On Page 182 of his biography (American Iconoclast) of Eric Hoffer, biographer Tom Shactman describes a conversation between Hoffer and Lili's son, Stephen Osborne: "Two evenings later he had another 'lively discussion', this time with Stephen Osborne, twenty-two and recently returned from two years in the Peace Corps, 'about the stagnating effect of Islam. Islam's lack of inner contradictions induced not only stability but inertness. It is infinitely easier to be a genuinely good Muslim than a good Christian. An Islamic society is almost without a sense of guilt. It is difficult to visualize an Islamic society in the grip of a Protestant Ethic.' These thoughts, also, would end up in a book."
Why would Islam be more stagnant and slow to modernize, reform and moderate as Christianity has done? There are likely many good reasons but the lack of inner contradictions lead to groupism, stability, inertness and not evolving culturally and intellectually.
All the contradictions, inconsistencies and struggles that have torn Christianity apart (For example this peaceful, gentle Jewish faith superimposed on warlike, violent, pagan Germanic tribes that always resented this alien but adopted faith.) did give us--along with Greek cultural input--the modern world of separation of church and state, science, liberty, capitalism and a Western admiration for thinking.
If what Hoffer contends is so, and it likely is, that Christians are racked with a sense of guilt, not felt by Muslims near as much, how could that jumpstart questioning, agonizing and rational searching to lift slowly Christians out of Medieval mindset into Modernist worldly optimism and seeking?
Christian sense of guilt and anxiety about being saved or damned motivated them to work hard out there is the the world, to discipline themselves and to lead godly lives. If Max Weber is correct and this spurred the rise of capitalism, the secular world of commerce, wealth accumulation and secular government versus the monopolistic world of the pre-Modern Church would allow for the rise of huge conflicts and tensions, and seeking to find meaning and resolve these crises would force millions of people to struggle to make sense of it all, and the Age of Enlightenment, progress, liberty, science, wealth accumulation and rationalism grew out of this angst.
My hunch too is that that Catholic. Christian and general Judeo-Christian sense of guilt might be one of the primary sources of further elevating the core Western assumption of the sovereignty of the individual to the ascendancy it has enjoyed for the last 250 years or so.
Stephen Hicks would have little use for Christian sense of guilt, and Objectivists would be optimistic about the need to work hard and think, think, think as voluntary chasing after egoistic ends that increase each agent's chance for worldly success, prosperity, personal growth and happiness. They would account for the rise of individualism in the West with little Judeo-Christian input, but I disagree with their theory in part. They have contributed but so have the Jews and Christians.
But I am still a cultural if lapsed Catholic. My ingrained sense of guilt, whatever that means, if I own it without obsessing about it, with my tragic view of life, suggests morally that I am to accept my responsibility to follow Jordan Peterson in embracing suffering and malevolence generated from me internally or from others externally, and then self-realize by transmuting these stirring influences prodding me, all the time, welling up in my consciousness, to prompt my accelerated reaching and experimenting creatively in the world going forward to become a living angel. With my original sin admitted to, and my guilt accepted as to my natural imperfection and rebellion against following the will of the Mother and the Father, this goading sense of guilt leads one to awaken, to no longer group-live, to progress always as the expression of one's becoming a better, richer self, on the road to great-souldom in service to the Divinities. A sense of guilt and a proper, mature response to it can help explain the rise of individualism in the West, and how that correct response advances our denominations, our culture and our civilization.
I invite our Muslim brothers to invite these alien ideas into their culture as part of their general reformation of Islam.
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