A recent Die Zeit essay by Mordechay Lewy explains some of the fundamental differences between the Judeo-Christian west and the Islamic east, and it's all about guilt and blame -- The west has a "guilt culture" (accepting one's own guilt), while the Arab / Islamic world, which Lewy calls the Orient, has a "blame culture" (blaming others). I summarize and/or quote key portions of the essay:
Lewy examines the key question: why is it that the west can produce so many intellectuals such as Susan Sonntag, Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy who are so ready to criticize western civilization and blame the United States for the problems in the Islamic world. The latter, on the other hand, accepts little responsibility for its own inadequacies, and instead embraces conspiracy theories that typically blame the west.
Lewy identifies eight principle reasons:
1. In the Orient, one's own guilt and inadequacies are always assigned to others. Self-criticism is seldom practiced. The ability for self-correction is accordingly limited.
2. In the Orient, the preferred role is that of the victim. Conspiracy theories are forged to rationalize this behavior.
3. Islam does not have the concept of "original sin" and therefore no historical tradition of collective guilt.
4. Islam does not promote the formation of free will and individual responsibility. In the Islamic notion of man, free will is subordinate to Allah's all-encompassing pre-ordained plan.
5. In the West, there is a tendency toward the avowal of guilt, whether rightly or wrongly. Therefore the role of culprit is readily adopted.
6. The guilt society in the West promotes self-criticism, and also the capacity for self-correction.
7. In the modern West, the religious-based notion of "original sin" has been secularized to some extent, and also expresses itself in acceptance of blame for the Islamic-Arab world.
8. In the overt or covert conflict between the two cultures, the West cannot operate with a free hand, by virture of its own self-imposed moral constraints. These self-imposed restrictions will be interpreted as a weakness by the aggressive blame society of the Orient. They will not be respected in conflict situations, but exploited.
Islam does not have the same concept of original sin as in the West. The expulsion from paradise was not a key experience in the Koran. Allah forgives all sins, large and small, if the sinner shows remorse and willingness to change. In the Koran there are no explicit battles between good and evil. In western tradition, Satan can lead men astray (the Faust motif). In Islam the devil disarms himself voluntarily so that he cannot exert any power over man. A practicing Muslims becomes certain of attaining salvation, solely by fulfilling Allah's commandments. This spares him the moral dilemmas that are inherent in Christianity. In the Islamic view, guilt is an entirely personal burden, that can be lifted by the strict ritual adherence to Allah's laws. The Muslim Orient knows of no collective guilt that is passed from one generation to the next.
In the West by contrast the Christian idea of original sin has become an integral part of the civilizational understanding. The original sin has been secularized. One feels guilty for being rich, even when one's wealth is earned through hard labor. Likewise one feels remorse over the use of force, even when it is legitimate force. Anticolonialism, anticapitalism and the anti-globalisation emotions are also fed from the such feelings of guilt that one feels toward the third world. Despite its oil wealth, the Orient is also depicted as a victim. And that is why it is absolved of its role in the violence. Financial contributions to developing countries serve to pay off the guilt. The Islamists abhor the democratic values of man-made origin and therefore stand in contrast with Sharia which descends from God. But if they themselves are politically persecuted, they don't hesitate to denounce the undemocratic treatment and to appeal to human rights. Some guilt-aware westerners are easily taken in by this hypocrisy.
Likewise, Muslims use conspiracies as consoling explanations for strokes of fate, which are due to God's inexplicable wishes. If a Muslim is dealt a hand from Allah that he can't influence, he doesn't take any responsibility for it. And thus arose the tendency to explain events as the intervention of outside forces, rather to attribute them to one's own shortcomings.
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Why yes, Lewy's framework of guilt and blame does help explain of a great deal of Arab and Islamic behavior which doesn't otherwise seem rational to many of us here in the west. It also explains a lot about the behavior of the left-wing self-blamers and victimologists, which doesn't seem rational either.(Thanks to German reader Tobias Kuhn for suggesting this article)
You should investigate the concept of "memes".
The concpet of "memes" is a meme.
Demonstrably, the Christian, European West has supperior memes to the Muslim Mid-East.
Muslims think that their embracing death makes them stronger than the West. The West glorifies life and prefers to avoid death. As the Japanese learned, our meme is superior. We are willing to risk our lives, just not to sacrifice them.
Please note that these observations come from an atheist. I could not be an atheist in a Muslim society. Thank you for that.
Posted by: Byna on February 14, 2003 12:40 AMstefan,
Erudite and sagacious. Thats what I'd call your blog.
You produce some of the best articulated thoughts of writing on the net!
yashekoach to you.
Jen
On the western view of embracing life rather than death:
"Don't be a fool and die for your country. Make the other fool die for his country."
- General George S. Patton.
