W. Davd Phillips

Why is East Asia more conservative?

“One of the major problems in most societies…is the fact that people observe correlations of attitudes & beliefs, and infer from those necessary relations.” What an opening sentence! We do that don’t we? We observe people, find out an important aspect of their belief system, and immediately categorize them according someone’s correlation theories. Suppose I said that I stated on this blog that I believed in macro evolution, the belief that one species can evolve until such time as a new species is formed, i.e., a horse becomes a cow. (I don’t believe this by the way.) Based on that statement, a whole set of associations, correlations, and categorizations begin to occur in your brain. For a particular group of people, I am now someone who denies the authority of scripture, see Genesis 1-11 as metaphorical or fiction, not true. Some might say that I would embrace homosexuality, endorse women as senior pastors and deny the virgin birth of Jesus. All because I stated that I believe in macro evolution. Is that a fair correlation?

We in the West have generally associated atheism with liberalism. I have to wonder if that is why we who claim to follow Christ fight so hard for maintaining the belief that America is a Christian nation, that our founders were Godly men, and our culture to be based on Judeo-Christian principles. We are fearfully concerned that the increase in atheism will lead to a total and complete social liberal agenda.

However, could it be that there are societies which are both far more secular than the United States, and more socially conservative? Is that even possible? According to the World Values Survey, it could just be. It appears that East Asia is more secular than the US and yet on social matters, it is more socially and fiscally conservative than us. A recent post by Razib Khan, a socially conservative atheist notes this.

I think it may be interesting to note something I heard Bob Roberts say at a conference in California in 2007. He said that there is such thing as a postmodern world. However, there is a postmodern West. According to Bob, who has spent years in East Asia and the Middle East, postmodernity is not an issue in these areas. Primarily, I think one of the reasons is because they have yet to go through modernity. They are still mystics, not relying solely on the modern scientific method to account for every aspect of life. They still believe in the spiritual. They still have faith. Their worldview does not revolve around the propositional but the relational.

In fact, another extrapolation of data from that same survey gives us the glimpse that those nations coming out of communism, which had a heavy emphasis on the non-existence of God, actually are less inclined toward the liberal socialism that appears to be growing in Western Europe and the United States. “In China atheists are actually some more hostile to the precepts of godless Communism than the religious..it was curious that Chinese atheists are probably among the segments of the world population most likely to appreciate the non-zero sum power of capitalism and economic growth.”

In the US, however, where the emphasis is on scientific and propositionally-based truth is great, atheists in America are about five times more likely to be extremely liberal than theists. I will follow this up in a future post.

What do you see as some of the reasons that Eastern cultures are more socially and fiscally conservative than many of the more Western cultures? In addition, how does that impact how we deal with the philosophical expressions of modernity and postmodernity as well as the religious embrace of either a modern or postmodern viewpoint?