Francis Fukuyama has done it again, this time closer to the mark. Last time in 1989, shortly after the historic Polish election, but before the East European communist governments actually fell, be published a well syndicated article on ''The End of History. Well, history does not seem as of date to have quite come to an end, as Fukuyama thought or wished in 1989.
This time according to the international Gerald Tribune of July 13 1992, he wants to inform us about the coming great civilization shift about to take place mainly in Asia. In describing this shift, he begins by making a distinction between capitalist ideology (economics) and western style liberal democracy (politics). Capitalism is more universally accepted in Asia according to Fukuyama, but that is not necessarily the case with western style democracy which is supposed to go with it.
The element of truth in Francis Fukuyama's judgment this time seems much greater than last time. Asian capitalist governments like those of Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hongkong, and Taiwan appear to have achieved whatever measure of stability and growth they have managed to maintain in the last ten years by combining capitalism with a form of government not necessarily linked to western style of liberal democracy but a polity more akin to a cross-breed of Asian despotism and Chinese Confucianism. The theoretical formulation of this combination still seems to be in the exploratory stage. I am personally very much interested therefore in Professor Peter Kato's paper on ''The Proposals of Wa-ism and the Japanese way of Looking at the Free, Private Market order'' to be presented in Committee VI on STRUCTURE.
Fukuyama, himself a Japanese American, and formerly deputy director of the Policy Planning Staff of the U. S. State department, thinks that a specific character of the Oriental way and particularly of the Confucian system is to place community welfare and interests above individual rights and interests. While quite often in the west individual rights get the higher priority, the former seems to be the case according to others. even with non-Confucian systems like in Malaysia or Indonesia, and also to a certain extent in India.
Whether Pacific Asia as a whole could ever adopt a single ideology or coherent value system or not is a possibility at best doubtful. There are people like George Yeo, Minister for information and the Arts in Singapore, who hold that ''a common East Asian consciousness is emerging" and that the economic rise of the region ''will be accompanied by a cultural renaissance of historic importance" (see NHT cited above, p.4). Some think that with trade, investment, and migration spreading, some of these East Asian influences could penetrate the west as well.
From my own point of view the canvas in the foregoing discussion has been rather narrow. We need to stretch our minds a little and examine the process by which we once made the shift from feudalism through mercantile capitalism to this present secular civilization and to its ideologies and institutions. Our secular civilization has developed two main types of economies-- the urban-industrial Marxist and the urban-industrial capitalist-- both creations of the 20th century.
The two types of economies are both heavily dependent on two sets of institutions: on Modern science/technology as the major force of production on the one hand, and on the secular principle and polity as the main mode of social control on the other. The shift in East Asia to which Fukuyama and colleagues are drawing our attention fails to deal radically either of these primary sets of realities. And to that extent they fail to deal with the problem on our hands inducing the right kind of civilization shift needed to save humanity from self-destruction.
Intellectuals in Asia, having been largely formed and trained in the culture and educational system of the global urban-industrial, secular, scientific-technological civilization, seem hardly able to question radically or transcend fundamentally their dogmatic faith in science-technology and in the secular principle and polity. The present speaker for one carries a deep conviction that without such radical questioning of these two dogmas, the needed civilization shift cannot occur. Any discussion on ''Absolute Values and science'' cannot make significant progress without a prior discussion on the philosophical and conceptual underpinnings of both the secular principle and science/technology. This is the point which I want to elaborate here so that further work can be done by a group with much more competence and knowledge than I can by myself hope to bring bear on the subject.
I am particularly grateful therefore for the presence here of my two distinguished fellow speakers, the outstanding physical scientist Dr. Alvin Weinberg, Distinguished Fellow of the institute For Energy Analysis in Oak Ridge and the equally world renowned social scientist Dr. Alexander King, Chairman of the international Federation of institutes for Advanced Study, as also of the other creative scientists and thinkers present at this Nineteenth international Conference for the Unity of the Sciences in Seoul, Korea. I am grateful for the privilege of addressing such a distinguished international, inter-disciplinary audience and will be even more grateful later for your wise and honest comments and for your kind critique of what I say here.
1. Science And The Secular - Mutually Reinforcing
In our civilization the secular principle and the methodology of science are not only dependent on each other, but also mutually reinforcing in a strong way. The secular principle seeks, though with very limited success, to keep the public realm free from all religious considerations and influences.
Modern science too finds religion or God irrelevant to its pursuit. Truth can be discerned or discovered by a method that is totally independent of such extraneous hypotheses related to God or religion or Transcendence. It believes that God, religion or transcendence makes sense only when subjected to investigation by the method of science.
