The Superiority Of Western Culture, esp. USA

An exchange from the soc.culture.china newsgroup, 6 March 2005

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The greatness of western civilization

By Edwin A. Locke, Ph.D., 2005

In this age of diversity-worship, it is considered virtually axiomatic that all cultures are equal. Western culture, claim the intellectuals, is in no way superior to that of African tribalists or Eskimo seal hunters. There are no objective standards, they say, that can be used to evaluate the moral stature of different groups. They assert that to deny the equality of all cultures is to be guilty of the most heinous of intellectual sins: “ethnocentrism.” This is to flout the sacred principle of cultural relativism. I disagree with the relativists—absolutely.

There are three fundamental respects in which Western culture is *objectively* the best. These are the core values or core achievements of Western civilization, and what made America great.

*Reason*. The Greeks were the first to identify philosophically that knowledge is gained through reason and logic as opposed to mysticism (faith, revelation, dogma). It would take two millennia, including a Dark Ages and a Renaissance, before the full implications of Greek thought would be realized. The rule of reason reached its zenith in the West in the 18th century—the Age of Enlightenment. “For the first time in modern history,” writes one philosopher, “an authentic respect for reason became the mark of an entire culture. “ The USA is a product of the Enlightenment.

Individual Rights. An indispensable achievement leading to the Enlightenment was the recognition of the concept of individual rights. John Locke demonstrated that individuals do not exist to serve governments, but rather that governments exist to protect individuals. The individual, said Locke, has an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of his own happiness. The result was the United States of America. (Disastrous errors were made in the West—for example, slavery, which originated elsewhere, and Nazism—but these were too incongruent with Western values to last and were corrected, by the West, in the name of its core principles of reason and rights.)

Science and Technology. The triumph of reason and rights made possible the full development and application of science and technology and ultimately modern industrial society. Reason and rights freed man's mind from the tyranny of religious dogma and freed man's productive capacity from the tyranny of state control. Scientific and technological progress followed in several interdependent steps. Men began to understand the laws of nature. They invented an endless succession of new products. And they engaged in large-scale production, that is, the creation of wealth, which in turn financed and motivated further invention and production. As a result, horse-and-buggies were replaced by automobiles, wagon tracks by steel rails, candles by electricity. At last, after millennia of struggle, man became the master of his environment.

The result of the core achievements of Western civilization has been an increase in freedom, wealth, health, comfort, and life expectancy unprecedented in the history of the world. The achievements were greatest in the country where the principles of reason and rights were implemented most consistently—the United States of America. In contrast, it was precisely in those Eastern and African countries which did not embrace reason, rights, and technology where people suffered (and still suffer) most from both natural and man-made disasters (famine, poverty, illness, dictatorship) and where life-expectancy was (and is) lowest. It is said that primitives live “in harmony with nature,” but in reality they are simply victims of the vicissitudes of nature—if some dictator does not kill them first.

The greatness of the West is not an “ethnocentric” prejudice; *it is an objective fact*. This assessment is based on the only proper standard for judging a government or a society: the degree to which its core values are pro- or anti-life. Pro-life cultures acknowledge and respect man's nature as a rational being who must discover and create the conditions which his survival and happiness require—which means that they advocate reason, rights, freedom, and technological progress. Despite its undeniable triumphs, Western civilization is by no means secure. Its core principles are under attack from every direction - by religious fanatics, by dictators and, most disgracefully, by Western intellectuals, who are denouncing reason in the name of skepticism, rights in the name of special entitlements, and progress in the name of environmentalism. We are heading rapidly toward the dead end of nihilism. The core values and achievements of the West and America must be asserted proudly *and defended to the death*. Our lives depend on them.

Edwin A. Locke, a professor of management at the University of Maryland at College Park, is a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California.

Therefore we have the MORAL imperative for destroying any peoples that deserve to be destroyed. REMEMBER HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI!! YEAH!!!!

