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WHY THE REST HATES THE WEST WHY THE REST HATES THE WEST: Understanding the Roots of Global Rage Meic Pearse, InterVarsity Press, 188 pp.; $13

Attempts to explain anti-Western feelings among Muslims have centered on weaknesses in Islamic societies and opposition to U.S. foreign policy. Church historian Meic Pearse bucks the trend by focusing on cultural differences—and along the way makes some prickly points about Western ways.

In Why the Rest Hates the West, Pearse builds on the thesis of Samuel P. Huntington (The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Orders, Simon & Schuster, 1997) that cultural factors increasingly dominate world conflicts. Pearse more directly asserts that culture, not religion or foreign policy, causes most of the conflicts between the West and the rest.

He asserts that culture includes religion, but it's much more. While Huntington compares civilizations especially in the last 100 years, Pearse focuses on Western developments since the Reformation. And unlike Roger Scruton in The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2002), Pearse does more than contrast the West's secular governments and Islam's divinely ordained political order. His portrayal of Western culture, however, bears some similarity to Scruton's description of non-Western caricatures of it.

Pearse argues that Western culture has changed so much since the Enlightenment that Western "common sense" is no longer self-evident to other cultures. Islamic cultures believe the West is "barbaric," showing lack of respect for the past, religion, family, and honor, while overindulging in sports, entertainment, and sex.

The result has been social atomization, dehumanization, and harm to the family and community. These ills have led not only to conflict with traditional cultures, but also to the West's moral and demographic decline. Pearse calls for a reform of belief and behavior in the West so that it increasingly resembles "the rest." He says this renewed moral vision should be based not on a culture of rights but of duty. Religious faith and life, he argues, must be brought back into the public square.

The author traces well the development of Western "common sense"—and shows how tempting and dangerous this common sense seems to the rest. We may laud him as a Western Christian paying attention to the log in Western eyes before dealing with the speck in the eyes of the rest. But his thesis that the primary cause of Western/Islamic conflict "is neither religion, nor foreign policy, but culture" sidesteps the central importance of U.S. foreign policy and of Islam itself.

He admits that one can persuasively argue that U.S. foreign policy has created anti-Westernism (among Muslims, at least). But he shies away from criticizing these policies because "it is hard to see how Western governments could accommodate these grievances." Moreover, conflicts over specific Western policies are often "merely symptomatic" of cultural differences.

I have recently been served a tv diet of American professional wrestling and the exhibitionism of former basketball player Dennis Rodman in a Pakistani airport and in an Arab-operated airplane, so I appreciate the author's critique. But we should not overemphasize cultural issues. A Pew survey in June 2003 that reported growing Islamic rage at the United States also found that Muslims are attracted to democratic freedoms. A poll of 50 countries found that people even in monarchies (like Jordan and Kuwait) and more authoritarian states (like Uzbekistan and Pakistan) desire freedom of expression and of the press, multiparty systems, and equal treatment under the law.

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March 2005, Vol. 49, No. 3