From the time of the French Revolution until very recently, two opposing ideas about the possession and distribution of wealth have vied with one another. One has held that seeking and holding individual wealth was basic to human nature, and the pursuit of wealth should be only minimally regulated, if at all. As importantly, those who amassed wealth would be entitled to use it as they saw fit -- private property is a basic right that should always be protected, in this view. Any program to redistribute wealth would have been seen as taking it from its rightful owners.
The opposing school of thought maintained that individual wealth-seeking was not to be trusted and would lead to unfairness, or worse -- wealth could only benefit society if it was held and applied more or less collectively. Capitalism could be allowed to create wealth, but through taxation and other instruments, its benefits would be spread throughout the society. But as we know, it was often the case that the capitalist system itself was seen as pernicious, and such concepts as private property, profit, and so forth were anathema. The economy would have to be run by the state, not private interests, in order to ensure that all citizens might share wealth equally.
As we have also seen, economic systems have evolved that have successfully drawn from both capitalism and socialism. However, in the main, the economic philosophy that most rewards individual wealth-seeking (free-market capitalism) has been seen to triumph over the variants of socialism (represented by a range of governmental and economic models -- from capitalism with some elements of socialism, as in Western Europe, to the 'pure' communism of the early Soviet Union and the first 40 years or so of communist China). State-run socialist economies have shown themselves to be failures, in the main. In the West, socialist policy survives only in Western Europe and Canada, in the form of pensions, health-care plans, supports for maternity and child-rearing, etc. (though many do argue that these supports come at a high expense economically to the nations that try to maintain them; these social welfare systems may not even be sustainable for much longer in their present form)*.
*There is the example of Venezuela. However, in Venezuela, wealth redistribution is not formal, institutional, as in Europe. When Hugo Chavez leaves power, it is possible that his social programs for the poor would be altered or discontinued altogether. For the purposes of this essay, I am also excluding the examples of North Korea, Myanmar, and other such countries.
For 300 years at least, the question of which economic and social model could most benefit society has preoccupied the world. During that time, religion has mainly been in retreat. And though the long decline of religion obviously has had many causes other than economic ones, it is clear that material well-being has taken up ever more of our attention, and religious faith, while still very strong in some quarters, has lost its hold; religious life has long since ceased to be central to Western society , whereas economic life has been so ever more. One could add that atheism was the official policy of many, if not all the communist states. Secularism was one of the thrusts of the Arab nationalist movements and the modernization programs of such countries as Turkey. Some major religions -- Catholicism for example -- have been forced to modernize or face obsolescence.
Religion has not been the only traditional institution that has been threatened by the indomitability of capitalism and its social corollaries. Traditional cultures and their values have also been in retreat. Whether it is a question of the society and values of the rural United States, or the indigenous peoples of the Amazon Basin, the machinery of commerce and communication has been steadily eroding local mores and cultural practices. Indigenous cultures throughout the world are every bit as endangered as the natural environments in which these cultures are frequently found.
However, over time, a resistance movement has arisen against the trend towards materialism in the world, and has become especially potent in recent decades. It is largely religious in nature, but it would be a mistake to see the movement as solely religion-based. The principle embodiment of this anti-materialist force has been so-called 'radical' Islam (but there are other groups that are in many ways aligned with Islamism in this movement, in some cases while being mortally opposed to it -- Islamism simply having the greatest number of adherents).
The Islamic world has many resentments against the Western, capitalist world (note: this essay should not be taken for support for or judgement against these resentments). Some of these are neither economic nor cultural: for example, the Palestinian question. But one of the main ones (and one that is less often talked about) is of the social decay that the bourgeois capitalist model seems inevitably to carry with it. We value the freedom of Western society, but much of the world is fearful of the cost of that freedom: crime, the decline of family life, the unclear social heirarchy, the emphasis on material well-being at the expense of spiritual integrity. We are fearful of the absolutism we see in Islamism (which is why some of us are given to calling it 'Islamo-fascism'); in some of the non-Western world, both within and outside of Islam, many are fearful of losing their religious and cultural foundations in a flood of commercial homogenization.
We now have a world-wide free market not just in commerce, but in culture. In both cases the large have an advantage over the small. But while the rain-forest tribes of Ecuador face long odds against the global culture of homogeneity, the Islamic world, with its broad territorial span and ample population, intends to put up a fight. The conflict between Islam and the West is most often charactarized as a religious one, and in some ways in may well be. But it is just as much conflict between two opposing attitudes about culture and the role it should play in everyday life. In the West, culture is seen merely as an embellishment to life. In fact the word itself is much more commonly used to refer to the arts or to entertainment than it is to talk about behavior and customs; in some of the rest of the world, including, I believe, much of the Islamic world, culture means the various traditions of a place, a tribe, or of a nation.
I think it is more than coincidence that during the same period (the last 40 years) that the Islamic world has become more assertive, evangelical Protestantism has entered the cultural mainstream, not just in this country, but in other countries that formerly were dominated by the Catholic church. And if one looks a little past the well-known stances the evangelicals take on so-called 'social' issues, and tries to see the motivation behind them, one detects that at the root they are just trying to impose order on a world that they see as bewildering, bereft of moral order (I feel obliged to say, as I did regarding Islamism, that I am in no way trying to be an apologist for any views you may associate with evangelicalism -- nor am I critiquing those views). It may also be significant that the trend in Judaism, especially in America, was once assimilation, but that nowadays, the Orthodox and Hasidic Jews -- living in separate, self-sustaining communities -- are becoming more numerous and ever more influential both in this country (within Judaism) and in Israel.
I am not in a position to postulate as to whether religions can be reconciled with one another or not. But I do think that if any one religion is hardening its stance towards the rest of the world, the true reason may be found in cultural changes now taking place globally -- every bit as much as one may find the reason within the theology of that religion. We would do well to evaluate the role of culture in our own society, and see just how much that role has been altered -- diminished -- over the years.
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