We WILL do it Again: YOU BASTARDS!

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The Locke essay is thoughtful and carefully written, and so it deserves our consideration. However, I find much with which to disagree in it, and so find it necessary to offer a little critique.

jhdkjh@jkjldkj.com (Joe Q Public) writes:

> TO THE WORLD:
>
> The greatness of western civilization Edwin A. Locke, Ph.D.

A preliminary comment. The axioms employed in an argument must be unproblematic. However, the title presumes that certain very troublesome concepts are transparent, which, unfortunately, is not the case. Specifically, the key terms, “greatness,” “The West,” and “civilization,” are all inescapably subjective. There is no agreed upon definition for any of them, and so I'm afraid Locke is off to a bad start.

This impression is reinforced by the title's social implication. It is impolite to refer to one's own social identity as “great” in contrast to that of others. Even if the argument to follow were entirely objective, empirically based and carefully reasoned, the title seems arrogant and confrontational, especially for the great majority of people who are presumably not part of “Western Civilization.” A teacher might consider a student's performance to be poor, but is careful not to tell him that he is stupid, but only that he could do better.

> In this age of diversity-worship, it is considered virtually
> axiomatic that all cultures are equal.

I believe this implies a misunderstanding. A “culture” conventionally refers to inherited patterns of behavior or symbol systems, and it in fact always represents an extraordinary diversity. It makes little sense to say that behaviors or symbol systems are “equal” in empirical terms, for you can’t compare or equate what is so evanescent, incoherent and lacking in boundary (I’d even cast doubt on whether culture is even inherited, but more on that later).

What is meant by the equality of cultures, surely, is that various cultures all have equal value in the sense that any evaluation of behaviors must be after the fact, rather than imposed in advance. Only a ruling class in is a position to prescribe behavior, but in a democracy we should primarily judge behaviors after the fact except when such behaviors seem likely to harm others. In a democracy, values should arise dynamically from a social negotiation, and not be imposed by some PhD or philosopher king.

The only empirically specific implication of the word culture is that it is socially transmitted, and there is little scientific foundation for identifying and characterizing any specific culture. Likewise, every person is unique, and not at all empirically equal, differing greatly in physical appearance, intelligence, virtue, and material advantage. Nevertheless we insist they all have equal value as human beings. Human life itself has equal value, despite the great diversity of its manifestations.

While it is possible to evaluate culture in certain ways, such as its appropriateness for achieving certain ends in a given circumstance, its complex richness, its relative sophistication, or the extent to which an elite culture is shared by the broader masses, these are not value judgements. Nor do they imply it is possible to compare cultures scientifically. Everyone's culture has equal value. This is axiomatic because our ideology of essential human worth implies people's right be behave a they see fit. That some of their behaviors should be condemned does should not compromise their right make choices in their lives, as capitalist ideology has long insisted.

Since culture is by convention socially transmitted patterns of behavior, it only represent a context in which people's actions are carried out. It makes some choices easier and others more difficult, even impossible. It is the resulting behavior that is important. More broadly, culture forms part of the circumstances in which we act, and while some circumstances are more favorable than others, it makes little sense to argue that one person's circumstances are superior to that of others. That context of action that is independent of action is meaningless.

Human diversity is an empirical fact, and so therefore is the diversity of culture. One can only wonder about someone who fails to appreciate social diversity as the source of a lot of fun and stimulation. To suggest that an embrace of human diversity is unwarranted because it is an article of religious faith, an object of worship, seems strange, even threatening. Human diversity has increased since the bourgeois revolution and is arguable one of its effects. Hitler tried to reduce it in Germany, but after several years his effort collapsed. We live in a globalized world, thanks largely to capitalism, in which people increasingly move from one region to another, and are forced to interact with people unlike themselves. Diversity is not only an effect of the greater opportunities for personal development in modern capitalist society, but is also required by that economy. To suggest that human diversity is undesirable seems to whistle in the wind, be dangerously fascist and out of touch with such empirical realities as the global capitalist economy that both encourages and depends upon it.

