The word "hate" being used in the title is rather deceiving. Rather than focusing on global rage, this book explicates how and why many perspectives, beliefs, and practices of the Western world are so offensive to others outside our culture. He does indeed explain them in a way that makes it understandable why this would arouse hate in the rest of the world, but this is largely implicit.
The prologue sucked me in... It discussed how concepts of being tolerant and multicultural have developed in our culture. "
Tolerance has been radically redefined. Originally it meant that two people (or groups or institutions) that were divided by hard, nonnegotiable differences refrained from oppressing one another on account of it. Now it has come to mean a dogmatic agnosticism about all truth claims and moral questions, with any dissent from it hounded at every turn until all submit to its insistent nescience.... The new "tolerance" will not tolerate traditional morality: 'everything is permitted in the permissive society-- except, of course, Christianity or Judaism or Islam or...'" (168-169)
Yet this concept of "tolerance" is almost something we take for granted in our culture. (By "our" Western culture, I speak mainly of the United States, Europe, and Australia and New Zealand.) We also highly prize privacy, see work as something for outside the home and value the family for emotional rather than economic support, and esteem education and progress (and also tend to devalue tradition.) But concepts we propose as "common sense" are not common in the rest of the world. We are rather the only ones in the world (and in fact, in all its history) to have these views. And because of our hyperprosperity (which is also quite unique to our place and time) our culture and economy easily "obliviously dominate."
Pearse explains how the reformation brought us the ideas of not just doing good, but
being good, and how this led to ideas like business integrity and sportsmanship. Eventually these ideas came to permeate even Western Catholocism, and integrity became a high value. Then, influenced by Romanticism, the value shifted from integrity to being true to oneself. Now, rather than making ones inward life conform to outward morality, we "radicalize interiority and discard traditional morality." We think that acting however we want is better than doing something we don't agree with. Of course, to non-Westerners, this makes us dishonorable. Whatever the interior motivation, non-Westerners at least continue to DO the right thing.
An interesting quote about this:
"People behaving hypocritically is, of course, a bad thing-- but the existance of this phonomenon is a sign of a good thing. One can only be guilty of it if one aspires-- or at least feels one ought to aspire-- to high moral standards.... When Jesus denounced the hypocrisy in the Pharisees, he did so while speaking to an audience who bleieved, as he did, in traditional moral codes in their full rigor. He calle don his followers to be above hypocrisy. If postmoderns are guiltless of this failing, however, it is
not because they are above hypocrisy-- but because they are beneath it. Without the least detracting from Jesus' denunciations of the Pharisaic moral double-dealing, I would venture to suggest that our circumstance is one that the gospel writers--indeed, any premodern sources-- did not entirely envisage. To be guilty of hypocrisy, one has first to accept the validity of the morals upon which it is predicated-- and our culture, uniquely, does not." (62-63)
My favorite chapter was on "Divided Lines, Infantilized Culture." A few quotes:
"But in a society where I can reinvent my life in an anonymous pea soup of people, change my career, leave home and make new friends in a different place, marriage bonds will be weakened. This was hardly an option open to premodern people. Quite apart from the laws and the more powerful force of social disapproval, the very material realities of life conspired against it. Moving away and reinventing one's life from scratch was not an option unless one was happy to submit to beggary.... For ordinary people, the necessities of life were best guaranteed by strong family ties. When the glue that holds the marriage together is no longer the self-interest of survival (for even moderate prosperity can be taken for granted nowadays) but the ability to enjoy the same entertainments together for half a century, then the edifice of the family is prone to come apart." (131)
"Premoderns knew who they were--and who other people were--by reference to their families. In modern society, the teenager must prove himself an adult by 'finding himself,' 'becoming his own person,' and he is to do this precisely by rejecting his family. The crisis of adolescence is a crisis of our own making..." (139)
"As our Western world intrudes ever more on non-Western space, we believe ourselves to be offering freedoms, prosperity and rising aspirations. And in a sense, we are. but we are also seen as egoists, rooted in no solid culture and no fixed network of family or relationships. The things we believe ourselves to be promoting do indeed appeal to non-Westerners. But quite understandably, not all of them are ready to throw themselves into the moral and social void in the process." (144)
Pearse proves that these things that separate Westerners from the rest of the world are not only offending them, but are negative for and will prove fatal to our culture and civilization. By the end, a call for a return to many pre-modern values, which are more sustainable and honorable, does seem in order.
