Importing the West's Fatal Flaw Into ISKCON

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ISKCON Cultural Journal

A commentary on the culture, views and progress of the International Society

for Krishna Consciousness.

 

November 27, 2004

Importing the West's Fatal Flaw Into ISKCON

 

James Kurth, Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College, in 1994

wrote a well-known essay titled "The Real Clash," which presented an

overview of Samuel Huntington's now famous "The Clash of Civilizations?"

essay. Kurth's essay also affords us an introspection of Western

civilizations' own future based on the merits of its own

intra-civilizational conflicts within the social and intellectual spheres.

It is this latter part of his essay that explains what is "The Real Clash."

Kurth's essay is of interest to ISKCON's members and well-wishers because it

is a forecast of the West's future from a prominent member of its own

intellectual community.

 

Forecasts being what forecasts are, no prediction based on direct perception

and inference can be 100% accurate. Yet for own welfare we nonetheless have

come to rely on such forecasts because they may contain facts which give us

real cause to believe that the predictions may come to pass. When some of

the predictions become manifest reality, the other predictions which have

yet to be fulfilled gain further credibility. Future events, or the

possibilities of such events, affect our present, as so many of our most

important activities are so many preparations for the future. As ISKCON

resides in the West and interacts with its Western host culture, having a

program of future events can only be advantageous in helping to be effective

and, especially, to withstand the social and cultural pressures from its

host culture, which are sure to act on ISKCON.

 

Kurth first identifies what he perceives as Western Civilization's likely

"fatal flaw":

 

The fact of the matter is that Western civilization is the only

civilization that is explicitly non-religious or post-religious. This is the

radical difference of the West from the other civilizations. It helps to

explain why there are new conflicts between the West and the rest. It

predicts that these conflicts will become more intense in the future. And it

also points to a possible fatal flaw within Western civilization itself.

 

(James Kurth. "The Real Clash" The National Interest. Issue 37. Fall,

1994. Page 3+)

 

The non-, or post-religious character of the West is identified here as the

West's potential Achilles heel. Us Vaishnavas, of course, fully concur that

it is. Irreligion and destruction go hand-in-hand. Nonetheless, it is good

for us to hear this from a member of the West's intellectual community.

Because so many of our Western Vaishnavas come from a secular background,

our sympathies for the secular tend to obscure secular culture's intrinsic,

irreligious influence.

 

To support his point, Kurth then gives a brief synopsis of how Western

civilization evolved to the present day. According to Kurth, several

specific cultural events transformed what was then known as Christendom

(civilization within the geographic location of Europe) into the West. Those

events he identifies as the Renaissance, the Reformation, the

Counter-Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the

Industrial Revolution. Kurth credits the Enlightenment with bringing about

the secularization of the intellectual class, the "idea bearing" class, and

he credits the French and Industrial Revolutions with disseminating

Enlightenment ideas among other important members and elites. The ideas of

the Enlightenment became entrenched in the Western consciousness as

"individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality,

liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church

and state." This is what Western Civilization stood for, or, more

accurately, claimed to stand for.

 

These ideas more or less enjoyed their last legitimacy with end of the great

wars of the Twentieth Century--particularly World War II, against Nazi

Germany, and the Cold War, against the Soviet Union.

 

The new content of Western civilization became the American creed.

Conversely, the new context for the American creed became Western

civilization. The combination of American energy and European imagery gave

the idea of Western civilization both power and legitimacy. The power helped

the United States win both the Second World War against Nazi Germany and the

Cold War against the Soviet Union. The legitimacy helped it to order the

long peace within Western Europe that was so much intertwined with that Cold

War. The term Western civilization has experienced, therefore, its own

heroic age.

 

That age, however, is now over. It is over partly because the term no

longer provides the United States legitimacy among the Europeans. Even

today, however, when there is no longer any obvious great power threatening

Europe, the Europeans are often willing to defer to U.S. leadership (as the

successive crises in the Persian Gulf, Bosnia, and Africa have illustrated

in different ways). The main reason why the heroic age of the term is over

is because it no longer provides any energy within the United States itself,

and this is because it no longer has any legitimacy among Americans.

