Andrei Cornea: A perennial conflict

Between 1901 and 1908, German engineers built the Hijaz railway from Damascus to Medina. The realization of this modernization project of the Ottoman Empire greatly increased the prestige of Sultan Abdul Hamid among Arab Muslims – as Peter Mansfield tells us in his A History of the Middle East, Humanitas, 2015 – as it was also presented as a means to greatly facilitate pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj). A hundred years later, Sultan Abdul Hamid is still seen by many Arabs as the last leader who served the cause of the Islamic ummah. The last caliph, in the original sense, as the heir of the Prophet, but with the means of modernization.

Here is an early example of what can be called – to use a phrase from Samuel Huntington – "modernization without westernization": the adoption of technologies invented by the West, but not its values, whether they are religious, ethical, or social values. On the contrary, the goal (or one of the goals) also became to uphold one's own values, considered superior. This phenomenon has been spreading enormously for at least 150 years, and examples abound: from Japan becoming a great power at the end of the 19th century, while still maintaining a feudal social structure, having at its peak a divinely considered empire, to post-Maoist China, which adopted not only technology from the West but also capitalism – albeit carefully controlled by the state, even though it has a social system it calls "communist" and which is fundamentally nothing more than a form of neo-Confucianism. Numerous nations and civilizations from Eastern Europe, then Asia, Africa, or even Latin America have enthusiastically adopted, within their modernization programs, railways, coal and oil exploitation, electricity, modern chemistry, and more recently, computer science – all inventions of the West; sometimes they even managed to successfully compete with the West in this field, such as China again in the field of electric cars and Artificial Intelligence. Of course, military technologies or those with direct military applications were among the first adopted by non-Europeans: from cannons to satellite systems.

In contrast, it is impressive to see how reluctant these civilizations were when it came to values: legal equality – including women with men – secularization, parliamentarism, individual rights and freedoms, among which freedom of conscience, were not at all priorities or, if they were adopted, were later revoked. Putin's Russia, Erdogan's Turkey are exemplary in this regard. And even when constitutions were promoted that established these norms and values (as happened in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, in the so-called "Tanzimat" era), very often they remained formal, little or almost not translated into practice. And yet these values formed in the West a unified body: we can imagine that the industrial revolution could have occurred in a dogmatic England, devoid of individual liberties and governed despotically, like Spain or France, not to mention the Ottoman or Russian Empires?

Moreover, if in the past these values enjoyed at least a hypocritical respect, today we see them contested in principle in many places: Putin's Russia, for example, condemns the West as "decadent," just as interwar fascism did. China – which blocks the Internet – does not hide its contempt for freedom and human rights. Should we also mention North Korea, a slave state equipped with nuclear weapons? And, possibly, the greatest rupture between modernization and westernization is observed today in the Islamic world. Peter Mansfield also writes: "Muslims view the triumph of the West in the last two or three centuries as an aberration of history" (p. 26).

An aberration of history that many of them want to erase, on the one hand, returning to the ways of the Prophet and the first four caliphs – what we, in the West, call "fundamentalism"; on the other hand, however, adopting more and more aspects of modernization: the use by ISIS of social media on the Internet to attract young people from Western Europe was nothing but a final and powerful example of this civilizational duplicity. The objective of all these "duplicities" is a state, technically speaking, modern, possibly equipped with nuclear weapons like Shiite Iran, but positing the tribal and patriarchal values of the early 6th century as a universal foundation of human civilization! That is a "historical aberration," you might say.

This duplicity might ultimately be counterproductive: we remember how the subordination of the technical and scientific to ideologies in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Maoist China led to the fragilization of these regimes by leaving them behind in essential sectors of the economy and war effort. Although many people have the impression that values are something super-added to material things (superstructure, in Marxist jargon), in fact, things are not like that, thus a profound rupture between values and these things could be a recipe for a final disaster for those who consistently follow this path.

Ultimately, perhaps, but for now not immediately: for now, at least, the irrational but no less real schism between modernization and westernization, the enthusiastic adoption of the former and the horror of the latter (sometimes under the misleading formulation of "identity preservation") has become a preferred recipe for the chaos, violence, and political instability of today's world. And this all the more so with the very heart of the West, in the United States led by Donald Trump and MAGA, the refusal of democratic and liberal values and anti-humanist fundamentalism, however enthusiastically supported by the magnates of technology, leading to a rupture between values and means that seems ever deeper. From here to officially declaring, after the Chinese model, these democratic and humanist values as outdated and "decadent," even blocking progress and modernization, is but a very small step, which has already been taken in many places and occasions.

https://www.dilema.ro/situatiunea/un-conflict-peren