> Western culture, claim the intellectuals, is in no way superior to
> that of African tribalists or Eskimo seal hunters. There are no
> objective standards, they say, that can be used to evaluate the
> moral stature of different groups. They assert that to deny the
> equality of all cultures is to be guilty of the most heinous of
> intellectual sins: “ethnocentrism.” This is to flout the sacred
> principle of cultural relativism. I disagree with the relativists -
> absolutely.

The writer discounts “intellectuals,” but is himself a college professor who is careful to append “PhD” to his name. This seems contradictory. I’ve known people from all walks of life, rich and poor, formally educated or not, who have struck me as either very intelligent or who value the life of the mind. These qualities are not the exclusive possession of university graduates, and surely Locke is aware of that.

So why then does he implicitly deride “intellectuals”? It may be that he feels intimidated by his more successful or numerous liberal colleagues. Although this might rest on a common presupposition, it is really just quaint nonsense. If we were to look carefully at the matter, the great majority of these colleagues turn out to be implicit supporters of the dominant capitalist system and its ideology. Because they all know that knowledge advances though criticism of past knowledge, and so university faculty are obliged to appear critical, but they are careful for the most part not to rock the boat too much. “Liberalism” is, after all, capitalist ideology, not some alien life form. Liberalism is the invention of the Enlightenment Locke so much admires.

Given all this, Locke seems neither to have in mind people who are intellectuals nor people in academia, but instead a particular intellectual position, although he carefully avoids identifying or defining it. This lets him escape the intellectual responsibility to engage in debate. Instead he appeals to a (I believe fictive) resentment among common people (Archie Bunker types, I suppose) for the advantaged few with a college education or an exciting life of the mind. I don’t know how to put it more charitably, but Locke here appears to be demagogic and intellectually dishonest. He fails to employ the scientific honesty which he holds up as a litmus test in his paper.

> There are three fundamental respects in which Western culture is
> *objectively* the best. These are the core values or core
> achievements of Western civilization, and what made America great.

There is a great danger here of reductionism, which reduces a complex whole to just a few of its parts which come to stand for the whole and the empirical reality of other aspect is simply discounted. We cannot presume the uniformity of Western culture, and a project to identify certain traits as characteristic, while dismissing others, is intellectually irresponsible. For example, I might argue on the contrary that it was the Greeks who invented the notion that military victory required the death of one's opponents, and ever since Western Civilization has been extraordinary vicious. One problem with this counter argument is not that is counter to the facts, but that it extracts one feature of a complex whole to serve as its measure. There's no scientific justification whatsoever for such a step. Further, if the parts are intangible ideas, such as a principle of rationality, our reductionism ends an essentialism, a religious belief entirely impervious to empirical reality.

Let me elaborate a bit. In science we are often able to abstract a covering law from the observation of empirical change. However, such laws (f = ma, for example) refer to only an aspect of reality, and do not stand for its whole. Abstraction from empirical specifics can certainly be a useful tool, just as is mathematics, but it does not represent a truth in itself that separable from the real world.

Another instance of abstraction is that most of our definitions of things are abstracted from empirical specifics to arrive at general concepts. If I use the word “dog,” you know immediately what I mean. These definitions are based on what are called the “constant conjuncture” of empirical traits, which, incidentally, tends to limit them primarily to short-range explanations in daily life. The abstract concepts represented by our definitions do not have an independent reality, but serve as mental tools, allowing us to map reality and communicate with each other. Unless we are objective idealists (and hence, unscientific), there are no dogs per se, but only specific dogs with specific qualities, some of which happen to be shared because of genetics.

> *Reason*. The Greeks were the first to identify philosophically
> that knowledge is gained through reason and logic as opposed to
> mysticism (faith, revelation, dogma).

