The New Penguin History of the World (192 page)

It seems more revealing, perhaps, that in 1947 the timing of the ceremony marking the establishment of Indian independence was only settled after appropriate consultation with the astrologers, even though India has a constitution that is non-confessional and, theoretically, secular. Around the world, too, confessional states or established religions are now unusual outside Muslim countries. This need not mean, however, that the real power of religious belief or of religions over their adherents has declined. The founders of Pakistan were secular-minded, westernized men, but in a struggle with the conservative
ulema
after independence, they lost. Pakistan became an orthodox Islamic state, and not a secular democracy on western lines, which simply respects Islam as the religion of the majority of its people.

It may well be true that today more people give serious attention to what is said by religious authorities than have ever done so before: there are more people alive, after all. Many people in England were startled in the 1980s when Iranian clergymen denounced a fashionable author as a traitor to Islam and pronounced a sentence of death upon him; it was a surprise to
bien pensant
and progressive circles to discover that, as it were, the Middle Ages were still in full swing in some parts of the world, without their having noticed it. They were even more startled when numbers of their Muslim fellow citizens appeared to agree with the
fatwa
. ‘Fundamentalism’, though, is a word borrowed from American religious sociology. Within Christian churches, too, it expresses a protest against modernization by those who feel threatened and dispossessed by it. Nevertheless, some believe that here as elsewhere western society has indicated a path that other societies will follow, and that conventional western liberalism will prevail. It may be so. Equally, it may not be. The interplay of religion and society is very complex and it is best to be cautious. That the numbers of pilgrims travelling to Mecca have risen dramatically may register a new fervour or merely better air travel facilities.

Alarm has been felt recently over the vociferous reassertion of their faith by Muslims. Yet Islam does not seem able to avoid cultural corruption by
the technology and materialism of the European tradition, though successfully resisting that tradition’s ideological expression in atheistic communism. Radicals in Islamic societies are frequently in conflict with westernized and laxly observant Islamic élites. Islam is, of course, still an expanding and missionary faith and the notion of Islamic unity is far from dead in Islamic lands. It can still nerve men to action, too. United with strong social forces, religion produced terrifying massacres in the Indian subcontinent during the months of partition of 1947 and in the struggles of 1971 which led to the breaking away of East Bengal from Pakistan to reappear as Bangladesh. In Ulster and Eire, sectarian Irishmen still mouth their hatreds and bitterly dispute the future of their country in the vocabulary of Europe’s seventeenth-century religious wars, though marginally less violently than at times in the past. Although the hierarchies and leaders of different religions find it appropriate to exchange public courtesies, it cannot be said that religion has ceased to be a divisive force. Doctrine may have become more amorphous, but whether the supernatural content of religion is losing its hold in all parts of the world, and is important today merely as a badge of group membership, is contestable.

What is less doubtful is that within the world whose origins are Christian, which did so much to shape today’s world, the decline of sectarian strife has gone along with the general decline of Christian belief and, often, with a loss of nerve. Ecumenism, the movement within Christianity whose most conspicuous expression was the setting up of a World Council of Churches (which Rome did not join) in 1948, owes much to Christians’ growing sense in developed countries that they live in hostile environments. It also owes something to widespread ignorance and uncertainty about what Christianity is, and what it ought to claim. The only unequivocally hopeful sign of vigour in Christianity has been the growth (largely by natural increase) in numbers of Roman Catholics. Most of them are now non-Europeans, a change dramatized in the 1960s by the first papal visits to South America and Asia and the presence at the Vatican Council of 1962 of seventy-two archbishops and bishops of African descent. By 1980 40 per cent of the world’s Roman Catholics lived in Latin America, and a majority of the College of Cardinals came from outside Europe.

