¹ Cultural identity is a term borrowed from the field of cultural studies. But in using the term I do not mean to commit myself to the theory or method of cultural studies as that is commonly practiced.

² For example, Latin‐American philosophy is usually classified as non‐Western, often courses in Latin‐American literature or history fulfill requirements for a non‐Western component in a university curriculum, etc.

³ Madariaga, Salvador de, Latin America Between the Eagle and the Bear (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962) p. 63Google Scholar.

⁴ Ibid., p. 64.

⁵ Among many others, Huntingdon, Samuel in his celebrated article, “The Clash of Civilizations?” (Foreign Affairs, 72, (1993)Google Scholar, has espoused this view: “Western civilization has two major variants, European and North American …” (p. 24). In his later book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996)Google Scholar, he continues in this same vein, comparing, for example, Mexico with Turkey and stating that “Mexico has a distinctly non‐Western culture” (p. 149). In his initial discussion of the various world‐civilizations in this book (pp. 45–48), he is a little bit ambivalent about placing Latin America outside the West. However, he seems to me entirely arbitrary about what he thinks are the identifying characteristics of Western culture, and one could as easily argue that the West was made up of Europe and Latin America only, and place the United States in a category sui generis.

⁶ An interesting article in the Washington Post, August 25, 2003, showed the somewhat strange controversy taking place among Latin Americans themselves in the debate over the terms Hispanic or Latino. Although both words are obviously of European origin, a preference for one or the other currently is taken to denote a different cultural identity. One person was quoted as saying: “I'll tell you why I like the word Hispanic … If we use the word Latino, it excludes the Iberian peninsula and the Spaniards. The Iberian peninsula is where we come from. We all have that little thread that's from Spain.” Another was quoted: “Hispanic doesn't work for me because it's about people from Spain … I'm Mexican and we were conquered by people from Spain, so it's kind of an insult.” Darryl Fears, “Latinos or Hispanics? A Debate About Identity,” pp. A1 and A5.

Yet another question of cultural identity by Hispanics concerns the apparently increasing conversion of Hispanics in the United States to Islam. Many of those doing so highlight the period of Moorish domination of Spain and claim that many of those who came to the New World were in fact secret Moslems. Indeed, some say they do not convert to Islam but “revert”! See the website http://www.latinmuslims.com

⁷ There are some signs that Latin American political elites are aware of their cultural identity. When Argentina observed March 25 as the Day of the Unborn Child for the first time, to symbolize its rejection of abortion, her President, Carlos Menem, wrote to the heads of state of all the Latin American countries, and of Spain, Portugal and the Philippines, inviting them to join in this observance. He wrote that “the common historical roots of our nations bind us together not only on matters of language but also in an understanding of man and society based on the fundamental dignity of the human person.” (Catholic World News feature, 3/25/1999)

⁸ “Strictly speaking, there are no true survivals of Indian cultures, even in the remotest Andes; there are transformed beginnings of a culture with Indian and Catholic roots.” Frank, Waldo, “The Hispano‐American's World” in Hanke, Lewis, ed., History of Latin American Civilization (Irvine: University of California, c. 1967) vol. 2, p. 329Google Scholar.

⁹ “Some countries or parts of countries in Latin America may have per‐capita incomes as low as any in Africa or Asia. But Latin America differs from them in that its basic social, political, and economic values come from the European tradition. Three hundred years of colonization by Spain and Portugal, more than one hundred and fifty years of independent life inspired by European and American ideals, and the important contributions by European immigrants, have produced a continent of many races unified by a common set of values inspired by Western Christian culture.” Godoy, Horacio H., “Latin American Culture and Its Transformation” in Shapiro, Samuel, ed., Cultural Factors in Inter‐American Relations (Notre Dame University Press, 1968) p. 167Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Of course, the entire notion of economic development, the idea that civilization as it has evolved in North America and western Europe is the pinnacle of human society and thus the desirable aim of every people, is itself a particular and far from obviously true, statement about man's nature and culture.

¹¹ Pope Pius XI had previously made this same point in his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (nos. 117–120 in Paulist edition).

