Institute for Tolerance Studies Guides to Religion and Culture

Colonialism, Globalism and Religion Ron Duncan Hart

Contents

1. Christendom, Colonialism and the World

2. The Hegemony of the Christian West

3. Globalism and Fundamentalism

4. Well-Being and Religion

5. Religion and the World System Today

6. Appendix

7. About the Author

   
   

   Introduction

   
   

   The Guides to Religion and Culture at present include Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam. The purpose of this series is to provide education and understanding of the religious traditions in our increasingly linked world.

   These volumes are written as an anthropology of religion, and I have attempted to state the beliefs, practices, and histories in words that are consistent with each religious tradition. I have provided historical, social, and cultural information to define the context within which each religion has come into being and developed as a living society today. To the extent possible, I have discussed and reviewed these materials with religious scholars and believers from each tradition although I recognize that there are internal differences in belief and practice within religions, and I have tried to reflect those in a correct manner.

   Belief and behavior are at the heart of our self-definition as human individuals and the emotional core of our identity. Our religious and/or ideological identity is so important that

   it shapes major life decisions. This series is published recognizing the powerful importance of religious belief and practice among us as humans, respecting and honoring the uniqueness

   of the spiritual nature that defines us.

   
   

   Colonialism, Globalism and Religion

   
   

   Religion is one of the fundamental experiences of humankind, and it is a guiding element of our cultural systems. The spiritual aspect of life is important in both the Eastern and Western religions, and religion solves this great emotional and intellectual enigma of what happens at death. Although medical science can explain death in biological terms, it does not deal with the pain and loss felt by family and friends. Religion does deal with those issues. In the West, religion has been centered on one powerful supernatural being, and religious practice is praise and obedience to that being. Failing in either respect or obedience is a sin, and only God can forgive those sins. In the East, religion is centered on the life of the spirit and meditation.

   Failure to observe the religious practices leads to defilement, and rituals of purification are needed to cleanse the person. In either part of the world, much of behavior is devoted to living a religious correct life. For over two thousand years, ideology has normally been religious, but since the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, ideology has become increasingly secular in some parts of the world. The expansion of the Western political theories, economics, culture, and religion in the contemporary global system has produced confrontations between the great religious cultural blocs.

   
   

   Christendom, Colonialism, and the World

   
   

   During the colonial expansion of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Western countries gained control over most of the Muslim world, Africa, South Asia, and even gained footholds in China, giving the West unparalleled political, economic, and religious power. Along with merchants, Christian missionaries became the primary agents in the diffusion of Western values and education. Discussing this history, Samuel P. Huntington has pointed out how dramatic was the control of the Western powers.

   “Europeans or former European colonies (in the Americas) controlled 35 percent of the earth's land surface in 1800, 67 percent in 1878, and 84 percent in 1914...In 1800 the British Empire consisted of 1.5 million square miles and 20 million people. By 1900 the Victorian empire upon which the sun never set included 11 million square miles and 390 million people...The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or

   religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence [i.e. war]. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do."1

   All major world civilizations were affected by this European expansion. Although many scholars argue that the power of the West is strongest today, its control over other parts of the world was actually the greatest under colonialism one hundred years ago. As the former Muslim, African, and Asian countries gained independence at the end of the colonial period, their power has been slowly growing. Huntington goes on to say,

   "The balance of power among civilizations is shifting: the West is declining in relative influence; Asian civilizations are expanding their economic, military, and political strength; Islam is exploding demographically with destabilizing consequences for Muslim countries and their neighbors; and non-western civilizations generally are reaffirming the value of their own cultures."2

   In this realignment of world power, countries are grouping themselves into religious, cultural blocks with one or more states leading each block.

   In the Middle East, the three largest countries have each adopted different models of national purpose. Turkey is a secular republic, Iran is an Islamist theocracy, and Egypt has created an autocratic government that attempts to balance Islamic and Western interests. Most other Muslim countries have monarchies or strong secular leaders whose power rests on the military. The Islamist movement is growing in many states and increasing the pressure to establish policies more oriented toward traditional values. In South Asia, India is the dominant power and overshadows the other regional powers, Pakistan and Indonesia. In East Asia, China is quickly emerging to share the influence with Japan. Latin America is dominated by Brazil and Mexico. Fundamental social, political, and religious values are being defined in each of these regions, and intervention by Western powers is often resented.

   
   

   The Hegemony of the Christian West

   
   

   Under colonialism, Western attitudes toward the rest of the world were commonly ethnocentric and even condescending. The poet and novelist of colonialism was Rudyard Kipling (1865 to 1936) who gave words to these attitudes.

