https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/09/western-civilisation-appiah-reith-lecture
Kwame Anthony Appiah wants you to know, you chauvinistic rube, that there is no such thing as western civilization. You’ve been laboring under a delusion all your benighted, bigoted life. But fear not, easily confused and bamboozled knuckle dragger, because a British university educated son of a Ghanian father and mud sharking, aristocratic british mother is here to repeal and replace at least one major building block in the impressive edifice of superstitious nonsense you call a mind.
We’ve all heard the tune of‘Western Civilization’ whistle through the wind flaps of innumerable defenders and detractors. For some, Western Civilization is the source of all things right, good, beautiful and true. It’s the mighty river of technologically innovative, democratically governed, wealth creating and distributing societies feeding a thousand dependent and often ungrateful tributary streams. To its many fortunate sons, men and women of the earth, of humble, untitled origins and working or middle class stations, Western Civilization grants powers and gives pleasures that would turn a roman emperor neon green with apoplectic envy.
But all things great attract the minor and minuscule; parasites, gnats, and ankle biting vermin living for no other purpose than tearing down and reveling in the ruin of what they could never create or maintain with their own effort. Bilious baboons running on the self immolating fuel of high time preference hoot and howl in furious disapproval at the sight of the slower burning self sustaining ways of the gratification delaying, posterity oriented, forward thinking and past preserving civilized type. Slaves of savage whim despise those with the mettle to master themselves.
And so you hear no end of recycled garbage about how Western Civilization is the great scourge of the earth. The mighty tyrant, the imperial occupier, the enforcer of alien ideals, the merciless meddler, corrupter, and perverter. Destroyer of nature, Juggernaut industrial rape ship set to warp speed resource extraction. Exporter of filth and degeneracy, sower of discordant seeds of stinking weeds. On the strength of philosophical well poisoners and scientifically calibrated oppressors, Western Civilization turns life on earth into a broiling hell for most to create heaven for a few.
Where anything of monumental importance is contested, where legacies are on the line and action is necessary, an academic will be there to fart out a nebulous gas cloud of obfuscation. The latest hand waving magic act begins with its conclusion in the headline and dully spins out unconvincing, stale, specious arguments in support of what it so dearly wants you to believe. Underneath the pompous, loopy, circular verbal trickery and smokescreen rhetoric is an insidious message, crystalline in its clarity and intent.
White western man of european descent, you who have any sense of belonging to a great tradition, a member of a racial or religious majority keen on preserving that majority status: you are destined for displacement and dispossession. A thousand years of marginalization, of tearful regrets and apologies from the shit specked bottom rung of our new world ladder ladder awaits you. It’s been decided and only has to be played out, and the less you resist, the better. Because you see, what you think you’ve inherited belongs to everyone else now. Your descent means nothing; it’s genes, identity and culture for everyone else but you.
All other peoples of the world are empowered to stick together as genetically related populations with binding customs and traditions for the purpose of looting the storehouses of civilization built by your ancestors. You are to enthusiastically join the chorus of croaking swamp frogs and demand your own demise; the only discarded scrap of ethnic consciousness tossed from the table of your well fed superiors is the acute awareness of your collective and individual guilt.
Characteristic of deconstructive approaches like the one our vibrant scholar takes is a kind of exaggerated shadow boxing with flimsy and weak concepts conjured out of thin air. What the author undresses is what he himself first dresses up. These kinds of recliner ready wank sessions sit back on tacit acceptance of highly skewed, ill or undefined terms just waiting to be corrosively analyzed into oblivion. No normal person ever talks about or believes in “essentialism”, or has a literal, fundamentalist understanding of ideal forms or unchanging essences.
No one thinks that a culture is only cohesive and genuine if it’s strictly composed of one homogenous group of people living in the exact same place over an infinite span of time without any adaptations, mutations, assimilations, cross pollinations, migrations, or foreign elements whatsoever. What we call Western Civilization is a specific interlacing of peoples, practices, ideas, and values which have evolved over time in a continuous and consistent enough fashion to be recognizable and distinctive. The narrative or mythic aspect of a culture is no mark against its solidity or reality.
Arab scholars commenting on Greek philosophy and medieval peasants ignorant of Latin are some of the pathetic examples brought forth as empirical evidence of Western Civilization’s lack of continuity and homogeneity, and therefore its nullity. Our resident expert on things that don’t exist wants to turn higher, lower, and auxiliary threads of a history into proof of its fraying and fabrication. “See, you hoodwinked hoodlum, you think the latin language and greek philosophy are part of your heritage, but not everyone knew latin and a few muslims handled Aristotle for a while, so forget about claiming anything special for yourself.”
Just because not every one is on the exact same page of cultural transmission doesn’t mean the greater book has no binding. And it doesn’t mean there aren’t common interests threatened by hostile forces without and undermined by corrosive, defeatist, dysfunctional elements within. Don’t worry, deracinated consumption drone, it’s all good now, our greasy high priest of pastiche reassures us; you can read Kant and listen to rap at the same time. You can gorge yourself at the buffet of instantaneous pap culture. A little of this, a little of that, a little more of this over here until you’re fat and demoralized with no room left for any fight within you. “Sorry, I stuffed myself with smatterings of our new global culture, I’m ready to roll over for anyone and anything now.”
The exact term “Western Civilization” may in fact be modern, but it’s an appropriate and applicable term for the coalescing of historically continuous patterns of interaction among groups of people with geographic, genetic, and intellectual common ground. Although it’s amenable to changes, it can’t just become anything whatsoever. And although there's an enduring identity over time, it doesn’t mean there’s an immaterial essence waiting to be deconstructed and dismissed.
History always has a retroactive aspect to it. People in the present have a wider scope through which to view the actions of their ancestors that led to their current conditions. And sometimes the catalyst of a strong collective identity is the emergence or reemergence of a vigorous, determined enemy. The higher and lower classes of the western world do have their own conflicts with each other, but they also have shared ways and beliefs to defend as a unified people. Especially in times of local fragmentation and familial breakdown, people need larger banners to rally under if they want to survive, even if those banners contain strands of myth and fantasy.
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