Le Jeudi IN ENGLISH / Dialogue of Cultures

Armand Clesse: «The key value of any future ethical code will have to be the absolute sanctity of life»

A civilisation comprises material and non-material factors, concrete and abstract ones. It consists of science, technology, economic production and it consists of culture, art, religion (see Alfred Weber). / Armand Clesse*

All these factors have taken a distinct shape and acquired perenniality, lasting for centuries or even millennia, changing modalities but not the essence. It is difficult to say how many civilisations there are at the present time: a Western, a Chinese, a Hindu, an Islamic one? Philosophers and historians do not agree on how many civilisations have existed in the past. Arnold Toynbee, for example, first talked of twenty-one, later of twenty-three, William McNeill and Fernand Braudel both recognised nine of them.
Many people, even outside the West, think of Western civilisation as the dominant one. But what is Western civilisation really about? A certain way of life? A set of particular values (freedom, tolerance), political institutions (democracy), a certain economic dispensation (liberalism), a certain religion (Christian), a certain state of mind (reason), and certain cultural traits?
It seems that the content of Western civilisation, and perhaps also that of other civilisations, is becoming more and more diffuse. Are we just witnessing a slow dissolution of civilisations in what we might consider as modernisation and globalisation? Indeed, they seem increasingly to be losing their contours as well as their substance. This, however, appears to be less true for Islam, and a more relevant question may be whether religion is not only the most significant glue but also the elixir keeping a civilisation strong and vibrant.
Civilisation in itself is more encompassing than culture. Culture is part of civilisation. A civilisation may be created on purpose, but culture emerges above all spontaneously. Civilisation can be universal in its claims, appeal and application. Culture cannot.
Civilisation, to a certain degree at least, precedes culture, and culture may be a kind of condensation of civilisation. Women, for instance, have played a greater role in the process of civilisation than in the making of culture. They had a decisive impact on customs («moeurs»), i.e. the basis of any cultural refinement. This civilisational role of women has however been declining in Western societies in the second half of the 20th century, and has almost vanished now, a feminist and largely barbarian influence having replaced the feminine one. This feminist movement therefore contributes to the vulgarisation and impoverishment of Western culture as well as its civilisation.

Refined brutality

Certainly, each civilisation is a mixture of refinement and brutality, the decisive question being which elements will prevail.
One may also talk of a discrepancy or even contradiction between realms of sophisticated culture and realms of barbarism – concert halls and slaughterhouses.
As the 20th century and of course all previous centuries have shown, there has not been any civilisational progress in terms of the behaviour of man towards man or man towards other creatures.
Regarding the political organisation of life, (parliamentary) democracy provides for at least an indirect participation of all citizens in decision-making. But in reality these citizens have no substantial role to play. In the material realm most Western societies profess an egalitarian credo when there are in fact growing economic gaps.
The stated efforts, particularly since the Enlightenment, to give Western civilisation a humanist and even a humanitarian touch have largely failed. The proclaimed goals of civilisation have not been reached. Religion, philosophy, scientific enquiry and discovery have not managed to raise the inner core of civilisation to a higher level.
Western civilisation, which now is often perceived as an American civilisation, consists of debris laboriously lumped together, a plasticised, synthetic and deossified civilisation, decadent, exhausted, emasculated and derelict.
The main characteristics of the present Western civilisation are those of emptiness and vacuity. Western civilisation has been losing its substance throughout the centuries. It has also lost its faculty to create and to reinvent itself. The loss of intellectual and spiritual substance has been exponential in character in the second half of the 20th century, with mediocrity triumphing on all levels of existence. Philosophers and other intellectuals may have succeeded in deconstructing the Western discourse, but they have been unable to come up with something to fill that void. The West remains haunted by the aberrations of modernity and post-modernity.
Looking beyond the West, we see largely colonised and heteronomous civilisational models. This is true for the whole of Latin America but also for Africa, and even large parts of Asia with the exception of China and Japan.

De-civilisation

There is an ongoing process of de-civilisation, engendered above all by de-spiritualisation. The West is desperately triying to maintain a supremacy no longer underpinned by substance. On a global level, and despite the resilience and even a certain revival of Islam, a hollowing-out and a shrinking of the concept of civilisation is taking place.
What is now called civilisation refers at best to some increasingly marginal aspects of what traditionally has been called civilisation. The process of secularisation has been paralleled by an erosion of the foundations of Western civilisation, manifested by a re-primitivisation. The result is a morally clueless, bewildered and disoriented society. Some rather trivial concepts such as the one of human rights are supposed to serve as ethical surrogates.
If it is true that much of the world beyond the West has been impregnated and in a sense contaminated by Western civilisation, this would mean that the creation of a new civilisation requires a radical de-Westernization of the world and a decolonisation of the mind. To get rid of Western civilisation, its cultural hegemony and diktat, a global restructuring and rebalancing would be needed. A new civilisational model, based on diversity drawn from many roots, will have to be founded on a number of common values and beliefs.

Sanctity of life

The key value of any future ethical code will have to be the absolute sanctity of life, the absolute respect for all forms of life.
The separation between the worth and dignity of human life versus that of animal life is at the basis of a divisive and discriminatory philosophy which is characteristic of Western philosophy from Plato via Descartes to the mostly minor philosophers of the 20th century. Religion, with the exception of Jainism and, to a certain degree, Buddhism and Hinduism, is also to blame for this greatest ethical aberration. For Christians, for example, man is the crown of creation, having the right if not the duty to subjugate all other creatures and nature itself. What is needed is conciliation – for those believing in the paradisial version of evolution, re-conciliation – of the so-called humans with the so-called animals, with a focus on spirituality instead of materialism – Dostoevsky instead of Marx. This implies the prohibition of abortion of human beings as well as the consumption of «animals», the end of speciesm and the end of all forms of domination and exploitation – intraspecies as well as interspecies (for those who want to stick to this, in fact obsolete, category of species), the end of exclusion (of ghettos etc.), the end of racism, the end of political borders and of militarism.
What it would lead to is the dawn of a new civilisation, in fact a first civilisation, a first way of living together which deserves the name of civilisation. It would imply the eradication of the will to harm or to oppress, to kill, and thus would entail an ethical, mental, spiritual and ultimately ontological revolution, the first real revolution in the history of mankind and at the same time the last one.
Speech delivered by Armand Clesse, director of the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies, at the 9th International Likhachov Scientific Conference on
«Dialogue of Cultures and Partnership of Civilisations» in St. Petersburg, 14-15 May 2009.