   Take up the White Man’s Burden–

   Send forth the best ye breed– Go bind your sons to exile

   To serve your captives’ need,

   To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild–

   Your new-caught, sullen peoples Half-devil and half-child.3

   Kipling’s colonial vision of “new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child” became the ideological justification for conquering, controlling, and evangelizing people in other parts of the world. The “White Man’s Burden” was to take Western civilization and religion to those who did not have it. Not understanding the civilized heritages of the Hindus, Muslims, and Confucianists by the Western colonial powers meant they did not interact with them as cultural equals. Arrogance of empire led to blindness about the rights and others, and eventually it led to atrocities. A few years after Kipling wrote those lines, British troops in Amritsar, India killed and wounded 1,500 people in a peaceful demonstration, committing the atrocity that awakened Indians to the injustice of colonialism and stimulating them to push for independence.4 Ignoring of the civil rights of subject people during nineteenth and twentieth century colonialism by European and American powers is remembered throughout the non-Western world.

   The colonial domination of the Middle East, India, and Asia died in the destructive fires of World War II that gutted the economic and military power of colonialism, and those former colonies are today looking for their own share of wealth and integrity in the world community.

   Colonialism. During the period of colonialism, cultural theorists, such as Edward Tylor and Henry Morgan5, explained civilization in evolutionary terms, dividing human societies into stages of savagery, barbarism, and civilization. They were understood to be the successive stages of progress through which humans had evolved, and these theorists saw civilization as the end product of cultural evolution and the highest achievement of humanity. Within this framework civilization came to be perceived as a European phenomenon. Through this Eurocentric perspective, the Muslims, Hindus, and Confucianists were seen as less civilized and in need of European direction and development. They provided the theoretical underpinning for the military and economic interventions of colonialism in Africa and Asia.

   During this period, the differences between the great civilizations of the world were also

   explained by the superiority of the Christian/capitalist culture, and Max Weber was the foremost theorist on the subject. In his study of European capitalism, Weber argued that there was a disproportionate representation of Protestants as owners of capital in comparison to Catholics.6 He found that in “ascetic Protestantism” people believed that hard work and self-denial showed their religiosity. Many also thought that the financial rewards they received were evidence of God’s blessing on them. By linking capitalism and Calvinist Protestantism, Weber suggested the ideological or cultural superiority of Western civilization over other world civilizations. He

   argued that the “modern capitalist spirit and...modern civilization” was the result of Christian asceticism7, leading to the differences in wealth between the Euro-American nations and the economically peripheral countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Weber would have trouble today explaining the fact that non-Protestant and non-European nations such as Japan and Brazil have larger capitalist economies than most Protestant European countries.

   In contrast, by the time of the Cold War from 1950 to 1990 the differences between cultures and ideologies were explained in terms of socio-economic systems, namely capitalism and communism. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, a number of writers returned to Weberian triumphalism, arguing that this was the ultimate victory of Western Judeo-Christian values.8 These “triumph of the West” arguments were flawed by the premise that the values of the West were replacing those of the non-Western world while subsequent events have demonstrated that was not completely accurate.

   The Rise of New Nation-States and Religious Fundamentalism. In the last fifty years, the ideological foundations of European political and economic hegemony have been challenged by non-European people and their ideologies. The disappearance of traditional colonialism and the emergence of new nation-states has given the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America the power of the collective. The old colonial and racist ideologies and power arrangements established over the last five hundred years have dissolved, as the European colonial powers (Great Britain, France, Holland, Italy, and Belgium) lost their empires. Although the twentieth century started with much of the world ruled by a few large empires, it ended with dozens and dozens of new nation-states struggling to make their place in the world. Most of the nations in the world today are less than one century old, and some are no more than a couple of decades. Nationalism is still being fought in some corners of the globe as local ethnic groups try to build their identity into a national one. As ethnicity and national pretensions have come to the fore, this has led to a fragmentation of the world into mini-states which sometimes lack the resources to maintain a viable international presence.

