destroys it, the best examples being Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte. The holocaust gives us the State of Israel. Today the West continues its support for the Right of Israel to exist in the Promised Land or at least part of it.
Islam believes in the reverse principle, the total destruction of the Jews; not only dissolving the Israeli State, but the liquidation of all Jews as a race: genocide, even though they too were the forebears of the Islamic faith. Their Anti-Semitism should alarm us because it shows that Islam, at least as it appears today, is Anti-Semitic; this may be far from the Prophet’s original vision, and is only held by a minority, if this is not the case, his followers should prove otherwise. It expresses no neutrality or objectivity in the matter. The Modern Western world is opposed to the Ancient Eastern world. I appeal to Spengler’s ponderous tomes The Decline of West where he someplace says the non-Western countries wish to throw off the yoke of the West, as a prelude to its downfall. We see this dynamic being played out in the Arab-Israeli Conflict.
Technology offers another hallmark of the triumph of the West; technological innovation is Western in nature and will eventually destroy the East by undermining faith in its own values and traditions. The internet and mass media exposes closed societies to Western ideas. The East unlike the West hates the Jews and soon they will have an equal amount of technology and fire power to destroy them. Their worldview is founded on intolerance − the Jews must go − not only all the sons of Jacob occupying the land, but the Jews as a race should be exterminated and the rest of the world converted. The East sees itself as saving the world from Zionism, which wants to show the Jews in power or at least in control of the holy land. Ancient Islamic belief holds that the Jews are not entitled to the land, but Esau is, namely themselves, his descendants. The world spins around an ancient blood feud or vendetta between the sons of Abraham, struggling over a relatively small piece of real estate the size of New Jersey.
By Zionism, I mean the Western, Christian Democracies, Post-Christian is a misnomer, since it argues for the predominate place of Christianity in Western history. We cannot escape our heritage. How else are we to judge ourselves without the value of freedom and reason we learn from the past? The West is guilty of atrocity, all well and good we know this, but we can only recognize that injustice by the same sense of morality we inherited from the West from our upbringing in Judeo-Christian values. Marxism, Feminism and Critical Race Theory are all critical of Western power structures, perhaps as they should be, despite the fact that this outrage comes from a Western value of individual freedom and human dignity. Just as Postmodernism uses critical analysis begun in the modern world to liberate oppressed people – Critical Modernity may be a better epithet for this movement, in the same way secular criticism uses Christian categories of right and wrong to judge traditional religion. They may accuse Christians of hypocrisy that is not living up to its own belief system, but they are not presenting anything fundamentally new. In their judgments they reaffirm those ancient beliefs. Christianity is the conscience of the West providing the tension that moves history forward. French historian Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) gives us a reasonable balance; “the history of the West is not a history of unrelieved criminality, and that what the West has given to the world weighs infinitely more in the scales than what it has done to societies and individuals.”[4] The barbarism of the past has left the modern West with a bad conscience or “white guilt” which if not soon resolved will end in madness then suicide.
The modern world, at least from 1948, has in part protected the Jews from ancient prejudice. Other great powers, such as Cyrus the Great made Judea a protectorate of the Iranian Empire. The same people in modern world want to turn Israel into an ash heap, effectively destroying their own heritage. This is a Cold War principle in effect throughout the non-Western world. Any move against Israel means an attack on the modern Christian world. The secular West is another form of Christianity, albeit disfigured, as I already pointed out; it wants the same goal of Judeo-Christian values without its Jewish metaphysics and mysticism. Secularism represents a society that wants the ethics of religion but not God.
Zionism represents the triumph of the West in modern technological progress and the victory of Christ across the world. Ellul makes an interesting argument that the West was entrusted with the revelation of the gospel and is in danger of losing that privilege from subversive forces, for example those who use free speech to end free speech as we see with aspiring Fascist and Communist movements. By this he means that the Western world in its ancient form believed in Eros or the will to power and domination clearly demonstrated in the Roman Empire, especially with the persecution of Christians. This drive for world domination was countered by the introduction of the Christian gospel or Agape, a contradictory force that moves Western society forward to love and freedom. It is the absence of Agape in our times that leaves the West vulnerable, stranded in a spiritual no man’s land and liable to collapse or to morph into some sort of monolithic world government. The city on the hill will lose its light and this would be disastrous for the rest of the world. “The West represents values for which there is no substitute. The end of the West today would mean the end of any possible civilization.”[5] The greatest need of our times remains repentance, to reintroduce Agape in the contemporary world.
Islam wants to be the Caliphate, just as China wants to be the Hegemon with its control over the oil supply and bourgeoning population. Islam views the West as a form of Jewish oppression. The Jews control the West to do its bidding in the desecration of the holy land, especially, The Dome of the Rock one of Islam’s holiest sites. If the centuries old monument, mosque falls even in an earthquake, or by a stray missile, however ironic, it could mean World War III − despite favoritism shown to Israel − we should let the Arabs retain control of the temple mount where the mosque is located and create a Palestinian State for the sake of peace, which represents another Western value.
[1] Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 235, 262.
[2] Georg W. F. Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans., by Robert S. Hartman (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953 [1822]), 23.
[3] Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest, 5.
[4] Jacques Ellul, The Betrayal of the West trans., by Matthew J. O’ Connell (New York: The Seabury Press, 1978), 193.
[5] Ibid, vii.