I don’t think this statement stands up very well. It can be argued that abstract reasoning is a feature of ancient slave societies in general, and is not peculiar to the Greeks. For example, the Vedic philosophy of North India, which has similar features, blossomed several centuries before that of the Greeks, and for the same reason. Also, I believe historians would insist that the Greeks were highly superstitious, and not particularly rational. Mount Olympus, haruspices and oracles come to mind. Further, while a handful of Greeks did pursue abstract thought to an extraordinary degree, not all ancient Greek philosophers did, and my sense of how most Ancient Greeks actually behaved and thought is that they were a despicable lot. At least, their neighbors thought of them as disgusting brutes (such as urinating in public places).

While Alexander tried to universalize Greek culture, he did so because it was an ideology suitable for Empire, not because there was anything inherently great about that culture. That the West has admired the Greeks is due largely to Alexander's propaganda and conquest.

And what is so great about the Greeks? They did well in some things, but in some other very important respects, they were unappealing, and they were generally overshadowed by other peoples. Was life for the population of the Greek peninsula in any way superior or more attractive or more comfortable than that among, say, the Persians or the Chinese at the time? Very doubtful. One might say that the issue is ideas here, not circumstances, but Locke later on uses material success as evidence for the rationality of ideas. He can’t have it both ways. Ideas are either to be handled naturalistically, or they are not.

Also implied here is a very weak model of cultural transmission. Even if the Greeks “invented” abstract reasoning, the issue is really why others subsequently did or did not adopt it for themselves. By the end of the first millennium B.C., “everyone” (actually primarily the elite associated with coastal cities) were exposed to all kinds of ideas from the East, the West, and from Africa. Why did the Romans decide to embrace Hellenistic culture, while people in West Asia, also exposed to the same Hellenistic culture as the Romans, prefer to adopt Persian influences?

Today we don’t think of culture as an abstract (and therefore static) ideational potency that transmits itself through time and space quite independently of human volition and circumstance. Cultural anthropology insists that culture is a creative manipulation of some inherited behaviors in response to needs, circumstances, and I suppose tastes. This is true of any action theory, and there is no reason to privilege culture as some metaphysical potency independent of the trials and tribulations of the hoi poloi. Arguably, culture is the product of real peoples' creative struggle to satisfy their needs and to construct their future in terms of circumstances, in terms of structures inherited from the past, which includes patterns of behavior and symbol systems—culture.

Another issue here is the relation of the Greeks to this imagined “Western Civilization” (a racist notion, I can readily prove), associated with political propaganda of the First World War. The empirical evidence suggests that in the first millennium B.C. there emerged a Mediterranean culture that synthesized elements from Africa (see, for example, Bernal's _Black Athena_), Turkey (Greek was profoundly shaped by their migration through that region), and from the Levant and from what is today Southern Europe. There were also peoples within that region who were quite independent of the Greeks and as they become part of that ecumene made important contributions to it, such as the Etruscans and various Italic peoples, pro-Roman Iberia, the Celts, and Germanic peoples. There were other sophisticated cultures immediately to the East and South that in the first millennium A.D. also contributed (such as the “orientalizing” tendencies that transform the Mediterranean world after its “Third Century Crisis.” By no means does Mediterranean Civilization reduce to the Greek contribution, nor was it static or self-contained. However, the main thing is that there is little relation between it and the recent propaganda concept, Western Civilization.

> It would take two millennia, including a Dark Ages and a
> Renaissance, before the full implications of Greek thought would be
> realized.

This is misleading. The reason for ignorance about the Greeks was that European intellectuals saw themselves until the Renaissance as simply late Romans, not as having Greek roots, and because what survived of Greek classics was mostly found in the Islamic world (awaiting Jewish translators to put them into European languages), and because, even at the height of the Renaissance, very few people in Europe were actually up to learning the Greek language.

