A Constellation of Issues around ‘the West’

As I’ve written my essays over these past three months, I’ve noticed some important threads being left unattended too long, so today’s essay will be an attempt to redress that oversight, at least in some small part. Certain of these unattended threads relate to the symbolization ‘the West’.

Like most symbolizations, the West is also a concrete entity—an extraordinarily complex concrete entity, and one with many ‘ragged’ boundaries between the domain of the concrete, and the domain of the abstract. (Actually, the reality of all concrete entities—even such apparently simplex ones as a rock or a chair—has contiguities with the domain of the abstract, and therefore extends out into the area of mythology—but that is another topic, a very complicated one, which we may revisit in the future.) In our analytical probes today, we will oftentimes be conflating the two domains, though it should be fairly evident to the perspicacious reader which domain is being accented more at any given point in the explication.

I do not wish to embroil myself today in a definition of the West—neither in its prosaic history, nor in its more mythopoetic self-understandings. Today, I will merely be picking up some of the threads I have left dangling from previous essays, and while I may touch on aspects of a definition of the West, I will not be centrally tackling that formidable subject.

The ‘Other’

One thread was my mention, in my essay PC Multiculturalism and Non-Western Cultures (August 18, 2006), of the symbolization of ‘the Other’ in Western history—a symbolization of, of course, all those peoples who were not Western. Much has been made of this symbolization, particularly in the pathologically self-critical culture of Western PC Multiculturalism in the last 50-odd years, in the realms of anthropology, political science, history, literature, and that mélange of pop and academic cultures, the news media. In the shallow vortex of PC Multiculturalism, the symbolization of ‘the Other’ is, of course, a singularly and colossally Western error, a horrible thing that evil and/or benighted Westerners constructed by which to dehumanize all those precious childlike beautiful animals the Leftist loves to dote on (perhaps as a way to expiate his and her Western sins) —i.e., the Noble Savage, the Third World creature.

In fact, it is true that Western civilization cultivated this symbolization of ‘the Other’. However, only three things need to be noted about this to put this anti-Western canard to bed:

1) It’s true: the West is superior to all other cultures in history, and all other cultures (particularly Third World cultures) do constitute an ‘Other’ that Western explorers, during the spectacular expansion of the West beginning in the 16th century, found to be remarkably and obviously regressive, barbaric, inhumane, and inferior on so many levels.

2) Nevertheless, the West is a continually evolving experiment—indeed, that is one of the qualities that makes it superior—and it evolved a moral and philosophical consensus by which to modify and ameliorate most of the rough edges of this doctrine of ‘the Other’. Indeed, the West did this so much, it went overboard, to pathological excess, such that it evolved a cluster of ideas by which the West was uniquely guilty of creating this symbolization of ‘the Other’ and, furthermore, that these other cultures were not at all backward, regressive or inhumane, but were merely lovely ethnic cultures being wonderfully ‘diverse’ when they sacrificed virgins (Aztecs) or beat their wives (various American Indian tribes) or hunted heads and shrank them (various Pacific Islanders), and so forth. The West embarked upon this great movement of self-criticism and exoneration of ‘the Other’ to a degree unprecedented in any other culture—and yet still, the anti-Western Westerners can’t see, in their perversely paradoxical self-righteous self-hatred, how superior their own culture is!

3) Finally, Islam historically has developed and put into practice a far more vivid version of the symbolization of ‘the Other’ in their division of Mankind into Believers (i.e., Muslims) and Infidels. Unlike the West, Islam has gone through no self-critical evolution that mitigates this symbolization: it continues today in forms that are so stark and virulent, it would make the typical Western Leftist blanch and ring the alarm bells if they found it expressed by a white Christian.