¹² “During the past decade Mexico has assumed a position somewhat similar to that of Turkey. Just as Turkey abandoned its historic opposition to Europe and attempted to join Europe, Mexico has stopped defining itself by its opposition to the United States and is instead attempting to imitate the United States and to join it in the North American Free Trade Area. Mexican leaders are engaged in the great task of redefining Mexican identity and have introduced fundamental economic reforms that eventually will lead to fundamental political change. In 1991 a top adviser to President Carlos Salinas de Gortari described at length to me all the changes the Salinas government was making. When he finished, I remarked: ‘That's most impressive. It seems to me that basically you want to change Mexico from a Latin American country into a North American country.’ He looked at me with surprise and exclaimed: ‘Exactly! That's precisely what we are trying to do, but of course we could never say so publicly.’“ Huntingdon, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, pp. 42–43.

¹³ Another and nearly perfect example of a question of cultural identity concerns the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, wedged between Poland and Lithuania. Kaliningrad, formerly the Prussian city of Königsberg, home of Immanuel Kant, was deliberately reconstructed, physically and culturally, by the Soviets after World War II to represent and embody the Soviet workers' paradise. “The people who moved there were defined by their Sovietness, not their ethnicity or religion or their connection to any particular landscape. But when the Soviet Union [collapsed], Kaliningraders' nationality was swept away … and suddenly all … who had built their lives in the postwar murk were forced to rethink who they were, now that they were no longer Soviets …. When the Red Army occupied the oblast in April 1945, it erased all forms of prewar life, blew up the castles and cathedrals, and repopulated the [area] with Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Tartars, Georgians, Uzbeks, and tens of thousands of other ‘transplant‐patriots.’“ Savodnik, Peter, “Kaliningrad,” Wilson Quarterly, 27 (2003), p. 16Google Scholar.

¹⁴ What might be considered as the “official” definition of “traditional society” is that of Rostow, Walt in his The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1971)Google Scholar. Rostow defines it: “A traditional society is one whose structure is developed within limited production functions, based on pre‐Newtonian science and technology, and on pre‐Newtonian attitudes toward the physical world. Newton is here used as a symbol for that watershed in history when men came widely to believe that the external world was subject to a few knowable laws, and was systematically capable of productive manipulation.” p. 4. Thus his description includes not only primitive cultures, but the high civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, China, India, Europe in the Middle Ages, indeed all human cultures up to the scientific and technological revolution in eighteenth century England.

¹⁵ Berger, Peter L., The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967) p. 113Google Scholar.

¹⁶ The overthrow of Aristotelian physics was in fact a chief landmark in the rise of the new Western civilization. As Henry Veatch has written, “the very rise of so‐called modern science and modern philosophy was originally associated – certainly in the minds of men like Galileo and Descartes – with a determined repudiation of Aristotle: it was precisely his influence which it was thought necessary to destroy, root and branch, before what we now know as science and philosophy in the modern mode could get off the ground.” And he speaks of “the Aristotelianism that both antedated and was considered antithetical to the whole modern experiment in knowledge and in living.” Aristotle, a Contemporary Appreciation (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1974) p. 4Google Scholar.

¹⁷ “Christian Apologetics” in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1970) p. 102Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Thomas Molnar used similar language to describe the two currents of Enlightenment thought, speaking of “the transparent French and the opaque Germanic thought ….” The Counter‐Revolution (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1969), p. 44Google Scholar.

¹⁹ “Editor's Postscript” in Liberation South, Liberation North (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1981) p. 97Google Scholar. Novak makes the same point elsewhere, for example in his Introduction to the volume, Liberation Theology and the Liberal Society (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1987)Google Scholar, where he writes that the papers in this work were meant “to open a public dialogue between the two forms of liberation theology in the Americas, the ‘liberation theology’ of Latin America and the liberal society of North America” (p. 1).

This shows that Novak is well aware that capitalism, so far from being a conserving force, is perhaps the chief agent of change in the world today. Thus the absurdity of Americans calling those who support capitalism conservatives. For an excellent statement from the Liberal side of the presuppositions and norms of the new society that was created in eighteenth century Britain and North America, see Lerner, Ralph, “Commerce and Character: the Anglo‐American as New Model Man” in Novak, ed., Liberation South, Liberation North, pp. 24–49Google Scholar.

²⁰ The classic statement of this view of the role of religon in the United States is Herberg, Will, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: an Essay in American Religious Sociology, rev. ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960)Google Scholar.