   
   

   States by World Religion and Time Period

   Time Period	Christian Europe/ Americas	Muslim World	Confucian/ Buddhist/ Hindu	Africa	Ocean Nations	Totals
   Post- 1945	27	26	12	38	24	127
   1900- 1944	7	6	2	1	1	17

   1850- 1899	5	0	0	0	0	5
   1800- 1849	18	0	0	1	0	19
   1750- 1799	1	0	0	0	0	1
   1700- 1749	1	0	0	0	0	1
   Earlier	19	3	4	1	0	26
   Totals	77	35	18	41	25	197

   World War II marked the end of colonialism as a global system and unleashed the most active period of nation building in the history of the world. Of the 197 territories that are recognized today as sovereign nations, 128 have been created since 1945. That is almost two- thirds (64.4 percent) of the nations of the world, including most dramatically the Muslim world and Buddhist Asia. As these new countries have built nation-states, religious ideology has flourished as a part of the new identity. Religion has come to express nationalism and cultural integrity.

   In this period of transition, many groups have struggled for control of the ideological foundations of the new nation-states. This has been a time of defining new operative ideologies, and these ideological conflicts can be seen in Russia, China, Latin America, Africa, and much of the Muslim world. The success of the secular ideology of capitalism in material well-being has created a challenge with which every part of the world has to contend. The conflicts between secular capitalism and traditional Islam, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity are being fought as people decide how to syncretize the new economic forces with their pre- existing religious and ideological systems. This has led to a wave of fundamentalism some world religions.

   Global Capitalism: A Secular Ideology Replacing Religion? The world system that existed until World War II was created over the last five hundred years and was based on European colonialism and the expansion of Christianity, and Europeans understood that they had the moral right to dominate other peoples of the world.9 In the world system of nation-states that has emerged since World War II is the medium of exchange by which the peoples of the various world regions communicate. We are creating a global system where the economic entities, such as corporations and financial institutions, have more control and power than political institutions. The power of kings, emperors, and presidents is largely limited to their nation-states, but the power of the executives and board members of corporations is transnational and global. Since

   capitalism is a secular ideology that defines the values of human life in terms of materialism and economic gain, it challenges the metaphysical principles of the world's religions. The ideological challenge of global capitalism to world religion has led to a rise in fundamentalism.

   
   

   Globalism and Fundamentalism

   
   

   Fundamentalism is not new, it can be seen in the Bible as Hebrew prophets called the erring people back to the fundamentals of their religion. What is different about fundamentalism today is that it is reacting to the scientific, humanistic view of the world that is secular and essentially eliminates religion as a viable cosmology. The globalization of the economy has brought the world into closer contact and constant communication, facilitating the dissemination of this secular world view. Although Max Weber saw capitalism as an expression of Calvinistic Protestantism a century ago, today it is seen around the world more as a purveyor of materialism and secularism which undermine the very percepts of religion.

   Kinds of fundamentalism. In the twentieth century a branch of militant piety emerged in each of the three major monotheistic religions, and they have openly used violence to pursue their aims. Fundamentalists have killed people in opposing places of worship, assassinated political leaders, used terrorist violence to interrupt everyday life, led armed insurrections, and taken over governments. Karen Armstrong says of these groups,

   "Fundamentalists have no time for democracy, pluralism, religious toleration, peacekeeping, free speech, or the separation of church and state. Christian fundamentalism reject the discoveries of biology and physics about the origins of life and insist that the book of Genesis is scientifically sound in every detail. At a time when many are throwing off the shackles of the past, Jewish fundamentalists observe their revealed Law more stringently than ever before, and Muslim women, repudiating the freedoms of Western women, shroud themselves in veils and chadors. Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists both interpret the Arab-Israeli conflict, which began as defiantly secularist, in an exclusively religious way."10

   Fundamentalism means different things in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Christian fundamentalists are more concerned with creed and a literalist interpretation of the Bible, which they consider to be the historically correct tradition. Muslim fundamentalists combine politics and religion, using the latter as the organizing ideology to project sovereignty and autonomy and protect a way of life. Jewish fundamentalists act out their religious legal traditions, as a means of creating their spiritual lives. Although most avoid secular politics, some have become active in the conflict with Arabs in Israel.

   Religious Fundamentalism and Violence. When a person has firm and unquestioning belief, their behaviors can become rigid and unchanging. The internal logic of true belief does not leave room for contradictory or opposing beliefs, leading to intolerance, and sometimes the

   use of violence. The intolerance implicit in fundamentalism tends to produce a frienge element that is willing to use violence to defend its beliefs, whether it be lynchings based on racism, witch hunts in Christianity, or suicide bombers in Islam. Some of the types of violence linked to intolerance are:

   1. Dominant violence on the subordinant group. It is the use of intimidation to suppress a group, and it may be linked with ethnocide or genocide. It may be state sponsored or tolerated, as in the case of the Nazis or white racists in the South of the United States.