Both the secular principle and modern science want to limit our concern to the world open to our senses (and open to our scientific instruments which are after all extensions of our senses), and to no other world.
Without the phenomenal achievements of modern science-technology which today far outshine the present demonstrable powers of religion, the secular principle could not have attained the prestige it today has. The origins of modern science can be traced back to a western Christian civilization or to a Deist version of it; but certainly the progress made by science in the last two centuries was accelerated by freedom from religious control and liberation from consciously held religious presuppositions.
The development of the secular principle in political economy, in the knowledge-acquiring process and in public life and the progress of science/technology in the production process have gone hand in hand mutually reinforcing each other, not only in Europe but also in other climes and cultures.
2. The Secular Principle
The secular principle does not confine itself to the separation of Church and State or Religion and Politics. We need to look at it in at least three of its primary dimensions: in healing, in public education. and in the political economy. And in all three areas, our civilization appears to be in big trouble.
A. Healing
Healing, in almost all pre-secular systems, has been integrally related to religion. As Dr. Andrew Weil, Professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, puts it in his award-winning book on health and Healing (revised and updated edition. Houghton Mifflin. Boston. 1988):
The link between the holy and the healthy is the common ground of religion and medicine. In many cultures the two have never been separate. (p. 431)
In the western culture too, the two had been held together from ancient times. In the Greek culture of old, healers and patients alike offered sacrifices to Asklepios, the patron god of healing. Healing took place in the Asklepeion within a temple ritual.
In modern medicine the holy and the healing system were torn apart from each other through the ''scientific'' secular principle. This has led to further distortions in healing like the separation of body and mind (failure to recognise the psycho-somatic cause and cure of all disease), the treatment of the body as a machine with detachable and replaceable parts, the excessive reliance on chemicals and antibiotics for repairing the body, insufficient attention to the body's own healing power, and to the roles in healing of faith and prayer as well as a community, and so on.
There are already significant trends in the direction of alternative systems of healing and of holistic healing, but the basic rupture between healing and the holy gets but scant attention from scientific researchers. No doubt the achievements of modern medicine are impressive, but its drawbacks and dangers are also becoming increasingly obvious with every passing day.
Ultimately we need nothing short of a comprehensive, radical and adequately effective revision of the whole healing system. And this can be done only by examining the unscientific secular principle at the bottom of modern scientific medicine. Nothing in modern science can justify the secular assumption that the world open to our senses is all there is. And in the realm of healing, people are just beginning to realise the falseness of the secular principle.
It is not totally impossible that the faint glimmers or what is needed in a new civilization will first show up in the realm of healing and health, which as the enlightened public has begun to recognize, has been secularized to our detriment. The state in many cases now licenses only secular systems as ''approved''. The necessary research for moving in the direction of holistic healing is now done not by the State, but by private individuals and groups. State systems of Medical training and licensing are still in the hands of diehard dogmatists of the old secular variety. Not only is the state itself secular but it infringes on the fundamental rights of citizens by imposing a secular system of healing on them. This is neither morally right nor legally justifiable if morality and law have anything to do with the welfare of human society and civilization.
The shift needed is both in the secular principle and in the discipline of medical science, including Medical training, Licensing, and institutional practice. A basic shift in the healing system may make the advance to the needed civilization shift a little easier. There is a lot of possibility here for individual and group pioneering by both medical and social scientists, as well as by the general public.
B. Education
There is a lot of talk these days about the need for ''value education'' in schools and in other institutions of learning. One often hears the insensitive and largely unreflected comment that our education systems fail to produce morally responsible persons. This certainly cannot be true, for if no educated person were morally responsible, society would have disintegrated long ago.
Schools cannot bear the whole responsibility for creating an alert moral consciousness in a society. The morality which politicians, members of the business community, professionals and others actually practise has a lot more to do with galvanizing or dissipating the moral fibre of a society.
Having stated that, one should nevertheless not minimize the powerful role the school, the university and other institutions of learning and training play in the development of a civilization. These institutions are the holders, makers, and transmitters of culture from one generation to the other. In one sense the school is one of the specificities of being human. Animals and birds do not seem to run training institutions and schools for transmitting what the collectivity knows. Our human fledglings when born seem to be the most helpless of all species within the range of our knowledge. Newborn humans, unlike other animals need an extended period of care, tutelage, and training before they can begin to fend for themselves. As the civilizational heritage grows in volume, the period of tutelage and parental dependence also seems to grow longer since there is so much more knowledge and skills to be transmitted from generation to generation.
