A Thought on Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera’s English website seems to me a most welcome and extraordinary media phenomenon. Headquartered in Dohar, Qatar, Al Jazeera covers the whole world with what appears to me to be a remarkable evenhandedness. With that general compliment out of the way, let me get to my present point: the English version of this Arabic/Muslim service underscores what I consider one of the central and even amusing facts of today’s world: the British are today’s “Greeks”; the Americans are its “Romans.”

Many of the site's anchors are actually British, but even more significant is the fact that many of its non-British anchors and announcers employ a crisp British-accented English, most of them closer to the Oxford standard than to what I think of as any of the contemporary provincial Englishes. So the whole thing gives off a kind of British, upper class sheen that tends to convince us that we are getting the cool, crisp, superior overview.

A considerable number of their correspondents, especially from America, speak with American accents, but they do not dominate; the British “thing” does.

Alexander conquered the “East” in his time and spread Greek language and culture far and wide. Then came the Romans with their bigger, more ruthless, and somewhat flat-footed empire such that one tends to forget that the Greeks had pioneered the conquest of the world before them. Things Greek persisted, with a marked undertone that “things Greek” were more cultured, more cultivated, and generally tonier than “things Roman.”

Ditto now. The British did their empire first and always dressed for dinner and never (almost never) “went  native.” Then we, that is “the Americans,” came along and have lain on the world with a very heavy weight, with a great deal of even heavier hypocrisy about out purposes.

Where am I going with this? Rome produced a religion that in its turn conquered the Roman Empire and ultimately the world, when the British took up capitalism and the “white man’s burden,” accumulating colonies until the map was almost all British red.

The Christian religion broke in two about 1000 AD—into Greek and Roman (Latin) halves, with much further fisiparousness, another 500 years along, into a zillion protestantisms in the Roman half.

What can we look for now? Let me state as a kind of cultural axiom that religion undergirds all. 

Now, Christianity has been rejected by Europe in favor of “science” and all that. America is too flat and dead and Mammonite in its present manifestation to offer much hope for spiritual reform. (Maybe, but I don’t look for it.) It is also hard to even imagine an improvement on the eternal and metaphysical implications of the Lord Jesus Christ (Ego sum qui sum) were his impact to be somewhat detached from hierarchical Rome and broadened to take in—democratically—the whole world, as the writings of Meister Eckhart, Brother Lawrence, Simon Weil, and many others imply can be done.

I’ll leave it there for the moment. I have some more ideas but need to think a bit and perhaps return to them later.