Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Post-American Prez losing post-Western allies

Former Harvard Law School Professor Harold Berman referred to late twentieth century developments in the crisis of the Western legal tradition as "post-Western." By that he meant that what constitutes the "West" (as in "Western Civilization") is not a geographical concept, but a cultural one, and, as he amply demonstrates in his book, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (1983), what gave the "West" its decisive character was not Greece or Rome or ancient Israel, but the Medieval and Catholic Corpus Christianum, which adopted the legacies of those earlier traditions as its own. In other words, a "post-Western" culture is one that has lost touch with its own historical identity.

This is nowhere more apparent than in contemporary politics, whether one looks at the European Union, which couldn't bring itself to reference the term "Christian" in defining European history, or the United States, where the current administration seems hell bent on defining "Western" tradition out of the meaning of American politics.

A good illustration of this point may be seen in Gideon Rachman's article, "America is losing the free world" (Financial Times, January 4, 2010). Mr. Obama is losing the loyalty of erstwhile Western allies, not only because he himself no longer represents the "Western" legacy; but also because these erstwhile allies (like Brazil, South Africa, India, and Turkey) no longer share the traditional American litmus test of "democracy" as an inviolable assumption and trust. Gone are the dependable alliances following the Second World War. O Brave New World!

Francis A. Schaeffer used to say that he never dreamed he would live to see Western culture "go down the drain" within a single generation in his own lifetime. He died in 1984. The year itself is prophetic in its Orwellian overtones. What would he have said if he lived to see 2010?

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