R. Joseph Hoffmann's Blog: Khartoum, page 21

غار حراء

You are as dark as your name
but is there something more?
What of the one who’s not the same
minute to minute, for
you specialize in being unknown–
except for your shoulders or
your breasts cupped, or a frown
that melts into a self-approving smile,
when I am caught speechless
by your lips and bravery overtakes you.

I thought I loved your neck the most–
It has a fleshy resonance, a certain swerve.
But now, I think, I like the rest
of you. I have become a connoisseur
who hopes like Moses for a sign
and waits, expecting you to lure
Samson from his sleep with naked thighs.

And will it come, this final vision?
Will you make my life dance
like so many dervishes in fast
and furious step, until they chance
to say, Listen! The music’s done, at last.

Or will you, thighs clad,
retreat into my lengthening past,
like my shadow, like your mad
ideas, by what this love has cost?

The Hunt

You worship the lover
who's open to pain:
"vulnerability's"
your favourite name

I can be open,
I can be plain
and sure as the sea
I'm open to pain.

But cometh the lover
who causes you pain
you will be vulnerable;
you'll play his game

We all want the other
we all want the same
Pain without feeling it
(Give it a name).

We say we want honesty
but worship the game
where we can kill something
and call it by name.

New

…wears off all things:

Shoes and cars,

Christmas stars,

kings and golden rings.



But love we’re told

If it is true

is always new

and never old.



I wonder if Odysseus

Half-heartedly

across the sea

divined the mess



he’d left behind:

a comely wife,

a married life,

love, of a kind.



Or did he mishap know

that temporality

is love’s infirmity

for us below?



We lack the angels’ plight,

their scope–

even a rope–

to scale their height.



And so we think

love is our portal

to the immortal

as down we sink.



No love’s not love

that alters when

the clock strikes ten

or fate plays rough.



Love’s the state whereby

we’re crazed to think

that passion’s blink

will never die.


* * *



I thought (the cheek!)

I’d found love true

In someone new,

and she was chic.



Her kisses fell like flakes

to ground–

She had me bound:

And Ah, the stakes!



She said, You are my only

heart’s desire–

Oh purple fire:

Make me unlonely.



And you, I said in trembling tone,

Are Chinese food

Not bad, not good,

–Was that my phone?



We sowed the field prodigiously

From summer’s call

Until the fall

religiously.



But what is new is never

Love and thus

this us

was not forever.



She packed her bag (the jerk)

and said

It’s dead

It didn’t work.

***



But Love’s not work, at least

the kind

that’s blind.

like the Cretan beast.



Love’s old at first hello,

Recognized,

not improvised

like Waldorf Jello.



Love says (the same) to each,

a simple word

barely heard,

touching without reach.



Love’s sad, right from the start

the rain

unexplained,

creation without art.



And love will find you hollow.

Thus, Jack and Jill

against their will

do leave the hill and follow.

***

The moral is beware the new

It’s shade

Will fade

For her, and you.

Burger

My dear, my dear--how can you hear
With all those voices in your ear?
They warn you of each hill and furrow
In verses, ayots, chapters, surah.

They claim to know it all my sweet
They tell it all to you served neat:
Religion first, and color second.
“You cannot love him. Have you reckoned

You will be your mother’s death?
That all your brothers curse this wretch?
And everything the imams approve
Is contradicted by his love?

Come home, and do the proper thing:
Give no attention to that ring.
It is at best a pagan token--
A symbol of the faith you’ve broken.”

My dear, it’s clear: do not go near.
Nothing to win and much to fear.
Your role’s to do a job, and fill
their hearts with pride, and do their will.

The Lord's Day

God looked down from heaven. He sighed deeply and called two of his younger angels into the room.

"Look," he said, fingering the report. "It's time." They nodded and glanced anxiously at each other.

"Except I'm changing the plan. No messiah."

"No messiah?" the younger angel said. "But...you promised. People have been waiting."

"Not the Jews," said the older one. "Not so much anymore. Not even the Catholics."

God snorted them to attention.

"I'm changing the plan. That's what I get to do."

They nodded again.

"The Catholics have a tight ship. Good for them. I like tight ships. But that nonsense they preach about virgin births and bread and wine--odious. The Jews are smart but their ship isn't tight. Come to think of it, out there in the desert where I found them they don't even need a ship."

The angels laughed. God had a very keen sense of humour, often missed by the veteran angels, especially the Seraphs who complained that they had to do an unfair share of the singing.

"But, you know, the Jews are smart. They keep winning me Nobel prizes. Those blinking Asians--never believed in me and never will. Know how many Nobel prizes they've won? Zip. A few Chinese Christians. I've made my point. Make me proud or hear me loud."

The younger angel cleared his throat nervously, "Lord, if you don't mind my asking--what is the plan? You haven't mentioned your other people--you know, the ones without a tight ship and Nobel prizes to offer you in homage--the..."

"Muslims? You mean the Muslims?" God smiled the smile of a man in the know.

"Yes, sir: them. If you aren't going to send a messiah but you still feel you have to destroy the earth, how do they fit in. They haven't been doing much since 1215.."

God beckoned the young angels to the window. "Look--there" he said. "See all of that smoke?"

"Yes," they said. "It's Syria. Iraq. Palestine..."

"Let it grow," God said. "We'll just sit back and watch. No stress, no blame, no responsibility. They're not pinning this one on me."

"I guess that's why you're God," the older angel said grinning a self-serving grin. "You knew this all along."