Certainly it ts this period of tutelage that lays the foundations of the human person's perception of reality and provides the range and scale for the choice of values to be pursued in life. The school may not be the whole of that tutelage and training programmed, but it does constitute a very substantial part of it.
But can ''values'' be taught in school like history or botany? And how does one get agreement on what values should be taught in a pluralistic society? Obviously there are no simple answers to either of these two questions. Of course there are acknowledged values like human freedom and dignity, integrity and responsibility, which cannot be questioned by anyone. But would talking about these values in class carry you anywhere? The important thing is not what values we talk about, but what values are embodied in the educational system itself.
Most people come to educational institutions in order to raise their earning capacity and to rise in the social ladder. In a country like India, the official line is that ''education is investment" -- the embodied value for the government is to put in some money into education in order to get more out of it in terms of production. From the personal point of view, if a university degree is a means of raising one's earning power, then the least effort by which that degree is obtained would be the best deal. In other words, education is no longer a value in itself whether in the school or in the university. For governments as well as for people, it is only a means to a higher end or value namely money.
Our educational systems have become largely ancillary to the urban industrial, scientific-technological managerial production machinery. Educational systems and institutions are forced to prostitute themselves to serve the interests of the production system by concepts like ''education as investment" and "job-oriented education". And of course, prayer, religion, and God have been banished from the school by public decree in many countries.
The consequence is that children get the general impression that prayer, religion, and God are but marginal. If they were central they would have been so manifest in the school where all important knowledge is supposed to be imparted.
School, as we have said, is only one of the formative forces in shaping consciousness. Traditionally, the two other educational forces have been the family and the social culture. But family worship, traditionally very powerful in shaping humans, is becoming more and more difficult to practise in the urban industrial society. And culture, which traditionally had been pervasively religious, undergoes heavy secularization in our societies. Children (or parents for that matter) do not attend temple festivals or participate in religious rituals on any regular basis. Social gatherings become more and more secularized.
Religious education, such as is sponsored by religious institutions, becomes increasingly marginal in relation to the secular school where the child spends most of its time. Such religious education as exists has become largely academic or intellectual in method and content, and fails to make lasting impressions on children.
The formative or educational systems thus constitute a mighty regularizing and alienating force. This is a major factor corroding our civilization, and the adding of a little ''value education'' to a secular system is unlikely to be adequate or effective. Reshaping the school and the university the family, and the social culture, rescuing them from the tyranny of the secular principle seems absolutely necessary for shaping new and more sane civilizations.
Again it will be unrealistic to expect the State to do all the pioneering at this point. The business community, the religious leadership, and the general public have all key roles here in setting patterns and creating models.
C. The Political economy
The modern democratic state is a creation of the West and bears the marks of its history. The development of Papal power over the European states in the eleventh century seems a unique phenomenon in history, which has radically affected the shape of the modern secular state. In 1075, Pope Gregory VII (ca 1021-1085, canonized as saint by Roman Catholic Church in 1606), in an attempt to reform the church caught up in the power politics of European feudal lords, asserted his power over emperor and princes through his work on Dictates of the Pope. The Pope "may depose emperors", and ''the Pope is the only one whose feet are to be kissed by all princes".
The system of papal control over princes was thus developed in Europe in the ensuing centuries; the Church laid claims to one third of the total land of Europe. Religious authority thus acquired civil as well as economic power, and also added military power, something quite unique in history it seems.
After the Protestant reformation or Revolt of the 16th century, Protestant princes refused to acknowledge this papal power. As Protestant and Catholic States began warring each other (Thirty Years' War. 1618-1648), the Peace of Westphalia was concluded in 1648. This treaty, the foundation of the pre-modern European State, affirmed the principle that the people of each state would follow the religion of their prince whether Catholic or Protestant (cuis regio eius religio). It seems the drafters of this treaty were the first to use the word ''secularization'' in the sense of converting church property into public property.
The ''secular state'' as we now know it came into being as the result of a revolt against the cuis regio eius religio principle: this principle was found to be incompatible with the rising individualism of the 18th century bourgeoisie since it denied the individual citizen the right to embrace a religion other than that of his Prince. The so-called ''separation of church and state'' thus banished religion from the public realm to that of private choice.
But religion is by nature public. There is no such thing as a private religion though some religions can be secretly practised but always in groups. Religion cannot be individual though some individuals try to create one's own private religion by serving oneself according to one's own taste from the cafeteria of the World's religions, each of which is public in itself.
