Philosophy And Modernity Essay

The conflict between Philosophy and modernness is a never ending topic. Each of the legal injury is individually supported by the tally generations. But those who support modernity, at least at some tier of life will surely support philosophy. That is the power of philosophy. Let us take a mishap as example that shows us how these ii issues conflict with each other.The misgivingist beleaguers of September 11 still haunt the minds of Ameri atomic number 50s discompose by the enormity of the crime.We need to know what could turn all over inspired soul to do such a thing. It is bad enough to experience such a monstrous event to feel it is inexplicable, an act with no imaginable motive, only adds to the sense of unreality.What is the source of this hostility? What ideas, values, and attitudes give rise to it? Lewiss observation contains the seeds of the two leading schools of thought about the answer to this question. twain schools place Islamist hatred of the USA in a lar ger pagan and historical context. Both ar plausible, and in many respects they atomic number 18 compatible. But they differ in what they see as the essential terms of the ongoing conflict, and in their implications for the future.One school holds that the war on terror reflects an underlying conflict between Islam and the West as polishs. Each is united, as a civilisation, by the loyalty of its raft to a narrative of their past, a common religion, and sh bed ideas, values, and ways of life. The current tensions between Islam and the West are only the latest of the conflicts that have occurred over the centuries. The USA is a grouchy object of hostility now because it is the most powerful western sandwich country.Those who balk modernity are to be gear up in every soil and civilization.The second school holds that terrorists hostility is directed at the principles and values of the West. On this draw, what they hate is non the West as a family or a civilisation per se, b esides rather the culture of modernity. Modernity was born(p) in the West, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, only if it is non inherently tied to the history or customs of any one society. It is a constellation of universal values the secular culture of reason, science, individualism, progress, democracy, and capitalism that have spread worldwide in different forms and to varying degrees.By the said(prenominal) token, those who reject modernity, who fear and wish to ruin it, are to be found in every nation and civilisation. And invariably they hate the USA as the fullest, most persuasive, and thus most dangerous embodiment of that culture.There are as many battles within civilisations as between them. Islamics saw legions success as a mark of Allahs favour.As Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a prominent Iranian philosopher and historian, observes, During the first twelve centuries of its historic existence, Islam lived with the full ken of the truth and realisation of deity s promise to Muslims that they would be rejoicing if they followed His religion. Such verses as There is no victor but God, which adorns the walls of the Alhambra, in the likes of manner adorned the soul and mind of Muslims.In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, the tide turned. The scientific and industrial revolutions immensely increased the wealth and the troops power of the West. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in human beings War I, the shopping mall East was taken over by European nations and broken up into colonies and protectorates. Today, despite decolonisation, the countries of this region remain poor and converse by comparison non only with the West but similarly with the booming economies of East Asia. Oil revenue has showered wealth on the region, but sparing growth has been held back by layers of regulations, wasteful government enterprises and investments, not to mention corruption.Because of their strategic location, Middle Eastern count ries were pawns of the Cold War but were rarely true partners or friends of either power. Now, Muslims feel they are at the mercy of a global economy driven by occidental capitalism. They feel invaded by Western popular culture, which they regard as morally decadent. Israel is the salt in all these wounds a nation of people who came from the West, disunite a patch of land from Islam, turned it into a vibrant, wealthy economy, and acquired the military prowess to defeat its Arab neighbours.The result of all this, is a feeling of abasement a growing awareness, among the heirs of an old, tall, and long-dominant civilisation, of having been overtaken, overborne, and overwhelmed by those whom they regarded as their inferiors. Having tried to take on Western ways, with dismal results, they are increasingly drawn to the idea that the resoluteness is a return to the pure Muslim faith that reigned in the old age of their former greatness.The clash-of-civilisations school doubtless re presents part of the truth of the matter. But it is not the whole truth, and not the fundamental truth. Its chief shortcoming is that it exaggerates the extent of obligation in outlook, values, ideas, and loyalties among people who distribute the common history and culture that fasten a civilisation. In fact, there are as many battles over these issues within civilisations as between them especially in the West.The hijackers target was a temple of modernity.At the level of fundamental philosophical principles, however, the Enlightenment block was much more important as a turning smear in the West, and in a way created a new civilisation.Anti-modernismModernity was born in the West in a radical faulting of its past. The world of the Middle Ages, built around the world-view of Christian Scholasticism, was a society of religious philosophy, feudal law, and an agricultural economy. Out of this soil, the Renaissance and Enlightenment produced a substantially new society of science , individualism, and industrial capitalism. When we examine the wider context of Islamic terrorism, it is clear that a hatred of modernity is its driving force.The cultural radical of this new society, if we state it as a set of explicit theses, was the view that reason, not revelation, is the instrument of knowledge and arbiter of truth that science, not religion, gives us the truth about nature that the pursuit of happiness in this life, not suffering in preparation for the next, is the cardinal value that reason can and should be used to increase human wellbeing through economic and technological progress that the individual person is an end in himself with the efficiency to direct his own life, not a slave or a child to be ruled by others that individuals have equal rights to liberty of thought, speech, and action that religious belief should be a private affair, border a social virtue, and church and state kept separate and that we should deputize command economies with ma rkets, warfare with trade, and rule by king or political commissar with democracy.It is therefore misleading to call our civilisation Christian, even though that carcass the largest religion in terms of adherents. The West may still be a culture of Christians, by and large, but it is not a Christian culture anymore. It is a secular culture. And that is what the Islamists hate most about us.The root hijackers did not target the Vatican, the capital of Western Christianity whose leaders launched the Crusades. They did not attack the British Foreign Office, which directed colonial policy in the Middle East after World War I. They attacked the World Trade Centre, the proud symbol of engineering audacity and global commerce, where businesses from scores of countries (including many Muslim countries) worked in freedom and peace, creating wealth and investing in material progress. Their target, in short, was a temple of modernity.The culture of modernity is not a Western good but a human goodModernity meant people changing their relationship with both the world and themselves. For the first time, through science, they realized that many things, such as certain weather patterns or illnesses, were not a matter of fate. The social order no longer seemed inconceivable to change either. Revolutions could sweep away despots and people could improve their living standards.The curse posed by the Islamist terrorists derives not from their Islamic background but from the ideas, values, and motivations they share with anti-modernists everywhere-including in the West. In that regard, they have not merely assaulted our civilisation. They have attacked civilisation as such.Civilisation is the condition a society attains when it emerges from prehistoric brutality and begins to apply intelligence systematically to the problems of human life, by creating technologies of production like farming, technologies of cognition like writing, and technologies of social order like cities and law.The culture of modernity is one of these permanent contributions the most important. Though Western in origin, it is not a Western good but a human good. It has vastly expanded our knowledge of the world brought a vast increase in wealth, comfort, safety, and health and created social institutions in which humans can flourish.Anti-modernism is not scarce loyalty to pre-modern stages of civilisation on the part of people who have not yet discovered reason and individualism. It is a postmodern reaction by people who have seen modernity and turned against it, who hate and wish to destroy it.This is a profoundly anti-human outlook, and there can be no agree with it. As we take aim at the terrorists who have attacked us, we must also take intellectual aim at the ideas that inspire them.