Contextualizing Cultural Interactions

The Clasp of Civilizations: Globalization and Religion in a Multicultural World, by Richard

Hartz. New Delhi: DK Printworld. 2015. Rs. 750.

Globalization: the word is hardly fifty years old but the process has been going on for a very long

time. Scholars generally trace its origins to the early seventeenth century, but it is possible to go

back much further. The prehistoric migrations that took homo sapiens from Africa to Eurasia to

the Americas were the first waves of globalization, setting the scene for all that followed. When

sedentary civilizations were established they came in contact with one other through aggression,

trade and cultural diffusion. These three motives – politico-military, economic, and cultural –

remain the driving forces of globalization today.

In this fascinating collection of essays, Richard Hartz looks primarily at cultural contacts,

especially between what are still called “the East” and “the West” – although these terms have

now lost much of their meaning on account, precisely, of globalization. How Eastern is a

software engineer working for a German firm in Bangalore, speaking English as his primary

language, and queuing up to see the latest Hollywood film? And how Western is a Manchester-

born woman who trades in her mini-dress for a burqa, quits her job in a biochemistry lab and

flies to Turkey to join the ISIS? Regional cultures still count for something, but global mashups

will dominate the future.

Increased globalization is inevitable, and the forces propelling it are beyond the control of

any organization, much less any individual. But, Hartz insists, our individual choices could still

make a difference. We “have to think about what kind of global society we want. If another

world is possible, what kind of world do we want it to be?” After stating his central concern in

these words, he acknowledges that “economic and political issues loom large among the

problems” of the globalizing world. He is chiefly concerned with cultural matters because

1
“economics and politics operate in cultural contexts which can no longer be ignored.” This

choice of focus is a natural one for Hartz: he is, the jacket informs us, a scholar interested in

Asian languages and cultures, notably Sanskrit literature and the works of Sri Aurobindo.

Throughout the book he relates the thought of Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda, Jawaharlal

Nehru and other Asian thinkers to the globalization theories of Samuel Huntington, Francis

Fukuyama and other Western political scientists. But before examining Hartz’s take on cultural

interaction, I want to reflect a bit on the relations between economics, politics and culture in the

modern world.

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest corporation, has revenues a little larger than the Gross

National Product of Austria and a little smaller than that of Taiwan. India’s GNP, a comfortable

tenth among national economies, is smaller than the combined revenues of Wal-Mart and the

next four largest corporations (all oil producers). These huge corporate entities, responsible only

to their shareholders, have no direct political power but great influence on political decision-

making. This helps them act freely in ways that affect the lives of billions of people. When

governments allow fracking despite environmental concerns, you can be sure that the oil lobbies

have been at work. Internet and entertainment companies, such as Amazon, Google and Walt

Disney (which rank 112, 162 and 232 in revenues), have more influence on global culture than

all the world’s galleries, concert halls and television stations put together. Hartz’s observation

that politics and economics operate within a cultural context certainly is true, but it is more

pressingly true that culture is subservient to the demands of economics and politics.

Hartz is not blind to economic and ecological problems. “Our national and international

life must be reshaped so that the affluence of some no longer depends on or coexists with the

poverty of others,” he writes. “And we need to form a new, sustainable relationship” with the

2
small, fragile planet we inhabit. But we also have to form sustainable relationships with one

another, and this is where cultural interaction comes in. The effect of globalization on culture can

be visualized in three main ways, termed by Jan Nederveen Pieterse “cultural differentialism,”

“cultural convergence” and “cultural hybridization.” The first emphasizes the preservation of

cultural differences, the second their homogenization, and the third their intermingling.

Huntington, with his clash of cultures thesis, puts the stress on differentiation. Fukuyama, who

predicts a gradual convergence towards Western-style democracy, favours homogenization.

Pieterse, along with Homi Bhabha and Hartz, sees hybridization as the most desirable outcome.

Several of Hartz’s essays deal with the ways that people in India have dealt and continue

to deal with the pressure of Western influence. During the apogee of the British Empire (that is,

after the destruction or domestication of the Indian monarchies and before the start of the

freedom movement), many in Britain assumed that the Indian elite would gratefully accept the

superiority of British political, economic and even cultural institutions, opening the way to

homogenization. The pain of that snub caused many in India to insist on the absolute difference

of their culture from all others. Anything brought by the British that was worth keeping was

given an Indian pedigree. Dayananda Saraswati found evidence of steamships and railways in the

Vedas. His intellectual descendants find cloning in the Mahabharata and spaceships in made-to-

order Sanskrit scriptures. But even during the colonial years, forward-looking Indians saw that

the only way to deal with the challenge was to make hybridization work to India’s benefit. The

question was not, wrote Aurobindo in 1919, whether to accept Western innovations, but

“whether we can bring them to be instruments and by some characteristic modification moulds of

our own spirit.” India could not lock itself up in an imagined past. There had to be a “strong and

3
masterful dealing with external influences,” a “successful assimilation” of what modernity had to

offer.

Hartz develops his ideas in seven separate essays, most of which originally were

presented at conferences, along with a new introduction that highlights his major themes. There

is, as always in collections of this sort, a certain amount of repetition; but Hartz adds something

new each time he returns to his favourite topics, the 1893 Parliament of Religions, for example.

Known in India primarily because of the presence of Vivekananda, the Parliament also is

remembered by admirers of other Asian participants, such as Anagarika Dharmapala and Soyen

Shaku. The organizers meant these exotic additions to the roster to be foils for the representatives

of the Christian denominations. “For all their rhetoric of brotherhood,” Hartz remarks, “part of

their motive was to reinforce the triumphalism of the Columbian [Exposition] with a religious

sanction giving it a halo of Christian universality.” Ironically the Parliament has practically been

forgotten in the West except by students of the penetration of America and Europe by Asian

religious traditions.

Scholars of religion use the terms “exclusivism” and “inclusivism” to signify two stances

taken by adherents of one religion towards others. The first is well illustrated by an Archbishop

of Canterbury who refused to attend the Parliament on the grounds that “the Christian religion is

the one religion,” and he could not sit in a gathering where parity of positions was implied.

Inclusivists are a bit less bigoted: they see other religions as possible approaches to the one true

one. So an American bishop who attended the Parliament thought that the increasing contact

between the nations was “preparing the way for the reunion of all the world’s religions in their

true center – Jesus Christ.” This was considered a liberal stance at the time. A third alternative,

what we now call pluralism, was advocated by Vivekananda when he said at the Parliament,

4
“We [Hindus] believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true.” It must

be added that he also endorsed an exclusivist view, as when he told a gathering in Madras: “Our

claim is that the Vedanta only can be the universal religion, that it is already the existing

universal religion in the world.” Hinduism has remained torn between these two stances ever

since.

As a Westerner who has spent most of his adult life in India, Hartz brings balance and

breadth to the discussion of topics that often encourage the taking of extreme positions. A careful

reader of his sources, he avoids the pitfalls of oversimplification that people who come to the

debate with fixed agendas tend to fall into. There is much to criticize in Huntington’s thesis, but

most of those who attack him, Hartz observes, skewer a straw man of their own creation. The

same is true of many Indian critics of Aurobindo and Nehru, who know their works only in the

form of snippets circulated on the Internet. Hartz is at his best when he shows the hollowness of

such tendentious criticism, but he may, by trying over-hard to avoid the same mistakes, keep

himself from expressing his own views with sufficient vigour. But this a minor quibble. His

Clasp of Civilizations is an important contribution to the globalization debate written,

appropriately, from a cosmopolitan standpoint.

Peter Heehs