Viorel ROMAN

Western and Orthodox Values

2005-08-27

The 16th International Conference “Danube - River of Coopera-tion�. Pancevo, Kovin, Bela Crkva, sep 30 - oct 2, 2005

To start with, let us acknowledge the divide between the Greek-Orthodox East and the Roman-Catholic/ Protestant West. Agriculture and the rural subsistence culture are dominant in the East, whereas in the West advanced industrial tech-nologies and urban culture are prevalent. Wages, productivity, political partici-pation, professional mobility, social differentiation are modest in the East, yet in the West they register high levels. Social organizing is simple and informal in the East, but sophisticated in the West. Direct and personal in the East, social control is indirect and institutionalized in the West. In the Orient, Christendom is of the state whereas secularism prevails in the western world. The West has universal values, while the East has peculiar ones. Outcome of a thousand year schism, of a separate evolution for Orthodoxy versus Catholicism, this dichot-omy of values generates different societies: a deadlock?

I.
The expanding of product and service exchanges, of western science and cul-ture, of the Roman Code of laws, and of reasonable contracts and organizations � in a word the Capitalism � enters periodically in conflict with the norms, val-ues, interest entities, cultures, etc. otherwise known as the religions of Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. As a consequence in the globalization era, the eco-nomic sciences are again thoroughly approached as during the 19th century im-perialism.
The first strategists of change, of transition towards western civilization, Max Weber and Karl Marx saw in capitalism a product of work protestant ethics (Weber), considering impossible its implementation in Orthodoxy, Hinduism, Islamism, etc. Since the norms and structures of religions have consolidated along centuries, it is hard to imagine that they would be adaptable to the mobil-ity, productivity, reasonability required by the Capital (Marx). Therefore the communists fought for a world market against all religions that they labeled “opium for the masses�; religions that surely are fortresses of resistance against the logic of borderless capital, imperialism and globalization.
One and a half century after the Communist Manifesto there is an obvious ne-cessity for a global coordination of economies, as well as for the protection of workers and environment against the excesses of capitalism. Communism that was initially a tribute glorifying the Prussian/German bureaucracy will, thought the communists, do away with the bloody corrupt capitalists and afterwards the freed proletarians will work according to their capacities and consume as dic-tated by their needs. Heaven on earth! Administrated by idealist party activists armed with Judeo-Prussian discipline and ethics.
Communism overtook the bureaucratic German imperial idea, continental and authoritarian, as well as the Anglo-Saxon capitalist concept, maritime and de-mocratic. Wladimir I. Lenin introduced the proletarian dictatorship in Russia and Joseph W. Stalin expanded it to other countries. Reaching a dead-end Gorba-chev abandon the communist dream and search for an adjustment to the con-temporary imperialism.