As for the papacy’s historic position within the Roman Church, that seemed to be weakening in the 1960s, some symptoms being provided by the Second Vatican Council itself. Among other things registering its work of
aggiornamento
or updating, for which John XXIII had asked, it went so far as to speak respectfully of the ‘truths’ handed down in the teachings of Islam. But 1978 (a year of three popes) brought to the throne of St Peter John Paul II, the first non-Italian in four and a half centuries, the first
Polish pope, and the first whose coronation was attended by an Anglican archbishop of Canterbury. His pontificate soon showed his personal determination to exercise the historic authority and possibilities of his office in a conservative sense; yet he was also the first pope personally to travel to Greece in search of reconciliation with the Orthodox churches of eastern Europe.

The changes in Eastern Europe in 1989 – and especially those in his native Poland – owed a great deal to the activism and moral authority of Pope John Paul II. When he died in 2005, after a pontificate that was the third longest in history, he left a mixed legacy: a staunch conservative on matters of doctrine, the Polish pope had grown increasingly concerned with the materialism that he saw as pervading the contemporary world, not least in the countries he had helped to break away from their Communist past. It would be hazardous to project further trends in the history of an institution whose fortunes have fluctuated so much across the centuries as those of the papacy (up with Hildebrandine reform; down with Schism and conciliarism; up with Trent; down with Enlightenment; up with the First Vatican Council). It is safest simply to recognize that one issue at least, posed by twentieth-century advances in the knowledge, acceptability and techniques of contraception, may for the first time be inflicting mortal wounds on the authority of Rome in the eyes of millions of Roman Catholics.

HALF THE WORLD

Some of the most influential changes of recent times have still to reveal their full weight and implications; after all, the issue of contraception affects, potentially, the whole human race, although we usually think about it as part of the history of women. But the relations of men and women should be considered as a whole, even if it is traditional and convenient to approach the subject from one side only. Much that settles the fate of many women can nonetheless be roughly measured and measurement, even at its crudest, quickly makes it clear that great as the level of change has been, it still has a long way to go. Radical change has only taken place in a few places, and is measurable (if at all) only in the last couple of centuries even there. Our recognition of the changes has to be very carefully qualified; most western women now live lives dramatically unlike those of their great-grandmothers while the lives of women in some parts of the world have been little changed for millennia.

Advances in women’s political and legal equality with men are easy to trace. A majority of members of the United Nations now accepts some
measure of female suffrage and in most western (and some other) countries, formal and legal inequalities between the sexes have now been under attack for a long time. Prolonged moral questioning of them has led at least to much compliance with the wishes of egalitarians. The range of legislation attempting to assure equity in the treatment of women has been steadily extended (for instance, into the recognition of disadvantages in employment which had long been ignored). Examples thus set have been noted and influential in non-western countries, even in the teeth of conservative oppositions. This has been a new operative force in changing perceptions and, of course, it has been all the more influential in a world where women’s labour has confronted growing opportunities thanks to technological and economic change. To the huge early opportunities of jobs they could take which were provided by textile mill and typewriter were later added literally hundreds of new roles which women could fill as they mastered other technical skills – and, indeed, as opportunities of education were increased to meet their needs.

Such matters continued to unroll in developing societies in the interconnected, interlocking ways in which they had done so since the industrialization wave began. Even the home was transformed as a place of work – piped water and gas were soon followed by electricity and the possibility of easier management of domestic processes, by detergents, synthetic fibres and prepared foods, while information became available to women as never before through radio, cinema, television and cheap print. It is tempting to speculate, though, that no such changes arising in more sophisticated societies had anything like the fundamental impact of the appearance in the 1960s of ‘the Pill’. Thanks to its convenience and the way in which it was used, it did more than any earlier advance in contraceptive knowledge or technique to transfer power over their own lives in these matters to women. It opened a new era in the history of sexual culture, even if that was obvious only in a few societies three or four decades later.

One concomitant, in the United States in particular, was a new feminism that broke away from the liberal tradition in which its predecessors had been rooted. Arguments for traditional feminism had always had a liberal flavour, saying that for women to live unencumbered by laws and customs which were not imposed on men but only on them was merely a logical extension of the truth that freedom and equality were good things unless specific cause otherwise were to be shown. The new feminism took a new tack. It embraced a wider spectrum of causes specific to women – the protection of lesbians, for example – laid particular stress on women’s sexual liberation, and above all strove to identify and uncover unrecognized instances of psychological, implicit and institutionalized forms of masculine
oppression. Its impact has been varied, even within societies and cultures whose élites are susceptible to modernization and its ideas.