Racism

The symbolization of ‘the Other’ brings us to the subject of racism. In a future essay, perhaps, I will deal with this subject in more detail, as it is a very complex subject. Suffice it to note now the following things:

1) ‘Race’ itself is a symbolization—a symbolization that was developed with the most sophistication in the West. As with all symbolizations of concrete things, it shades off into the realm of mythology. We may say that ‘race’ is a symbolization that mythopoetically was engendered in the history of the West (with complications added by certain suppositions—not all entirely noetic—arising from the development of modern Western natural science, not to mention by coincident currents of modern Gnosticism) to make some sense of the mysterious differentiation of Mankind—a differentiation that was rendered more acute as the West began to encounter more different peoples in the world beginning in the 16th century with the beginning of the great Age of Exploration and subsequent colonization. Various paradigms were developed in the West by which to explain this mysterious differentiation of Mankind, but none of these paradigms were sufficient. We are currently left with the latest paradigm that admits some sort of differentiation of Mankind into ‘races’, but leaves ambiguously and amorphously hanging many questions about this differentiation—questions which are never answered, but only continually put off by regular tweakings of the interpretations of the data, each attempt at tweaking over the past few decades more gingerly and fastidious than the last, in order to placate the gods of PC Multiculturalism.

2) Nevertheless, there is a real differentiation of Mankind, and though its aetiology and destiny is mysterious, it has certain concrete manifestations—among which is that, for some mysterious reason, that portion of Mankind more or less coherent as ‘the West’ has been more progressive and more humane than all other portions of Mankind in history.

3) All non-Western peoples practice racism and in fact, most non-Western peoples practice racism far more regularly, endemically and virulently than do Western people—particularly as the modern West has progressed to try to better its own record of racism while most other non-Western cultures have lagged behind. It is, nevertheless, part of the anti-Western given of the PC Multiculturalist template (congruent with the opinions of most non-Western peoples) that the West is singularly guilty of racism while all other non-Western (and, of course, non-white par excellence) peoples are incapable of racism. Even after the PC Multiculturalist has been shown the incontrovertible evidence of racism on the part of non-Westerns, he or she will skew the interpretation of that data in order to absolve the non-Westerner—and, for added flavor, put an extra twist of the knife to somehow blame the white West for that fact of racism among non-white non-Western peoples. The most egregious non-Western racist is the Muslim, not only because their racism is framed most colossally as a division of all Mankind into two races (Muslim and Infidel), and not only because they have put that racism into savage practice by mass-murdering millions of non-Muslims over the centuries, and virtually (or actually) enslaving millions of others—but also because their racism is sanctified by being conceived as emanating directly and literally from God’s own mouth to Mohammed’s ear. This makes Islamic racism that much more dangerous and that much less amenable to the effects of the kinds of rational progress to which the modern West has been uniquely open.

The West as the World

Although I devoted an entire essay to this topic in The West as equivalent to the Cosmos (6/25/06), there was at least one thread left hanging in that essay which needs to be integrated into the ongoing, never-ending mosaic that is this blog: Not only is the West a symbolization equivalent to Cosmos (for reasons I explained in that essay), but also, by extension, the West is a symbolization equivalent to the symbolization the World, for the reason that the World is the modern Western equivalent (based upon medieval Christian philosophy) of the classical Cosmos. But there is more to it than that. The modern West, through its spectacular progress and subsequent comprehension of the rest of the world over the past 400 years—enveloping and integrating the rest of the world into a fairly unified system of geopolitics and economics, as well as a parallel development of pop cultural influences—has made the entire world, in many significant respects, Western.

The West in its current hegemony of the rest of the World offers far more protection of local non-Western mores and cultures and more respect for non-Westerners in general, than any other non-Western hegemony would if it had the power—particularly an Islamic hegemony. Indeed, this particular feature of Western superiority has, like many others, been pathologically deformed into excess by PC Multiculturalism, whereby our machine of respect for other cultures is set on auto-pilot and cannot even recognize a pernicious non-Western, mostly non-white culture when it comes into our radar: Islam. Our PC Multiculturalist template, born of the good Western value of respecting other cultures, is so pathologically excessive, it causes us to bend over backwards to respect and protect Muslims even when they contradict (blatantly or insidiously) the very humane and liberal ideals upon which that PC Multiculturalism was based.