Not sure this is a useful essay - has credibility problems to me. i am willing to buy his main thesis about the differences between "oriental" culture (don't tell Edward Said I called it that) and "Western culture," but the examples he gives don't support his thesis. Judaism is more similar to Islam than Christianity in many respects, yet Jews have a heightened sense of personal responsibility and willingness to feel guilt.
"Allah forgives all sins, large and small, if the sinner shows remorse and willingness to change."
very Jewish.
"In the Koran there are no explicit battles between good and evil. In western tradition, Satan can lead men astray (the Faust motif)."
Judaism is much closer to Islam than Christianity here. Satan and hell are barely concepts in Judaism, but personal responsibility and self-correction are big concepts.
"In Islam the devil disarms himself voluntarily so that he cannot exert any power over man. A practicing Muslim becomes certain of attaining salvation, solely by fulfilling Allah's commandments. "
In Judaism, as I mentioned, ha-satan (the Adversary) is an intermittant concept and not a big deal. A practicing Jew follows God's law in order to be closer to God and in alignment with his/her people. Remorse dissolves sins between God and humans, but only contrition and restitution dissolve sins between human and human. Perhaps that is the difference?
"This spares him the moral dilemmas that are inherent in Christianity."
This seems too facile to me. I just don't buy that Muslims don't have moral dilemmas.
"In the Islamic view, guilt is an entirely personal burden, that can be lifted by the strict ritual adherence to Allah's laws. The Muslim Orient knows of no collective guilt that is passed from one generation to the next."
Not sure collective guilt is a useful concept or a spur to Western self-criticism. Certainly Judaism has strong assumptions of collective guilt as a way of community all taking responsibility for each other (i.e. we say the Yom Kippur atonements in the plural and we each say all of them, whether or not an individual committed a particular sin). But this does not pass on to future generations, it is absolved each year - that's what YK is about.
I don't know the Christian analog to this, just noting that the author seems to mush Judaism and Christianity together and attributes attitudes to both that may not be common to both.
If the author is that mushy about Judaism and Christianity, maybe he misrepresents Islam too? Also, is he describing Arab culture or Islam? Do non-Arab Muslims have a significantly different take on these issues? I suspect so.
Excellent post Stefan.
Excellent observation. I will consider adding this blog to my favorites.
Original sin is a tricky concept, mostly because the term is not in the original text, and covers several areas.
The first meaning is in the context of Adam's first sin. All men are regarded as guilty because they are descendants from that first sinner. This, apparently, was a legal argument made by Satan to relieve himself of the burden of having to tempt all of Adam's descendants to sin. Using the same reasoning, God turned the Death of Christ into payment for that very same original sin. ("So, by one man, many became sinners?" "Yeah! Right! They're all mine!" "If that's true, then it also follows that by one man, many can become righteous!" "HUH??? WHAT??? WAITAMINIT!" "Sorry old chap. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander." "AAAAARRRRGGGHHHH!") Its all outlined in Romans.
The second concept behind original sin is that it was a metasin: a sin that enabled sin to exist and rule over men. The closest analogy is to an acquired genetic defect that is passed on from parent to child. It is certainly unfortunate and a tragedy when someone suffers from the effects of a genetic disease, but such a thing happens, and no matter how much we whine, fuss, complain, and scream about it, its the natural outworking of natural laws given the inputs handed to Mother Nature. I know it is the vogue thing to have insurance, undertake lawsuits, pass protective laws, and set up welfare schemes so that the consequences and "payback" of bad decisions and plain accidents does not fall upon the victim, but on others deemed "more capable" of bearing those consequences. To be blunt, I obviously have no idea what sorts of natural or spiritual laws were in effect that would apply to a sinless man, and whose whiplash upon that man sinning would have both spiritual and physical consequences. Every day, Science discovers new consequences to existing physical laws, and every long once in a while manages to discover NEW physical laws that excaped notice because they applied in areas we couldn't observe.
These, at least, are my ideas.
However, I really don't think that the concept of Original Sin had this sort of beneficial effect on Western culture. In my reading of the Koran, I found no command on the part of Mohammed to forgive your enemies or those who apologize to you for their sins. The forgiveness of Allah is one thing, but there is no corresponding command, continually repeated, emphasized, and made mandatory, that you, the believer, forgive your sinning neighbor their trespasses. The blame game is not as much to deflect the wrath of Allah from youself as to reflect the wrath of the wronged party off of yourself onto others.
In the Christian religion, the refusal to forgive the confessed sin of your neighbor is regarded as a cardinal sin in and of itself: Its regarded as an unsurmountable obstacle for you to obtain forgiveness of your own sins. (This is where the "seventy times seven" comes in.) In a sense, unforgiveness is in the same class as Original Sin: something whose reach is farther than at first blush.
This mandate on humans to forgive the repentant sinner is the real key to the success of the Judaeo-Christian West: It lowers the human relation costs of admitting your own mistakes, making it easier for you to back out of a wrong course of action and get back on track. I think it is the lack of THIS mandate in Islam that is the reason for the blame culture.