"And no salvation."

Blue

When I was a boy I was sure
the moon was a hole in the sky.
In every crayon drawing
I blued it over to fix the hole.
My teachers worried:
Don’t you get it, they said:
The moon belongs there--
Colour it white.

At night, I would part my curtains
and there it was again:
swelling from a thin, vaporous veil
to a stark white hole in the black sky.
I wondered why God had not sewn it up:
It looked like some unfinished
bit of work, like Nonnie's extra yarn
or wood curls on my father’s shop floor.

The sun was an orange butterfly
flitting against the dark blue sky,
but the moon was a moth eating away
at the perfection of a dead day,
as shadows moved deeper and deeper
to kill my vision.
If only we can kill the moon
I thought at eight--and ten.

Now I am older. I know what the moon is
and I know I cannot cover it in blue.
And I know that it is a white, round, cold thing
and not a hole in the fabric of God’s canopy.
I know the stars are not so many slits
glittering behind a black canvas to tease us
into knowing what heaven is.

When I am gone, you will miss me like
you miss the moon you never knew
or never understood.
You will miss me for what I am, not a rip
in a perfect heavenly cloth but a white
and shining love that shone in your life
and brightened your night for a little while.

Of God's Tears

Let's face it. Any atheist can be forgiven for looking at the Middle East and clucking that religion promotes violence.

Unless you believe that God's will for humanity is a state of perpetual war then this is hardly the best advertisement for his effectiveness.

Thy will be done. Insh'Allah. Really?

I wrote an essay a few years ago called The Number Three It basically maintained (hardly a new idea) that the three book religions were like spoiled children fighting over daddy's vineyard--echoes of Shakespeare and Lessing.

It isn't just about water and arable soil anymore, or al-Aqsa. Those things were important once, but now it's about two thousand years of hating each other.

The exponents of these book traditions always say the same thing. They all say in different ways their religions are about peace, love and compassion. They all hold to the doctrine that this is what their holy books really say. God loves Israel. God is love. Islam means peace. They say it even when they strap guns on their back, or drop bombs on beaches, or don suicide vests to kill bystanders--often their own kith--in restaurants, weddings and market places.

They say this when they beat women, or refuse a woman the right to marry someone she loves, or divorce someone she hates, or decide how many children to have.

They say this when they deny girls the right to education. They say this when they teach their boys and young men to kill. They say this when they teach them that their way is the only right way and the words in their books the only right words.

This God is not the lord of the universe but a God of the small places, their worst instincts and most vicious prejudices. If their ancient texts point to man being made in God's image, the reality is a God who has been fashioned from their ugliest features.

I believe that God is better than this, but it is just a belief. The human attempts to write down his mighty deeds, express his will, and carry out his injunctions look more dismal and imperfect with each passing day.

That is because the story of God has become entwined in the efforts of believers to limit him to their particular vision and to equate his reality to whatever they happen to be doing at any given moment in history.

Faced with a similar "meaning" crisis, aeons ago, the biblical writers decided to invent the story of Noah. According to it, the earth had become irredeemably wicked. God regretted what he had done. So, the story goes, he decided to wash it away, blood and all, and start over. And so he did.

Alas atheists use this story to prove that God is a cruel and limited being. They import lots of later theological notions (omniscience, for example) and argue that a God who is all-knowing should have known better. That he was at cross purposes with himself. How absurd. How--irrational.

But for my money, this myth (and, like the creation story, it is one) is not about an all-knowing god. It is just about God. It is an expression of where we were once upon a time and where we still are. "Man is evil continually" and God, like all exasperated fathers, wants an end of it.

Equivalently depressed longings gave us ideas about the end of the world--apocalypse, the messiah (deliverance from evil) and the Islamic belief in a new path that would correct the errors of the old. It gave us the belief in judgement, and indirectly a theory of morality--of good and evil. These aspirations were not based on the belief that a religion is inherently good but that religion is a struggle against the human tendency to mess everything up. Sin.

I am close to saying, figuratively of course, that I believe in a God who weeps, and would weep at what he has to watch unfolding. What has changed is that in olden days, the sons of men did not say "Our religion is perfect; it's just a few misfits that are giving it a bad name." That is not what any of the book religions taught. They taught struggle against error, even if they defined error in self-serving terms that could later be exploited by religious experts as the one, true, noble, straight or revealed path to heaven.

The first century missionary St Paul had his profound moments. One of them was when he realized that the "inclinations of the heart" were normally so corrupt that even the best of men was still more like the worst of men than like God. He did not see Christianity as a magical cure for this problem. He saw the problem as invasive and global. He saw that it extended to Jews and Christians alike, and if Muslims had existed then he would have been happy to include them in the tally. He saw as its cure the simple recognition that we are sinners--we all fall short, every one. Religion does not bring us up to standard. It just tells us that we all fall short.

Please "get" that I do not believe in sin or in very much of anything that passes for doctrine.

But I do believe, like the ancient Persians (and Paul, who seems to have known a few--like Augustine did) that we are pulled between forces that incline us to be generous, kind and compassionate and forces that persuade us to be cruel, violent and mean. Paul believed these forces were real--the "principalities and powers in high places." But we know these demons are within, not above, and part of our consciousness, not something apart from it.

Religion is not the cause of this struggle: It is the stage on which the struggle is acted out. It is a description of it. Struggle made it. But it does not control the outcome.