 

(Ibid.)

 

Not only did Kurth argue that the appearance of the term "the West," or

"Western Civilization", pointed to a decline of the West, he now argues that

this loss of legitimacy among its own people now points to a more advanced

decline of the West. To identify this decline, Kurth analyzes the major

developments that have matured during the manifest identity of Western

Civilization.

 

The end of the Cold War, although without doubt important, is not the most

significant development in Kurth's analysis. What matters most to Kurth are

the transformations of the West's economy, its society, and its intellectual

community. These three areas of Western Civilization are interrelated, and

the developments in each have lead to what Kurth seems to view as the brink

of Western Civilization's terminal condition.

 

According to Kurth, the economy has undergone a long and eventful journey

from being agrarian to industrial and finally to post-industrial. An

agrarian economy is, of course, one based on farming. An industrial economy

is associated with factory products, machinery, etc. In part, an industrial

economy also implies the mechanization of agriculture. This lets a

relatively few people produce all the food for the rest of society, freeing

up others to work in the factories. A post-industrial economy is a service

economy. A service economy (post-industrial) is differentiated from an

industrial economy in that wealth is obtained by value-added service to

already manufactured products. The venue for such work is to be typically

offices rather than factories. A post-industrial economy is intimately

related to the effect of globalization, wherein industrial enterprise

largely shifts to countries where manufacturing is cheaper. Interestingly

enough, the agrarian economy is the kind of economy that Srila Prabhupada

has told us is most closely associated with a godly civilization. The

decline of religiosity within Western Civilization seems to correlate with

the transformation of its economy from agrarian to post-industrial.

 

The next area of civilization important to Kurth is the transformation of

its society. The end result of this transformation has been the erosion of

the family unit into what Kurth describes as, "the non-family

('non-traditional' family, as seen by feminists; no family at all, as seen

by conservatives). " Within the agrarian economy, families were extended

families, typical of the industrial economy were the nuclear families we are

more familiar with, and the "non-family", as Kurth describes it,

characterizes the post-industrial family. By all indications the non-family

is steadily on track to become the Western social norm. Kurth's explanation

of how the transformation of the family is correlated with the

transformation of the economy is notable:

 

The agricultural economy was one that employed both men and women. They

were, it is true, employed at different tasks, but they worked at the same

place, the farm, which was also the home. The industrial economy largely

employed men. They worked both at different tasks from those of women and at

a different place, the factory, which was away from the home. The service

economy is like the agricultural economy in that it employs both men and

women. But it employs them at much the same tasks and at the same place, the

office. Like the industrial economy, that place is away from the home. These

simple differences in tasks and place have had and will continue to have

enormous consequences for society.

 

The greatest movement of the second half of the nineteenth century was

the movement of men from the farm to the factory. Out of that movement arose

many of the political movements that shaped the history of the

time--socialism and anti-socialism, revolutions, and civil wars. The full

consequences of this movement from the farm to the factory culminated in the

first half of the twentieth century with the Communist revolution in Russia,

the National Socialist reaction in Germany, and the Second World War that

included the great struggle between the two.

 

The greatest movement of the second half of the twentieth century has

been the movement of women from the home to the office. Out of that movement

there have already arisen political movements that are beginning to shape

the history of our own time. One is feminism, with its political demands

ranging from equal opportunity to academic deconstructionism to abortion

rights. Feminism has in turn produced a new form of conservatism. These new

conservatives speak of "family values;" their adversaries call them "the

religious right."

 

(Ibid.)

 

His expectation is that the full consequences of these socio-economic

transformations and feminism will be realized in the first half of this

century.