   2. Subordinant violence resisting domination. Armed resistance is used by some groups against the military, political, ethnic, and/or religious power that dominates them. Examples are the Black urban riots in 1968 in the United States or the Muslim use of violence in Israel, Russia, and other parts of the world in recent decades.

Not all fundamentalists act out violence, and the circumstances under which they live can either calm or trigger potential violence. When a group lives in a homogeneous situation or is clearly dominant numerically, politically, and economically, it rarely resorts to violence. The same is true for groups that are clearly subordinant. Dominant groups are more prone to use violence when their dominance is threatened, and on the other hand, subordinant groups may resort to it when they have the possibility of challenging the control of the oppressors. There are fundamentalists in all the religions of the world today.

How Globalism Has Contributed to the Rise of Fundamentalism in the Muslim World.

The globalism of today has continued the colonial relationships of the past between the West and other regions of the world, especially the Middle East. The break up of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I played a major factor. The Middle East lived almost continually under a single dominant Muslim ruler from the time of Muhammad until 1920, first under the Abbassids, the Umayyads, and the Ottomans. With the fragmentation of the Middle East into small nation- states after the period of European colonial occupation, Muslim power was broken. The Muslim world had been wealthy and powerful under the empires with trade flowing easily throughout the region. With the loss of imperial status, the Muslim world has no single nation that is large enough to project the power and wealth of that civilization, and the influence of the Western powers led by the United States has grown, threatening religion and the way of life.

1. Cultural Globalization and Religion. Along with the Western corporate power and influence have come the cultural and religious influences through movies, music, books, fashions, and the ever present Western travelers. In the Muslim world and Latin America, some groups have rebelled against the Western cultural influences, reasserting local and national ideals. In Latin America, they tend to be political and secular ideals, but in the Middle East the political ideals are ensconced in Islamic traditions. For many, fundamentalism become the barrier to stave off the encroachments of the West, both the secular and Christian ones.

2. Migration and Religious Enclaves in the West. As large numbers of Islamic students and workers have arrived to Western countries for jobs and study, they have experienced

   discrimination. For some, the enclave experience in Western countries has radicalized their thinking. As their acculturation begins to threaten their cultural and religious roots, some find religious fundamentalism as an avenue to reaffirm their roots.

3. Fragmentation of the Muslim World into Small Nation-States. The Ottoman Empire was the last Muslim empire, and after its dissolution, European colonialism fragmented the Middle East into small nation-states that would never again threaten Europe. Africa was also divided up into small colonial holdings by the competing European powers. Although the reasons for this were mostly economic and political, the religious implications cannot be missed. Dividing the Muslim world into small nation-states had the effect of minimizing the collective power of Islam in the world.

4. The Failure of Military Intervention against Ideologically based Movements. Although the colonial powers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used military force to their advantage, that has been true less frequently in the contemporary world. The experiences of the French in Vietnam and Algeria, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and the United States in Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq indicate the limitations of using military force to shape differences in culture and civilization.

5. The Christian Missionary Movements. Evangelical missionary groups have moved into every nation-state where the corporate and/or military power of the United States has been established. Many times they come in as aid agencies, but they ultimately use their presence to proselytize the local people. This face-to-face confrontation of Christianity with the local religion is especially a problem with Islam. In the pluralistic traditions of India and China, one more religion in the local mix is not so threatening.

The present global system has developed in two stages: first, the European conquest and colonial governance carried out mostly by the Spanish, British, and French from the 1500's to the mid-1900's, and second, the North American economic and military hegemony since the end of World War II. Religious intervention began in the colonial period and continues today. The Western coalition works through the corporate control of the economies of other countries which leads to the introduction of cultural and religious influences. Given this linkage between economic power and religion, resistance movements against Western economic influence are frequently expressed in religious terms, especially in the Muslim world.

Well-Being and Religion

Just as the purpose of religion is to give meaning to the lives of people, one of the primary purposes of civilization is to provide well-being, but one of the great problems of global capitalism is the inequality between the world civilizations. World capitalism has wealthy areas of capital accumulation and poor areas from which capital is being drained. Colonialism allowed the West to accumulate great wealth at the expense of the Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and

Confucianist areas of the world.

