This is the first in a series of essays that explores the meaning, scope, and history of globalization. We examine the impact of monotheism on the unfolding World History leading to our current moment of globalization. Why should we focus on the relationship of monotheism and globalization you may ask? Some may even ask what globalization has to do with monotheism or religion? I agree that the connection between globalization and monotheism is not obvious. I would, however, point out that the lack of clarity of the close connection between the two has contributed to our inability to understand our global moment and our failure to deal with the identity crisis and identity politics that plagues the world today.
I will address the above questions in subsequent essays, but I would like for now to engage four key concepts in this lecture series: globalization, globalism, monotheism, and rationalism.
Globalization
Globalization has been studies extensively in the last three decades, and the focus has been mainly on its economic and political aspects. The description of what constitutes a process of globalization is becoming increasingly clear, but its beginning, dynamics, and end goals are either in dispute or unknown. In its immediate manifestations, globalization may be understood as the expansion of a vibrant culture to engulf the entire globe, reaching out far beyond the territories in which it took its essential shape. So, it is fair to say that globalization as we know it marks the expansion of Western culture to the rest of the world.
Western culture has embraced a set of ideals that transformed it from an isolated society in the Occident region of Europe in the 17th century to a worldwide civilization by the close of the 20th century. Those ideals are generally grouped under the rubric of liberalism. But where did the ideals of liberalism come from? And is liberalism a singular set of ideas? Furthermore, is globalization confined to the modern/western experience, or is it the outcome of a historical process rooted in pre-modern times? Karl Jaspers suggested, in his, The Origin and Goal of History, that world history is interconnected and rooted in the Axial Age, in the period of 500 to 800 BCE. The view of globalization as a historical process is also shared by many contemporary scholars.
Not every aspect of the modern West is Eurocentric, as Western civilization incorporates many universal elements that reflect the accumulation of elements of pre-Western civilization, most notably elements that took shape under the Islamic civilization. The expansion of Western ideals and experiences across the globe underlies the process of globalization, but the process could be fully recognized after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.
“Globalization” is the process by which globalism becomes increasingly thick. ~ Robert Keohane
“Globalization refers to the expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness across world-time and world-space.” ~ Manfred Steger
Globalism
Globalization is the process, but the outcome is globalism. Globalism is the shared understanding of how world society relate to one another. The difficulty of assessing modern globalism is that there is no other globalism to be compared to. Modern globalism may be identified with both positive and negative aspects. Among the positive popular education, development of science, the increased role played by women in the public sphere, etc. Some of the negative aspects of modern globalism is the thorough secularization of society and purging of transcendental ethics from the public life, the creation of social hierarchies and the division of humanity into civilized and uncivilized worlds, in deconstructing human sexuality and insisting that the sex category in a human construct rather than a biological and natural aspects of humanity, and above all it manifest itself in the unrestrained capitalism and its increasing divorce from its ethical and legal limitations.
There have been two global moments anchored in monotheistic traditions: The Islamic and the modern Western. The first culminated in the 16th century and was described by Marshall Hodgson in the Venture of Islam, and the second is our moment of globalization which just started, and I’d like to discuss in this series of talk.
Rationalism
A new philosophical approach to understanding the human condition emerged in Amsterdam during the short-lived Dutch Republic in the 17th century. The relative freedom afforded by the first republic attracted many free thinkers of the time, including John Locke. Descartes is the pioneering figure in this new enterprise. Descartes grounded certainty of knowledge in human subjectivity, in the knowing self. This approach to knowledge was completely new to European thought, and is reflected in what become known as the Cartesian cogito: Cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am. This ran contrary to intellectual mood of the time which predicated knowledge and knowing on Being. With Descartes, being is now predicated on subjective knowledge. The second foundation of certain knowledge was in the Cartesian rational philosophy is the knowledge of God.
The real shock to traditional European though came from Benedict Spinoza who advanced in his Ethics and The Theological-Political Treatise introduced a deep critique of Medieval theologically grounded thinking. Spinoza healed from an Andalusian family, and his work revealed great affinity with Islamic rationalism, in both his understanding of the relationship of humanity to divinity and in his discursive critique of the biblical text. His ideas had a great impact on both idealists (Kant, Fichte, Shiller, and Hegel) and materialist German philosophers.