 

The full consequences of this movement from the home to the office will

only culminate in the first half of the twenty-first century. They may not

take the form of revolutions, civil wars, and world wars, as did the earlier

movement of men from the farm to the factory. Feminists have constructed

elaborate theories about how women are far less violent than men. But there

are other factors at work.

 

The movement from farm to factory in large measure brought about the

replacement of the extended family with the nuclear family. The movement

from home to office is carrying this process one step further. It separates

the parents from the children, as well as enabling the wife to separate

herself from the husband. By splitting the nuclear family, it is helping to

bring about the replacement of the nuclear family with the non-family

("non-traditional" family, as seen by feminists; no family at all, as seen

by conservatives). The splitting of the family's nucleus, like the splitting

of the atom's nucleus, will release an enormous amount of energy (which

feminists see as liberating and conservatives see as simply destructive).

 

Some indication of that energy, and its direction, may be gleaned from

the behavior of the children of split families or single-parent families,

especially where they have reached a critical mass forming more than half

the population, as in the large cities of America. In such locales, there is

not much evidence of "Western civilization" or even of civility. For

thousands of years, the city was the source of civilization. In contemporary

America, however, it has become the source of barbarism.

 

(Ibid.)

 

For Kurth, Feminism is the most important outcome of this socio-economic

transformation of Western Civilization. He considers feminism to be the

essential factor that has led to the widespread delegitimization of Western

Civilization within its intellectual community and, hence, the rest of

society. Kurth notes that,

 

Increasingly, the political and intellectual elites of the United States

no longer think of America as the leader, or even a member, of Western

civilization. Western civilization means nothing to many of them. And in the

academic world, Western civilization is seen as an oppressive hegemony that

should be overturned.

 

(Ibid.)

 

What is significant for Kurth is the shift of the intellectual elites'

cultural and ideological allegiance from Western culture to

Multiculturalism. Although his description of this phenomenon and its social

impact is focused on its occurrence in America, it is by no means limited to

America. As a result of multi-culturalism, Europe is also undergoing a

similar, though belated, transformation of its society. America itself has

for a long time been demographically multicultural--with significant

populations of Blacks, Latinos, and other immigrant populations. Yet none of

these groups could capture neither the imagination nor sympathies of

America's intellectual elites. Kurth claims that even if the minority

cultural and racial groups banded together, they still would not have

succeeded in changing the pro-Western drift of America's intellectual class.

According to Kurth, they needed some other class to help them:

 

Even a grand coalition between them would not have been grand enough to

take power and make policy. A truly grand coalition had to include, indeed

had to have as its core, a group that was much closer in social and

educational background to the existing elite and much more central to the

emerging post-industrial economy. That group, which was not really a group

but a majority, was women. We have already noted the importance of women in

the post-industrial economy and the consequent importance of feminism in

post-modern politics.

 

The feminist movement is central to the multicultural coalition and its

project. It provides the numbers, having reached a central mass first in

academia and now in the media and the law. It promotes the theories, such as

deconstructionism and post-modernism. And it provides much of the energy,

the leadership, and the political clout.

 

The multicultural coalition and its feminist core despise the European

versions of Western civilization, which they see as the work of "dead white

European males." They also despise the American version or the American

creed, particularly liberalism, constitutionalism, the rule of law, and free

markets. (They also in practice reject the separation of church and state,

because they want to use the state against the church, especially to attack

a male-dominated clergy as a violation of equal opportunity and to attack

the refusal of church hospitals to perform abortions as a violation of

women's rights.) The multicultural project has already succeeded in

marginalizing Western civilization in its very intellectual core, the

universities and the media of America.

 

(Ibid.)

 

One of the predictions Kurth made above (and which is probably an

observation, but we don't know exactly what he observed) is something we

have recently seen in the media.

 

In September the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Catholic Charities

of Sacramento's appeal of a decision forcing it to pay for contraceptives

for employees. The case was viewed by many as a clear-cut question of

whether religious organizations—charities, schools, hospitals—can get the

same protection under the law as churches, synagogues, and mosques. The

religious groups say their teachings compel them to serve the public. The

state claimed that in serving the public and hiring people unaffiliated with

their faith, these institutions have forsaken many of their religious

protections.