The end result is twofold: On the one hand religion even after legislative action to separate religion and politics, continues to play a major and often detrimental role in politics. We can see many concrete instances of this today: the moral majority in America, the Middle East problem, or the Irish question in Great Britain, the Hindu-Muslim-Sikh problem in India. The consequence of the Secular Principle: religion's role today in politics has become largely negative and destructive. Where it is used for vote-getting, it becomes a lamentable corruption of religion.
On the other hand, religion driven away from the public realm to the marginal regions develops its own complexes. Denied its legitimate role in public life, it turns inward and becomes narrow minded and fanatical. It develops a parallel authority structure and institutional power in conflict with other religious authority structures and sometimes even confronting the governmental authority structure itself. Its teaching becomes insular and unrelated to public life and the academy. Instead of being concerned with the whole of humanity, it becomes parochial and fights for the special privileges of its own followers.
Meanwhile the State and its institutions deprived of all spiritual guidance, can only mediate within the clash of group interests and resist or respond to pressure of powerful influence groups. It thus has very little energy left to look after the interests of the general public. There develops the modern political game, in which anything goes so long as some desired results are achieved. Governments keep vital information away from the public, give them false ideas as to what the real dangers are, create artificial enemies, and tax the citizen unjustly in order to pay for the comforts and privileges of a few officials and politicians. In the name of rationality and the secular principle, the most evil forces gain power in the political economy. Justice withers away, integrity gradually disappears, human relations are governed by the crassest of motivations, morality disintegrates, peace fails to appear and the life environment becomes foul and life-destroying.
All in the name of the Secular Principle, humanity suffers ill health, bad education and dehumanizing social institutions.
2 The Question Of Values So-Called
''Value'' as a moral word is a comparative newcomer to the western languages. It was taken over largely by phenomenologist philosophers from the economic theory of the 19th century. Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill, among many others, were battling each other on the question of the source of value in the commodity market. Some preferred the labour theory of value which Marx later unthinkingly accepted, while others argued for cost of production or utility as the main determinant of value. Non-Marxist western economists largely gave up the effort to define value and preferred to talk of ''price'' rather than ''value''.
In philosophy, Plato and Aristotle never talked about ''value''; they preferred to talk of ''virtue''. It was only the Neo-Kantians of the late 19th and the Phenomenologists of early 20th century Germany who began developing ''value'' as a semi-moral concept. R.H. Lotze (1817-1881) and Albrecht Ritschi (1822-1889), both Neo-Kantians teaching at Goettingen made the term value or Wert popular in Germany. Kant had proscribed the right of entry for Pure Reason to the realm of taste and value. The Neo-Kantians had to clarify the principles by which Practical Reason and judgment dealt with value or the good expressed in morality and aesthetics. Lotze's Mikrokosmos (1864) laid the foundation on which others like C. Von Ehrenfels (system der Werttheorie, 1897- 98). H. Muensterberg (philosophie der Werte, 1908) built. Comprehensive studies of this development can be found in W. Stern, Wertphilosophie, 1924. N. Hartmann, Ethic, 1926. O. Kraus, Die Werttheorien, Geschichte und Kritik, 1937, and also in C. Bougle' L'Evolution des valeurs, 1922, as well as in R.B. Perry, General Theory of Value, 1926.
In English, H. Muensterberg's The Eternal Values, and W.M.Urban's Valuation, Its Nature and Laws both appeared in 1909. With Nietzsche's programme for ''the transvaluation of all values," the concept of value gained prominence in western thought.
In German and French philosophy, the Phenomenologists found that the ''innate ideas" (noemata) latent in the human consciousness included not only mental objects, but also mental values. Max Scheler gave us a phenomenology of values in his Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, 1913-16. Alexis Meinong developed this in his Zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Werttheorie, 1923.
In the philosophy of science the neat distinction between ''fact'' and ''value'' began to come into prominence. Science (or Pure Reason. according to the Kantians and NeoKantians) being concerned only with fact and not with value. Value, for Meinong, was a function of desire, not of knowing.
Others (pragmatists) spoke of value as that which would give satisfaction. Brand Blanshard would add satisfaction and fulfillment. The Language Analysts stayed away from giving any precise definition of value, but characteristically examined the circumstances leading to people making value judgments. They also told us that ''the Good'' is not the central concept in ''value'', but rather "the ought", which they dogmatically asserted, could never be derived from an ''is''.
Science could not, by its very nature, deal with value. And since science somehow occupied the centre-stage of the theatre of learning in the west, value had no place either in the academy or in the school curriculum. Every attempt to get in by the window has proved unsuccessful. And those who think that science must always have the last word will have to be satisfied with the judgment that while science can clarify some of the details of the circumstances in which moral issues arise, it itself shall not give any judgment as to what ought and what ought not to be.