Another problem is that in terms of the conventional history of science, it was not Greek rationality that gave scientific advance a boost in the 16th century, but Greek superstition. The European Middle Ages were very scientifically oriented, although not to the extent of Islam, but were held back by their inability to abstract from empirical specifics. Medieval science was a “cookbook” science based on practical experience. In the Renaissance, on the other hand, neo-platonist irrationality, specifically the superstitious belief that all things were essentially connected as part of one mystical cosmic unity, came to support a separation of the knowledge of specific things and a knowledge of the classes of things in general. That is, scientific thought was liberated from traditional empirical constraints by adopting a metaphysical axiom, and henceforth knowledge gained in one area had potential meaning and use in others.

Actually, Greek influence at the time tended to be irrational in other respects as well. Ptolemaic geography persuaded certain intellectuals that the world was flat, while most people had always known, based simply on empirical observation, that it was actually round. Christopher Columbus was merely asserting traditional medieval knowledge against the new intellectual fashion that sought to recast knowledge by basing it, in theory or in practice, on certain Greek and Roman superstitions or precedents (such as the early Church and writings of the Church Fathers—i.e., the Reformation).

> The rule of reason reached its zenith in the West in the 18th
> century—the Age of Enlightenment.

This is silly. An idea does not really rule, but is hegemonic because an elite wishes it to be. Ideas don’t have a life of their own. So we cannot disregard just where and when these “Enlightened” figures lived. The term Enlightenment refers to a certain intellectual fashion among certain people in certain places, but there were other intellectual currents, some very sophisticated. It just happens that bourgeois revolutionaries in France and England found Enlightened ideas congenial to their cause because it justified their breaking the law, but we can’t use the outcome of these revolutions to distort the intellectual realities of the 18th century. Furthermore, these Enlightened ideas were based on metaphysical axioms, such as atomism, and therefore escape real empirical validation. They represent superstition, which comes down to religion. Social justice, democracy or progress are not the effects of an idea, but the sources of ideas.

> “For the first time in modern history,” writes one philosopher, “an
> authentic respect for reason became the mark of an entire culture. “
> The USA is a product of the Enlightenment.

To a degree, the American revolutionaries were influenced by certain Enlightenment ideals, but was it because those ideals were intrinsically superior or better (or “greater”), or because they provided a rational for breaking the law? Arguably, economic self-interest played a more important role, and arguably most revolutionaries had no notion of Enlightened ideals at all. Some were just anxious to escape their social obligations (taxes) or to get their hands on Indian land as a reward for military service in the Revolution.

Also I find strange here the apparent reduction of rationality to Enlightenment thinking. Abstract thinking is only one kind of rationality, and clearly can sometimes stand in the way of rational (instrumental?) decisions. The implication is that the Chinese or the Zulu were somehow irrational, which is nonsense. The Chinese were clearly as rational, if not more so, than the European colonists in the New World, if we are to measure rationality in terms of worldly success.

I’m writing within walking distance of the place where the Dutch once built a fort to provide military backing for the growing Pequot empire based on the trade of beaver pelts. These pelts were exchanged with the Dutch for prized European manufactures. Then came the English from Massachusetts, who went beyond the limited objectives of the Dutch by colonizing the area to escape constraints upon their livelihood they experienced the Boston area. The Dutch were not colonizers, for they farmed only a few acres immediately outside their fort (leaving behind several nearby street names as evidence), while the English opened extensive farms by appropriating Native land. Native Americans not decimated by the European diseases were forced upstream several miles from the mouth of the Hog River where the Dutch fort was located, there to fade away.

There is no indication these early settlers had any particular virtues or knew anything of Greek thinking. And soon enough they employed slaves in significant numbers, which, besides their abuse of Native Americans, certainly contradicted any Enlightenment notions. When the time for Revolution came, half were opposed to it, even if some were beginning to profit nicely from the growing maritime trade connections. One could go on, but I see no empirical evidence in the situation closest to home that a) abstract philosophical ideas were at all relevant, b) that such ideas as these country bumpkins had were at all influenced by the Enlightenment. They may have indeed have been in rational pursuit of their own self-interest, but that hardly distinguishes them from, say, folks native the East Indies, who were a lot more successful at it.

