Meic pearse biography of alberta

Part of the problem

Meic Pearse is a traditionalist and a Christian. He defines the "clash of civilizations" in terms that at their core relate to his belief in the moral and spiritual infallibility of the Bible. Thus on pages 77-79 he defines human rights in terms of Biblical scripture, concluding that the sort of human right "that is claimed simply by virtue of one's existence" to be "not derived" from "Scripture" and therefore not something he is in agreement with.

We can see that Pearse is in agreement with the Muslim belief that laws come from God and not from human beings themselves. So it is not surprising to read this: "Normal people (that is, the rest of the world)...cannot exist without real meaning, without religion anchored in something deeper than existentialism and bland niceness, without a culture rooted deep in the soil of the place where they live." (p. 29)

Nicely expressed, but I wonder, do these "normal people" that exist outside the West--would that include humanists and agnostics, Buddhists and Hindus, Taoists and Zen Buddhists, Jains and Vedantists--indeed mainstream Christians, Jews and Muslims--or is he just referring to the subset of people who follow the fundamentalist expression of the Middle Eastern religions?

It is also not surprising that Pearse echoes the reaction of some fundamentalist clerics in the West. e.g., Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who declared after the World Trade center was hit by terrorists that essentially we had it coming. This view is one that I find abhorrent because, while it does not exactly condone such murderous acts, it tries to shift the blame from the murderers themselves to aspects of the American culture that they--Pearse, Robertson, Falwell and others, along with the fundamentalist Muslims--find threatening to their world view.

In truth, Pearse's is a rearguard action against not just Hollywood and commercial America (the usual whipping boys), but against the basic tenets of democratic society. We can see this in his statement that "human rights are essentially an invention of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment" whereas, "Traditional systems of morality worked on the principle of obligation: act this way; don't do that; you must; you shouldn't." (p. 64) Again he is in strong agreement with the traditionalist interpretations of the three Abrahamic religions.

My problem with those who worship "the Bronze Age God of battles," with those who find their authority in ancient texts and their behavioral guidance in tribalism, including intolerance of other points of view and the use of violence to resolve differences, is their utter irrelevance to, and ignorance of, the real issues the world faces today. The fundamentalist interpreters of religion are Dark Age relics of a mentality that cannot possibly come to grips with the very real challenges of science, globalism and the postmodern world. How a God that has a bad temper in whose image it is insisted that we were made, a God that apparently has a beard and an alimentary tract (what would he need that for?), a God that seems not to have any kind of grip on his world, but must resort to suicide bombings and tanks and guided missiles in order that His will be done--how can such a God of the tribe and superstition hope to cope with the 21st century?

Pearse seems to think that people who do not accept this God and his authority are atheists (he uses the term again and again to describe those in disagreement with his views) who hold values "not as an alternative to traditional values but as a negation of them--as anti-values, in fact." (p. 29)

This then is the problem. It is not so much that Pearse is in disagreement with Western culture. It is much worse than that. What he perceives as Western culture he calls "an anticulture." In other words, he and those who think like him have values and culture. Those who disagree with his primitive view of religion, do not. He sees only the culture of the mass media and the mass mind. He doesn't seem to realize that people like David Hume and John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, existed, and he clearly turns his back on the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights in which men are declared to have inalienable rights. In other words, Pearse would be a Christian fundamentalist Muslim--if such a creature existed, finding authority not in science or the Declaration of the Rights of Man, or in the cultural traditions coming out of the Enlightenment, but instead following only the authority of Scripture--which of course means following the authority of Scripture as interpreted by the clerics currently in power, as it had always been until the rise of the modern world.

Finally I don't think "they" hate us so much as Pearse likes to imagine. The anti-Americanism that we see expressed today is largely a result of the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq and the unilateralism of his attitude. After all, it could be said that they "hate" us in Europe too. America still has an enormous amount of good will in the world, and we are looked upon by hundreds of millions of people as the best hope for humankind and admired for our democratic way of life and our system of government with its checks and balances and its respect for individual human rights--something that authoritative thinkers like Pearse do not fully appreciate.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”