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ResetDoC - Dialogues on Civilizations
The aim of our meeting is promoting a better understanding
between people who belong to different cultures and
trying to move some steps further from the mere announcement
of this principle.
We will begin discussing a method in the relationships
among individuals considering that each person has his
own, single responsibility and is not a symbol of some
Islamic, Jewish, Christian, Western or Oriental essence
or other platonic categorizations or essentialisms.
Obviously each one of us has a different history, comes
from a different cultural background and holds his own
identity. So if it is clear that in our societies none
of us can be abstracted and devoid of identity or social
belongings, it is also clear that all of us have cultural,
ethnical, geographical, historical and national coordinates
to refer to.
Better trying to control our own prejudices than thinking
that we don´t have them, as Gadamer suggested.
We are all bound to some “transcendental”
degree of localism but this factor isn’t always
determinant.
I am coming, for instance, from the same nation, from
the same region, from the same small town of Italian
former Minister Calderoli who pretended to enforce a
principle of liberty by insulting Muslims, yet I don´t
agree with anything of what he uses to say and I am
happy because he was fired by the Italian government
of which, unfortunately, he was a member. On the contrary,
I totally agree with two Jewish-Americans who live in
New York, Benjamin Barber and Michael Walzer, when they
say that the principle of the freedom of press does
not guarantee that every use one does of it is good,
just, and responsible. I am not searching a captatio
benevolentiae (attempting to catch sympathy) at every
cost from an Arab audience because I want to add another
suggestion coming from Barber: the challenges to enforce
freedom are those made by minorities towards majority
and not viceversa. Therefore it is not a proof of courage
insulting Muslims in Denmark, but it would be so in
Tehran or Ryad or wherever Muslims represent the majority.
As Stuart Mill wrote in “On Liberty”, the
liberal test of “invective” doesn’t
apply when it comes “from the Christian majority
against pagans in a Christian society”. And the
offence against a minority is more hurtful than that
against a majority.
In order to start a dialogue capable of crossing cultural
differences, we need a method that requires some specific
features. First of all, we need to free ourselves from
those misunderstandings which come from unequal, prejudicial,
superficial attitudes poisoned by a presumption of superiority.
We want to give to our dialogue what we believe is its
necessary precondition: equal dignity among partners,
both in speaking and listening. That means that we will
not declare to agree with each other just for politeness
reasons and we will not avoid mutual criticisms.
We must be specially careful in identifying the kinds
of deformations which are unfortunately common in the
current discussion and that we can define as the vices
of a “glance from the distance” which tends
to unify the “other part” – Arab world
and Muslim world in the eyes of Europeans, Americans
and Westerns in general, and, viceversa, the West in
the eyes of the Others: the “West” versus
the “Rest” - making a monolith of what is,
in fact, a mosaic of heterogeneous, contradictories
and, in any case, different realities. If one idealizes
the other, you can call it “exotism”, if
one rejects the other, you can call it “racism”
or, more kindly, “ethnocentrism”. We must
overcome these deformations that usually go under the
name of “Orientalism” and “Occidentalism”.
I will explain you why, in a while.
The method of dialogue must help us to find areas of
consensus on some common, general values like, first
of all, the need and desire of understanding each other,
the wish to avoid driving contrasts always to an extreme,
critical breaking-point, the ability of exploiting partial
agreements and compromises, whenever possible, for the
benefit of all. Those who affirm the importance of intercultural
dialogue must not give up to their beliefs, faiths and
absolute tenets both secular and religious. However
they must necessarily love the idea of opening their
eyes over the beliefs, the faiths and the absolute tenets
of others, appreciating the variety of the world and
the challenge that this variety represents for their
own verity.
Some of us suggest writing Variety with a capital V
and opposing it to Verity. I believe this is a good
idea.
We must promote the circulation of richer information
about what is “normality” of life of normal
people living in different civilizations, that are filled
of individuals who work hard to maintain their families
and grow up their children giving them an education
and teaching them to respect others and their rights.
Such “normality” is cast in the shade from
the logics prevailing in the global village of mass
communication. Let’s try to oppose the trend of
the informative selection made by mass media and for
which our realities come into contact and tend to see
each others only in the extreme cases of disorders and
caos, upheavals and deaths.
We need a method that helps us to accept the variety
of the world without hiding it under prefabricated categories.
I read on a brilliant Turkish newspaper in English language
that “Graffiti insulting the Prophet Muhammed
was found scrawled on a West bank Mosque in Palestine”
and that the American policy in Iraq has certainly resulted
in “strengthening Hizbullah in Lebanon, which
(like Hamas) is often described in the West as a terrorist
organization”.
The lessons one can draw from these news are: 1) blasphemy
doesn’t inhabit only in Europe; 2) promoters,
sometimes involuntarily, of Islamist radicalism do not
inhabit only among Muslims, as a confirmation of the
variety and non-linearity of situations in all fields.
Specialists of the relationships between the West and
the Arab World wrote that we should ask ourselves if
it is possible to try still for a dialogue since we
cannot even agree on what is good and what is evil.
Sometimes it seems that what is good for one is evil
for the other; what is heroism for one is diabolic for
the other. However I believe that we are not condemned
to this condition. And it is not the first time in history
that things look like this. We might not find an agreement
on everything, but we can work to extend the ground
of our consensus, not only between us, experts of dialogue,
but also among several others who are not here.
Our conference contribution will be structured in four
points:
1) The first one will consist in formulating ideas
on the method of dialogue among individuals who belong
to different cultural contexts in order to open ourselves
to listen to each other. It is what I was starting to
do and that is best to leave up to our discussants.