It is sometimes argued that history is only a myth about the past, but a cavalier disregard for the constraints that empirical evidence imposes upon this myth-making, leads to folly. These empirical constraints are the source of the truth value of our little stories. Thus we distinguish real (scientific) historiography from the fictional construction of ideological apologists who disregard or discount the empirical evidence, such as by representing abstract ideas as history's principle engine.

> Individual Rights. An indispensable achievement leading to the
> Enlightenment was the recognition of the concept of individual
> rights.

Sounds good, although I don’t recall any such claim coming from the Enlightenment writers. Equality before the law is not the same as individual rights. People always had individual rights. Even in the middle ages you had rights, and you could represent those rights in a court of law. Admittedly, there existed what is called the personality of the law, which means that if you were a priest, nobleman, peasant, or a town dweller, your rights would differ. But individual rights go back at least to 11th century in Europe. People were not equal before the law, but there was law, and they all had certain rights in terms of it.

That equality before the law existed in the new United States is not as clear as Locke presumes. First, there was slavery, which in some areas represented quite a large portion of the population. True, slave importation was slowly reduced in the course of the 19th century in some places and eventually slavery ended in law, so that Blacks and whites were equal before the law. But this was more in theory than in fact, as we all know. Meanwhile, consider how Native Americans were treated? Is genocide the appropriate word? There were precious few in the 19th century who insisted the Red Man was essentially the equal of the White Man, although some early settlers and visitors in the New World felt that way before the Enlightenment. And what about women? They represent, after all, half the population! When did they become equal in law?

Concepts here appear to substitute for empirical realities, which is certainly not being rational or scientific. There is a real danger that the ideology of equality before the law serves only to hide the realities of empirical inequality. Even today, we know that justice depends on how good a lawyer you can afford. The equality proposed by the Enlightenment, was not a description, but an ideal, and it was not simply the rule of law, but an insistence upon the essential equality of all humans simply by virtue of their humanity. In such terms, inequity based on wealth or on race was an anathema. Adam Smith and Malthus, each in his own way, tried to confront the problem of real inequality, but with the demise of Enlightened ideals and of the sturdy yeoman farmer, real equality ceased being discussed. Enlightenment equality did not reduce to equality before the law, which was hardly new, but to an essential human unity. Equality before the law was merely an ideological implication of that ideology, not its essence.

> John Locke demonstrated that individuals do not exist to serve
> governments, but rather that governments exist to protect
> individuals. The individual, said Locke, has an inalienable right to
> life, liberty, and the pursuit of his own happiness. The result was
> the United States of America.

Extraordinary! The ideas of one man, whom few read, created a nation! That would be a surprise to those living at the time, I’m sure. I’ve no doubt that participants in the Boston tea party where thinking primarily of their bank accounts, not philosophical ideals. We should not disregard the empirical evidence of what people actually do and say in order to substantiate the existence certain notions we presume are hidden in the back of their mind. And the Sons of Liberty, who actually did much of the initial fighting, were little more than mercenaries who at best thought (naively as it turned out) that they would get a vote as their reward. The founders explicitly created a government to serve the interests of the owners of productive property, not the interests of the great number of free whites who did not happen to own productive property, or the half of the people who were of the wrong gender, or the third of the population of the wrong color, or the significant numbers of Native Americans, who had been expropriated to create this wondrous new nation.

> (Disastrous errors were made in the West—for example, slavery,
> which originated elsewhere, and Nazism—but these were too
> incongruent with Western values to last and were corrected, by the
> West, in the name of its core principles of reason and rights.)

