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The Piety of Strangers
| Article
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11125 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1993 |
3,324 Words |
| Author
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Larry Witham
Larry Witham is a religion writer at the Washington Times. He
is the author of three books, the most recent of which is a
novel,The Negev Project. |
THE NEW COLD WAR?
Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State
Mark Juergensmeyer
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993
292 pp., $25.00
Dramatic changes in the world order since 1989 have prompted some remarkable speculation about what sort of turning point we have arrived at in history.
Most obvious, the demise of the Soviet bloc has ended the world's major nuclear standoff. With that global dichotomy gone, some see economic forces, such as a trade rivalry between the West and Asia, defining the future. The world is also said to face an economic split between the rich North and the poor South, with the power of population and immigration on the poor's side. Events that conjure similarly grand themes include the new European Community, a revived United Nations, and a "third wave" of democracy, which is focused in old Roman Catholic nations. Mixed into all of this is the communications explosion.
The most consequential development, however, may be what Mark Juergensmeyer calls a new cold war. On one side are the increasingly secularized nations, with pride of place given to Europe and North America. On the other side stand nations, mostly in Africa, the Middle East, and across Asia, that may attempt "a new synthesis" of traditional religion and the state. Juergensmeyer, dean of Hawaiian, Pacific, and Asian studies at the University of Hawaii, did not discover this trend, but by being summarized in book form the idea now seriously enters the contest for telling the future.
A good touchstone for analyzing these competing global visions is the widely discussed 1989 essay by Francis Fukuyama "The End of History." He envisaged a "pacific union" in the world, a place where liberal democracy becomes the only game in town and where humanity is homogenized by common use of science and technology.
Called both silly and profound, the thesis has provoked a salient critique about values. In this pacific union, from where do humans derive meaning and virtue? If people want to keep their religious and ethnic identities, can such a liberal, high-tech global village emerge? Running parallel to the Fukuyama thesis is a more perilous warning about the tyranny of technology. In calling it a technopoly, social critic Neil Postman says a world united mostly by
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