For supporting evidence, I present France: Years ago, France turned away from Israel and has engaged in a course of action calculated to help and aid the Islamic cause. HOWEVER, it still suffers from bombings by arab militants who will not forgive the sale of mirages to Israel over 3 decades ago, and who continually say, "NOW it is MY TURN TO TAKE REVENGE!" In the end, I do not believe that apologizing for the Crusades or any other "sin" against the arab world will result in the termination of bombings and terrorist actions against us, because ALLAH NEVER COMMANDED MUSLIMS TO FORGIVE NON MUSLIMS WHEN THEY ASK FOR FORGIVENESS.
That's my two cents.
Posted by: Ptah on February 15, 2003 05:01 AM"Blah-blah, blah-blah-blah, blah-blah."
Anybody expecting any ethical or moral contact between a Judeo-Christian conception of life and an Islamic one is a big fat idiot.
For the origin of this difference, check out Genesis 16:2. For you Hebrew readers out there, compare with Genesis 3:17a.
The very creation of the Arabs amounted to another Fall. The descendents of the slave's child will never be able to do anything else other than blame others.
As for the origins of their "monotheistic" religion, check out "Count Belisarius" by Robert Graves. I wish I had the book (I borrowed it from a friend to read then made the mistake of giving it back), but it contains a passage showing that Islam, for all its borrowings from Judiasm and Christianity, is nothing more than a syncretistic form of Aten worship. Picked up from mamma Hagar, no doubt.
Just some guy blowing off some steam...
Posted by: someguy on February 15, 2003 05:04 AMThe structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas Khun deals with something very analogous and relevant to this phenomenon.
Posted by: bunuel on February 15, 2003 11:13 AMThe three monotheistic faiths have both similarities and differences, and you talk about some of each yourself, but it would be clear to any religious Westerner that Judaism and Christianity are closer to each other than to Islam. Firstly, fully one half of Christianity is pure Judaism, that is, the Old Testament. Secondly, Western culture is not called Judeo-Christian for nothing. It has had little Muslim input in two thousand years, except for science (religiously neutral) during the Middle Ages, plus seven centuries of localized (and outside the Western mainstream) influence in what Osama bin Laden still calls Al Andalus (Spain).
Peace on earth,
Val
Posted by: Val on February 15, 2003 12:08 PMGreat posts. Revolutioniary Islam has created societies where a glorious (to them anyway) death is more valuable than a well-lived life. This is the opposite of what Christians and Jews believe. The streak of fatalism that seems to be part of Islam makes Moslems easier converts to this type of fanaticism. It is said that many of the terror bombers go to their deaths and cause the deaths of innocent mothers and children with a smile on their face. This shows that they have no doubt that their action is not only correct but that they will soon be having relations with all those virgins. The only historical society that I can think of that was so perverse were the Japansese of the first half of the 20th century which had perverted the Bushido code. They treated prisoners of war so badly because they thought it was dishonorable to surrender but only honorable to die and take as many of the enemy with them. There needs to be a Islamic Reformation but I won't hold my breath as moderates or reformers are usually killed in the Islamic world and not by Israelis or Americans!
Posted by: Jeffrey Morseburg on February 15, 2003 06:46 PMDaniel Pipes has examined the role of conspiracy theories in Islamic countries in his excellent book The Hidden Hand. He notes that such theorizing is a recent development in the Muslim world, and basically an import from Europe in the last 150 years or so. It is not something inherent in Muslim culture or derived from faith.
I suspect the Western "guilt culture" owes much more to a modern turn away from religion on the part of the West than it does to the lingering aftereffects of Christianity. Among the religious people it is the "modernists", as Anglicans call them, who are the most guilt-wracked about things, and they are just the ones who have the least belief in God and sin. It is more connected with what we call "liberalism" here in the US than with anything else.
Posted by: Michael Lonie on February 16, 2003 06:39 PMNice blog. Keep it up ...
Hi there
Apologies for posting an off topic question here.
I am invitation your views on ABORTION in order to present a case to help those in the developing world.
I personally see abortion as a NECESSARY EVIL and that unwanted pregnancy is not only a personal problem and it is also a very real problem for the society at large.
Do you think it is right to burden say a 15 years old school-going girl with a new life when she is yet to have any economic mean to sustain herself and obviously, most girls of her age are not mentally ready for a family life. Furthermore, is it fair to rob her of her career, aspiration, dream etc., in the name of preserving a life that is yet to be fully developed?
If you have an opinion, please email it to me at divinetalk@gmail.com or if you wish, you may post your comment here: Your Onion Counts!
Also, what do you think of the recent “Pharmacists Refused Contraceptive Prescriptions”.
Do you think Pharmacists have the rights to Play God?
Posted by: La Bona on June 24, 2005 10:20 AM