Comparison of Well-Being by World Religious Regions

The comparison of the indicators of well-being between the religious blocs gives a clue to the reasons for conflict between them, beginning with the enormous gap in income. The Christian West ($25,500), Muslim Middle East ($4,300), Confucian East Asia ($4,700), and Buddhist South Asia ($1,700) cover the range from the wealthiest to the poorest nations of the world. Beyond the differences between the religious civilization blocs, there are other factors that affect wealth and well-being. Agricultural societies generally have lower incomes, and most regions of the world have a majority of their people in agriculture (Muslim Africa, 78.9 percent and Christian Africa 71.6; Buddhist South Asia 64.2 percent; India 60 percent and Muslim

Central Asia 52.3). Both Christian and Muslim agricultural countries in Africa rank among the poorest in the world (Muslim, $1,080 and Christian $1,020). So, economic infrastructure is more powerful force in affecting the differences in the wealth and well-being of peoples, but these differences are frequently interpreted religiously. Many people in the West attribute their economic success to Judeo-Christian values. In contrast, many in the Middle East view their lack of contemporary economic success as exploitation by the West.

Not only are wealth differences an issue, but so are those in health and education, key indicators of the well-being of people. Although health care world-wide has brought up life expectancy rates, yet Africa lags far behind the rest of the world, and Christian Africa has the lowest life expectancy of only 43 years. The Middle East and African states rank high in fertility rates for women, suggesting that women have little opportunity other than exercising their roles as mothers. Africa, India, and the Muslim world have low scores for women’s literacy. The lowest indicators of well-being come from Sub-Saharan Africa (both Muslim and Christian).

The youngest median age in the world is in Muslim countries (17 years), and the lowest per capita GDP is in Christian Africa ($1,020). The highest percentage of workers in agriculture in the world is in Muslim countries (78.9 percent), and the lowest life expectancy is in Christian areas (43.2 years). In Muslim states the fertility rate is the highest in the world (6.09), and women have the lowest literacy rate (34.1 percent).

Religion and Economic Equality. Inequality in the distribution of the goods and services of a society is an inherent problem in civilization, and each religion solves it somewhat differently. The Gini Index is a measure of the equality of the distribution of income that has been calculated for many of the nations of the world. The variation of this equality by country and region gives an indication of how religion and culture are impacting these economies.

Economic Equality by World Religious Regions: The Gini Index

The Confucian/Buddhist countries have the most equal ratings, and the Christian countries have the most unequal ones. The countries that are the most equal include Confucian/Buddhist (Japan, 24.9 and South Korea 31.6), Muslim (Egypt, 28.9 and Indonesia, 31.7), and Christian (Germany, 30, Spain, 32.5, and France 32.7). The other countries from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa tend in the middle range of income distribution. Latin America (Christian) is the most unequal region in the world with Brazil having the most unequal rate (60.7) of all the nations surveyed. Africa is close behind in inequality of income distribution. The United States has the most unequal ranking among the large Western nations.

Literacy. In most countries around the world, men have higher literacy rates than women, and this is especially true in societies with agricultural economies. Women’s literacy rates are an important measure of the well-being of a society, as well as being an important measure of gender rights. Women in the Christian West have the highest rates of literacy, and those in Muslim Black Africa have the lowest rates.

Women’s Literacy by World Religious Regions

The existence of a good educational system and women having access to it are crucial factors in literacy rates. The strongest regions are the Western nations, East Asia, and Latin America. The new Central Asian countries also have high rates which they inherited from their former status as part of the Soviet Union. The Muslim countries with land-based economies in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia have the lowest rates of literacy for women. Of the ten countries in the world with the lowest literacy rates for women, eight are Muslim, which indicate that gender values in some traditional Muslim societies are a barrier to women's literacy.

Religion in the World System Today

World religions today are complex and multi-layered with Middle Eastern, African, European, Asian, and American influences mutually affecting each other. We are a pluralistic world in which each of us has borrowed from the other to be who we are. The nationalism of the twentieth century has unleashed the conflicts between hundreds of tribal, ethnic, and religious groups in the new nation-states. Just as these new nations have been defining themselves, the ideology of secular capitalism has come to the fore as the dominant economic and political force in a global movement. The spread of the economic growth potential brought by capitalism further acerbates the conflicts as more and more people bid for the increasingly limited natural resources, such as oil, water, and land. During the twenty-first century, we will see the global society and economy grow, but we can also expect a continuing series of regional conflicts drawn from the cultural, ethnic, and religious differences. The hegemonic power of Christendom and the secular ideology of capitalism have been increasingly challenged by the followers of the great religious traditions of the world from Islam to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism.

