Is The West The Best? After The Attacks: Taking A Closer Look At Both Sides of The World

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...“to be rich, Western and white is not, in fact,
always to be right,” and “we are certainly not supreme,
super-evolved, Western beings.”

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The “West is best” refrain has not gone unchallenged. Multiculturalists and leftists in general have always disputed the notion that Europe’s cultural heritage is better than those of other societies. They cite imperialism, racism, capitalism and even unbridled individualism as examples of the Occident’s less than perfect track record. In the alternative Toronto weekly Eye, columnist Sky Gilbert summed up the left's world view in a few catch phrases: “to be rich, Western and white is not, in fact, always to be right,” and “we are certainly not supreme, super-evolved, Western beings.” He expressed fear that Westerners’ horror over the attacks, coupled with US President George W. Bush’s “ultra-right-wing presidency,” will cause the already existing “demonization of the Third World” to “spin out of control.”

Those who praise Occidental civilization as the pinnacle of human achievement do frequently lose sight of quite a few important points. For example, New Jersey-based writer Cathy Young - who, by the way, is not Western herself; born Ekaterina Jung to a Jewish family in the former Soviet Union, she emigrated to the United States in her late teens – pays homage to the “uniquely Western ideal… [of] the technological mastery of nature.” Absent from her paean is the fact that for a long time Europe was far from being the most technologically developed area of the world. In fact, many of the discoveries by Europeans in the Renaissance and afterwards were made possible by the Muslim Arabs’ scientific advances in the Middle Ages. China also boasted an impressive tradition of scientific endeavor during the same period, giving the world what are now staple items like paper, gunpowder, and the wheelbarrow. Nor are modern non-Western societies averse to technological progress; witness for instance the industrialization of Japan.

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In fact, many of the discoveries by Europeans in
the Renaissance and afterwards were made possible by the
Muslim Arabs’ scientific advances in the Middle Ages.
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Even from a social point of view, Western countries are not necessarily more evolved than their non-Occidental counterparts. The claim has often been made that women enjoy higher status in the West than in any other part of the world. But that’s not always true on a nation-by-nation basis. For example, as late as the 1970’s the Philippines had a higher percentage of female doctors than the United States did. Similarly, a recent Gallup poll of sixteen nations found that Thais were more likely to approve of unmarried couples having children than were Americans (and don’t tell me that opposition to out-of-wedlock childbearing isn’t sexist; as American feminist Ellen Willis says, trying to set a single sexual standard is like telling the rich that they too can sleep under bridges).

Yet as much as I find the pro-West crowd unenlightened at best and embarrassing at worst, people like Sky Gilbert also leave me with a number of unanswered questions. In their haste to distance themselves from what they see as the imperialistic oppressor, leftists appear to forget that many of the values they hold dear are embraced more by the Occident than by any other part of the world. Never mind abstract concepts like freedom, secularism and the importance of the individual. Take something as concrete as capital punishment – a practice that leftists and liberals almost universally oppose. Though a smattering of nations around the globe have abolished the death penalty, the only region as a group to do away with it is the West – Western Europe itself and the so-called neo-Europes abroad, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Latin America. Even liberals who would deplore the glorification of the Occident by individuals like Berlusconi are forced to admit that the elimination of the death penalty is largely a Western phenomenon. One American abolitionist website wonders aloud why the US continues to execute its citizens when the countries with which Americans identify culturally – i.e. those in Latin America and Western Europe – no longer do so.

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...the Far East is less similar to the West than
the Muslim world is (for example, doctrinally Islam resembles
Christianity much more than Buddhism does)
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In addition, anti-Western leftists seem somewhat confused as to what is East and what is West. Sky Gilbert describes the destruction of the World Trade Center as an example of “East destroying West.” But what does he mean by “East?” Apparently not East Asia (Japan, China, Korea and so on), which has had nothing to do with the attacks, but the Middle East. And here lies the rub: when people either praise the West to the high heavens or chide others for doing so, they’re usually comparing the Occident to the Middle East, not East Asia. Perhaps this is because even though in some ways the Far East is less similar to the West than the Muslim world is (for example, doctrinally Islam resembles Christianity much more than Buddhism does), so-called “Asian values” appear less extreme and thus less threatening. For instance, most Westerners can live with the fact that a woman in Japan who has a child out of wedlock is going to face more social disapproval than she would in Sweden or Colombia. Yet they’re horrified by accounts of women in Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern countries being publicly executed for adultery. And some Westerners actually like “Asian values.” When Singaporean authorities caned a young American man for vandalizing cars in the mid-nineties, many people in the United States and Canada cheered. Sure, the sentence was harsh, but in some respects it stood as a welcome contrast to the laughably short jail terms juvenile delinquents in the West receive for much worse crimes.

Gilbert isn’t quite clear what the West is either. His combination of the words “rich,” “Western,” and “white” effectively excludes the many white people in the West who don’t happen to be rich, as well as non-whites who have lived there for generations, such as American blacks. Gilbert also forgets that some Western nations, like most of those in Latin America, do not have a white majority population. Nor does his “rich, Western and white” paradigm account for the mainly white inhabitants of Eastern Europe, who are neither Western nor, in many cases, wealthy.

The September 11 tragedy seems to have divided observers into two camps: the anti-Western, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist faction on one hand and the rah-rah West crowd on the other. But maybe it would be best to acknowledge that the West is simply one culture among many and that it needs neither to be demonized nor unduly glorified.

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