What's So Great About America (8 page)

I
f ethnocentrism is not Western, what about colonialism? Well, colonialism is also not a unique characteristic of the West. My native country of India, for example, was ruled by the British for more than two centuries, and many of my fellow Indians are still smarting about that. What they often forget, however, is that before the British came the Indians were invaded and conquered by the Persians, by the Afghans, by Alexander the Great, by the Arabs, by the Mongols, and by the Turks. Depending on how you count, the British were the eighth or ninth colonial power to invade India. The English were merely the latest installment in a series of conquerors who forced their way onto Indian soil since ancient times. Indeed, ancient India was itself the product of the Aryan people who came from the north and subjugated the dark-skinned indigenous people.

Those who identify colonialism and empire only with the West either have no sense of history or have forgotten about the Persian empire, the Macedonian empire, the Islamic empire, the
Mongol empire, the Chinese empire, and the Aztec and Inca empires in the Americas. Shouldn't the Arabs be paying reparations for their destruction of the Byzantine and Persian empires? Come to think of it, shouldn't the Byzantine and Persian people also pay reparations to the descendants of the people they subjugated? And while we're at it, shouldn't the Muslims reimburse the Spaniards for their seven-hundred-year rule? As the example of Islamic Spain suggests, the people of the West have participated in the game of conquest not only as the perpetrator, but also as the victims. Ancient Greece, for example, was conquered by Rome, and the Roman Empire itself was destroyed by the invasions of Huns, Vandals, Lombards, and Visigoths from northern Europe. America, as we all know, was itself a colony of England before its war of independence; England, before that, was subjugated and ruled by the Norman kings from France. Those of us living today are taking on a large project if we are going to settle upon a rule of social justice based upon figuring out whose ancestors did what to whom.

Perhaps it is not colonialism but slavery that is distinctively Western. Actually, no. Slavery has existed in all known civilizations. In his study
Slavery and Social Death,
the West Indian sociologist Orlando Patterson writes, “Slavery has existed from the dawn of human history, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized. There is no region on earth that has not at some time harbored the institution.”
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A brief survey of the nations of the world confirms this. The Sumerians and Babylonians practiced slavery, as did the ancient Egyptians. The Chinese, the Indians, and the Arabs all had slaves. Slavery was widespread in Greece and Rome, and also in sub-Saharan Africa.
American Indians practiced slavery long before Columbus set one foot on this continent.

If slavery is not distinctively Western, what is? The movement to end slavery! Abolition is an exclusively Western institution. The historian J. M. Roberts writes, “No civilization once dependent on slavery has ever been able to eradicate it, except the Western.”
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Of course, slaves in every society don't want to be slaves. The history of slavery is full of incidents of runaways, slave revolts, and so on. But typically slaves were captured in warfare, and if they got away they were perfectly happy to take other people as slaves.

Never in the history of the world, outside of the West, has a group of people eligible to be slave owners mobilized against the institution of slavery. This distinctive Western attitude is reflected by Abraham Lincoln: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.”
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Lincoln doesn't want to be a slave—that's not surprising—but he doesn't want to be a master either. He and many other people were willing to expend considerable treasure, and ultimately blood, to get rid of slavery not for themselves, but for other people. The uniqueness of this Western approach is confirmed by the little-known fact that African chiefs, who profited from the slave trade, sent delegations to the West to protest the abolition of slavery.
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And it is important to realize that the slaves were not in a position to secure freedom for themselves. The descendants of African slaves owe their freedom to the exertions of white strangers, not to the people of Africa who betrayed them and sold them.

Surely all of this is relevant to the reparations debate. A trenchant observation on the matter was offered years ago by Muhammad Ali, shortly after his defeat of George Foreman for the
heavyweight title. Upon returning to the United States, Ali was asked by a reporter, “Champ, what did you think of Africa?” Ali replied, “Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat!” There is a mischievous pungency to this remark that is entirely in keeping with Ali's character. But there is also a profound meaning behind Ali's words that I would like to explain by starting with a context more familiar to me, the context of colonialism.

While I was a young boy growing up in India, I noticed that my grandfather, who had lived under British colonialism, was instinctively and habitually antiwhite. He wasn't just against the English, he was generally against the white man. For him, the white man was basically a scoundrel, and if he ever came across a white man, he had a way of showing that the seemingly innocuous fellow was actually up to no good. When I first proposed the idea of going to America, he dissuaded me. “You should stay away from that place,” he said. “It's full of white people.” I realized that he had an animus that I did not share. This puzzled me: why did he and I feel so differently?

Only years later, after a great deal of experience and a fair amount of study, did the answer finally hit me. The reason for our difference of perception was that colonialism had been pretty bad for him, but pretty good for me. Another way to put it was that colonialism had injured those who lived under it, but paradoxically it proved beneficial to their descendants. Much as it chagrins me to admit it—and much as it will outrage many Third World intellectuals for me to say it—my life would have been much worse had the British never ruled India.

How is this possible? Virtually everything that I am, what I do, and my deepest beliefs, all are the product of a worldview that
was brought to India by colonialism. I am a writer, and I write in English. My ability to do this, and to reach a world market, is indebted to the British. If not for them, I might still be a writer (actually this is extremely doubtful, but for reasons given later), but I would write in a local language (Konkani or Marathi) and reach a very limited audience. My understanding of technology, which allows me, like so many Indians, to function successfully in the modern world, was entirely the product of a Western education that came to India as a result of the British. So also my beliefs in freedom of expression, in self-government, in equality of rights under the law, and in the universal principle of human dignity—they are all the product of Western civilization.