In some traditional societies any feminist advance at all has been fiercely contested. In only one respect has there been a widespread and striking change and it owes as much in specific places to colonialism, communism and Christianity as to feminism. This is the worldwide retreat of polygamy. Few governments now officially support it. Other institutional expressions of special cultural attitudes towards female emancipation nonetheless remain very striking. This is often remarked in western comments on Muslim ways. Yet this, too, is a topic formidably difficult to evaluate. It tempts the observer to subjective and emotional judgement on subjects best not abandoned to quick and generalized reaction. Specification, though, is almost as dangerous as generalization. Only too obviously, the Islamic world maintains restrictions and practices that protect an ultimate male dominance. Many attempts to change this have been thwarted or aborted. Yet not all Muslim societies impose the veil on their women and the wearing of the
chador
in the Iranian Islamic republic is not incompatible with successful support by Islamic scholars for defending certain rights for women. Whether such facts turn out to establish sensible compromise or uneasy equilibrium will differ from one Muslim society to another. It should not be forgotten that violent contrasts in what is thought appropriate behaviour for women have until recently existed in European societies, too. It is not easy to relate such paradoxes as they have sometimes presented to what are supposed to be uniformities of faith.

PRINCIPALITIES AND POWERS

Whether organized religion and the notion of fixed, unchanging moral law have or have not lost some of their power as social regulators, the state, the third great historic agent of social order, at first sight seems to have kept its end up much better. It has never been so widely taken for granted. There are more states – recognized, geographically defined political units claiming legislative sovereignty and a monopoly of the use of force within their own borders – than ever before. More people than ever before look to government as their best chance of securing well-being rather than as their inevitable enemy. Politics as a contest to capture state power has at times apparently replaced religion (sometimes even appearing to eclipse market economics) as the focus of faith that can move mountains.

One of the most visible institutional marks left by Europe on world history has been the reorganization of international life as basically a
matter of sovereign (and now, in name at least, often republican and usually national) states. Beginning in the seventeenth century, this was already in the nineteenth century beginning to look a possible global outcome, and the process was virtually completed in the twentieth century. With it went the diffusion of similar forms of state machinery, sometimes through adoption, sometimes through imposition first by imperial rulers. This was assumed to be a concomitant of modernization. The sovereign state is now taken for granted, as in many places it still was not even a century ago. This has been largely a mechanical consequence of a slow demolition of empires. That new states should come into being to replace them was scarcely questioned at any stage. With the collapse of the USSR almost a half-century after the dissolution of other empires, the global generalization of the constitutional language of the sovereignty of the people, representative institutions and the separation of powers reached its greatest extent.

The aggrandizement of the state – if we may so put it – thus long met with little effective resistance. Even in countries where governments have traditionally been distrusted or where institutions exist to check them, people tend now to feel that they are much less resistible than even a few years ago. The strongest checks on the abuse of power remain those of habit and assumption; so long as electorates in liberal states can assume that governments will not quickly fall back on the use of force, they do not feel very alarmed. But the cause of liberal democracy worldwide does not always look very hopeful; there are now more authoritarian political regimes in the world than in 1939 (though, since changes in Greece, Portugal and Spain in the 1970s, and later in eastern European countries, few in Europe). This is a measure of the narrowing base of what was once thought to be the cause of the future, but seemed to turn out to be only that of a few advanced societies of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, the forms of liberal politics have, indeed, in one sense prospered, for democracy and constitutionalism are more talked about and nationalism is stronger than ever. Yet the substantial freedoms once associated with these ideas are often non-existent or conspicuously in danger and even if most states now claim to be democratic, the lack of any but historical and circumstantial connections between nationalism and liberalism is more obvious than ever.