CHAPTER III

 

GLOBALIZATION AND ITALIAN CULTURE

 

ROBERT ROYAL

 

 

Religion, like other large-scale human structures, is one of those things that our postmodern condition is supposed to have made problematic. Identification with a particular spiritual tradition, like identification with a state, a locale, and other historic markers of identity, has been put under a great deal of pressure by various factors in a globalizing world. We have far more knowledge of a wide array of belief systems and ways of practicing religion than in the past. This is not only through electronic media, but through daily contact with people of other faiths in the workplace and on the street in our various pluralist societies. At the same time, adherence to formal institutions of all kinds B churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples B is assumed by most analysts to be weakening, and there is some evidence in certain parts of the world that this is true.

 But I want to begin these reflections from a different perspective: the very forces that have given rise to the assaults on simple identity, be they postmodern or globalizing, have inevitably produced a counter-reaction. Human beings are by nature religious and will remain so, with religion serving as one of the counterweights to the vast impersonal forces of the postmodern, globalized world. The phenomenon of what is often referred to as Fundamentalism in various world religions is partly the result of threats to human identity. It is wrongly regarded, by grouping them all together, as a refusal to deal with modern problems. Some fundamentalisms are a flight from the world. But the turn to religion is one way human beings seek to anchor themselves in the very midst of modernity. Much of it is better thought of as a product of our situation, rather than a flight from it. I believe that the same is true of our identification with a territorial state, with local communities, with families, and with other deep sources of the self. These identifications will become more valued, not less so, as globalization proceeds.

 

ITALIAN CULTURAL IDENTITY AND INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE

 

On the religious challenge of a globalizing world for Italian cultural identity I have few firm opinions, primarily because it is so difficult to form a clear idea of contemporary religion or of Italian Culture in the abstract. Religion means many things globally; very few religions fit exactly the model people coming from Christian, Jewish, or Islamic points of view might expect. Hinduism, perhaps, presents a rough analogy to our traditions, but much of Buddhism can only be called atheistic. Tribal religions may or may not have the kind of overarching cosmic framework we think of as central to religion. Confucianism or Zen could be classified as philosophies, rather than religions. Scholars of religions have difficulties sorting these things out. But for functional or descriptive purposes, we might think of religion as the human beliefs that offer us the deepest and broadest systems of meaning. That is why Marxism or modern Western liberalism can serve as a sort of religion for some people.

Similarly, I find it hard to know exactly what Italian culture means globally. One thing we can say as a kind of first approximation to the subject is that Italy has never been B from the time of the Roman Empire to our own day B a very theoretical society. The collapse of a strict Enlightenment rationality in postmodernity does not disturb Italian culture as much as it might others, because Italians never relied as much on that form of rationality for their social or religious lives. So Italy is well placed to maintain its cultural traditions, however we might define those, in our globalizing world.    

Globalization, it is worth recalling, did not begin in the last few decades with the invention of jet travel, satellite communications, or the Internet. It began in 1492 when a visionary Genoese navigator sailed from Europe and set us all on the course of knowing that we live in one world. Prior to Columbus, people spoke in the abstract about the globe and its peoples; Columbus made the growing experience of that unity a reality. And as I have argued in my book 1492 and All That, it is not true to say that this early form of globalization was merely the beginning of Western imperialism or the economic exploitation of the world by Europe.

 Columbus did seek material rewards; they were the only way he could justify his enterprise of the Indies to those who would have to invest in it. He also sought compensation so that he and his family could live after his days as an explorer ended. But to limit our analysis to these factors is to overlook the very real role that the navigator’s faith and courage played in his epic discoveries. I am convinced that he saw his voyages as one of the ways to preach the Gospel to all nations and arrive at the end times when Christ would return. But the cynical view also fails to appreciate the way that Europe was interested in other parts of the world as no other culture then or since. It is no accident that the early missionaries undertook the first studies that led to the later development of anthropology, ethnology, comparative religion, and so forth. At least for the West, economics, religion, and cultural curiosity were present at the start of global integration. We would be wrong to neglect any of them today.