²¹ For example, the attempt to interpret John Paul II in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus as repudiating the Church's previous reservations about capitalism and the market. See, for example, Weigel, George, ed., A New Worldly Order: John Paul II and Human Freedom (Washington: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1992)Google Scholar. But for another view, see Krason, Stephen, “ Centesimus Annus: Maintaining the Continuity of Catholic Social Teaching” Faith & Reason, 17 (1991) pp. 371–87Google Scholar, and the present author's “What Does Centesimus Annus Really Teach?” The Catholic Faith, 7 (2001) pp. 34–40.Google Scholar

²² Speaking of England, Bernard Murchland wrote, “This England was in effect a battleground between two humanisms. One, in a line that might be traced from Francis Bacon through John Locke and Adam Smith to Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, favored the modern developments of science, democracy, and capitalism. The other humanism followed a primarily literary‐religious track, beginning with Renaissance humanists like Petrarch and Erasmus … and continuing in an unbroken line through the German idealists to Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold, Matthew.” Humanism and Capitalism: a Survey of Thought on Morality (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1984) pp. 1–2Google Scholar.

²³ Dawson, Christopher, Christianity in East & West (La Salle, Ill.: Sherwood Sugden, 1981), pp. 104–106Google Scholar.

²⁴ “The development of this rationalized theology and of this secularized millenniarism, whether in its revolutionary‐socialistic or revolutionary‐liberal forms (but especially the latter), is of central importance for the understanding of modern culture. It was in fact a new reformation, which attempted to rationalize and spiritualize religion in an even more complete and drastic way than the first Reformation had done, but which ended in emptying Christianity of all supernatural elements and interpreting history as the progressive development of an immanent principle.” Dawson, Christopher, “The Kingdom of God in History” in Mulloy, John J., ed. The Dynamics of World History (La Salle, Ill.: Sherwood Sugden 1978), p. 283Google Scholar.

²⁵ This is not the place to enter into the controversy over the Church's teaching on the place of religion in the public order since the Second Vatican Council. Suffice it to say that whatever one may think about Dignitatis Humanae, the Council's Declaration on Religious Liberty, the conciliar documents themselves make clear that Catholics are to be active in shaping cultures according to the pattern of the Gospel. For example, Apostolicam Actuositatem, the Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, “The temporal order is to be renewed in such a way that, while its own principles are fully respected, it is harmonized with the principles of the Christian life and adapted to the various conditions of times, places and peoples” (no. 7), while Gaudium et Spes teaches that it is the mission of the laity “to impress the divine law on the affairs of the earthly city” (no. 43).

²⁶ Before his elevation to the Papacy, Pope Benedict XVI referred to our present civilization as “post‐European.” He wrote, “Ist die siegreich über die Welt ausgebreitete Zivilisation der Technik and des Kommerzes die europäische Kultur? Oder ist sie nicht eher posteuropäisch aus dem Ende der altern europäischen Kulturen geboren?” Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Europas Kultur und ihre Krise,” Die Zeit, nr. 50, (7 December 2000).

²⁷ Thus Roger Scruton's work, The West and the Rest (Wilmington: ISI, 2002), gravely errs by identifying the West simply with Enlightenment liberalism and secularism.

²⁸ The attitude and practice of the United States in this regard is complex. Although under the Republican party the United States government professes to oppose abortion and usually curtails funding for some pro‐abortion groups, such as the United Nations Population Fund, nevertheless the U.S. government continues to promote contraception and sex education. However, probably the best promoters of these ills are American popular culture and the general approach to life which capitalism tends to create. Since these generate enormous sums of money, every U.S. government, regardless of political party or professed outlook, will support their penetration into every part of the world.

²⁹ “The United States achieved their independence in the heyday of the European Enlightenment, and this ideology of the Enlightenment was the foundation of their national existence. The peoples of Europe, in spite of their revolutions, were committed to the past and to their separate national traditions. But Americans were committed to the future. They saw the Revolution as the dawn of a new age and a new civilization which was destined to be the civilization of a new world ….” Dawson, Christopher, The Crisis of Western Education (New York: Sheed & Ward, c. 1961), p. 182Google Scholar.

³⁰ The dedication, to President George Washington, of Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, contained a sentence which began, “That the Rights of Man may become as universal as your benevolence can wish, and that you may enjoy the happiness of seeing the New World regenerate the Old ….” It is a very short step from the desire that “the New World regenerate the Old” to George W. Bush's present crusade to force neoliberal democracy upon the entire world.

³¹ President George W. Bush, in his second inaugural address (January 20, 2005) stated, “So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

³² The Philosophical Act in Leisure the Basis of Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1952) p. 121Google Scholar.