What an evasion of reality! The fact is that slavery existed in the U.S. until the end of the Civil War, having lasted some 300 years there, which certainly represents a “lasting” institution. That slavery was incongruous with Western values is hard to believe, when it had existed since Antiquity and only ended fairly recently in the United States primarily because the economic interests of the industrial North prevailed over the prevailed over those of the plantation South.

> Science and Technology. The triumph of reason and rights made
> possible the full development and application of science and
> technology and ultimately modern industrial society.

Again, Locke is building sand-castles out of abstractions and pseudo-history. Until the late 19th century, Europe in fact lagged some other large regions in the globe in terms of technological and economic advance. Locke must be very naive about history if he assumes that by the time of the Enlightenment Europe led in any respect whatsoever, except perhaps in piracy.

If we identify this “modern industrial society” with the Second Industrial Revolution in Europe, which I suppose most people would do, then we find that this technological achievement was intimately coupled with the first modern wars of mass destruction (U.S. Civil War, Crimean War, World War I), and the “Age of Empire.” Many historians would be inclined to argue that the leap forward in wealth and technology were intimately tied to the creation of empire by military means. I believe very few would be so foolish to suggest that these global momentous changes were simply an effect of Greek rationality or Enlightenment ideals, about which most were ignorant or cared little.

> Reason and rights freed man's mind from the tyranny of religious
> dogma and freed man's productive capacity from the tyranny of state
> control.

More imaginary history. The “productive capacity” in context seems to refer to the Second Industrial Revolution, in which case, the empirical fact is that state control was actually increasing because it was the only way to catch up in competition with prior capitalist states. If Locke instead really meant the so-called First Industrial Revolution, then he would do well to review the literature of recent decades, which establishes that the early economic leap took actually place before roughly the middle of the 18th century (in the Colonies, roughly with the mid 18th century), and not after the American Revolution, and not after the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas. While European economic output increased, it took almost a century to surpass that of India and China. Noteworthy is that until then, the relative economic advance had taken place under the aegis of powerful interventionist states.

Yes, there is an anarchist argument that the state institution tends to stultify an individual's development by displacing or discouraging his being able to make optimal decisions, but that's a purely ideological cant that is not empirically based; it is not scientific. Locke goes on about Western scientific and technological progress in terms that are so fantastic (and parochial) that they are not worth discussing.

> The result of the core achievements of Western civilization has
> been an increase in freedom, wealth, health, comfort, and life
> expectancy unprecedented in the history of the world.

Again, Locke offers no defense of his selection of achievements that represent a “core”. He could just have well selected “weapons of mass destruction” as a unique Western development that have had a contrary effect. Not only is he guilty of a unscientific reductionism, but reduces history to the interplay of figments of his imagination, having little connection with empirical fact. For example, how could he reconcile “freedom” with the facts of very low voter participation, with little access to reliable and relevant information, with the tidbits of false information we are regularly spoon fed by a secretive government? The idea of freedom here substitutes for empirical reality of a very limited real popular power, which after all is the literal meaning of “democracy”. What little empirical evidence he bothers to mention seems seriously out of date, inaccurate, and very parochial.

He offers no temporal or geographic delimitation of “Western Civilization.” Is Ancient Carthage part of it? Is 17th century Russia part of it? Is the West everything west of the Urals and north of the Mediterranean? And so would we exclude ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt? The term “Western Civilization” is so blatantly ideological and contradictory that it puts to question any argument that might arise concerning it. If we value our intellectual integrity, we should avoid its use altogether.

Locke continues with his nonsense, which gets ever more fantastic. He imposes these arbitrary (subjective) imaginary core values that are little more than logical implications of Enlightenment ideology for actual behaviors and real circumstances. For example, he throws in the bizarre notion of a “pro-life culture,” but I wonder how the extraordinary murder, incarceration and execution rates in the U.S. are supposed manifest it. Who, after all, first developed the atomic bomb, which is about as anti-life as you can get, and alone had the pathology actually to use it to murder innumerable innocent civilians? Yes, one might debate some of these judgements, but the point is that it is not at all self-evident that the U.S. is fundamentally pro-life, even if one ventured to define that concept. In the absence of some justification for the point, it is best ignored.