Jews, Christians and Muslims need to stop saying that their "religion" is a perfect thing practiced by imperfect men and women. That is not true. It is a system for defining a relationship which is defined as imperfect, and which makes a clear distinction between two things I do believe in: good and evil.

When you look at the arrogance of Jews operating in the Gaza, or at Bible-toting American zealots who believe in a "Christian" America, or at suicide bombings in Iraq or kidnappings in Nigeria described as attempts to restore the "true Islam" of the Prophet's time you are looking at your religion.

You are looking at all religion. You are looking at why God weeps.

Down

Let the ghastly coverage begin
On Fox and Friends and CNN
Show little purses 'midst the fires,
And guidebooks ripped and pacifiers.
Show backpacks strewn amidst the clutter
And ipads melting while flames sputter.
Leave nothing that might be said unsaid,
Ye media ghouls who love the dead.
Two days in, the politics bore us--
You have no option but to whore us.
And after all we can't just blame it
All on you: it's entertainment.
No scene's too grisly or too gory
When e'er it works to sell the story.

PERSIA IN THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION

We talk a lot about the legacy of Greece and Rome but in 1948 the polymathic Will Durant, in a transcribed lecture, tried to set the historical record straight: we owe far more to ancient Persia than anyone has ever dared to admit.

Persia in the History of Civilization: By Will Durant

[Originally presented as an address before the Iran America Society in Tehran on April 21, 1948.]

...
For thousands of years Persians have been creating beauty. Sixteen centuries before Christ there went from these regions or near it-from Aryana Vaieho, or Old Iran-the migration that poured new blood into northern India. From that new blood came the noble Sanskrit language, so nearly kin to your own melodious speech; from that fusion came the Vedas, the Upanishads, and Buddha. You have been here a kind of watershed of civilization, pouring your blood and thought and art and religion eastward and westward into the world. From the Avesta of your ancient faith came not only a hundred influences upon Judaism, Christianity, and Muhammadanism, but one of the highest moral philosophies of all time-the conception of life as struggle between light and dark-ness, truth and falsehood, good and evil, and the command to men to enlist in the fight for light, and help Ahura Mazda win that great battle whose cosmic scope and vast duration gave to the individual life a meaning, a value, and a nobility that could not be crushed by death.

I need not rehearse for you again the achievements of your Achaemenid period. Then for the first time in known history an empire almost as extensive as the United States received an orderly government, a competence of administration, a web of swift communications, a security of movement by men and goods on majestic roads, equaled before our time only by the zenith of Imperial Rome. The decay of that Achaemenid Empire after Marathon and Salamis was a tragedy for civilization; and yet, when Alexander came, 150 years later, he was so impressed by the culture and courtesy of the Persians, the refinement and grace of then-lives, and not least by the beauty and modesty of their women, that he abandoned all notion of conquest, proposed a union of Greek and Persian blood and civilization, and set an example to his soldiers by marrying Persian wives. I should be happy if the narrow morals of my own rearing would permit me to follow his example.

In some ways the Seleucid dynasty realized Alexander's dream of uniting Greek and Persian cultures into one complex civilization. The entry of Rome and its armies into Asia disturbed that fusion; and throughout the Parthian period Persia had to spend its forces, as now, on the preservation of its national independence against external pressure or aggression. The Sasanian kings almost recaptured the glory of Achaemenid days; once again there were great rulers, orderly government, artistic creation; every material, from the most delicate textiles to the strongest iron or bronze, received the impress of skillful workmanship and subtle design; and now took form many of the decorative motives that were to influence Byzantine orna-ment, and came to fullest flower in Persian Islam.

The Arab Conquest disturbed the continuity of your cultural development. But hardly a century passed before the Abbasid revolution marked, or allowed, the victory of Persia over her conquerors; Persia did to the Arabs what Greece had done to Rome. The Shi'a faith rewrote the Muhammadan religion for the Persian people. Grammarians, lexicographers, historians, rose as if from the dead, and prepared the way for a literary renaissance. In the fourth century of your era ten large catalogues were required merely to list the books in the public library at Rayy; about 550 H. Merv had ten libraries, one of which contained 12,000 volumes. As early as the third century of the Muslim era you were producing great historians like al-Tabari; and 900 years ago a Persian scholar, Ibn Miskawayh, wrote what I am now trying to write in too brief a life-a universal history from the point of view of philosophy.

About 197 H. Khwarazmi, a Persian of Khiva, introduced the Hindu numerals into Persia, whence they spread through Islam to the West to become our "Arabic" numerals. On the cars that I saw in Baghdad both sets of license numbers were Arabic, though few Iraqis or Europeans there realized it. The same Khwarazmi practically established the science of algebra, and gave it its name-al-jabr, integration, completion. He formulated the oldest known tables of trigonometry. By general consent of even European historians like George Sarton or David Smith, Khwarazmi was the greatest of mediaeval mathematicians.

A still greater scientist, a savant of astounding range, was also born near Khiva, about 362 H.-Muhammad Biruni, the Leonardo and Leibnitz of Islam. He was a mathematician, an astronomer, a geographer, a linguist, an historian, a poet and a philosopher; and he did original work in all these fields. The princes of Khwarazm, Tabaristan, and Ghazni competed for the honor of sheltering him at their courts. You know the story of the traveler who told Mahmud that he had seen a land on which the sun never set for months at a time. Mahmud thought that the traveler was making fun of him, and ordered his execution; Biruni saved the traveler's life by explaining to Mahmud the midnight sun of the north polar regions in our summer, and of the south polar regions in our winter. Al-burins Tank al-Hind-Inquiry into India-is the greatest work of objective scholarship in all mediaeval literature. He took for granted the sphericity of the earth, measured with amazing accuracy the inclination of the ecliptic-the angle between the equator and the orbit of the sun's apparent motion around the earth. He expounded gravitation, and remarked that all known astronomical phenomena could be explained by supposing that the earth revolves daily on its axis, and annually around the sun.

