Mind the Gap

From Foreign Policy-

Talk of a global "clash of civilizations," first propounded by Samuel P. Huntington in the early 1990s, has been criticized and debated for many years -- and like the current vogue for the walking dead, the "clash" thesis refuses to lie down. In his article ("The Convergence of Civilizations," January/February 2013), Charles Kenny takes aim at this thesis, arguing, quite rightly, that the West is not on an inevitable collision course with the Muslim world.

At the same time, however, it is unclear that "shared values are converging across countries," as Kenny argues. The convergence thesis rests on the premise that repeated exposure to the ideas and images transmitted by Hollywood during the heyday of movies, CNN International during the 1980s, and YouTube and Twitter today will gradually undermine indigenous values and local norms. Consequently, many deeply conservative cultures fear that opening the floodgates to Western media will erode faith in religion, respect for marriage and the family, and deference toward traditional sources of authority. This argument, however, exaggerates the impact of, and access to, globalized mass communications and social media in many of the world's poorer countries.

Evidence from the World Values Survey now covers almost 90 percent of the world's population, and the data allow analysis of trends in public opinion since the early 1980s. The results reveal the stubborn persistence of substantial contrasts in values among rich and poor societies around the globe.

Religiosity, for example, persists most strongly among poor populations vulnerable to physical and other harms. At the same time, secularization and the concomitant eroding of religious practices, values, and beliefs have occurred most clearly among wealthy, secure demographics in post-industrial societies. Thus a large -- and sometimes growing -- values gap driven by socioeconomic conditions persists between religious and secular societies irrespective of Western communications.

Similarly, the residents of affluent countries have become far more liberal over time on a wide range of social values and matters of sexual morality, exemplified by issues such as tolerance of homosexuality and support for gay rights, attitudes toward marriage and divorce, and ideas about the appropriate role of the different sexes. In high-income countries, the prevailing norms concerning gender and sexual orientation are changing much more rapidly than in low-income countries, with the result that a growing gap is opening between these societies. As illustrated by the deepening schism in the Episcopal Church over the role of female religious leaders, poorer countries often sharply reject this liberalization as Western decadence.

More here-

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/03/04/mind_the_gap