• §4 The rise of the West

 

The mouse that roared

Europe did not get off to a good start, and it wasn’t initially Christian. The Christian Church was strong in North Africa, the Middle East, India and China well before it made progress in Europe. Britain was virtually pagan before the final Roman departure about 410, and it was about another thousand years before Europe was extensively Christian.[1] And it was uncivilised.

At the end of the 13th Century there were two civilisations: China and Islam. India had been the dominant world culture for a thousand years[2], but by 1200 Mamluks (non-Arab Muslims) were coming to power in India, and it had become part of the Islamic world that stretched all the way to the West.[3]  The “Franks”, as the Westerners were known to Islam, were “barbarians, dull in mind and heavy in speech, and the farther to the north, the more stupid, gross and brutish.”[4] By that time, Islam had already replaced Christianity in the Middle East, in Turkestan, in North Africa, and was threatening Europe. And yet, within five hundred years the roles were reversed, and Islam has never regained its ascendency.

Islam had moved from Africa into Spain, crossed into France and was within 240km from Paris in 732 before its advance was halted, and it was forced to abandon France in 975. Meanwhile, Islamic attempts to conquer Europe continued in the East. In 846, Islamic forces sailed up the Tiber River and attacked Ostia and Rome; the ancient walls of Rome were not breached, but the surrounding city was sacked.

The most criticised actions of the West in these years were the Crusades, which began in 1096, to recapture Jerusalem and take control of the Holy Lands, all in the name of God. There is a lot for the Church to be ashamed of with the Crusades, not least the Fourth Crusade, which got diverted to Constantinople, where they sacked the Christian city and desecrated one of the oldest churches in Christendom. The Crusaders briefly held territories in Palestine but were defeated and ejected. The reason for the Crusades, however, was that after some 300 years of Islamic armies attempting to force their way into Europe, the West hit back.

The first major victory for the West was in 1571 when the combined Western forces destroyed the Turkish fleet at Lepanto off the west coast of Greece. This was a major victory for the West, but trivial for the Turks, who rebuilt their fleet within six months and for a sum that barely dented their treasury.

Islam’s last attempt to push into Europe was at Vienna in 1683, where the city was besieged, but the Turks were forced to retreat. The following year Russia joined a league of five Catholic powers that effectively pushed the Ottomans back. For the first time, an Islamic army had to negotiate, treating the “Franks” as equals.

Islam has never since beaten the West on the battlefield. They have adopted western arms, western strategy, western uniforms and army bands, and employed western instructors, but to no avail.[3]

Victory on the battlefield has been followed by dominance in the marketplace. By the end of the eighteenth century, if you stopped at an Ottoman market to buy a cup of coffee, the coffee would have come from Dutch Java or Spanish America, and the sugar from British and French West Indies. By the nineteenth century, even the water and gas were supplied by British and French-owned companies.[3]

Western society has a dynamism that is not matched and has not been matched by any other culture or society.[5] That is an objective fact. It is not an ethical justification, and it has not all been good.

The Nature of Western Thought

Mātauranga Pākehā is mechanical, reductionist, secular, individualistic and dynamic.

It is mechanical.  Before 1500, European society was organic.[6] People lived in small, cohesive communities with close personal relationships, with spiritual and material things united, and the needs of the group dominating those of the individual. The organic universe was replaced by Newton’s view of the world acting as a machine. Questions of meaning, significance and values were discarded and replaced by the desire for prediction and control.

It is reductionist. To understand the machine, it is broken down into its component parts, and the relationship to the whole is lost [6]. This reductionism is not restricted to science, but common to all thought, even the study of our past with historian Richard Fletcher[1] complaining, “Professional historians today are expected to know more and more about less and less”, rather than to seek an overall, holistic view of the past. Everything is reduced to its component parts.

It is secular. The intellectual activity of the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th  centuries disposed of “God” as an explanation for natural events. That was important to encourage a search for natural causes behind events, but it also meant that Jean-Jacques Rousseau effectively invented “Religion” as a separate concept removed from the public realm to become an optional, private matter, something inconceivable to Māori.

