What's So Great About America (7 page)

Despite its intellectual limitations, the environmental school retains its appeal among critics of the West because it attributes the civilizational superiority of Europe largely to chance. But there is a second, even more popular, explanation within the anti-Western camp. According to this view, the reason that Western civilization became dominant in the past five hundred years is because it is evil. Oppression—and specifically the crimes of ethnocentrism, colonialism, imperialism, and racism—is said to be the key to Western success. This may be called the school of “oppression theory,” and its thesis may be summarized in the statement that the West grew rich and powerful by beating up everybody else and taking their stuff.

Oppression theory is highly favored by advocates of multiculturalism because it allows them to account for the disjunction between their dogma of cultural equality and the reality that the cultures of the world are far from equal. Multiculturalists reason that because all cultures are equal, existing inequality is undoubtedly the consequence of some cultures oppressing others. A few years ago Jesse Jackson led a group of protesters at Stanford University with banners advertising the sins of the West. Jackson and the demonstrators chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture's got to go.” A more scholarly version of the oppression thesis can be found in the works of Edward Said, particularly in his influential study
Orientalism
and his more recent book
Culture and Imperialism
.

Outside the West, oppression theory is also popular among Third World intellectuals like the Marxist scholar Samir Amin, author of
Eurocentrism
. Another Marxist, Walter Rodney, blames European colonialism for “draining African wealth and making it impossible to develop more rapidly the resources of the continent.”
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A similar note is struck by the African writer Chinweizu, who offers the following explanation for African underdevelopment: “White hordes have sallied forth from their western homelands to assault, loot, occupy, rule, and exploit the world. Even now, the fury of their expansionist assault upon the rest of us has not abated.”
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Perhaps the most forceful exponent of oppression theory is the anticolonial writer Frantz Fanon. Fanon writes, “European opulence has been founded on slavery. The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races.”
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In recent years Fanon's oppression thesis has been taken up with a vengeance by many in the Islamic world. Islamic radicals are familiar with, and frequently cite, Fanon. And Muslim devotees of his work go considerably beyond the bin Laden circle. Even many Muslims who do not condone terrorism seem firmly to believe that they are poor because the West is rich, that somehow the West is to blame for their poverty and misery.

The multicultural remedy is a simple one. Multiculturalists call upon the West to publicly atone for its crimes and pay up. Reparations for slavery is the favored approach. Jesse Jackson strongly supports the idea.
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African-American activist Randall Robinson advocated it in a recent book, black lawyers like Johnnie Cochran and Charles Ogletree are drawing up a legal strategy to promote
it through the courts, and members of the Congressional Black Caucus have taken up the political cudgels to convince the U.S. government to go along. For many Third World and Islamic activists, reparations are not enough. For them, the crimes of the West provide a justification for violence. Fanon himself advocated such violence—“The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor”—and his battle cry has been taken up by Islamic radicals who have found in it an added pretext for
jihad.

It must be granted that if the wealth and success of the West are the product of distinctive Western evils such as slavery and colonialism, if they amount to nothing more than “stolen goods” pirated from the rest of the world, then the West should atone for its crimes and pay reparations to those it has robbed. One could even argue that, under such circumstances, some form of violent retaliation against an unrepentant West is both understandable and justified. The question we must face, therefore, is whether the advocates of oppression theory are right.

I
t is impossible to deny that ethnocentrism, colonialism, and slavery are all part of the history of the West. What we have to determine, however, is whether there is anything intrinsically Western about these practices, and whether the West's participation in them is the cause of its wealth and success.

First, ethnocentrism. This notion that “our way is the best way” and that “we are better than everyone else” is certainly part of the legacy of Europe going all the way back to the ancient
Greeks. The ancient Greeks distinguished between the civilized and the barbarians, and found themselves to be the most civilized people in the world. Later the medieval Christians drew their own distinction: between the believer and the infidel. Still later the champions of the West drew another line of demarcation, this time between the white man, who was held to be superior, and the yellow and brown and black men, who were held to be inferior.

When we look to other cultures, however, we find that there is nothing distinctively Western about ethnocentrism. It is present in abundance beyond Western shores. The Chinese, for instance, believed themselves to be the Middle Kingdom, the center of the universe. They were so convinced of this that Western visitors like the Jesuit Matteo Ricci could persuade the Chinese court to consider Western maps only when they were redrawn to place China at the center of the world. And just as the Chinese emperors considered themselves emissaries of heaven, so too the Indian kings called themselves
Chakravarty Rajas,
which literally means “universal sovereigns.” Of course Islam resembled Christianity in believing itself in possession of the whole revealed truth, with everyone else consigned to ignorance and darkness.

These arrogant proclamations may be understandable when they are made by the representatives of great civilizations, but anthropologists like Ruth Benedict show that even the world's most primitive tribes are ethnocentric. Indeed, it is frequently the case that the less developed a tribe, the more ethnocentric it is. Groups of people that can barely feed themselves, that have still not discovered the wheel, whose counting does not go above the number two, still consider themselves the greatest and favored by the gods and their way of life the best way. What this research
confirms is that ethnocentrism is universal, and it is not necessarily substantiated by civilizational achievement.