The great cleavage between fact and value is a central feature of modern western civilization. If we try to concede the legitimacy of that cleavage, and then seek to bring in values edgewise into a realm dominated by science, we are likely to face more and more frustration. The great cleavage is one of the creations of the ''secular principle'' and ''presupposition-free modern science"
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Conclusion
There ls one enormous reality distortion at the bottom of both the secular principle and the false claim of science to be pure and presuppositionless. It is the facile, adolescent, unthinking, and unscientific elimination of the Source and Ground of all Being from the understanding of existents. It stems from the mistaken central principle of the European Enlightenment about humanity having attained its mundigkeit or maturity or adulthood, so that the humanity, particularly the ''enlightened'' segment of it, can now proceed to take over the world through modern science/technology and the new secular political economy, without so much as a ''by your leave'' to its Creator and Sustainer. We should wonder whether ''patricide'' (killing of the father) is at the root of modern secular civilization. Are we guilty of at least having attempted to kill our Father (God) in order to come into the inheritance of God's world and to assert our adulthood and lordship over it? Allowing the Source and Ground of Being to take its proper place at the beginning, at the end, and at the centre of all understanding and all action and all creativity is an arduous task indeed. It calls for repentance on the part of those who have been guilty of hubris in the past. It calls for a new faith which makes us realise that the world is not our property, but belongs to God and depends on him for its existence as well as its welfare. This means we do not put our trust in our science and technology, or in our reason, but in God and his great goodness and mercy. Normally humans prefer to trust on themselves and not to depend on God. Our civilization embodies that human attitude of rebellion and unbelief.
It calls for wisdom in bringing in symbols of the Transcendent from all religions into the heart of culture, political economy, education and healing, without thereby paving the way for a new domination of society by religious leadership.
One way to prevent a new domination of society by the clergy is to make sure that whatever role religion is now assigned, that role is not given to any one single religion. I think it is not for nothing that God allows many religions to flourish today. In a mono-religious culture there is no way to keep the clergy from dominating and misusing their powers.
The multi-religious context will teach the leadership of the various religions to be more understanding and respectful toward each other and to learn from each other.
The context should be genuinely multi-religious; it should grant full freedom for those who prefer to adhere to secularism as their religion (for it is only by an act of faith that one can adhere to secularism): there is no reason for the clergy or the priestly class alone to represent the religions in policy-making. There is often more religious commitment as well as competence in the laity than in the clergy.
It is at this point that I would like to stress the potential creative role of women and younger people in the renewal of religion as well as of society. Personally I would like to see proportionate and balanced representation of men and women, older and younger people, articulate and creative children, voices of the underprivileged and the marginalised, intellectuals, experts and ordinary people-- all participating in the reflective process and in the creative work of the pioneering institutions. The presence of the secularist can always be helpful in challenging any of the too facile assertions likely to be made by representatives of religions, and also in counteracting the large scale ignorance of the clergy in many fields.
Yes. it is the participation of all the religions and secular people in democratic policymaking that we are talking about. It is new genuinely democratic constitutions for all nations and trans-national entitles in which religion has its proper place that we are recommending. It is new sets of non-secular as well as secular, medical, educational, and civic institutions that we are envisaging. This will also mean that no religion would be allowed to monopolize the culture of a nation. The dominant religion whether it be Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or whatever will have to recognize other religions as equal partners and give them full democratic freedom to function.
In such a context there will be no artificial separation not only of religion and politics, but also of fact and value. Science will do its job according to its competence. Society needs proper science and properly human technology, but the school and the academy will no longer be under the dictates of science and the secular principle. The context of culture will be multi-religious and not secular. The varied religions will themselves learn to create institutions which will promote the better, the more pro-human side of all the religions and regulate the religions from, straying into anti-human pursuits and activities.
The above is only an indication of the direction. Its worth and feasibility should be explored by you scientists along with other people of goodwill including religious thinkers and leaders. The first step would be to convoke a meeting of scientists and other savants including religions thinkers to reflect on this possibility of a new multireligious foundation for civilization and its institutions.
The coming civilization shift seems inevitable for the present one has proved unviable. Which way it will shift will be partly the doing of history, which still has many surprises in store for us, and partly related to our own wise planning and preparing. It is to that wise and informed planning, preparing and pioneering that I beg to invite you, wise men and women of the world, if you are genuinely concerned about the unity of the world on the foundation of enduring values.