I would like to add only that the choice of pointing
out Occidentalism and Orientalism as the names of two
typical deformations came from two books and from the
series of reasoning that derived from them. Orientalism
is the name that a Palestinian-American, Edward Said
gave to the colonial deformation of the Western look
on everything that is in the East. Today one could discuss
Said’s theories, especially with regard to the
role of religion. When he wrote the book, twenty-five
years ago, it seemed convincing to assert that orientalism
allowed a disproportionate prominence to the religious
dimension and that this prominence was unjustified because
many features that were attributed to religion derived,
as a matter of fact, from social and economic factors.
Today, both in the West and in the East, in Rome as
in Cairo, we tend to recognize - obviously in different
ways since our political systems, our histories and
the development of a liberal mentality are different
– a persistence and an influence of religion that
contradict, at least in part, the secular convictions
of Weberian tradition. However there is no doubt that
the concept of Orientalism identifies the deformation
produced by colonialism and by the different degree
of development, a deformation that highlights only those
Eastern things that the West is interested in. It is
the deformation that, like Hassan Hanafi could say,
states who is “Me” and who is the “Other”.
Now, the problem is that nobody is willing to always
play the role of the Other.
On the other hand, Occidentalism is a specular idea
developed by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit. It takes
as a model of “satanization” of the West,
the anti-modern ideology of Japan in the thirties and
forties of the past century. Westernization was seen
as a form of intoxication of the spirituality and integrity
of the East. Its radical critics targeted sciences,
capitalism, new technologies, individual freedoms, democracy,
the Hollywood system and the entire materialist civilization.
Buruma and Margalit write: “The occidentalist
view of the Occident is comparable to the worst features
of its counterpart, the orientalism that deprives its
human targets of their humanity. Some orientalist prejudices
represent non-westerns as diminished, childish human
beings. Almost an inferior species. Occidentalism is
nearly the same reductive: its sectarianism doesn’t
make anything but overturning the orientalist view,
reducing an entire society to a mass of soul-less, decadent,
greedy, rootless and faithless parasites… Prejudices
pertain to human condition. However when the notion
of the Other as inferior being becomes a revolutionary
force, one goes toward the destruction of humanity”.
Deformations have some similarities. Occidentalism and
Orientalism have in common a dangerous and serious vice
that brings toward a culture that goes out from the
borders of Variety that we are willing to appreciate,
because it “de-humanizes” the other, depriving
him of “Humanity” and representing him not
only as Evil but as a member of a category which is
inferior to that of human beings.
Stereotyping the Other going beyond the human limits
and degrading him prepare the ground to violence and
death. Dialogue is a good therapy because the knowledge
of the other inevitably puts us through his human essence.
2) In second instance we will discuss about the historical,
economic and social contexts which allowed major cultural
transfers in past centuries. We need to understand how
cultural intertwinings in science, philosophy, and literatures
came about in the past in order to know the background
of our work. Translations came out of a need. XI century
Latins needed math, physics, and technologies and they
took them from the Arab world in the most various ways.
Professor Burnett will explain how Federico II had an
Arab intellectual in his Sicilian Court because he needed
him in order to understand the Arab logics and how,
at the beginning of the XIII century, political leaders
exchanged scholars as well as books. This makes me think
that some exchanges of this kind would be helpful and
that our Foundation has some propositions to make, both
in the East and in the West.
3) The third issue will address one of the most difficult
challenges faced by intercultural dialogues in our times,
the challenge of measuring the differences that separate
cultural contexts in relation to democracy: to its introduction,
its practice, its several interpretations and the meaning
to give to the term itself and to the political systems
that it describes.
We will be focusing on two problematic questions: first
of all, the precious function of the democratic and
parliamentary experience in de-radicalizing extremist
movements, in reducing violence, in transforming bloody
conflicts into political and non-violent confrontations.
As Nadia Urbinati explains “as European modern
history shows us, the parliamentarization of politics
has the power of transforming conflict from a factor
of instability to one of dynamic stability and tolerance
and of making religious beliefs malleable to political
regulation and a vehicle for social stability”.
We will then focus on the limits that reality, in fact,
impresses to the possibility of extending democracy
on the base of pure willpower and of our best desires,
when lacking preliminary economic, social and cultural
conditions. It is through critical interpretation and
through the reworking of their own and diverse traditions
that democracy can grow with solid roots.
4) The fourth session of our conference will address
the topic of the role of the media in the dialogue among
civilizations and in current conflicts. As already said,
the considerations which followed the case of Copenaghen
Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons have often been complicated
by the confusion between freedom of press and responsibility
toward others. However we should analyze in depth the
consequences of the transparency allowed by global media
communication, thanks to digital and satellite technologies.
The backstage has now become visible and the veils of
secrecy have been lifted - as stated by Joshua Meyrowitz,
American leading expert of mass communication studies.
There are no more barriers and this leads to many positive
consequences which, however, we must learn to control.
Parochialism is not allowed any more, provincialism
cannot be overseen in political life and can have catastrophic
results. This process radicalizes and exacerbates reactions
because it selects extreme events: audience rewards
violence and condemns moderation.
All the four sessions of our conference will help us
to define some proposals for continuing our activity.
Dialogue in itself is a contribution to reduce the radicalism
which we can feel around us, because dialogue among
civilizations already includes an acceptance and legitimacy
of difference, an admission not only of its viability
but also of its irreducibility as a peculiarity of human
condition. We can talk of a “germ” of relativism
and doing so some - even if not many - would join me.
Thus, prudently, I will stop before hoping to find the
consensus of all. And I will call our dialogue “a
training to plurality and pluralism of values”.
Beyond
Orientalism and Occidentalism
March 4th/6th 2006 - Cairo, Egypt
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