Francis Fukuyama sees business constituting the glue that binds together a globalized society at some point in the future:

I both agree and disagree with the “clash of civilisations” thesis. I agree that cultural factors have become the prism through which many people see international affairs today. On the other hand, I believe that this point of view underestimates the integrating forces driving global development, and the way in which the modernisation process is forcing a convergence of institutions and approaches to governance on an increasingly world-wide scale…

different countries must find their own routes to modernity. The specific paths that western Europe, the United States, Japan, Russia and other countries have taken are all different.

Modernisation and development arise from the efforts of the people who live in a given society, not from those of outsiders. Countries can learn from one another, but their ability to shape outcomes in foreign lands is usually very limited. This is something that the United States has painfully learnt over the past four years in Iraq.

The question we need to address, however, is whether we are taking different paths to the same endpoint – an endpoint of a single world civilisation – or whether different human cultures are heading to fundamentally different places.

My view, contrary to Professor Huntington’s, is that modernisation itself in the long run requires the convergence of many types of institutions, regardless of cultural starting points. And economic integration between states is most productive, and results in the most durable forms of trust, when it is based on transparent rule-bound institutions rather than the looser ties of cultural affinity…

Of the two forms of trust, the cultural version is clearly the most natural and widespread, but it is also more primitive. All human beings organise themselves into primary social groups or cultural communities and nearly all people fall back on such groups in times of trouble or crisis.

The second form of trust expands the potential radius of trust indefinitely. It is more durable because it is based on self-interest and it is the basis of modern economic interdependence. Trust becomes increasingly anchored in reciprocal self-inter-est rather than culture as countries modernise. Globalisation provides the opportunity to expand markets far beyond the limits of one’s own community, requiring development of an impersonal, structured institutional framework by which trust can emerge between complete strangers.

Spengler sees a Christian China in the 21st century transforming a vast part of the world:

Ten thousand Chinese become Christians each day, according to a stunning report by the National Catholic Reporter’s veteran correspondent John Allen, and 200 million Chinese may comprise the world’s largest concentration of Christians by mid-century, and the largest missionary force in history. If you read a single news article about China this year, make sure it is this one.

I suspect that even the most enthusiastic accounts err on the downside, and that Christianity will have become a Sino-centric religion two generations from now. China may be for the 21st century what Europe was during the 8th-11th centuries, and America has been during the past 200 years: the natural ground for mass evangelization. If this occurs, the world will change beyond our capacity to recognize it. Islam might defeat the western Europeans, simply by replacing their diminishing numbers with immigrants, but it will crumble beneath the challenge from the East.

China, devoured by hunger so many times in its history, now feels a spiritual hunger beneath the neon exterior of its suddenly great cities. Four hundred million Chinese on the prosperous coast have moved from poverty to affluence in a single generation, and 10 million to 15 million new migrants come from the countryside each year, the greatest movement of people in history. Despite a government stance that hovers somewhere between discouragement and persecution, more than 100 million of them have embraced a faith that regards this life as mere preparation for the next world. Given the immense effort the Chinese have devoted to achieving a tolerable life in the present world, this may seem anomalous. On the contrary: it is the great migration of peoples that prepares the ground for Christianity, just as it did during the barbarian invasions of Europe during the Middle Ages.

Last month’s murder of reverend Bae Hyung-kyu, the leader of the missionaries still held hostage by Taliban kidnappers in Afghanistan, drew world attention to the work of South Korean Christians, who make up nearly 30% of that nation’s population and send more evangelists to the world than any country except the United States. This is only a first tremor of the earthquake to come, as Chinese Christians turn their attention outward. Years ago I speculated that if Mecca ever is razed, it will be by an African army marching north; now the greatest danger to Islam is the prospect of a Chinese army marching west.

People do not live in a spiritual vacuum; where a spiritual vacuum exists, as in western Europe and the former Soviet Empire, people simply die, or fail to breed. In the traditional world, people see themselves as part of nature, unchangeable and constant, and worship their surroundings, their ancestors and themselves. When war or economics tear people away from their roots in traditional life, what once appeared constant now is shown to be ephemeral. Christianity is the great liquidator of traditional society, calling individuals out of their tribes and nations to join the ekklesia, which transcends race and nation. In China, communism leveled traditional society, and erased the great Confucian idea of society as an extension of the loyalties and responsibility of families. Children informing on their parents during the Cultural Revolution put paid to that.

Now the great migrations throw into the urban melting pot a half-dozen language groups who once lived isolated from one another. Not for more than a thousand years have so many people in the same place had such good reason to view as ephemeral all that they long considered to be fixed, and to ask themselves: “What is the purpose of my life?”

We don’t know what to make of Spengler’s prediction, but it at least addresses issues beyond man as a rational economic animal. A capitalist and Christian China would be very good news for the world indeed. Fukuyama’s prediction, by contrast, seems too blithely deterministic for our tastes.

As for us, while we note that the general trend of the Western world and its ideological children has been upward for the last hundred years or more, it is the great discontinuities — market crashes, wars, pandemics, etc — so ruinous for the generations affected by them, that temper our willingness to draw straight lines toward the sky. (Spengler’s hypothetical conversation between Putin and Bush provides plenty of examples of the forces of darkness that ever threaten the triumph of modernity.)

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 12th, 2007 at 8:13 am and is filed under business, China, General, Law, Religion, Science, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.