Ahmed Afzaal

Islamic Renaissance

Quotes and Insights

Worldview

Our worldviews determine to a large extent what we can believe about life,

faith, and the very cosmos. If we are unaware of which worldview claims our

allegiance, they will continue to determine our behavior in ways to which we

are simply blind. At a far deeper level than ideologies or myths, worldviews tend

to dictate what we are able to believe. They are the presuppositions by which we

think, the very foundations of thought itself. . . .

Worldviews are the fundamental presuppositions about reality, the elementary

bases of thought for an entire epoch. A worldview dictates the way whole

societies perceive the world. It is neutral, in the sense that it provides only the

presuppositions with which to think, not the thoughts themselves.

Worldviews provide a picture of the nature of things: where is heaven, where is

earth, what is visible and what invisible, what is real and what unreal? As I am

using the term, worldviews are not philosophies, or theologies, or even myths or

tales about the origin of things. We might think of them rather as the foundation

of the house of our minds. On that foundation we erect the walls and roof, which

are the myths we live by, the symbolic understandings of our world. The

furnishings—the stuff to sit on and lie down and eat with—are our theologies and

personal philosophies. People notice the sofa and rugs (our theologies), they

comment on the structure (the key myths), but no one notices the foundation

(our worldview). It is covered, hidden from view. In the very act of opposing

another person’s thought, we usually share the same worldview. Thus, during

the Cold War, the Russians and the Americans share a similar worldview, but

with no comprehension that we were so alike.

Worldviews are the background against or context in which faith exists. Hence,

a worldview can prevent certain kinds of faith. The basic tenets of a worldview

are not argued to but argued from. A worldview is always presupposed, being

transcendent to daily life and even to philosophical rationality. It tends to be

global, a pre-understanding by which whole societies live. Worldviews are

antecedent even to our reflections and discussions of them.

Walter Wink. 2006. “The New Worldview: Spirit at the Core of Everything” in
Transforming the Powers: Peace, Justice, and the Domination System, edited by Ray
Gingerich and Ted Grimsrud. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, pp. 17-18.

The Technical Age

Various terms are now used in referring to the distinctive complex of cultural

traits that have played a decisive role in human society since about the

generation of 1789. Most of such terms are appropriate in one context or

another. A first set of terms depends on the recentness of these traits and on the

fact that they do not remain constant, but must always be brought further up to

date. The age characterized by these traits (together with that period which,

within the Occident, can be regarded as leading up to them) is usually called

‘Modern’; the traits can be summed up as ‘Modernity’, and adoption of them, as

‘Modernizing’. A second set of terms refers to the high degree of economic

exploitation of resources which is also a fundamental characteristic. A society

lacking the traits in question is called ‘undeveloped’ or ‘underdeveloped’ and the

acquisition of such traits is called ‘development’, which properly should refer

strictly to technical development as applied to exploitation of resources, but can

be generalized to all the necessarily related traits. A third set of terms has a more

precise application. Because a key trait is technical rationality in the sense of

subjecting all behaviour to calculation according to presumedly objective ends

without interference from arbitrary tradition, the acquisition of the traits

generally can be called “rationalization’. Finally, some refer to acquisition of the

traits in question as “Westernization’ because they were first developed in

western Europe, and because acquisition of them appears to make any group

seem like western Europeans.

Marshall Hodgson. 1974. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World
Civilization (Vol. 1) Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp.50-51.

The Great Western Transmutation

Between about 1600 and about 1800 there took place in Western Europe a

general cultural transformation. This transformation culminated in two more

or less simultaneous events: the Industrial Revolution, when specialized

technical development decisively transformed the presuppositions of human

production, and the French Revolution, when a kindred spirit established

likewise unprecedented norms in human social relations. These events did not

constitute the transformation I am speaking of; they were its most obvious early

consequences . . . . The same generation that saw the Industrial and French

Revolutions saw a third and almost equally unprecedented event: the

establishment of European world hegemony. . . .

The Western transmutation can be described . . . as consisting primarily in

transformations of culture in three main fields: the economic, the intellectual,

and the social. In the economic life there took place that great increase in

productivity—due to a sequence of new techniques, and carried out through a

concentrated control of production based on capital accumulation and mass

markets—which led up to and culminated in the “Industrial Revolution” and the

accompanying “Agricultural Revolution.” In intellectual life there came the

new experimental science, from Kepler and Galileo on, and more generally the

philosophical exploratory independence made widely popular in the

Enlightenment. In social life there came the breakdown of old landed privileges

and supremacies and their replacement with a bourgeois bureaucratic or

mercantile power which ushered in the American and French revolutions, with

their repercussions throughout Europe. . . .