As Biruni was the greatest of mediaeval scientists, so Razi (born c, 220 H.) was the greatest of mediaeval physicians. His picture hangs in the School of Medicine at the Uni-versity of Paris, along with that of Ibn Sina. Ibn Sina, whom Europe calls Avicenna, was, quite deserving it, more famous than Razi as a writer on medicine; but deserved his fame as the greatest of mediaeval philosophers. Born near Bukhara about 380 H., he lived at Khiva, Gurgan, Hamadan, and Isfahan. His Qanun of medicine, translated into Latin, displaced both Razi and Galen, and was used as a text in the universities of Montpellier and Louvain till our seventeenth century. The Astor Library in New York has a precious copy 300 years old; I was allowed to study it, but could hardly carry it from shelf to desk- a thousand double-columned pages as large as those of your great Qur'ans. Even vaster, running to eighteen volumes, was Ibn Sina's Kitab al-shifa-a one-man encyclopaedia of science, philosophy and theology-the greatest intellectual achievement in all mediaeval history. Here and in Aristotle were the sources of Averroes and Maimonides, and even of Christian scholastic philosophy. Roger Bacon considered Avicenna the greatest philosopher since Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas quoted him repeatedly, with respect equal to that which he gives to Plato.

I know of no people in history-except possibly the Japanese-that has had so many poets as Persia. Harun al-Rashid's favorite poet was the scandalous Persian, Abu Nuwas. The ShahnNameh of Ferdowsi is one of the major works of the world's literature; and none of its rivals has ever been written, or illuminated, or bound, so beautifully as the magnificent Shahnamehs that are treasured in the museums and private collections of the world.

I have spoken so far only of Persia before the Seljuq ascendancy. I say nothing of the graceful glory of Persepolis, its mighty architecture and massive reliefs; nothing of your rock-cut reliefs, from Darius I to Shapur II; nothing of the scant remains that Turkish, Mongol, and Tartar raids have left of your art in the Abbasid period; yet Muqaddasi and other travel-ers ranked the mosques of Nishapur and Turshiz with the Umayyad mosque of Damascus. To your Seljuq conquerors you did as you had done to the Arabs-you transformed them from warriors into artists. "Seljuq architecture," says Arthur Upham Pope, "is one of the classic manifestations of the human spirit."

The Persian taste for graceful ornament united with the heroic mould of the Seljuq Turks to produce at Merv, and Hamadan, and Qazvin, and Isfahan an architectural flowering as remarkable as, and contemporary with, the Gothic efflorescence in France. In Persia and other lands of the Near and Middle East the elements of Gothic architecture in pillar and pointed arch, vault and dome, took definite form, and, in the Seljuq masterpieces, achieved perfection and unity. And in that Seljuq age ceramics became a major art; architecture became at times an appendage to pottery; and the tiles of Rayy and Kashan, the lustered decoration, faience, and glass of these and other Persian cities-Tabriz, Sultanabad, Damghan, Nisha-pur-brightened the face and walls of a hundred mosques and a thousand palaces. And on the walls, and under men's feet, were Persian rugs such as even Persia cannot make today. "All the paintings of the Italian Renaissance," said an American painter, John Singer Sargent, "are not worth one Persian rug."

Your most famous poet belongs to the Seljuq age. Omar Khayyam, of course, was above all a scientist, whose quatrains were the casual amusement of one whose greatest pleasures were mathematics and astronomy; do not take too seriously his paeans to wine. His proposed reformation of the Persian calendar was more accurate than Europe's present Gregorian calendar; this errs by a day in 3,330 years, Omar's by a day in 3,770 years. I mourn that I shall not see his tomb in Nishapur, nor the artistic wealth of Mashhad; nor shall I see the little town near Tiflis where Nizami sang of Layla and Majnun; nor the shop in Nishapur where Attar sold perfumes. But I trust that I shall see Shiraz, and thank it for Sa'di and Hafez.

The Mongols came upon all this glory and laid it waste; ruined the canals that watered your soil, and the libraries that nourished your souls; and you repaid them by turning them, too, into lovers and creators of art. Tabriz grew rich on the trade that flowed between the Mongol lands of the East and the cities on the Black Sea; probably along this route the Mongols brought from China the art of printing; Tabriz used the art to print paper money in A.D. 1294. I need not tell you of the great mosques that rose and fell at Tabriz; of the famous observatory at Maragha, near Tabriz, where Hulagu in 1259 brought together the leading astronomers from the Chinese to the Islamic worlds, under the leadership of Nasir al-Din Tusi; of the brief magnificence of Uljaitu's Sultaniyeh, and the university city built just south of Tabriz by the great prime minister, Rashid al-Din, at the opening of the fourteenth century of the Christian era, "There is no greater service," wrote this vizier, rivaled in Islam only by Nizam al-Mulk, "than to encourage science and scholarship ... to make it possible for scholars to work in peace of mind without the harassments of poverty."