Any analysis of the prospects of Italian culture in the religiously globalized world must, I believe, operate simultaneously  on two levels. First, there is the level of what continental Europeans, following Habermas, usually call the life world. In more Anglo-Saxon regions, we usually speak of these as the structures of everyday life. I find the expression better because it is less tied to philosophical echoes from German idealism and other traditions of thought that may distract us from the reality itself.  In this mode of analysis, the habits of ordinary people B their cuisine, family affections, local social relations, economic activities, and religious practices B are examined as constituting the true texture of life in any age. In every one of these categories, Italy has been and remains a source of attraction for many around the world. In North America, Italian restaurants are by far the most popular; Italian families B Mafia aside, and sometimes the Mafia as well B are admired as offering the kind of warmth people from other backgrounds would like to find in their own families; and Italy’s long ability to produce beautiful environments while offering social and economic opportunities is a kind of model to architects and municipal planners. We also see, not least in American films, a fascination with the kind of Catholic parish that is common in Italy and not uncommon here, with its wealth of statues and artwork celebrating local saints and particular religious figures. All this interest, I think, reflects a certain thinness in our Anglo-Saxon heritage: we admire and are grateful to the British for their economic and political sanity. But no one turns to Britain for the thick and rich practices of a good life.

There is, of course, a second level of cultural analysis that must be added to this picture and brought into its proper relation with the first. This level involves large-scale public institutions of politics, economics, and education. Here, too, there are admirable Italian traits that are less well-known or even entirely neglected. Americans are suspicious about governmental powers and believe others, especially Europeans, should be so as well. Our suspicions do not deny government’s proper role, but show our belief that liberty requires constant vigilance against potential tyranny. That is one place where Americans and Italians are largely in agreement.

What I think needs further elaboration in the Italian case, however, is how the two levels B the culture of everyday life and the culture of public institutions B work together sometimes with happy results. I always think of Italian behavior towards Jews during the Second World War as the best example of this. Italy’s behavior was not perfect; some Italian Jews fell afoul of the virulent anti-Semitism and absurd racial theories promoted by the Nazis. And the wildly exaggerated criticism of Pius XII’s alleged “silence” during the persecution of the Jews B though mistaken B points to some failings that should not be overlooked. But I think Italy’s relatively good behavior B or perhaps I should say the good behavior of many Italians B says a great deal about the way that the everyday level of Italian culture with its welcoming and tolerant ways, and the large public level, co-operated in producing something good. France certainly did not show the same cultural virtues. Italians may be reluctant to speak about this part of their past, but as an American, I have no such reluctance and say it deserves proper recognition.

It deserves recognition for itself, but also because it tells us some things about religious factors in an age of globalization. We cannot deny that Italian Catholicism played a positive role in that behavior at a very difficult time. And that contribution is an important datum for our own time when the events since September 11 and the continuing turmoil in the Middle East make it appear to some that religion is always a force for conflict. Like any other human thing, religion can be and often has been a bone of contention. But human beings are by nature religious. The much discussed secularization of societies as they modernize has not proved itself to be empirically true. In Europe, perhaps, there has been a falloff in participation in religious institutions. But spirituality and religiosity of a kind have continued even there, according to social surveys. So unless we intend to relegate religion to a wholly private realm B something both impossible and unjust B we have to find some way to sort out the good from the bad kinds of public religious influence in our globalized world

I think the Italian experience has much to teach here. To begin with, the Catholic Church as an institution operates on what can only be called an old Roman model. The central papal authority in union with subsidiary local dioceses is essentially an administrative feature of the late Roman Empire, its own way of acknowledging Globus et locus. Dissenting Catholics in America often say they are “Catholic, not Roman,” meaning they want to do what they want to do B mostly in sexual matters B  without papal interference. Italy’s history, of course, reflects some of the difficulties when the Church and the State are too close, producing anti-clericalism at times even among Catholics. But whether these complaints are justified or not, they overlook the remarkable achievements of the multiplicity within unity that the Church has offered. Just think back to the ways throughout history that popes and bishops have resisted improper exercises of power by the state, or how the Church as an outside authority helped Solidarity in Communist Poland and continues to defend persecuted Catholics in a place like China today. You may believe that the whole institutional framework is clumsy, but what large-scale human structure is not? And we should not undervalue the institution’s proven durability. As the American poet Ezra Pound once said, any institution that could survive “the picturesqueness of the Borgias has a certain native resilience.”  Say what you will about the Roman Empire or the Roman Catholic Church; the old Romans of both kinds know how to govern.