The shift from reliance on custom and continuity to reliance on reason and

innovation, although it occurred only in a limited measure, was not in itself

what was specific to the Modern Western Transmutation. It was not this that set

the Westerners apart from both their ancestors and the rest of the world. It

merely accompanied and facilitated a change in the patterns of investment of

time and money. This . . . occurred only in a special form, one that I shall call

technicalistic, so that specialized technical considerations tended to take

precedence over all others. Indeed, in that special form—rather than in other

forms—the shift went to unprecedented lengths, so that the results set new

conditions for all historical life. It was not that the human mind as such was

suddenly emancipated, as if by some mutation, and could therefore begin freely

to explore all calculable possibilities where, before, new paths could be opened

only by chance and despite the weight of customary bias. Rather, new concrete

sorts of opportunity for social investment, hitherto impractical even for the most

emancipated mind, became practical, attracting even minds that still, by and

large, resisted any deviation from intellectual habit. And then the resistance

was gradually reduced. . . .

At the core of the new innovation was the pattern of multiple technical

specializations. Such technical specialization was not altogether new . . . . But

now it reached a breadth of scale, a “critical mass,” which allowed much more

extensive institutionalizing of such innovation than before, an institutionalizing

which has to embrace and finally dominate all the key sectors of the whole

society. Economically, it appeared in forms of industrial and commercial

investment in northwest Europe during the seventeenth century: capital was

systematically re-invested and multiplied on the basis of continuing technical

innovation and of anticipated expansion in market patterns. Intellectually, it

appeared in the work of such associations as the Royal Society . . . . In the

seventeenth century the Royal Society aimed explicitly at gathering and

disseminating that new knowledge which would replace the old, and did so

largely in expectation of the continual new inventions of the by then

professionalized instrument-makers and the new observations that they would

make possible.

One must suppose that the intellectual side of the movement was dependent on

the economic side, but not in the sense that the natural sciences benefitted

directly from the inventiveness of industry. Rather, the expansion of industrial

investment released more resources to the whole economy. These were then

made use of, among scholars, in a manner consonant with the expansive mood of

which the pace was surely set by the exhalation associated with the new

mercantile and industrial ventures. The intellectual development was

apparently quite autonomous. After a certain point is reached in the

development of natural sciences, at any rate, it cannot advance further without

a disproportionate amount of human investment on all fronts at once: i.e.,

increasing specialization in many different fields. . . .

In both scientific and economic life, the scale of increasing technical

specialization brought with it qualitative changes. Perhaps most obviously it

reached a level on which it paid to invest the requisite time, funds, and concern

into institutions that embodied and further confirmed the technical

specialization. These very institutions, then, helped to hasten the process. . . .

It will readily be seen that such a technicalistic process left behind most basic

presuppositions of all agrarinate society. Even those agrarinate level societies

that there not themselves immediately agrarian—being, say, pastoralist or

mercantile—had depended for their existence on the social relations prevailing in

their agrarian hinterland, in which the agrarian surplus provided the chief

income on which the carriers of the high culture, the chief market of the

mercantile cities, depended. The growth of inter-dependent technical

specializations freed the income structure of the privileged classes in large areas

from primary dependence on agrarian exploitation of the agriculturalists.

It did so, of course, not because the industrial production could take the place of

agricultural in providing the common necessities of life, such as food. Rather,

what the non-agricultural sectors of the economy could support now was the

special income of the privileged, the careers of the high culture; and this was not

only in a few immediate urban situations, as before, but in the overall economic

nexus. Even with no increase in the agricultural surplus, that is, with no

increase in the number of non-agricultural laborers that could be fed, technical

specialization could vastly increase productivity, and hence total production, till

so much of it was nonagricultural that a correspondingly large proportion of

income in the society need not be determined by agrarian relationships. . . .

The overall process, and then the condition of society in which it has resulted, I

call technicalization, which I will define as a condition of rationally calculative

(and hence innovative) technical specialization, in which the several specialties

are interdependent on a large enough scale to determine patterns of expectation

in the key sectors of a society. . . .

Central to the technicalistic spirit was the expectation of impersonal efficiency

through technical precision. There had in all times been concern with

efficiency, especially military efficiency, in limited ways. There had also been a

certain amount of technical specialization and precision, for instance in fine

craft work. Even technical inventiveness had held a respected place within a

more rounded economic pattern. But now in western Europe the technical

efficiency was increasingly given a primary role, such that all other

considerations of a less universally or obviously objective sort—aesthetic,

traditional, interpersonal—were increasingly made to yield to this, and it was

relied on as the most important basis for excelling in constructive activities. On

this psychological level, to say that all aspects of social organization where being

technicalized means that they were organized primarily in terms of specialized

procedures calculated to yield maximum efficiency for the limited ends

immediately in objective view. It is in this form that technicalization meant

institutionalizing a major shift from authoritative custom toward independent

calculation. . . .

Marshall Hodgson. 1993. “The Great Western Transmutation” in Re-Thinking World
History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 44-71.