In your great Archaeological Museum I saw some of the few surviving works of Rashid al-Din as historian, and mourned that no book of this century would ever be written or illustrated so beautifully. One could almost forgive the ravages of the Mongols for the art of illumination that prospered under their patronage. In those centuries, patient and subtle fingers made the loveliest books that the world has ever known. These men knew printing, but would not use it for their books; and the best printed books of today are to an illuminated masterpiece of the Mongol age in Persia and Transoxiana what a Ford car is to the Parthen-on. "Imagination," said a Persian poet, "cannot grasp the joy that reason draws from a fine-drawn line." I do not know which, in these great manuscripts, is fairer-the illumination or the text; only Chinese and Japanese can rival the Arabic script as works of calligraphic art. To my perhaps untutored taste the inscriptions that label the objects in your Archaeological Museum are among the loveliest things in these bright halls.

But I must not continue this reckless leaping from peak to peak of your cultural history. Forgive me for talking so long. But I have learned to love your poetry, your art, your man-ners, your spirit; I wish the years might be given me to study your achievements more fully, and to do them justice in my history. But I shall do what no Christian author has ever done -give to Islamic culture almost a third of all the space in my volume on mediaeval civilization. My Christian readers will marvel at the length of my survey of mediaeval Islam; and Muslim scholars will mourn its criminal brevity.

Seldom has any society seen, in an equal period, so many illustrious figures in government, education, literature, philology, geography, history, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, theology, and philosophy as in the four centuries of Islam between Harun al-Rashid and Averroes. In a sense this brilliant flowering was a recovery of the Near East from Greek domination; it reached back not only to the Persia of Darius but to the Judea of Solomon, the Assyria of Assurbanipal, the Babylonia of Hammurabi, the Akkad of Sargon, the Sumeria of unknown kings. So the continuity of history reasserts itself; despite earthquakes, epidemics, eruptive migrations, and catastrophic wars, the essential processes of civilization are not lost; some younger culture takes them up, snatches them from the conflagration, and carries them through imitation to creation, until fresh youth and spirit can join the fray.

As men are members of one another, and citizens are parts of a united state, so civilizations are units in a larger whole that we may only call history; they are stages in the life of Man. Therefore the scholar, though he belongs to his country through affectionate prejudice, feels himself also a citizen of that boundless realm, the international of the Mind; he hardly deserves his name if he carries political or racial distinctions into his studies; and he accords his grateful homage to any people that has borne the torch and enriched his heritage. So I do to you.

-Ism and Isn’t: The Introspective Conscience of the West

The following essay is reprinted from The New Oxonian (3 May 2014: http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/... )


I’m not sure when I first heard the word multi-culturalism, but I am pretty sure that it has been around for almost half my life. So have the words pluralism, globalism, inclusivism, and Eurocentrism, along, of course, with lesser -isms that define the way we are supposed to look at the world. Some of these are of almost exclusively academic–which is to say almost no interest—postmodernism, for example; some with political-social and theological valence: racism, sexism, speciesism, denialism, creationism. I am losing track.

The main thing to remember is that -ism words can mean good things, bad things or just things depending on what noun (or adjective) they are attached to. Capitalism and communism are economic things, gradually giving way to an unpredictable monster called consumerism. Racism and sexism and Eurocentrism are bad things. Pluralism and inclusivism are good things. Multiculturalism and globalism are things. Postmodernism may be a good thing or a bad thing or just a thing, and if you take it seriously it doesn’t matter which it is.

I am pushing for a new term to describe gun-lovers, hoplotism (from the Greek for weapon), but then we would need a word to describe the people who oppose them—and we already have that: citizens.

About seven years ago a student of mine at Wells College, an ardent proponent of Native American land claims in Onondaga, New York (near Syracuse and Ithaca), wrote the following sentence. “I am a squatter on the land of the Onondaga people, a citizen of a multicultural, pluralistic society that has denied them their rights, their traditions and their sacred ground because of our shameful insistence on Eurocentrism.” It’s a poor sentence: what she really means is that the European settlers, mainly British and French, grabbed land from the Seneca, Mohawk and Iroquois people and that the colonists, reinvented as citizen landowners, mindful that the Onondaga people sided with the British during the Revolution, did not treat them well after Independence. It’s also true that the Indian nations grabbed land from each other, and false that the Europeans “introduced” war and squabbling to the indigenous peoples.

Anyway, what bothers me about this kind of thinking and writing is not just that it is C+ work but that its author probably thinks it is solid A-quality stuff because the sentiments it expresses are generally agreed to be accurate, or, what is more important, politically altruistic. It is part of what the postmodern klatch that dominates conversation in our universities calls “narrative” and we all know that all narratives are relatively true, relative, that is, to who is speaking. That being the case, can I put my red pen back in the drawer and have a drink?
But there is actually something more worrying about the loose-use of the -isms to build up or destroy (or preclude) argument.

I used to laugh when students challenged me on a point by saying, “Whoa—that is so Eurocentric,” because, after all, the whole direction of modern western intellectual culture has been to get us to recognize that particular sin, along with androcentrism and heterosexism.

I considered myself redeemed—twice born, washed in the flood of Foucault & Co. I felt this way until one day I asked a sluggish third year seminar class, “What do you mean by that? What does Eurocentrism mean?” Perhaps it was my edginess that caused the sudden silence to fall over the usually happy group. But I think it was something deeper, more deeply troubling. I don’t think they knew what they meant. They had been told that when they weren’t sure what to blame for some indeterminate injustice to blame Eurocentrism, just as the world over the last sixty years has learned the philippic Blame America—which, to be honest, it sometimes needs to do. I once suggested that insurance companies change the phrase ‘acts of God’ to ‘acts of America’ to describe lightening, flood, earthquake and storm. No one replied to my suggestion.