 

ISLAM AND THE DIALOGUE OF CIVILIZATION

 

And there are advantages to the right kind of centralizing structures. The American Islamist Bernard Lewis has argued in his recent book What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response that one of the reasons we Westerners find dealing with Islam frustrating is that it has no clerical hierarchy. As we have seen, even terrorist actions that seem far outside the central Islamic traditions may be condemned by one scholar, praised by another, with no way of resolving the question. The Conference of Islamic Nations meeting in Kuala Lumpur, precisely because it represents the usual Muslim confusion of Mosque and state, had different in agreeing that blowing up women and children in Israel is simply wrong, as the best Muslim tradition clearly believes. There is too much emphasis on the political context, too little pure religious reflection backed up by religious authority.

I have deliberately singled out this feature of Islam because I think it cuts across the grain of some lazy analysis in the West. Many journalists and politicians believe that the Muslim world needs to separate itself from religious authority, to undergo a Reformation and Enlightenment on the Western model. In a sense, it has had its Reformation, which like the Christian Reformation introduced greater puritanical furor into the Middle Eastern mix. This was called Wahhabism, which began in Saudi Arabia in the nineteenth century. Its growth in the Middle East and support by Saudi Arabia, not least here in the United States, has produced no little potential trouble for the future.

    In a similar vein, Western hopes for an Islamic Enlightenment fail to come to grips with the specific nature of Islam. The kind of Enlightenment that occurred in the West would be thought of as simple unfaithfulness in the East. Furthermore, this overlooks the very real limits of the Enlightenment, for all its benefits, even in the West. This lies at the heart of the postmodern turn. It may be possible for some sort of internal evolution to occur in Muslim societies that will make them peaceful and respectable partners in a global dialogue. But we should not deceive ourselves: if that evolution comes, it will have a Muslim character; it will not be likely to resemble anything in Western history.

Since September 11, we have heard a great deal again about the clash of civilizations. Samuel Huntington’s thesis in the book by that name had fallen by the wayside somewhat prior to the terrorist attacks.  You will recall that Huntington argues that the large cultural formations of the world, which he rightly sees as stemming from the cultus, the religious traditions, are permanent features of the world that may lead to conflict. The reason that End of History has not come, said Huntington, is because the secularization thesis has proven false. Indeed, the American sociologist of religion Peter Berger has spoken of a coming “Desecularization of the World” as peoples exposed to the impersonal forces of modernity and globalization seek a firmer identity in their own deepest traditions.

We may argue over the details or consequences of Huntington’s thesis, particularly whether cultural differences automatically lead to serious conflicts. For instance, I often notice as a person who lives in a primarily Anglo-Saxon culture, but has spent a fair amount of time on the European continent, that there is a wide gap between the pragmatic approaches of England and North America and the more theoretical modes of thought of the continent. There is a kind of schizophrenia within the European tradition itself that leads to different ways of behaving. There was a time when such differences loomed large; and they persist. But would any of us say today that they must inevitably lead to conflict?

The same might be argued about conditions across cultural traditions. China, for example, is a large country that will play an ever larger role in world affairs. Its form of Marxism presents a problem, but perhaps also some opportunities. If one reads Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book it is astonishing how much Marx may be made to speak like Confucius. And the basic Confucian and Chinese talent for commerce has made even its Marxist rulers look upon market economics in a far different way than the old Soviets or tercermundistas.  So we do have differences of a very deep nature. But much depends on the quality of the religious or philosophical tradition that we find ourselves engaging. And much depends on our own ability to draw on the fullest and deepest levels of our own religious tradition to respond with openness and a spirit of co-operation to other cultures.

