Justifications For Colonialization Due To Western Superiority

It's easy for me to understand how one civilization thinks it is better than another, because it's easy to see how an individual person thinks they are better than everybody else, and that's why groups are so horrible- they magnify the problems of all the individuals within them until the horde is so convinced of its superiority that it makes of itself quite a nuisance.

The only thing worse than a person is a group, because it's in groups that people tell each other what they've decided they already want to hear so loud and so often that they're all convinced.



Today I was reading in A Study of History, (Arnold Toynby, ed; D.C. Somervell) and some specific reasons were given concerning the superiority of Western Civilization.  On page 36, there are several indicators of Western superiority.

People are so busy trying to either pretend like there is no such idea or that it's wrong that we don't even talk about the obvious.




The whole world is now involved in one economic system of the West's designing, and the lines on the map that define nations are the result of decisions and definitions made in the West as to where and what constitutes a country.  The United Nations is in New York, which had to give up being the capital of the United States so it could vie for the title of capital of the world.  How do you think it's doing in this quest?

Even in this book, this amazing truth of economic and political dominance is called only a "superficial view."  I'm not going to call it superficial, because people all over the world are using terms and concepts defined in the West to define themselves.  We made the maps people, let's not underestimate this.  People all over the world aren't of course, necessarily using an alphabet that I'd recognize to contemplate these truths, but they probably are, and lots of them are speaking English while they discuss it.  And I'd add that the whole world now goes along with a Western conception of time; whether we call it A.D. or C.E, the division marker is the life of Christ.  And the whole world likes many things about Western Pop culture also.  So even if people all over the world aren't aware of it, they are going along with a dominance that started in the West that is now global.

Whether you think this is good, or whether you think this is evil, or whether you don't think of it as either one; let's all just agree that it is.

While the economic and political maps have now been Westernized, the cultural map remains substantially what it was before our Western Society started on its career of economic and political conquest.  

If we start with the presumption, as this book does, that the whole world is made of five societies, then we do have to admit that entire continents have been ignored in the study of history.  But that doesn't mean that these deep and lasting lines of demarcation don't have a lot to teach us. .

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.

This is rough.  No wonder many don't want to look behind the curtain and see what's really there.

Then there are three specific justifications listed for the belief that Western Civilization is better than anybody else's or maybe even the only real civilization; which will be subsequently proven wrong.

These are really interesting.

p. 37

The assumption that there is only one river of civilization, our own, and that all others are either tributary to it or else lost in the desert sands- may be traced to three roots : the egocentric illusion, the illusion of 'the unchanging East', and the illusion of progress as a movement that proceeds in a straight line. 

I'll add a few other illusions.  We divide the world into East and West, and that's helpful but we all have to admit that dividing one big thing into two and thinking we now understand it, is a really really big generalization.  We divide religion into monotheism and polytheism, and maybe that's what we're actually defining when we try to force every part of the globe into one of two categories.

I almost don't want to add it here, but there's really only one natural category of two that I think of as helpful and that is male/female.  Some people pretend like it's a sliding scale, but there really are two categories here, unlike race or class.

But let's be real.  If we divide the world into two, that may tell us something, but East/West or more recently North/South really just means us and them, doesn't it?



I look forward to reading about 'the unchanging East' which I assume to be a way of us saying we are progressing, while them aren't.

I can't stand the idea of progress as a movement in a straight line.  That is so stupid to me and I see it assumed so often.