> Despite its undeniable triumphs, Western civilization is by no
> means secure. Its core principles are under attack from every
> direction—by religious fanatics, by dictators and, most
> disgracefully, by Western intellectuals, who are denouncing reason
> in the name of skepticism, rights in the name of special
> entitlements, and progress in the name of environmentalism. We are
> heading rapidly toward the dead end of nihilism.

I love this! My core principles may be under attack, but mostly by my own president (well, actually by most U.S. presidents). In actual fact, he is far more likely to threaten what I hold dear than any (other) terrorist. I’m surrounded by religious fanatics, true believers who speak in tongues and reject science out of hand, and a president who thinks of himself on a Crusade, which only encourages reprisals. These are not outside forces alien to the Greek or Enlightened ideals, but are us, the supposed heirs of these values. As Pogo put it, We have met the enemy, and he is us! Rather than the rule of law, our president considers himself above international and to some extent even domestic law in many areas of policy. Islamists, on the other hand, are unlikely to affect me directly at all.

And are not “Western intellectuals” part of Western civilization? Are not our model dictators, Mussolini, Franco and Hitler, products of that civilization? Locke praises rationality, but disconnects it from any troubling empirical facts. He brings within Western Civilization those with whom he happens to agree, and excludes those with whom he disagrees! It is obvious that WC is being employed here only as an ideological term.

> The core values and achievements of the West and America must be
> asserted proudly *and defended to the death*. Our lives depend on
> them.
> ——————————————————————————
> Edwin A. Locke, a professor of management at the University of
> Maryland at College Park, is a senior writer for the Ayn Rand
> Institute in Irvine, California.

In a way, I sympathize with Locke, for I do regret the growth of anomie (which, incidentally is a global phenomenon, not peculiar to Western Civ), and social pathologies. I, too, would like to see the sharing of values and the maintenance of social standards. To that extent I’m as conservative as he, for in their absence we must all feel a bit insecure and lost.

But I don’t think Locke offers any constructive guidance. He brings up values that he pretends derive from the past, but in fact do so only weakly, and it is a past largely of his own invention. Common sense suggests that in our rapidly changing world we need to construct new values that are appropriate to the circumstances. Of course, there are some older truths worth preserving, but we surely need to look at these traditions critically and not just embrace everything from the past just because they existed in the past. Among the roots of “our Western Civilization” one stoned women to death for infidelity, but I doubt that would make much sense today. We don’t need to be blindly fundamentalist in this way. And if are to assess the worthiness of past values, we can’t bend them to suit our own ideological proclivities, as Locke clearly does, and still pretend they acquire legitimacy because they are static, impervious to people's changing needs and goals.

Locke's choice among these elements of the past amount to a naive version of capitalist ideology, when in fact capitalism is the principle cause of the growing anomie and fundamentalist reactions we experience throughout the world today. One does not have to reject capitalism to admit this, and a rational defender of capitalism would not run away from capitalist realities in order to salvage it.

One aspect of this is the fact that, for better and worse, we live in a globalized world. Any solutions to today's problems must be solutions that are meaningful in global terms. The world over we share the same problems, often eerily similar in detail, and we are intensely interdependent. As a result, there can be no local answers to our difficulties, but only global ones. Locke's parochialism, if anyone were to take him seriously, could only exacerbate difficulties.

I believe Locke needs to escape the prison of his own national and class insularity. It is clear that his so-called “middle class” is entering crisis and its position increasingly contradictory. As a result, any solutions to the global crisis that arises from it are necessarily contradictory and deconstructive. Furthermore, as long as one uncritically supports a system of which one is a beneficiary, but is associated with misery for most others, you can' expect to be taken seriously.