April 17, 2005
Are We Really Better?
In A Study of History, Arnold J. Toynbee writes of the
"misconception of the 'unity of civilization'":
quote:
"The misleading feature is the fact that, in modern
times,* our own Western Civilization has cast the net
of its economic system all around the World, and this economic
unification on a Western basis has been followed by a political
unification on the same basis which has gone almost as far; for
though the conquests of Western armies and governments have been
neither as extensive nor as thorough as the conquests of Western
manufacturers and technicians, it is nevertheless a fact that
all states of the contemporary world form part of a single
political system of western origin.
"These are striking facts, but to regard them as evidence of the
unity of civilization is a superficial view. While the economic
and political maps have now been westernized, the cultural map
remains substantially what is was before our Western Society
started its career of economic and political conquest. On the
cultural plane, for those who have eyes to see, the lineaments
of the four living non-Western civilizations are still clear.
But many have not such eyes; and their outlook is illustrated
in the use of the English word 'natives' and of equivalent
words in other Western languages.
"When we Westerners call people 'natives' we implicitly take
the cultural colour out of our perception of them. We see them
as wild animals infesting the country in which we happen to
come across them, as part of the local flora and fauna and not
as men of like passions with ourselves. So long as we think of
them as 'natives' we may exterminate them or, as is more likely
to-day, domesticate them and honestly (perhaps not altogether
mistakenly) believe that we are improving the breed, but we do
not begin to understand them."
::
* This was first published in 1946.
more:
I think that Toynbee's words here exposes the blind-folds that
so many pundits wear. When I hear people saying such things as:
quote: Edwin A. Locke, Ayn Rand Institute
"There are three fundamental respects in which Western culture
is objectively the best. These are the core values or core
achievements of Western civilization, and what made America
great."
quote: Michael S. Berliner, Ayn Rand Institute
"We should honor Western civilization not for the ethnocentric
reason that some of us happen to have European ancestors but
because it is the objectively superior culture."
quote: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
"We should be conscious of the superiority of our civilization,
which consists of a value system that has given people
widespread prosperity in those countries that embrace it, and
guarantees respect for human rights and religion. This respect
certainly does not exist in Islamic countries."
quote: Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online
"There's not a single category of enlightened governance in
which the West broadly speaking isn't superior to the Islamic
world—again, broadly speaking."
The world is a spectrum of peoples from one 'end' of the world
to the other, but who can say that one people is "better" than
another?
Who can say that a person living in New York with apartment,
cable television, a computer, etc. is "better" in any way than
someone living in, say, the Amazon, without any "modern"
technology?
Certainly, the amount of or sophistication of materials one is
surrounded with is not a measure of the importance of a person,
let alone a people.
What of having a government? The New Yorker may be part of a
representative democracy, and the Amazonian part of an idyllic
system that lacks written laws of any kind. But what is a
"government?" Can it not simply be the way a society gets along?
It need not be written down.
Or perhaps it is that we have books, art, intellectual pursuits,
etc., where they have simple art and story-telling. Given the
extraordinary value now placed on historical artifacts I find
this thought to be quite ridiculous.
That Native Americans did not invent the wheel we are told is
an example of their inferiority. Since they had no pack animals
other than dogs they never had reason to go beyond the travois.
Only those whose understanding of "Indians" fails to go beyond
movies would give merit to this.
Try as I may, I can not come up with anything, any part of a
people's culture, that would set them above others.
I chose the comparison of a New Yorker and an Amazonian as the
two ends of the material and governmental spectrum. The
conclusion I draw is that if two cultures are living peaceful,
free, satisfying lives then the economic systems (amount of
technology) and the government (amount of written laws) do not
make the case that one is in any way "better" than the other.
What then of the making of war upon one's neighbor? What sticks
out from the minds of the pundits of Western Civilization these
days is that "we" only make war because we have to at times to
suppress fascism, dictators and genocide--the World Wars and the
conflicts in Bosnia and the Gulf given as examples. Anyone who
reads history though knows that the history of the rise of
Western Civilization has been one based upon conquest by war.
The U.S. in particular has its own history of invasion,
annexation and dictator creation, little as it may be mentioned.
All fascist dictators of modern history have been products of
Western Civilization. And, as many pointed out in the past
regarding Germany's and Japan's warring phases, the German and
the Japanese people were not to blame, their leaders were.
(Alas, today, very few in the U.S. point out that the people of
the middle east are not to blame. In fact, many pundits these
days specifically blame the Muslim religion.)
As for the civilizations of the New World, the pundits are quick
to point out that there was cannibalism and human sacrifice. But
beyond few ritual or war based instances of cannibalism, and the
limited systems of sacrifice by the Aztecs and Mayans, these two
aspects of the New World were no worse than those of witch
burnings and institutionalized, generational systems of slavery
of England, Europe and America.
At any point in history can anyone say that of all the separate
peoples across the wide spectrum of civilizations that one is
better than all the rest?
It boils down to a vile, supremacist view based upon
mythological ideals of greatness solely on material conquest
and accomplishments. (We got a man on the moon first so
therefore we were better than the Russians for example.)
It can only be the amount of tolerance and justice that a
society has towards all people that could be used in any way
as a measure of it's worth.