I am becoming worried that the code and shortcuts we use are enemies of critical thinking—a term much abused in its own right, especially in the academy—rather than tools to be used in the careful analysis of ideas. Where in our lexicon are words like Sinocentric, Afrocentric, iconoclasticentric (objecting to the Eurocentrism of the western canon), homocentric, and gynocentric? Nobody seriously suggests that these words be added to an already overstocked stew. Because even a moment’s reflection will tell us that a lot of the ‘discourse’ that people have been labeling ‘political correctness’ for at least a decade (trendy word warning!) privileges the critique over solutions to the problem and often doesn’t acknowledge the existence of a well-reasoned opposing viewpoint. -Isms have always been about the insiders; flail and squirm as you like, it is difficult to escape their incisive cultural power.

It well may be that a critique of the critique is unnecessary and that the mere mention of words like ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘Eurocentrism’ suggests the need to change attitudes, awareness, agendas, and political reality. What’s past isn’t prologue: it’s wrong. ‘Reality’ is a good choice of words because so many -isms evoke the notion that there are certain things we need to wake up to, that half of any population at any given time is asleep whilst the really attentive and politically engaged are wide awake. And however correct the asseveration of an -ism may be when applied to anything, it is not mathematical correctness. Surely (human beings being the imperfect creatures we are) there are degrees of racism, sexism, and Eurocentrism?

But that is not exactly my point. My point is that our students are learning that these words have a withering, non-negotiable, self-evidential truth-value. And that is the death of thinking. It is the opposite of critical thinking.

I want them to see more and sloganeer less: to think not just about what they are saying but what other people, untouched by the native (naïve?) liberalism of the Western university are saying. Their commitment to oversimplification is such that they actually believe that the country that introduced the –isms to world attention and discussion is alone and unique (and singularly guilty) in perpetuating the bad -isms that make the good -isms necessary.

The list I’ve just given is long, so let me just focus on my student’s use of the word “multiculturalism” and its next of kin, “pluralism” and her theory that she is an intruder who needs to apologize for the sins of her fathers and mothers, or change her name to Crying River.

I have spent the last three years in China. Despite its insecurity as a bumbling, aggressive giant trying to behave like a friendly bear, China is not a pluralistic country. Its population is 95% mono-ethnic, and so too (despite what you may have learned) is its language. Mandarin (standard Chinese or Pǔtōnghuà) is spoken by 93% of the people (the Han) and only about 6% of the population belong to one of the 57 recognized ethnic minorities who inhabit the country. This makes China, along with its neighbor Japan, one of the least pluralistic or “multicultural” nations on earth. Only the principates of the Middle East can claim to be more incestuously and genetically cohesive, and we know how they treat الأجانب –outsiders.

Where I am located, I seldom see another European face. I am gawked at, pointed at, jostled (deliberately) and occasionally laughed at by swarthy workers (yes there is still that class in China, and they are a very significant part of the population) and sometimes even groups inside the university gates (where I am also treated kindly and generously). The reaction of the ordinary folk is so obvious that it does not bother me at all. I have come to take it as a compliment. Somewhere in the recesses of my Teutonic brain I probably think racialist thoughts: words like wog, chink and gook flash across my mind. They are probably saying (to be overheard) yángguǐzi (洋鬼子), which has about the same emotional lode as “nigger”, but it is easy to ignore and to smile back at them, which they find incredibly stupid of me. Being an American I am naturally interested in the psychological roots of their reaction—what phobia through yonder visage breaks?—but I know that there are parts of the psyche of the Middle Kingdom that will be forever inscrutable to me. Last year I was astonished on a May Day outing to see the same sort of people ridiculing monkeys at the Beijing Zoo and throwing used cardboard cups at polar bears.

Why do I mention this? Because the West—Europe, its colonies and its modern offspring, like America–is so obsessed with doing penance for its checkered and beastly history that it has forgotten two very important points: First, it created modernity. That is no small feat. Most of what we call science, democracy, and cultural progress comes from the West. To put this negatively, it did not come from the East, or South Asia, nor from Africa and there are perfectly good historical reasons for why this is true. Some of these reasons are tied to isolation. Some are linked to religion. Few however have anything to do with colonialism: which is to say, colonialism did not cause isolation and backwardness to happen, it exploited it. It profited from it. It was not fair race. It was not even a race.

I am not impugning the contributions of these distaff geographical regions and societies to the history of humankind, century’s yore. It is the first response of multicultural zealots to say, What about –the printing press, paper, gunpowder, surgery, and a litany of other achievements. No one wants to forget these contributions, and we should always keep them in grateful view, whether or not they influenced western technology or not. But just for the record: China did not invent the printing press and the circumference of the earth and the theory of evolution are not in the Qur’an. Let’s get that straight.

What I am saying is that the West created modernity. One of the reasons we may be forgiven for being Eurocentric is that we have been the caretakers of modernity for a long time, and even created post-modernity to castigate ourselves for inventing it.

And the West did this by developing what Krister Stendahl, a former dean of the Harvard Divinity School, called “the introspective conscience of the west.”