It is individualistic. Towards the end of the 17th century the English philosophers, Thomas Hobbes[7] and John Locke,[8] broke new ground with the idea that the foundation of being human was the freedom of the individual, an idea that has dominated Western thought ever since. So Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of England, could proudly say, “There is no such thing as society”. This has become a common theme in politics, that people should stand on their own two feet; it is good as long as we remember it cannot always be so. All of us were born totally dependent on our parents. Most of us will die totally dependent on our children if we are fortunate, or on strangers if we are not.

It is dynamic. The upheaval of the Dual Revolution (primarily Industrial in Britain and Political in France) is not an isolated event. Peter Watson[5] draws attention to the opening months of the year 1900. Within a few weeks, Sigmund Freud unleashed his ideas of the hidden depths of the human mind. Arthur Evans arrived in Crete and started his excavations that proved European culture was not founded on the innovations of Greece and Rome, but goes back to the Minoan. Hugo de Vries discovered the forgotten work of Gregor Mendel, which explained how Darwin’s “transformation by descent” actually worked. Max Planck discovered the quantum and totally disrupted the way we viewed both energy and matter. And Pablo Picasso arrived in Paris and began his assault on art, forcing us to view the world in a radically different way.

These are five areas where our minds will never again be able to return to where they were, simultaneously impacting the Western mind. Watson then spends 800 pages detailing the history of the people and ideas of the West in the 20th Century as a vital, evolving and dynamic culture that is unmatched by any other society, ancient or modern. Watson, having searched through scholars specialising in the major non-Western cultures (India, China, Japan, southern and central Africa, the Arab world) says “I was shocked (and that is not too strong a word) to find they all (I am not exaggerating, there were no exceptions) came up with the same answer, that in the twentieth century, the non-Western cultures have produced no body of work that can compare with the ideas of the West”.

The Punctuated Evolution of Western Thought

 We can begin with the concise and dramatic view from historian Eric Hobsbawm[9] looking at the massive transformation of society in what has been my lifetime.  He claims the changes since the end of World War II in areas like marriage, family, work, society and morals, have produced the greatest transformation in human society since hunter-gatherers became village dwellers and farmers, 14,000 years ago.

Peter Drucker[10] takes a longer view looking back more than a thousand years and sees quiescent periods punctuated by transforming events at roughly 200-year intervals:

In the Thirteenth Century, almost overnight, the European world became centred in the new city – with city guilds as the dominant social group; the revival of long distance trade; discovery of Aristotle; universities in the city replacing rural monasteries as centres of learning; and Latin being replaced by the vernacular.

Two hundred years later, between Gutenberg’s printing with moveable type in 1455 and Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation in 1517, we have the Renaissance; the rediscovery of antiquity; the European discovery of America; in Spain, the first standing army; the rediscovery of anatomy and rational inquiry; and the adoption of Arabic numerals.

The next transformation began in 1776 – the year of the American Revolution, James Watt’s steam engine and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and concluded with the Battle of Waterloo. During these forty years came universal education, the modern university, the emancipation of the Jews, and the Rothschilds, as bankers, becoming more powerful than ruling kings. Capitalism and Communism had appeared. By 1820, a new European civilisation had come about.

After each of these transformations the world had changed so much that young people could simply make no sense of their grandparent’s world, and the transformations continue. By 1870, the telegraph enabled the instant flow of information around the world. Railways and steam ships provided passage for people and goods around the world, such that we were no longer in a transformation of Western society, but living in the formation of the Westernised world culture.[11]  When did this mature? Possibly 1960 with Japan being the first non-Western country to become a great economic power, although Drucker favours an earlier date at the end of World War II, with what he calls possibly the most important event of the twentieth century, when the G.I. Bill of rights gave every American returning soldier the money to go to university.