Appendix

The Clash of Religion and Civilization is Personal

Wednesday, July 31. 7:00 am. This morning I awoke early to the news that a bomb had exploded at the Hebrew university in Israel where our daughter was doing research. Seven were killed, and eighty were injured. Vanessa carries a cell phone so that we can make sure that she is safe after a bombing. I immediately called, but she did not answer. The machine voice came on in another language saying to leave a message after the beep, which I did, asking her to call us

back. Why was she not answering? She always has her phone at hand and answers quickly. My anxiety grew. My wife was still asleep, and I went to the kitchen and started mundane chores to keep my mind occupied, but time dragged on. I called again, still no answer. I turned on the computer and started to write these notes, maybe I could write out my fears.

Later, I heard Gloria in the bedroom, and I knew that she was awake and must have heard the news. I went, and she sat frozen and rigid on the edge of the bed listening to the radio. She knew the possibility as well as I did. I tried to dissimulate my fear saying that maybe Vanessa did not go to the university today. We listened to the continuing drumbeat of news about the dead and injured. Gloria called Vanessa’s phone, and there was no answer. We sat numb, listening to the repeated cycle of the news that we already knew and was already burned indelibly into our memory. The repeat of the news non-news provided the focus for our emptiness during the time that we did not know if our daughter were dead, injured, or alive and well. I felt the emptiness of frozen fear that people feel when terrorism strikes at schools, restaurants, clubs, buses, markets, homes, and other places of daily life.

About 9:30 the phone rang, and Gloria and I both answered on the first ring. A man's voice with an Israeli accent spoke, and my heart sank. Oh no, I thought, we are being notified, something has happened. Was she injured, or worse? Through those confused thoughts I heard him say that he had spoken with Vanessa. I focused. He knew her and had called as soon as he heard about the attack, and he was calling to let us know that she was all right, but she could not call. My mind locked onto that phrase. Why could Vanessa not call? Was she injured? The call seemed strange to me because I did not know him, and I had never spoken with him. He did not know details and could not tell us any more. We were comforted to know that she was alive, but fearful about why she was unable to call. If she were physically able, she would be calling us instead of sending messages through someone else. Was she in a hospital and could not call?

With these thoughts flooding our minds, we called her phone again, and this time she answered. She had been not been at the university, but her cell phone was functioning intermittently because the system was overloaded after the bombing. For the time being my immediate fear was put aside, but it had been honed to a knife's edge. Where will the next bombing be, and will Vanessa be in the wrong place at the wrong time? My fear and anxiety were only temporarily calmed by our talk with her. I thought about the people who have this experience on a regular basis and have no escape from it. When does one side or the other become exhausted from the killing and being killed? Why do we as humans all too frequently have trouble accepting the existence of the other that is different from us? My daughter is alive, but today I stared into the face of tragedy. I saw the thousands of mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters who have stood in the same place and came away seared by grief and death and by the blast of the bomb or shot of the rifle. 10:20 am.

About the Author

Ron Duncan Hart, Ph.D., is a cultural anthropologist from Indiana University with postdoctoral work at the University of Oxford. He is the Director of the Institute for Tolerance Studies and a former University Vice-President. Hart has written books on Crypto-Jews, Jews and the Arab World, and Sephardic Jews. He has spoken widely as an invited lecturer on Jewish life and culture at universities and other venues. He is a former President of the Jewish Federation of New Mexico.

1. Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Touchstone Book, Simon and Schuster Inc. Page 51.

   
   

2. Ibid.

   
   

3. Kipling, Rudyard. 1903. The Five Nations. London: Methuen & Company.

   
   

4. Spodek, Howard. 2001. The World’s History. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice- Hall, Inc. Pages 694-695.

   
   

5. See Henry H. Morgan. 1877. Ancient Society: Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. Reprint edition. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company. Pages 3-18. Also, Edward Burnett Tylor. 1871. The Origins of Culture. Reprint edition, 1958. New York: Harper & Row Publishers. Pages 26-69.

   
   

6. Weber, Max. 1904. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New translation and Introduction by Stephen Kalberg, 2002. Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Co. Pages 3ff.

   
   

7. Ibid., page 122

   
   

   

8. Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. “The End of History?” in The National Interest. No. 16, (Summer). Pages 3ff. He developed this argument in more detail in the book, The End of History and the Last Man. 1992. New York: Simon and Schuster.

   
   

   

9. Hanke, Lewis. 1974. All Mankind is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de La Casas and Juan Ginés Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians. DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press. Page 62.

10 Armstrong, Karen. 2000. The Battle for God. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Page ix.

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