Marcel Gauchet

De Franse intellectueel Marcel Gauchet is directeur van de Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales en hoofdredacteur van het tijdschrift "Le Débat." Le Monde stelde hem de volgende vraag: 'The West Is Blind to the Impact of Globalization on the Economy and on Morals. You described a "disenchanted" world in the 1980s: doesn't the brutal return of religion to the international political scene surprise you? No. I was surprised, as everyone was, by the Islamic Revolution in Iran, but since then, I have continued to think that we're not anywhere near the end of the surprises produced by the "departure" of religion, which is accelerating in the West - the case of the United States being atypical - and the reactivation of religious identities in the rest of the world, especially the Islamic world. I insist: it's not a "return" of religion in good and due form that we are witnessing, but rather a revival of identities with a religious character.
Europeans' problem is that they can no longer understand what religion means in societies where it still maintains a structural power. They've forgotten their own past. For them, religion has become a system of individual and private beliefs. Now the rest of the world does not operate that way. It also is not spared the "departure" of religion which accelerates with globalization. But this "departure" of the religious organization of the world, destroyed by urbanization, Western-style economism, liberal thought, technical efficiency and consumption cohabits with an aspiration to rediscover traditional religion. So we end up with a revival that can also be explained by the failure of previous forms of modernization ... Yes. Forced Westernization, development, Arab nationalism, Pan-Arabism, socialism: all that failed. What's left? Religious identity, the collective conscience ordered around the inheritance of a tradition. Push this recovery movement to the end and you've got fundamentalism, so that it's no longer a matter of rediscovering habitual religiosity, but rather the truth of sources hijacked by the corruption of the present. The pretext/affair of the caricatures of Mohammed has demonstrated the immense resentment felt by populations that feel despised, abandoned by history, in a situation of perpetual failure in relation to a West that does not measure how the penetration of its ways of doing things and of thinking is destructive to the existing social order, notably in this Islam that, as much as a faith, is a way of life. The West is blind to the impact of globalization of the economy and customs, to how it disaggregates the traditional family and violently changes the relationship between men and women and between generations. We're talking about an existential uprising. How do you explain Westerners' "blindness?" From the First World War to the end of decolonization, Europeans experienced a moment of crisis in their good conscience as dominators. They tried to understand other cultures and civilizations that they had trampled on for a long time. Today, that questioning is over. Overall, they are reconciled with their history. They no longer have any imperial pretension; they are in favor of peaceful coexistence of cultures; they celebrate diversity; but they're not very interested in what isn't their own.
Moreover, the failure of the socialist revolution project and the Soviet Bloc's crumbling imposed the idea that democracy is an impassable system and that market capitalism had been tested and proven. This consensus about the operation of our societies does not promote relativism regarding the rest of the world. There's no other way to be modern ... Those who don't yet enjoy the good fortune of possessing democracy, freedom of speech, the market, and human rights must urgently acquire them!' Lees verder, in het Frans: http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3232,36-749810,0.html Of in het Engels: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/031406H.shtml