I am not suggesting that it was the intention of the colonialists to give all these wonderful gifts to the Indians. Admittedly some apologists for colonialism, such as Macaulay and Kipling, wrote as if the British endured a “white man's burden” to share civilization with the lesser peoples. More candidly, Lord Lugard spoke of colonialism's “dual mandate”: to help the local people
and
to benefit the ruling power. In practice, of course, the colonialists routinely subordinated the first objective to the second. Colonialism was not based on philanthropy; it was a form of conquest and rule. The English came to India to govern, and they were not primarily interested in the development of the natives, whom they viewed as picturesque savages. It is impossible to measure, or overlook, the enormous pain and humiliation that was inflicted by the rulers over their long period of occupation. Understandably the Indians chafed under this yoke. Toward the end of the British reign in India Mahatma Gandhi was asked, “What do you think of Western civilization?” He replied, “I think it would be a good idea.”

Despite their suspect motives and bad behavior, however, the British needed a certain amount of infrastructure in order to govern India effectively. So they built roads, and shipping docks, and railway tracks, and irrigation systems, and government buildings. Then the British realized that they needed courts of law to adjudicate disputes that went beyond local systems of dispensing justice. And so the English legal system was introduced, with all its procedural novelties, such as “innocent until proven guilty.” The English also had to educate the Indians in order to communicate with them and to train them to be civil servants in the empire. Thus Indian children were exposed to Shakespeare, and Dickens, and Hobbes, and Locke. In this way the Indians began to encounter new words and new ideas that were unmentioned in their ancestral culture: “liberty,” “sovereignty,” “rights,” and so on.

This brings me to the greatest benefit that the British provided to the Indians: they taught them the language of freedom. Once again, it was not the objective of the English to encourage rebellion. But by exposing Indians to the ideas of the West, they did. The Indian leaders were the product of Western civilization. Gandhi studied in England and South Africa, Nehru was a product of Harrow and Cambridge. This exposure was not entirely to the good. Nehru, for example, who became India's first prime minister after independence, was highly influenced by Fabian socialism through the teachings of Harold Laski. The result was that India had a mismanaged socialist economy for a generation. But my broader point is that the champions of Indian independence acquired the principles and the language and even the strategies of liberation from the civilization of their oppressors. This was true not just of India but
also of other Asian and African countries that broke free of the European yoke.

My conclusion is that
against their intentions
the colonialists brought things to India that have immeasurably enriched the lives of the descendants of colonialism. Colonialism was the transmission belt that brought to India the blessings of Western civilization. It was a harsh regime for those who lived under it, to be sure. My grandfather would have a hard time giving even one cheer for colonialism. As for me, I cannot manage three, but I am quite willing to grant two. So here it is: two cheers for colonialism! Maybe you will now see why I am not going to be sending an invoice for reparations to Tony Blair.

Back to Muhammad Ali: I understand him to be making the same point. Slavery was a grave moral crime that inflicted incalculable harm to the slaves. But the slaves are dead, and the truth is that their descendants are better off as a result of slavery. Jesse Jackson is vastly better off because his ancestors were enslaved than he would have been if that had never happened. If not for slavery, Jackson and others like him would be living in Somalia or Ethiopia or Nigeria. The enormous improvement in their condition can be verified by simply asking them whether they would consider moving to one of those places. As the African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston bluntly put it, “Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and that is worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it.”
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I realize that in saying these things I am opening the door for my critics, and the incorrigible enemies of the West, to say that I am justifying colonialism and slavery. This is the purest nonsense. What I am doing is pointing out a historical fact: despite
the corrupt and self-serving motives of their practitioners, the institutions of colonialism and slavery proved to be the mechanism that brought millions of nonwhite people into the orbit of Western freedom.

I
t makes no sense to claim that the West grew rich and powerful by taking everybody else's stuff for a simple reason: there wasn't very much to take. “Oh yes there was,” the retort often comes. “The Europeans stole the raw material to build their civilization. They stole rubber from Malaya, and cocoa from West Africa, and tea from India.” But as economic historian Peter Bauer points out, before British rule, there
were
no rubber trees in Malaya, nor cocoa trees in West Africa, nor tea in India. The British brought the rubber tree to Malaya from South America. They brought tea to India from China. And they taught the Africans to grow cocoa, a crop the native people had previously never heard of.
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None of this is to deny that when the colonialists could exploit native resources, they did. But this larceny cannot possibly account for the enormous gap in economic, political, and military power that opened up between the rest of the world and the West.

What, then, is the real source of that power? I want to suggest that the reason the West became the dominant civilization in the modern era is because it invented three institutions: science, democracy, and capitalism. These institutions did not exist anywhere else in the world, nor did they exist in the West until the modern era. Admittedly all three institutions are based on human impulses and aspirations that are universal. But these aspirations
were given a unique expression in Western civilization, largely due to the influence of Athens and Jerusalem—Athens representing the principle of autonomous reason and Jerusalem representing the revealed truths of Judaism and Christianity.