This changing world

If there is anything more true, we live in a changing world. And while Duterte is a refreshing political personality for the Philippines, he did not invent change, It is part of humanity and the world we live in.

Still we must work for change. The problem comes when we refuse to change. In the present time and in the Philippines that is the situation. So I believe that our perspective is wrong if we blame Satan as the concept of evil. That is what I was taught in religion as a child. Evil or Satan is not obvious or simple with our limited knowledge. A materialistic society of fashion and other appearances of wealth can just be as evil.

Evil does not present itself as evil. On the contrary, it presents itself as good. And that is the source of our wrong judgments. As a child, I was taught that Satan was an ugly red hot creature with a tail and horns. He is ugly so there should be no reason for men and women to flock to him. Evil or the personification of evil is more complex than Satan because he or it is presented as good and beautiful. We do not immediately recognize what is good and what is evil because evil would not have followers if it was to appear as evil.

I have been writing columns for many years now and I find that I have written on this already. One of the most useful was one I wrote 16 years ago about “A more mature and spiritual world.”

That column was sourced from Karen Armstrong’s “Fractured Fundamentalisms.” It is a good context for what is happening now with ISIS in the Philippines. It was sent to me by Ahmed Menaidy. “Why are there few Islamic democracies?” Democracy is not created by an act of will. The form we know today emerged very gradually in the West. It was not simply dreamed up by political scientists or inspired statesmen but appeared as the result of a process of trial and error. Over time, we’ve found it to be the best way to run a modern society. In the 16th century, Europe and, later, what would become the United States began to create an entirely new kind of society. In what we call the premodern world, all civilizations were based economically on a surplus of agriculture, which could be used for trade. But at the time of the scientific revolution, the West began to create a society founded on technology and reinvestment of capital, enabling Europe and America to replicate its resources indefinitely.

This involved major change at every level of society, and it was a painful process. Modernity did not come fully into its own until the 19th century, and during that time the Western countries experienced revolutions, violent wars of religion, exploitation of workers in factories, the despoliation of the countryside, and great distress as people struggled to make sense of this profound change. It is similar to upheavals going on now in developing countries, including the Islamic countries, as they make this difficult rite of passage.

The new order demanded change on every level: social, political, intellectual, scientific and religious. And the emerging modern spirit had two main characteristics: independence and innovation.

There were declarations of independence in nearly all fields. The American Declaration of Independence was a modernizing document, and the war with Britain a modernizing war. But people also demanded independence intellectually: scientists could not permit themselves to be impeded by a coercive state or religious establishment; the Protestant Reformers who declared their independence of the Catholic Church were also forces for modernization. And innovation: Constantly people were making something new, breaking unprecedented ground, discovering something fresh. There was excitement as well as the distress that inevitably accompanies major change.

It was found that in order to be fully productive and thus provide a sound basis for the new civilization, more and more people had to acquire the modern spirit and therefore a modicum of education, even at a quite humble level. Printers, clerks, factory workers and finally women were brought into the productive process. Those societies that were secular and democratic seemed to work best. In Eastern Europe, countries that reserved the fruits of modernity for an elite, and that used more draconian measures to bring Jews into the mainstream, fell behind. It is important to note that this modernization took about 300 years. New ideas and ideals had time to filter down to society’ lower echelons, under the dynamic of its own momentum.

This has not been the case in the Islamic world. Here modernization has been far more accelerated, leaving no time for the trickle-down effect. Consequently, society has been polarized: only a privileged elite has been educated to take part in modern politics, while the vast majority find their society changing in ways that seem incomprehensible and bewildering.

Middle Eastern countries is not a society corrupted by the outmoded religion of “Islam,” but an imperfectly modernized society.

Islam is not inherently opposed to democracy, however, and this recent attack was not a war against democracy or freedom. There are principles in Islamic law, such as the need for shurah (consultation) before passing new legislation, which would be very compatible. And it is not strictly true that Islam is incapable of separating what we in the West call “church” and state. In practice, Muslims have perforce kept religion and politics separate. In the Shiite world, this separation of religion and politics was a sacred ideal, because all states were seen as corrupt. In the Sunni world, there was a de facto separation of religion and the political life of the caliphal court. The shariah, the Islamic legal system, began as a counterculture, as a white revolution against what they saw as the corruption of the court. The ulama (religious scholars) promoted a more egalitarian, principled and just system of law than was actually feasible in the realpolitik of the court, which had its own aristocratic culture, known as the adab. Muslims do have problems with the Western definition of democracy: “Government with the people, for the people and by the people,” is not tenable, because in an Islamic perspective God and not the people is sovereign.

So the achievement of a full democracy is not simply a matter of setting up a parliament, and it is nearly always contested. Religion can sometimes facilitate the struggle. It can be a modernizing factor, and some forms of fundamentalism in the Middle East can be seen as enabling people to make the painful rite of passage to modernity more easily.”