For the foreseeable future, Christian/Islamic relations will be a sore point. We in the West have no necessary conflict with Islam. In Bernard Lewis’ reading, even Muslims themselves are divided between those who think that the current turmoil in their countries is the result of their own failures, and those who think that someone outside has harmed them. Any dialogue between the Christian West and the Muslim East will first need to settle some thorny practical problems such as the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. But even if we could reach a tolerable political and economic settlement, we will still have to engage in a cultural dialogue that will engage the more basic problem of religious difference, and not only in Islamic countries, but in places such as  India. There Hindu Fundamentalism has arisen in response to the same forces of globalization that have inflamed many other parts of the world. It has led to violence that never existed in India’s generally tolerant history, against Christians and other Westerners.

 

THE CATHOLIC TRADITION AND THE DIALOGUE OFCIVILIZATIONS

 

The Catholic Church has many resources for such a dialogue of civilizations. As another sociologist of religion, Ernst Troeltsch, once observed, we have two main forms of religion in the West: the Church and the sect. The Church model, of which the Catholic Church is the pre-eminent representative, sees as part of its responsibility to be engaged with all dimensions of society. That is why the Church developed its just war teaching and why modern Catholic social thought has elaborated notions like subsidiarity and solidarity.  The sect, by contrast, flees contact with the world. We have many such sects in the United States, groups that basically believe it is a corruption of the pristine purity of the religious body to soil itself with the affairs of the world. Each model has its advantages and drawbacks. But for those of us who believe that Christianity has and needs to have a role in the important work that faces us in the modern world, it is a great advantage to possess a tradition that has accumulated rich conceptual tools and flexible practices from its long engagement with several civilizations.

      What do we most need from our religious traditions in our time of globalization B globalization of linkages and globalization of conflict? I would suggest that we need something that could be called the spirit of Dante. Dante is, of course, one of the greatest figures in Western civilization and therefore represents many things. But the thing that we might best learn from him, and that a properly ambitious Italian culture might offer to the world, is a drive to respect everything B theology, mysticism, philosophy, poetry, science, history, geography, and politics B in a single civilizing vision. That spirit need not be identified with a crushing drive for mastery or hegemony, as it often is in the modern world. The individuals Dante describes in the Commedia have vigorous lives, precisely because they are allowed to be themselves in their fulness, but are also viewed against a larger background.

Any attempt at such a universalism today, of course, is very ambitious and cannot be carried out by a single individual or a small group. It would take a fairly large number of people all striving to work along similar lines to weave the many loose strands of modern civilization into a substantial fabric. We are all quite aware of the many obstacles, including simple, practical ones, to this pursuit. Even one small area of science exceeds the capacity of individual scientists themselves to know thoroughly. But our awareness of the complexity and extension of modern knowledge need not hamstring us. We need to know how much detail we need for purposes of cultural integration, and how much we can leave aside as important but less central detail.

Let me say as a Catholic and deep admirer of Italian culture that, for all these reasons, I hope the next pope will be another non-Italian. One of the problems internal to Catholicism that has to be frankly faced was the unfortunate perception since the Counter-Reformation that the Church was closed in on its own backward-looking culture. The creative energies of the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance had evaporated, and nothing in the Church seemed capable of galvanizing a new, forward-looking approach to culture. The European culture that had formerly been internal to the Church and produced the great philosophy, poetry, art, and music that is so much a part of the Italian patrimony, had to develop outside the Church for many reasons too complicated to trace here. Suffice to say, though, that the confident criticism of a figure like Voltaire B that the Church’s anti-intellectualism and corruption would soon lead to her demise B proved absolutely wrong. The papacy since Leo XIII has been a vibrant element in European and world culture. And under John Paul II the Church is perhaps the most respected moral authority in the world.