What is distinctively Western is not ethnocentrism but a profound and highly beneficial effort to transcend ethnocentrism. Only in the West has there been a consistent willingness to question the identification of the good with one's own way. Even the Greek philosophers, who scorned the primitivism of the barbarians, admitted that non-Greeks were capable of civilization. In his
Education of Cyrus,
the Greek writer Xenophon located his ideal regime not in Greece but in Persia. Greek thinkers from Herodotus to Aristotle showed an inexhaustible interest in other cultures, and this curiosity about others, as well as a desire to learn from them, became a staple of Western civilization. Alongside ethnocentrism, the West has long entertained a fascination with the other, and even a belief in the superiority of the other. It was the West, after all, which invented the notion of the “noble savage.” We take this curiosity so much for granted that it surprises many to learn that other cultures historically have not shared it.

The truth, however, is that throughout its history Western civilization has gained immensely from its absorption of the ideas and inventions of other cultures. From the Muslims the West recovered parts of its own lost Greco-Roman heritage. Muslim thinkers like Ibn Sinha, Ibn Rushd, and al-Farabi had a powerful impact on the philosophical debates in the West. From the Hindus the West learned its numeral system, including the number zero and the concept of negative numbers. The Hindus developed this system, but it was brought to Europe by the Arabs, and thus the Europeans erroneously called it “Arabic numerals.” Despite the misnomer, it seems evident that without Arabic numerals
the West could not have made the progress it subsequently did in mathematics and science. Equations and calculus are hard, if not impossible, to perform with Roman numerals. As Thomas Sowell wryly observes, today Roman numerals are only used for naming kings and Super Bowls.

This example shows that civilizational development does not always go to the group that invents things. It frequently goes to the people who are able to take the inventions and run with them. The Chinese were responsible for inventing printing, gunpowder, and the compass. They knew all these things since the eleventh century. Yet these inventions were closely held by the Chinese court, and they had a very limited impact on Chinese society. Printing, for example, was mainly used by the emperor to issue official documents. By contrast, once the West learned about these inventions they had a convulsive, transforming impact on European society. Gunpowder revolutionized Western warfare and gave European nations the means to impose their will on other peoples. Printing made possible the Gutenberg Bible and the Reformation. It allowed the spread of literacy and created the conditions for the rise of democracy. The compass helped the West develop navigational resources to venture forth to the far corners of the world, inaugurating the new age that we call modernity.

But if the West has shown itself willing and eager to learn from other cultures, this attitude has not been reciprocated until recent times by other cultures. In the Islamic empire, for instance, a prevailing view was that Muslims have nothing to learn from other people. This attitude may strike us as the provincialism of the lowly and the ignorant, but in fact it was shared by many of the most sophisticated minds of Islam. For instance, Ibn Khaldun—
the preeminent Muslim historian of the Middle Ages—writes a universal history called
The Muqaddimah
but shows absolutely no interest in what is going on outside Islamic civilization. “God knows better what exists there.”
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Even more striking is that, in subsequent centuries, when the leading figures of the Muslim world heard about the raging debates in Europe over democracy and popular sovereignty and human rights, they ignored them. Muslims had access to political and scientific works from the West, but they never bothered to translate them into Arabic. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution passed without notice in the Islamic world. This self-imposed isolation has had immense consequences both for Islam and for the West, consequences that we are living with today.

The Chinese were, if anything, even more ethnocentric than the Muslims. By all accounts China, not Europe, should have dominated the age of exploration. Early in the fifteenth century, the Chinese admiral Zheng He (also known as Cheng Ho) inaugurated a series of voyages to Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf, and the coast of Africa. The Chinese had the best astronomy, the best cartography, the best navigational skill, and the best built ships in the world. Even so, they made several voyages to other countries and then stopped.
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Chinese exploration came to an abrupt end around 1433, more than half a century before Columbus took his epochal voyage to the Americas.

Why, then, did the Chinese quit? One clue is provided by a Chinese ship that arrived on the Indian shore in search of animals for the Chinese zoo. The expedition yielded a giraffe, which caused quite a sensation at the Chinese court. But no other Chinese ships came to India, presumably because the needs of the Chinese zoo were satisfied. In general, the Chinese went abroad
not to learn from other people—a prospect they found impossible—but rather to demonstrate their own greatness and to find people to pay tribute to their civilization and to their emperor. Once their vanity was appeased they decided to forgo the expense of foreign travel, and they called the whole thing to a halt. Zheng He has been called the Chinese Columbus, but he is more accurately termed “the man who could have been Columbus.” Daniel Boorstin suggests that the exploits of Zheng He were anomalous; a more appropriate symbol of Chinese psychology is the Great Wall, built to keep the Chinese in and everyone else out.
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