On the opposite side of the transcendental idealists stood various schools of political philosophy that rejected the notion of humanity endowed with innate values or an innate capacity to distinguish good from evil and believe as the Greek did those ethical values are nothing other than the virtues honorable and noble men possess, that help them to moderate their actions. They also reject transcendental law and believe that all systems of law are based on the negotiated rules by social actors. These are the rational realists that constitute the major schools of thought which anchored themselves in the Hellenic philosophical tradition.
Positivism and materialism gradually converged into what we came to know as realism, and both lunch a systematic attack on idealism in the late 19th century and throughout the 20th century. The attack particularly target Kant and Kantianism, which advances a rational idealist worldview that has its roots in monotheism, and particularly the rational idealism articulated by Islamic philosophers and theologians.
While early rationalists, including Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Kant, and Hegel build their rational ideas on the notion transcendence, the majority of rationalists either dispense with the idea of transcendence as either irrelevant or lacking any truth. Many rationalists claim that reason and reason alone can solve all human issues. Yet reason cannot do away with transcendence because it has always to begin with presuppositions. This has created what I would like to call the idealism-realism tension that has always formed the dynamic of change in monotheistic traditions.
Monotheism
Modern rationalism is grounded in ideas and values that have their roots in monotheism. This point be elaborated in a subsequent lecture. For now, we need to explain what we mean here when we talk about monotheism. Monotheistic traditions are distinguished from other religious traditions by a combination of two elements: faith in the transcendent and the obligation of the faithful to uphold transcendental ideals (moral values). All the monotheistic religions that belong to the Abrahamic faith share the belief in a singular divine that transcends the created world. This faith is associated today with three Abrahamic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Monotheistic traditions share the same grand narrative of the purpose of life and basic set of transcendental values that define human responsibility. We will come back to discuss the role of monotheism in the unfolding of globalization in subsequent chapter, but for now I would like to briefly touch on the four ideals that distinguish the Abrahamic faith: (1) rational pursuit of truth, (2) moral agency of the faithful, (3) purposive human history, and (4) the equal dignity of humanity.
The rational pursuit of truth is emphasized in the story of Abraham’s journey towards the monotheistic faith in a transcendental divine: “Why do you worship things that have no spirit in them? For they are the work of (men’s) hands, and on your shoulders do you bear them, and you have no help from them.” (Jubilee 12:5)
Moral agency comes from the requirement that the faithful follow a moral code and take responsibility to speak truth to corrupt power. The purposive history associated with temporality of life on earth as series of moral test in preparation for an eternal life after death. The equal dignity of people is asserted in the various books of the bible as well as in the Qur’an. This does not mean that the followers of the Abrahamic traditions assert, let alone treat, that all humans are equal. Many arguments have been introduced to limit the scope of equality to a particular group of people.
Globalization and the current identity crisis
We are at a crucial juncture in the history of modern civilization, as we transform from moment in human history that transcends the modern Western moment, often referred to as post-modern and post-secular society. The most accurate description of this new moment is a post-Eurocentric modernity. The liberal order that brought great improvements to modern society began to recede as early as the turn of the twentieth century with the rise of nationalism, as the West began to abandon the very ideals that gave rise to modern liberalism. The breakdown of the liberal West began in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century because of the involvement of Western powers in colonial control of non-European societies. The competition over colonial control and dominance among European countries, which almost wiped out European civilization had it not been for the intervention of the United States and the Soviet Union. The breakdown of Europe was predicted by Oswald Spengler, a German philosopher of history, as early as 2018 in his highly acclaimed work, The Decline of the West.
These series of talks aim at addressing the core issue surrounding the unfolding of the global order. The issues are complex and multilayered, including inequalities, social hierarchy, nationalism, ethnocentrism, etc. For the sake of simplicity, I will reduce it to the increasingly dissolving tension between human ideals and the real social and political human conditions. The tension between idealism and realism has been crucial for the rise of the West, as it has always been crucial for the rise any civilization.