That authority derives in no small part from the Polish Pope’s capacity to present the rich Catholic tradition in terms relevant to the future of the world. If Voltaire were alive today, for instance, he would be shocked to find that the postmodern secular culture of Europe had all but abandoned its once robust faith in reason. And that the Pope in Rome had become one of the most vigorous advocates of a more confident and more ambitious reason that seeks truth not only in the everyday framework of the world, but in every sector of reality open to human knowledge, including the knowledge of the divine. Voltaire might also be shocked that the Church was the great defender of human life. The wide acceptance of abortion and growing acquiescence in euthanasia and assisted suicide are an ideological narrowness stemming from the more fundamental belief in the radical autonomy of individuals which needs to be countered by a more humane vision. We have reached the point where countries are regarded as relatively less free or actual offenders against human rights because they do not allow abortion. Countering this long slide into individual autonomy is difficult and requires a certain cultural position. I do not think that an Italian pope could be as effective at this moment in history in making the world aware of the Church’s universalism in the face of this sectarianism. Situations change rapidly, and the right Italian perhaps could do so. But paradoxically, at least for the moment, the great riches of Catholic culture, a large percentage of which are Italian, may have greater influence in the world if they are advanced by a non-Italian.

Speaking as an American from an American perspective, I might even go so far as to say that it might be best if a non-European were to become the next pope. I do not say this from sentimental or politically correct motives. Both Europe and the United States, in my opinion, would benefit from some fresh currents of thought on the two central principles of Catholic social thought: solidarity and subsidiarity. These concepts have obvious affinities with the twin drive towards globalization and localism in the world as a whole. But Europe and America have some limited perspectives on these two processes. Subsidiarity as it is currently practiced in the European Union does not seem to me to be adequate to protecting the concrete needs of local communities. On the contrary, it’s very idea of subsidizing the local has allowed larger national and international bodies to be involved in a variety of strictly local decisions.

In the United States, a similar process has been underway for some time. Its Constitution was carefully calibrated by the Founding Fathers to give only specific “enumerated powers” to the national government. States rights B and by states Americans mean the regional entities such as New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, or Virginia B were regarded as important checks on the excessive power of the federal government. After the Civil War, the term states’ rights was used by some states in the South to resist changes demanded by the North in the civil rights of Americans of African descent. That unfortunate element in American history made it possible to erode and, in some instances, almost eliminate the earlier, very robust notion of local control over local affairs. Recent U. S. Supreme Court decisions have tended to restore greater power among the states. But this trend, in my view, has not yet gone nearly far enough, and a change in the members of the court could easily return us to a more centralized government far from the classical spirit of the American Founders.

So both Europeans and Americans need to rethink the idea of subsidiarity in the light of the centralizing tendencies of the European Union and the U.S. government. For that purpose, we need input from the deeper sources of our own traditions and from other cultural currents. And we are about to get them. In a few decades, the Americas and Africa will each have more Christians than does Europe. Asia will still have fewer, but not for long. So as Europe becomes the third or fourth Christian continent in terms of size, it will have to introduce the new Christians to the fulness of Christian culture and principles, as well as welcome their input as to their concrete embodiment in the world.

Take the notion of solidarity. In Sollecitudo rei socialis, John Paul II spoke for the first time of solidarity as a virtue. He emphasizes that individual element because too often solidarity has been thought of as a set of policy mechanisms for helping the poor, the marginalized, and the victims of natural or man-made disasters. Solidarity must find expression in public policies, but we know that those very policies may sometimes have perverse effects. In Centesimus Annus, the Pope rightly points to the ways that social assistance, culminating in the social assistance state, may actually discourage the very individual initiative and enterprise they are intended to foster. These cautions have applications both at national and international levels. The way to be sure that we have good global input is to pay attention to local Christian churches. The Catholic Church, for example, not only runs an administrative structure of dioceses and parishes around the world. Catholic Relief Services offer the most extensive, permanent social assistance of any institution. The Church’s minute knowledge of local conditions and its global capacity to transmit that knowledge to governments and international institutions is a unique resource in the global age.