226
PARTISAN
I~EVIEW
University, I found myself trapped in a truly archaic ceremony honoring
the Meiji Emperor. After the ceremony we walked outside, where there
was a gigantic park, a gathering place of literally thousands of teenagers,
with all the accoutrements of the West. I asked my hosts, isn't there a
contradiction here? They said, absolutely not. One of the ingenious
things about Japanese culture has always been that people can do very
different things at different times and yet it somehow has a unity. It's not
exclusively a Japanese trait; I think we all participate in culture on multi–
ple levels. One of them may be the English culture you note, but there
are others. There are different modernities.
What you are saying in a way is, one cannot wear jeans
"innocently." I am raising the possibility that one may wear jeans
"innocently," and yet die for Allah .
Claudio Veliz:
One person may wear Jeans innocently, but millions
may not.
Peter Berger:
I'm not questioning the massiveness of it, but I'm ques–
tioning the seamlessness of the web you have constructed. [s it not possi–
ble
to
differentiate?
Claudio Veliz:
Of course it is possible. As Dr. Arias Calderon pointed
out earlier, culture systems are like less or more complex systems of ec–
centric wheels , turning at different levels and at different speeds , with
each of us in the place on the axis. There are levels that are less obvious
and possibly more important than hamburgers, bubble-gum, and jogging
shoes. When [ referred to religion in my book on the centralist tradition
of Latin America , for example, I observed that the largest non-Catholic
minority in Latin America , including non-believers, Protestants, Jews ,
Muslims, and others, amounted to less than seven percent of the popula–
tion. Evidently a very great change has taken place here , with the massive
conversions to evangelical Protestantism that have taken place during the
past few years. The same is true of the discarding of the apparatus of the
state as the bearer of the principal responsibility for the economic life of
these countries. Had anyone asked me, in 1980, whether it was possible
for Argentina to privatize her state-owned telephone system, I would
have replied that this was absolutely impossible. There is no doubt that
important changes are taking place at the most significant levels of the
cultural tradition.
We had a
collversaz iolle
here a few months ago, on "The Worth of
Nations," which considered some of these themes and which strength-