Then in 1993 Peter Drucker describes the dawning of another transformation. Beginning from about 1750, capitalism and technology had conquered the globe and formed a world civilisation founded on “Capitalism” and the “Industrial Revolution”[10] and brought about by a radical change in the meaning of knowledge. Since ancient Greece and China, knowledge had been something one applied to oneself, it was about being. Overnight it was applied to doing, it was applied to tools, processes and products, and created the Industrial Revolution. That changed society and created the “class wars” and Communism. Knowledge was now applied to work and produced the “Productivity Revolution” that allowed “workers” to earn enough to move out of poverty and so defeated the class war and Communism, since Marx’s predicted world revolution did not appear because the workers now had too big of a stake in the system. Then after World War II, knowledge began to be applied to knowledge itself, with a Management Revolution.[10]

The Impact on Māori

So the dynamic nature of  Western culture continues unabated, and in becoming a world culture it has engulfed mātauranga Māori but not destroyed it. Māori embraced European trade and prospered until we were disenfranchised from our land, and then we recovered to be a presently significant economic force in New Zealand. We took from mātauranga Pākeha that which would benefit us without losing our core values. Similarly, from the missionaries, we took what was good spiritually. The missionaries were generally well-intentioned, but were agents of the Empire, ignorant of their own cultural prejudices and determined that their values were superior in every way.[12] Despite that, Māori were able to take the core of the Christian gospel and use that within our own mātauranga. The effective work of establishing Te Hari Mihinari (The Māori Church) was done by the early Māori converts, against opposition and discrimination from the settlers’ established English clergy, adapting the evangelism, instruction and worship to fit more comfortably within mātauranga Māori.[12]

That has always been the pattern with the spread of Christianity. The New Testament describes Peter, and especially Paul, modifying the message to enable the Church to move from being a new sect within Judaism to becoming a worldwide movement following its reception amongst the Greeks and Romans.[13] Richard Fletcher[1] details the same process with the thousand year conversion of Europe to Christianity: every time a new kingdom opened to the Church it is because there was a change of emphasis to make the message relate to the people, and thereafter followed a transformation of the culture to reflect its participation in the Kingdom of God, with always an ongoing tension and debate as to where the balance should be.[14, 15]

Dynamism and domination

Love it or loathe it, the West has dominated the physical world, pushing it to the verge of possible collapse. The West has also dominated the intellectual world, creating mātauranga Pākehā and mātauranga Scientifica, which are simultaneously both beautiful and strangely unsatisfying. The future for mātauranga Māori is not in head-on competition for equality, but contributing to ameliorate what the West has failed to supply.

To do that, we need to understand how the West won.

 

Soon to be posted:  §5 The foundation of Western domination.

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  1. Fletcher, R., The Conversion of Europe: from Paganism to Chrisitanity 371-1386 AD. 1997, London: HarperCollins. 562.
  2. Dalrymple, W., The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. 2024, London; Oxford; New York; New Delhi; Sydney: Bloomsbury Publishing. 479.
  3. Lewis, B., What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Midle Eastern Response. 2002, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; Phoenix pb. Phoenix 200.
  4. Crosby, A.W., The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600. 1997, Cambridge  New York  Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 245.
  5. Watson, P., A Terrible Beauty; A History of the People and Ideas that shaped the Modern World. 2000, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
  6. Capra, F. and P.L. Luisi, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. 2014, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. 498.
  7. Hobbes, T., Leviathan. 1651.
  8. Locke, J., An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1689.
  9. Hobsbawm, E., Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century. 1994, London: Michael Joseph. 627.
  10. Drucker, P.F., Post-capitalist Society. 1993, New York: Harper Business.
  11. Hannam, J., God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science. 2010, London: Icon Books. 435.
  12. Kaa, H., Te Hahi Mihinari: The Māori Anglican Church. 2020, Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget William Books.
  13. Saxby, A., James, Brother of Jesus, and the Jerusalem Church: A Radical Exploration of Christian Origins. 2015, Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock. 318.
  14. Bosch, D.J., Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. American Society of Missiology Series, No.16. 1991, Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books. 587.
  15. Nida, E.A. and W. D.Reyburn, Meaning Across Culture. American Society of Missiological Series. Vol. 4. 1981, Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books.