Technology followed the opening of the mind to the world and the world to the mind, and this seems to have happened in the period we call the renaissance and the “age of discovery.” It was an intellectual, geographical, religious, and social revolution that did not happen anywhere else, finalized in the rejection of monarchial and biblical authority and the political revolutions, oft-admired but never successfully duplicated, in France and America. I am not sure that it could have happened anywhere else, because like all unique things it did not happen anywhere else and the conditions were not ripe for it having happened anywhere else. Even in Europe, outside England, its happening was almost sacrificed to the gods of pagan antiquity, especially Teutonic ones, and their hatreds. But her children saved her from her past.
I am going to be blunt and outrageous: most of the world does not have this introspective conscience. China does not have it. Japan does not have it. India does not have it. Africa does not have it. The Middle East and the Islamic world do not have it.

Hold fire, Ye soldiers of Multicultural Rectitude: I am not saying these cultures don’t have traditions of learning and wisdom and spiritual insight. I am saying that there is something they did not have. The West has it because its history is the history of how this conscience and its institutions developed, in a self-critical way from tribe, to kingdom, to nation-state, to democratic nations, and from the rule of divinely anointed hereditary kings and princely bishops to elected, secular authority.

Put flatly, it means that most of the world outside the West did not generate the critical interchanges that led finally to old Europe becoming modern Europe, a growing process that (as we all know) was not characterized by peace, love and understanding but by bloody battles and heated philosophical discussions and fierce political rivalries leading not to religious hegemony (like the Ottoman Empire) or a political crackdown (like Communist-style nationalism) but to freedom of conscience and action. Indeed Stendahl sees this as being foreshadowed in the missionary journeys of Paul the apostle who forged alliances between Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, the first ecumenical movement, a pre-global globalism, that was then gradually secularized through the progress of Christianity and it civilizing power to become the synthesis that we call the West.

Something like Stendahl’s thesis was reiterated by none other than Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, reminding Europe of its debts to Christianity, a reminder that was so nuanced (or seemed so wrong) that most people took hardly any notice at all.

But regardless of whether Stendhal and Benedict were right, I am sure that only Europe, itself evolved from tribal confederations, linguistic confusion, and two millennia of ideological and religious contests, made it happen. We can argue endlessly over debts, but not over proceeds.

Someone asked me recently why America achieved so much more in the short 250 years of its existence than Europe had achieved in the previous 2000 years and China in the previous ‘5000’ [sic]. The answer is simple: By the time America happened, all the preliminary work had been done. It was a new country—not a new civilization. It began with the printing press, books, ships, telescopes, even, thanks to itinerant refugees from Cambridge, a college–and the accumulated wisdom of Europe; it didn’t need to invent it.

It did lack one thing Europe had, which made it easier for progress to be made: It had no fealty to the past.

But it is also true that while other countries throw around the mantra of multiculturalism, America in terms of size, diversity complexity and ethnicity is the most pluralistic country on the planet. Media attention to its racists, yahoos and bigots sometimes tempts its critics to think that modern America is a lot like 1950′s South Africa; but no one who really knows the country thinks this. It’s just that the media is part of the process of contrition that the country uses to acknowledge the perdurance of its sins.

Compared even to multicultural Britain, the master of the post-colonial sweepstakes in terms of its rule of very un-European places, only about 10% of Britons identify as “non-white”. In America, the number who officially identify as white is now a scant 63%. And the number of Americans who speak Spanish as their first language has risen to 50,000,000 in a country of 313,000,000 people. If questions like immigration, colour, and (even) the fate of native Americans seem large and sloppily handled to the rest of the world, it is because the rest of the world is not as multicultural as America. I cannot tell you how many of my foreign chums who pride themselves on their anti-American credentials are flabbergasted by the ‘phenomenon’ of Barack Obama and look merely confused when I say he must be a pawn of the Republicans. America is, after all, an inside joke.

China is not multicultural. It is not interested in becoming multicultural. It is happy that the West beats its chest for the mistakes of ‘Eurocentrism’, just as the Middle East about ten years ago was rapturous over Edward Said’s theory, in Orientalism, of The Other, a catchy thesis that completely ignored the otherization and demonization of the West by Arab and Asian elites in general. –That is, until they need to go shopping.

The East does not want the West’s defeat: it wants its own success. China wants the victory of the Han people over a stumbling and fumbling confederacy of western powers. Its history tells us that such differences create weakness and that weaknesses can be exploited for gain–indeed, the whole modern history of China has been based on the dominance of unity and sameness. It does this through propaganda, censorship, a tightly controlled entertainment media and a constipated and illiberal university system; through promoting itself as the ‘soft power’ country, the country you can love and trust, and whose Destiny (China’s real god, a Hegelian-Marxist idol with stone feet set deep in its history) is to rule the world benevolently.

Because the Middle East and its minions are tied to a religious mandate, the West is a cultural problem. As events of the last fifteen years have shown, the Islamic world does want the cultural defeat of the West as a means of confirming their teleology—their view of history as being in the hands of God. It cannot do this (as China can) economically. It cannot do it philosophically or apologetically (the West is where all the Christians are, or what remains of them). So they are reduced to the patterns of violence we call terrorism. Moreover, the contemporary Islamic world, despite its piety and zealotries, has more in common with the West than with Asia and a long history of conflict, especially with China.

We may well live to see the defeat of the West happen, in economic terms. But if so, this will not represent the triumph of multiculturalism; it will be the triumph of a myopic, self-interested and determined mono-culture over the West. It will be the West emplacing in power, through its penance towards the sins of the past, a part of the world which feels little remorse about anything. And like the Germany of 1929 is determined to recover from its ‘century of [European] humiliation’.

