religion and philosophy
global warming
A blog was published the other day
Steve Gardiner's AnthroBlog - http://slgardiner.com/blogs/anthroblog
on the blogsite titled Sinology. This was a response to a book by Marks on the evolution of the modern world. I can no longer access either of these or for that matter even see this blog. I wrote this response to Gardiner. I publish it so other's elsewhere may see it. Here it is. I hope Steve Gardiner also publishes it so it can be visible on his site as well. This version takes the arguments a little further than the one i posted to his site.
My own book "The Global Silk Road" takes account the issues Steve Gardner's comments on Robert Marks book raises but with an interpretation that does not rely on accident but human hubris and design. I have spent the last five years working through the arguments he and marks raise.
Accident is not, I believe, a good way to describe social evolutionary changes of the kind described in the above blog. Islam was far more vital to the story than merely being a stop to land based trade between the East and West. The continual defeat of Islam by Christian, Catholic and Orthodox forces forced a fundamentalist re-think within Islam. Muslims believe that the Prophet was given the direct and final word of God in a far more extensive and meaningful manner, the Koran, than Moses had been given the 10 Commandments. They tried hard to faithfully follow God's and the Prophet's expressed wish to unite mankind under the one true God, by following his Koranic direction. They felt they were clearly not succeeding so they acted in a manner such that it is possible God's will, as expressed to them, may now indeed possibly be achieved. By working hard to be true to God they have assisted his purpose in manner they did not foresee.
In the Koran God requires true believers to provide others a genuinely humble example to follow totally devoid of hubris and free of any Koranically (God) forbidden prozletising. They had done so but schism rife Christianity was expanding not Islam. To many therefore Islam was clearly failing to do God's will. Fundamentalism was thus born.
Up till around 1400 each individual in Islam was able to liberally interpret through his own direct communion with God what actions he should take in his daily life when not given an explicit direction by the Koran or by the saying of the Prophet. This is the principal of "ishtehad".
In this cultural context Islam nurtured the scholarship that in the end was to create the Western "Enlightenment". Howver many in Islam felt that its lack of progress against the schisms in God's world between the Jews, the Catholics, the Orthodox and the Muslims, the people the Koran calls, “the people of the book”, must mean that something was wrong in Islamic practice. So while for many centuries Islam provided the free-est most tolerant societies on the planet the Caliphates in the late 14th and early 15th Century started closing down on such freedoms - "the closing of the gates of Ishtehad".
The closing of this gate to freedom of thought did not just close the route to the East it did so in a manner that effectively passed the ball of social evolutionary change to the West in clear preference to the East. Chinese Confucian communal culture was designed to produce the social stability required for agricultural production to be at its most effective. To do this it relegated intellectual ability to the personal service of the Emperor and made trade and business the lowest form of social life. The reverse had been true in Islam. The Prophet himself was a trader. There was no place in China for free thinking independent Islamic scholars, artists business men and thinkers. Thereby China committed, as you and Mark's observe, short term socio-economic suicide.
Islamic scholars sought their freedom to be in the West. They found it in the autonomous city states of Italy. They brought with them a Renaissance of Greek culture. Very few original or often even copies of Greek texts had survived the burning of the Greek library at Alexandria in Egypt. Fortunately Arab scholars had translated them into Arabic. This included original or very early texts of many of the gospels. This knowledge had until then been denied to independent Christian scholarship only a privileged few with access to the material in places like the Vatican library could do so. It was the re-translation of these works into Latin together with the addition of five or six centuries of Islamic scholarship on top that gave us this European re-birth, then the enlightenment, then the reformation, then the industrial revolution and then the social turmoil that led to Western migration. The latter re-enforced the discovery of America forced as you observe by the fundamentalist closure of the West's former land route to the East.
The reformation is particularly interesting. Its roots were in part new access to the original Greek texts of the gospels but it was also in part to a new way of thinking about man's relationship with God, Islam. This puts each individual in a direct relationship with God. There is no intervening priesthood let alone a church hierarchy. Their is no priesthood in Islam. Their is no central organizing authority. Nothing stands between a believer and his God. In a very real sense the protestant churches came into being epitomising this aspect of God's will as set out in the Koran.
What bears even more thinking about is that the American Constitution very firmly and explicitly places "ishtehad" at the top of its agenda in providing the framework for the achievement of the American Dream. Freedom of thought and deed subject to fellow feeling and respect for the integrity of others were basic to Islam well before they became enshrined in the Constitution of the United States of America.
In a very real sense the USA exists and is powerful today because those with power in Islam 7 centuries ago, in the interest of political stability and religious fundamentalism, thrust these ideas out from within their own purview. They gave them and their socio-economic consequences thereby as a gift to the West.
As we know from there they have eventually spread to the planet as a whole. This is in a manner that through modern communications has put within our grasp the unity of mankind, the at-one-ment (atonement) sought for by God in the Koran and fervently believed in as is clear from the words of the Prophet.
God, the Universe, the Way works in mysterious ways it seems for by putting into being their fundamentalist views of God's wishes and closing the gates of Ishtehad Islam as it exists today has played a huge part in putting mankind in a position to unite as one just as God desires in the Koran. Our increasing global consciousness of the common dangers we now face if we continue to destroy our planetary environment are such as to make it inevitable that we face our maker with our own destruction in prospect or come together in atonement to seek the resolution of the dilemma we and our planet now faces.
As is rightly observed in the blog that stimulated this blog China has in the end been forced to acknowledge the realities brought about by the socio-economic forces of modernism. China in consequence will return to its traditional position of economic power and authority in the first half of this century and so inevitably must have a big say in how the dilemmas facing us are overcome. This could be for good or ill. However given China's traditional predilection for adaptive communally cooperative responses to social dilemmas one would surmise this can not be anything but for the good. Especially when one realises that most of China's growing wealth and much of its huge population live along its very low lying Eastern seaboard and so China has a huge amount to lose and much to gain in working with the rest of the world to resolve the danger our planet now faces.
Mankind needs to keep his hubris at bay if we are to adopt the right globally conscious attitude to what we now face. It is very important never to downgrade the processes of "The Way" (The Dao in China, God in the West) to mere accident. I try to keep what I think in an appropriate perspective by observing that my own hubris can be put aside very easily by noting that I have only been in the systemic thinking movement for 25years while Shanghai near where I live encapsulates all the above as a Chinese-European city adaptively conceived in the face of force majeur by the Chinese emperor and built 250 years ago first by British and later many other European nationalities. On the other hand Suzhou where I live has been a powerful Chinese city of some significance for some 2500years. Note both could be destroyed by global warming in the next 50 years. Organized existentially communicating humanity has however existed for about 25000 years and could perhaps survive global warming. Humanity itself however has only existed for about 2.5million years while the dinosaurs hacked 250million years before being almost totally destroyed by the Way. All this is of course nothing as compared to the planet's rocks which have done at least 2500million years. The solar system maybe has exceeded 25000million and the galaxy a lot more than that and the universe???????? Our view back out into that ancient universe makes it clear that stars, galaxies and even clusters of galaxies are fairly frequently destroyed on the Way of the cosmic evolution of which we are an almost unobservable small part of minute duration.
Who am I in this?