 

(Mark A. Kellner "Liberties 'Violated'" November 2, 2004. Christianity

Today. site: http://www.christianitytoday.com. page:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/012/1.17.html)

 

Kurth concludes that the West's intracultural conflict, more popularly known

as "the Culture War", is fatal to the West because the combatants have

polarized, and neither side can any more be said to be Western.

 

The overthrow of the Enlightenment by the post-Enlightenment is also the

overthrow of the modern by the post-modern and therefore of the Western by

the post-Western. At the very moment of its greatest triumph, its defeat of

the last great power opposing it, Western civilization is becoming

non-Western. One reason is that it has become global and therefore

extra-Western. But the real, and the fatal, reason is that it has become

post-modern and therefore post-Western.

 

The real clash of civilizations will not be between the West and one or

more of the Rest. It will be between the West and the post-West, within the

West itself. This clash has already taken place within the brain of Western

civilization, the American intellectual class. It is now spreading from that

brain to the American body politic.

 

The 1990s have seen another great transformation, this time in the

liberal and the conservative movements that have long defined American

politics and that, whatever their differences, had both believed in the

modern ideas represented by the American creed. Among liberals, the

political energy is now found among multicultural activists. Liberalism is

ceasing to be modern and is becoming post-modern. Among conservatives, the

political energy is now found among religious believers. Conservatism is

ceasing to be modern and is becoming pre-modern. Neither these liberals nor

these conservatives are believers in Western civilization. The liberals

identify with multicultural society or a post-Western civilization (such as

it is). The conservatives identify with Christianity or a pre-Western

civilization. A question thus arises about who, in the United States of the

future, will still believe in Western civilization. Most practically, who

will believe in it enough to fight, kill, and die for it in a clash of

civilizations?

 

(Kurth. page 3+)

 

One thing I have personally noted among many of ISKCON's "pro-Western"

intellectual elites is that they have a romantic notion that Western culture

is taking over the world, riding on the crests of the tsunami of

Globalization. They further believe that for ISKCON to accommodate with the

culture and ideas of the West's intellectual class is essential for a

Krishna Conscous world conquest--a move considered pragmatic in as much as a

neutral country, in order to share the spoils of victory, might shrewdly

side with another country they predict will win a conflict with a third

country. Apparently, what they somehow fail to consider is that if Western

Civilization's intellectual core is so thoroughly anti-Western, how can it

be concluded that Western Civilization in the end will triumph and, hence,

ISKCON with it?

 

We have mentioned before on this site that Western culture is no longer

homogeneous. Some of the older devotees might remember it when it was, but

Western culture being a monoculture is no longer the case. The culture war

in the West is clearly and socially fratricidal. The West is on its way out.

If we want the Hare Krishna Movement to be victorious in the long run, it

cannot accommodate with secular ideologies and consequent social patterns,

which we have discovered are both destructive to culture and fundamentally

irreligious. Furthermore, we cannot accommodate the opposing forces, which

represent the pre-Western civilization of Christendom. Not accommodating the

overtly Christian forces is, perhaps, easier to do because we are positively

their competition.

 

What the Hare Krishna Movement, ISKCON, needs to do is become an alternative

that implements the social and cultural objectives the pre-Western forces of

Christendom wish to reestablish (and more) as well as preserve and

disseminate the rich cultural, intellectual and theological heritage of

Gaudiya Vaishnavism and Vedic culture. On the other hand, and this seems to

be the direction ISKCON's intellectual elites want to move in, aligning

ourselves with the West's liberal intellectual class will result in ISKCON's

eventual marginalzation and destruction, as it has done with so many other

main-stream Christian denominations. Secular Western culture is on its way

out, it is a sinking ship. ISKCON should not make the mistake of boarding

this sinking ship at the onset of its final and doomed voyage.