The East does not necessarily want violence, and China, for example, eschews it and in view of its patchy history in fighting foreign powers probably fears it. Violence, as in war, is always unpredictable and the aftermath of modern wars is hard to assess—viz. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. Modern Europe seems to have lost its appetite for war. China (as China) has never won one. Nor really has the Islamic world since the fall of Constantinople in 1452. Only the United States seems to retain something of the Old World love of burning powder and the rockets’ red glare.

What the East wants is the end of the West as the center of gravity, economy and culture. And what they cannot understand, and regard as ignorant, is that sometimes the West wants it too, wants it for catharsis, cleansing, restoration. Freedom of expression means freedom of critique, and the West’s vaunted openness and almost pathological willingness to dissect itself in public—especially America—is usually mistaken for foolishness, weakness, and a public declaration of inferiority.

Our students need to know this, too. The West has learned from Paul the apostle to the gentiles—the West–no less that we are all sinners looking for redemption. There are a thousand variations on this theme, most of them since the Renaissance secular. In the old calculus, this redemption came from God, who stood before and above the nations with his scale. But in the post-Christian and secular world, there are only nations, and their scales are not weighted towards justice.

But this is not a broadside against monocultures. We have to be honest, that some nations and states are still homogeneous. Their ties are family ties often reinforced by the strong bonds of religion and language. For those who have not traveled, the West, especially America and Britain, is not in the old sense a land of opportunity (or hope and glory) but a concept that overshadows these traditional patriotic, ethnic and religious ties.

The mysterious East reacts to the otherness of America with a mixture of grudging admiration, petulance, suspicion–and safeguards in the form of critical media, internet and social media censorship, sometimes outright hostility—like the Filipinos exercising their right to throw eggs at Mr Obama (at a safe remove) a few days ago, a right which would be denied these protesters but for their having been hatched in a Pacific nursery of American democracy. Chinese cameras were quick to record and broadcast the incident, which would have been strictly and vigorously prevented in Beijing. I want my students to understand why, not just to side with or against the egg-throwers. Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini and Mao tse Dng were never pelted with eggs, at least not when they were in charge.

Our students must learn the sins of the past. After all, it is what we, the sons and daughters of Europe, did to slaves, and Jews, and aboriginal people and Serbs and Turks that helped to shape this introspective conscience in Europe and much of central Asia, especially Russia. I will not make the obvious point that our habit of confession and remorse goes back much further than that, to the crucifixion, or to Paul’s “The good I would do, I do not do; but the evil that I would not do—that is what I do.”

But we also need to teach them that We Are Not Rousseau. The cult of the untouched, noble, unaffected, anti-social savage was a myth of grand proportions and should have stayed confined to the 18th century. Even Shakespeare seems to have known better (over a hundred years earlier) when the west didn’t know much about the native peoples of the New World: Caliban is not noble; he is jealous and vicious. But he is a mixture of who he is by nature and what his master has made him. We all are.

Our students must discover, however, that their own introspection and remorse is not enough in the real world, in the world of ideas and action. Their responsibility is more complex. Vast numbers of people on earth do not value the ideals of pluralism, inclusivism, multiculturalism. Even refugees from North Africa who risk life and limb on rafts to get to the coast of Spain have no idea what they are getting into, and (as the European states are finding more and more) neither do the escapees and wannabes of Pakistan, the ‘burger’ who occupy the inner cities of ‘Mancusistan’ (Manchester, UK) and Waltham Forest (North London), where Muslim patrols try to enforce Sharia on the locals. They wanted out, but they are not sure about being in. Is it ‘Eurocentric’ to say that they seem to be missing some crucial existential point?

Vast numbers from these monocultures of language, ethnicity or religion regard western values as sexy and exciting, desirable and dangerous. They ‘want’ it but they are afraid they will go to hell if they take it. That in part is what 9-11 was all about—an attack on the secular icons of western society, as poignant in its way as the burning of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem by Roman pagans would have been in the year 70 AD. The ruling elite of China have no such compunction: they simply want it because they are convinced that Sina Magna crouches towards Beijing to be born.

Which is to say that to teach students slogans without teaching them how we came to value these words and what historical events shaped our particular consciousness of the world is a poor way to teach human values. If the West is at all special—let’s avoid the word ‘exceptional’—it is because it has succeeded more or less, and from time to time, in providing a general critique of its sins.

It has done this by developing a tradition of tolerance for good ideas. It’s done this by insisting that in the contest between personal freedom and the unquestioned domination of the state, it is best to err on the side of personal freedom—especially in matters of free speech, which is always preferable to revolution and war. It has done this in permitting religion to develop without interference while insisting that the work of government has to be kept separate from religious control, even in questions of morality. In multiple ways, the values of tolerance, freedom, and the ‘spirit’ of reason have permitted a unique kind of democracy to flourish in the West while permitting the western democracies to pursue their visions in different and sometimes conflicting ways.

Our students have to get beyond the critique of colonialism and Eurocentrism to a fuller understanding of the complete narrative—which has to be read before it can be critiqued or dismissed. And I am sorry to say that to be ignorant of the classics and the so-called western ‘canon’ is to avoid this responsibility—an unthinkable intellectual crime in China, Japan, or the Islamic world in terms of their own canons sand culture. They need to understand that their right of dissent, free inquiry and free expression, does not arise from the monocultural thinking of Said’s Other, the mystical monotonous East. It comes from the uniquely Western values that make it possible for them to say both passionately critical things and profoundly silly things without worrying about the consequences.