II.
Religion is the key, the foudation of socio-economic behavior, which explains why the unification of Europe based on a tehnocratic and abstract acquis, with-out the joining of Chritsian values, broken in two for a thousand years, is illu-sory. Let us remember, that the interdependence between religion and society has been for a half century made into a taboo in the Comunist-Orthodox camp and denounced as a reactionary sort of misticism.
From Weber, Marx there has been a continuity in approaching communication barriers and conflicts generated by religious cultures. Samuel P. Huntington in “The Clash of Civilizations� foresees the conflicts with Afghanistan and Irak. Niall Ferguson of New York University sees even today�s German economic stagnation as the result of a diminished protestant ethics. Barro and McCleary, experts of the National Bureau of Economic Research in the USA, have col-lected data and analyzed the relationship between the belief in God, heaven and hell, between the attendance frequency of worship-places and economic development in the 59 states.
The University of Michigan (The World Values Survey) makes a period-by-period classification of cultures, showing that behind them always stands a dominant religion, based on four values; rational-secular; traditional; survival; self-expression.
1) Catholic Europe. Austria, Belgium France, Italy, Luxembourg, Spain. Here the degree of liberty, self-expression are high, with a good balance between rational, secularized and traditional values. Social stability, and an overarching system of social security makes for the individual survival values to be less de-veloped.
2) Protestant Europe. Denmark, Switzerland, Finland, Germany (West), Island, Norway, Holland, Sweden. Here the degree of personal liberty, self-expression, rational values, and secularism are the highest in the world. As well as in Catho-lic Europe and for the same considerations, the personal survival values are also weaker.
3) Orthodox Europe. Albania, Belarus, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine. Lacking an adequately func-tioning social system, the survival capacity of Russians and Romanian is quite remarkable, while the Moldavians�, closely competitive with the Russian�s, is among the highest in the world.
4) English language countries. England, New Zeeland, Canada, Ireland, USA. In Euro-Atlantic protestant countries the degree of liberty, self-expression are similar, but the level of rational, secularized values is much diminished. More than elsewhere, in the USA traditional values predominate.
5) South America. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, El Salvador, Mexico, Pe-ru, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Venezuela. The Latin-American Catholi-cism by being a combination between traditional, liberty- and self-expression values with a clear preponderance of traditional values is unlike North America or Europe, where the Spanish and Portuguese colonists came from.
6) Confucian countries. China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan. In Asia religion is in search of balance, a harmonization of human relations, based on astral or natu-ral models. Here the degree of secular, rational values is quite high, on par to that of the North European countries. Moreover, here the balance between sur-vival and traditional values is a good .
7) Asia. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Iran, Turkey. In countries where Abrahamic religions took root, that is the belief in a single, unique and abstract Deity, both survival and traditional values predominate. As a result, norms and values of individual liberty and self-expression and those tied to secularism and rationalism are still undeveloped.
8) Africa. Egypt, Ghana, Morocco, Niger, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zim-babwe In traditionally animist countries or in those converted to Christianity or Islam during the colonial era, the traditional and survival values are strongest. Freedom, self-expression and rational, secularized values are the least devel-oped in the world.

III.
In completing the American way of seeing and classifying the predominating norms and values in religious cultures, let us review the five principles of the Frankfurt School of sociologic thinking.
The principle of reciprocity. In each human society there is a code of communi-cation, rules upon which presents, greetings, compliments and offences, etc. are exchanged, accepted or excluded.
According to these rules do people in the final analysis coordinate their activities or cooperate positively, in realizing marriages, stable organizations, or act nega-tively, by divorcing, entering in conflicts, wars, etc.
The principle of preferences. In each society value judgments are made perma-nently for he sake of differentiating between good and evil, between tolerable and intolerable.
Based on this process moral judgments are continually passed, in the end al-ways for the victory of the past, of the holly tradition.
In our relations we always prefer or reject something. This is the reason for which mutual tolerance has been institutionalized to the point of belief that this might be applied in an unprejudiced manner even to the study of social sci-ences.
The principle of collective identity. Human societies have limits--some are ac-cepted, others are excluded. In the name of individualism, cosmopolitism, glob-alization we may certainly protest, but without great success.
The principle of camouflaged and subtle communication, indirectly or by taboos. All human societies have a code of communication which implicitly or very clearly prescribes whatever it is permissible to express, or whatever is to be wailed, prohibited, a taboo.
Even those who will fight against taboos, as a rule will reformulate them, by modernizing the old or by creating new ones, as was the case with people of Enlightment, or more recently, with Communists and Globalists.
The principle of lethal consequences. Each action, human endeavor bring about more or less desirable consequences, which, in turn, generate other even less controllable effects, and so on.
In the past this chain of weaknesses was defined as something destined to happen, assignable to fate. In our days, in the era individualism, this somewhat fatalistic principle is controversial at best, since the modern human being be-lieves that everything is dependent on his will.

IV.
In organizations, the cultural foundation of norms and values stands on soci-ety�s religious code, as this may be observed by using the American model and the German principles. This is an undeniable truth against which all imperialists have fought in the 19., Communists in the 20. century, and the theoreticians of globalization, the integrationists in the UE, even today. So, without harmonizing the values of Orthodoxy with those of the West, the social-economic integration between organizations from East and West remains an illusory goal.
Re-forging Christian unity has been a goal for one thousand years. Only this unity can create the necessary background for the political-administrative union with Europe. Presently, the process is proceeding exactly the other way around. This is exactly the way EU aquis is being now implemented, that is, first the laic form of Roman-Catholic canonic code, and only subsequently,--or in the best case simultaneously,--by harmonizing values in Europe.

Prof. Dr. Viorel Roman, academic advisor at the Bremen University