Peter Watson: Our priorities in the West are wrong. Secularism is what we should be spreading across the globe
[Peter Watson is the author of A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind, and Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud.]
If Gillian Gibbons, the British schoolteacher, was not incarcerated somewhere in Sudan, the whole Teddy Bear called Mohamed incident would be comical. But it serves to remind us once again that fundamentalist religion and Western values do not sit together. And it rubs in that we should spend more time promoting secularism around the world and worry less about spreading democracy.
Consider some dates. Native Americans got the vote in the United States in 1924. Spanish women were given the same privilege in 1931, French women in 1944. Lords of the Realm in the United Kingdom could not vote in parliamentary elections until 1999. Although democracy began in Athens two and a half thousand years ago, it was for centuries a fragile flower and has blossomed only recently.
Democracy, we tell ourselves, is a hallmark of “the West”, the treasure that the rest of the World envies and that accounts for the pre-eminence of Europe and North America in economic progress, intellectual dominance and moral freedoms.
But it's not the case when you examine the chronology. The rise of the West had much less to do with democracy than with the rise of secularism. The West's advance was chiefly related to the decline in the influence of religion that sought the truth by “looking in” to see what God had to say, and its replacement by looking out, deriving authority from observation, experimentation and exploration.
The original figures to draw attention to this were Bishop Robert Grosseteste, early in the 13th century, the first person to imagine the experiment, and his contemporary, St Thomas Aquinas, the first man to imagine a secular world, a world without God directing everything. Secularism is not the same as atheism, of cours, both Grosseteste and Aquinas were priests. But they helped us to escape from the overbearing medieval view that the world has meaning and pattern only in relation to God....
In China, at the moment, every member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the central bastion of power, is a trained engineer -- every one. There is not a religious figure in sight, the country is going from strength to strength, former Maoists have seen the light, recognising rationally the prosperity that technology can bring; and elections are simply not the issue there that they are in Pakistan. Prosperity comes from secularism, and where you have prosperity you have political and social stability. Only once you have stability can you start thinking sensibly about elections.
Read entire article at Times (London)
If Gillian Gibbons, the British schoolteacher, was not incarcerated somewhere in Sudan, the whole Teddy Bear called Mohamed incident would be comical. But it serves to remind us once again that fundamentalist religion and Western values do not sit together. And it rubs in that we should spend more time promoting secularism around the world and worry less about spreading democracy.
Consider some dates. Native Americans got the vote in the United States in 1924. Spanish women were given the same privilege in 1931, French women in 1944. Lords of the Realm in the United Kingdom could not vote in parliamentary elections until 1999. Although democracy began in Athens two and a half thousand years ago, it was for centuries a fragile flower and has blossomed only recently.
Democracy, we tell ourselves, is a hallmark of “the West”, the treasure that the rest of the World envies and that accounts for the pre-eminence of Europe and North America in economic progress, intellectual dominance and moral freedoms.
But it's not the case when you examine the chronology. The rise of the West had much less to do with democracy than with the rise of secularism. The West's advance was chiefly related to the decline in the influence of religion that sought the truth by “looking in” to see what God had to say, and its replacement by looking out, deriving authority from observation, experimentation and exploration.
The original figures to draw attention to this were Bishop Robert Grosseteste, early in the 13th century, the first person to imagine the experiment, and his contemporary, St Thomas Aquinas, the first man to imagine a secular world, a world without God directing everything. Secularism is not the same as atheism, of cours, both Grosseteste and Aquinas were priests. But they helped us to escape from the overbearing medieval view that the world has meaning and pattern only in relation to God....
In China, at the moment, every member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the central bastion of power, is a trained engineer -- every one. There is not a religious figure in sight, the country is going from strength to strength, former Maoists have seen the light, recognising rationally the prosperity that technology can bring; and elections are simply not the issue there that they are in Pakistan. Prosperity comes from secularism, and where you have prosperity you have political and social stability. Only once you have stability can you start thinking sensibly about elections.