Debate About Western Superiority
I would of paid good money to see this debate in which the statement ‘We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values’ was argued. While some readers on this blog find merely discussing this kind of thing distasteful its nice to know what there are some willing to have this kind of debate.
I thought this was an excellent counter argument:
‘Our superiority need not be asserted violently.’ He reiterated a point made by David Aaronovitch about the crisis of Abu Ghraib. Ultimately the discovery that America had committed torture reaffirmed liberal values. ‘Lynndie England was found guilty,’ Murray said, ‘in the West. By the West. For the West.’
I very sympathetic to this position:
The winning majority howled with pleasure when Ibn Warraq summed up the debate: ‘I don’t want to live in a society where I get stoned for committing adultery. I want to live in a society where I get stoned. And then commit adultery.’
At the end the audience gets to vote and Western Value came out on top. Apparently the debate audience is more classically liberal than the liberals that read my blog.
October 12th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Steve says:
While some readers on this blog find merely discussing this kind of thing distasteful
I say:
The mere discussion? You said in plain words that it was a fact that western culture is better than eastern culture. You said it was a simple judgment that anyone with good sense could make. You said muslims were bad. Muslims make up 25% of this world. Some readers found the statements to be racist.
Let’s not make your white supremacy someone else’s problem.
October 12th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
Sigh…
Please point to where I say Muslim in the context you are using it.
October 12th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
I apologize for taking it a step further when those were not your “true” words. I hate when you do that, so I admit that I did. However, what you said was:
One must have the good sense to discern between good and bad. Western culture is good while middle-east culture bad.
There are several religious and cultural values in the middle east. I had suspected you were talking about Islamic countries. But, taking your words at face value, I guess all middle-east culture is bad. Including countries like Armenia which is a democratic, mostly christian country.
Maybe you weren’t calling out the muslims, instead just putting the middle-east muslims in with many other cultures that you or I have no experience with. Good sense to judge, eh?
October 12th, 2007 at 10:23 pm
“One widely used definition of the “Middle East” is that of the airline industry, maintained by the IATA standards organization. This definition — as of early 2007 — includes Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestinian territories, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.” - Wikipedia
Steve: Honestly, I think your position would be clearer if you simply said “culture informed by radical and harsh interpretation of religious doctrine, particularly when it involves attempts to force said interpretation on others”, rather than “Middle Eastern culture”. As I mentioned in conversation, there are many different cultures within the Middle East, and I don’t think you are really talking about (for example) Israelis when you say “Middle Eastern culture”, nor do you wish (at least, I hope you don’t) to single out this behavior as worse when it occurs in the Middle East rather than another region of the world.
Jamie: Armenia isn’t literally part of the Middle East. Bahrain would be a better example.
http://web.amnesty.org/web/wire.nsf/March2002/Bahrain
In 2005 Kuwait followed in expanding suffrage to some women (previously there were heavy restrictions on voting, with only 15% of the population eligible to vote). Granted, both of these countries still have a long way to go, but it seems like they are making clear steps in what most people here would likely consider the ‘right’ direction. And this was achieved in a fashion much cheaper (both financially and in terms of loss of life) than a protracted occupation.
October 12th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
So if a Jainist (an ancient Indian religion) says that all people deserve independence and that we should not attempt to control each other through violent means, are they singing the praises of Western Superiority? Or are they expressing the primary tenants of their millenia-old Eastern religion?
The problem you have here is that you’re trying to set up a strict identity between the political and cultural actions of teh United States and the liberalistic spirit and ideals that our country was founded on. But that strict identity just doesn’t exist- indeed, many (if not most) Americans today disagree with a large number of those basic liberal tenants you praise, and they certainly aren’t the single, unchallenged motivating factor behind our international policy.
I have no problem with saying that freedom is better than oppression, or even more concretely that Democracy is better than Monarchy/Dictatorship. But when you say that western culture is better tahn middle-eastern culture, you’re not comparing two sets of concepts, you’re talking about real things in the real world, and you’re making blanket statements that collapses across millions of individuals and topics/ideas/events that you (and I) really know nothing about.
I’m never going to be satisfied with that type of over-simplified rhetoric on ANY topic.
October 13th, 2007 at 1:09 am
Worse than over-simplified rhetoric is redundancy of arguments.
In “simple” words: We’ve been there a numerous times, in differents shades of arguments. Now, the data, the arguments, the direction couldn’t be any clearer unfolded - couldn’t be more persuasive and convincing. And? AND???
Is that the absurdity Steve was talking about? With any new point, we’re feeding his re-picking on older points, we find ourselves justifiying, trying to employ HIS standards of “good sense judgements”, and thereby, at times ridiculing the situation on the whole.