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February 09, 2006
Mohammed, Cartoons, and "the Brutal Enlightenment"
I put my blogtrolling for the ROS post on hold for a few hours to go to class on Tuesday. The class is Gordon Wood's senior historiography seminar, The Practice of History. Great class.
At one point in the discussion, we're talking narrative is the only way to write history well because it's analogue to our own experience of time, we're talking sociologists look at human behavior to try to track predictable, applicable events, historians look at events as unique, not extrapolations of rules we're asking is history an autonomous discipline?
As a kid who likes her historiographical theory wrapped around her history like prosciutto on sausage, I eat this stuff up.
Then at one point, Prof. Wood offers an opinion: The reason there's been so much outrage among Muslim populations over the Danish cartoons is that Muslim populations never experienced the Enlightenment.
Sounds like a huge value judgment, I know. Furtive glances over the seminar table said I wasn't the only one unsettled. But I bit my tongue and heard him out, under the banner of "productive discomfort."
The religious wars of the 17th century-- WWII lasted four years. The Thirty Years' War was thirty years of the most brutal combat any of them could imagine at that time. The Catholics and the Protestants slugging it out with every weapon they had, killing each other with the greatest ferocity they could muster. But they learned from it. There was a softening of the passions. Religion lost its bite. The West is full of secular humanists now.I don't think these Muslims have gone through that. They didn't experience the brutal Enlightement.
My first objections: But clearly there are still religious battles being fought in "the West." Homophobia and abortion debates in the U.S. are always shadowed by religious doctrine.
GWood's response:
Well, the original U.S. colonists never went through the Enlightenment either. The Puritans escaped it, and when religious dissenters cropped up in the colonies they were just sent off to Rhode Island.
We went back and forth for a while, he says religious toleration came from the Enlightenment, i say that's what the protestors were demanding from the Euro newspapers, that's what it said on the signs they carried; he says: they just know what will strike a chord with Western audiences, I say Well, it worked.
Posted by Greta Pemberton at February 9, 2006 01:39 PM
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