Terry Eagleton - A review of religion, politics and culture

More from Eagleton:

Part of what has happened in our time is that God has shifted over from the side of civilization to the side of barbarism. He is no longer the short-haired, blue-blazered God of the West — well, perhaps he is in the United States, but not in Porto or Cardiff or Bologna. Instead, he is a wrathful, dark-skinned God who, if he did create John Locke and John Stuart Mill, has long since forgotten the fact. One can still speak of the clash between civilization and barbarism; but a more subtle form of the same dispute is to speak of a conflict between civilization and culture. Civilization in this dichotomy means the universal, autonomous, prosperous, individual, rationally speculative, self-doubting, and ironic; culture means the customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective, unironic, and a-rational. Culture signifies all those unreflective loyalties and allegiances for which men and women in extreme circumstances are prepared to kill. For the most part, the former colonizing nations are civilizations, while the former colonies are cultures.

Watsuji Tetsurō distinguishes between cultures (文化) and civilizations (文明), and on roughly these lines. The fatal flaw in Watsuji’s philosophy is that he ultimately collapses the values of religion onto the values of the nation-state. I wonder if Eagleton will make the same mistake…