Embarking on a process of personal, individual “de–Westernization” is absolutely essential if we propose to defend the humanity of humanity.
This is an edited version of the second of two lectures the author gave recently on “Defending the Humanity of Humanity.” He spoke Oct. 10 at Mut zur Ethik, a twice-yearly conference held in Sirnach, near Zurich. His first lecture can be read here.
Bust of Herodotus. (Bradley Weber, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
The barbarities of Zionist Israel force fundamental questions upon us: Where is our humanity as the Israelis prosecute their terror campaigns before us daily? What shall we do as we find ourselves powerless to react meaningfully because, as the West Asia crisis has suddenly forced us to realize, our institutions have failed us?
Now many of us recognize the need to defend our humanity — the humanity of humanity, as I think of it.
I previously addressed this question as it relates to public space and argued that it is time to look again at multilateral institutions, the United Nations chief among them, with a view to reviving them after a long period during which they have been discounted and devalued.
Now I want to turn the questions just posed in another direction and suggest we consider the matter from a personal, individual perspective.
What must each of us do, in the privacy, so to say, of our consciences, our thoughts, our surmises and judgments, to take up the work of defending humanity’s humanity? It is at bottom a psychological question. It is a matter, very simply, of “changing our minds.”
We must begin, it seems to me by recognizing who we think we are. Note right away: I speak not of who we are but who we think we are, who we assume ourselves to be.
We live in “the Western world,” as it is called, and it follows naturally we are Westerners. Who can argue with this? To be Westerners is absolutely integral to our identity, I think I can say without further explanation.
This has been so for many centuries. I take my date in this connection to be 1498, when Vasco da Gama set foot along the Malabar Coast, in southern India, making himself the first modern Westerner to arrive in the non–West.
And then it follows easily enough that when we declare what we are we declare what we are not. I have just suggested the result: The world is divided between Westerners and non–Westerners. This division, fundamental as it is to how we think, is by and large the West’s doing. Let us take care to note this.
This line between West and non–West is very old, going back much earlier than 1498. It dates at least to the 5th century B.C., when Herodotus recorded the Persian Wars in his famous Histories. And it is remarkable how intact this line between West and East comes down to us.
The Biden regime and the rest of the West think of it today as the line dividing democracies and autocracies. Cast the Israel–Palestine question in a larger context and you find that, whatever else it is, it is another confrontation between West and non–West.
Ruins left by Israeli airstrikes in Khan Younis in the southern of Gaza strip, On Oct. 8, 2023. (Mahmoud Fareed, Wafa for APAimages)
We may not accept the Biden regime’s contention that it is waging war against the non–West’s autocrats in behalf of the West’s democrats, but this does not mean we do not nonetheless conceive of ourselves as fundamentally “Western.” We have in this way inherited our past, consciously or otherwise.
We come to my first fundamental point. If we are to defend the humanity of humanity, our first obligation is to recognize that the line between West and East is, as it has always been, a human construct and nothing more. Herodotus, in his wisdom, made this point: Even as he recorded the half-century of enmity between the Persian Empire and the Greek city-states, he called the line between them, dividing East from West, “imaginary.”
Nobody seems to have got this point over the past 2,500 years: It is commonly assumed today that this line is etched immutably into the earth, as if it would be visible from a satellite. So we must begin by disposing of this unexamined thought. It is a question, then, of — very literally — “changing our minds.”
This means, and let’s invent a useful word here, we must “de–Westernize” our consciousness. I suggest to you that embarking on a process of personal, individual “de–Westernization” is absolutely essential if we propose to defend the humanity of humanity.
The Japanese — the early Japanese feminists, actually — had a wonderful expression for this kind of project. These were superbly human people —principled, authentic, at ease among strangers such as I was — and I learned a lot from them. They spoke of “the edifice within” and the need to dismantle it.
As things stand the Biden regime and its clients are dedicated now, just as they will tell you, to defending the West as their primary responsibility. When we de–Westernize our consciousness we can easily see through this thought and understand how pitifully shallow and limited it is.
Instantly, we have opened the door for ourselves to defending not the West — the implication being the West against the rest — but humanity and the humanity of humanity.
Let me say this straightaway. Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of NATO, and Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, and Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, are in great, obvious need of de–Westernization. But let us not make the mistake of assuming it is these few unreconstructed Western supremacists who constitute our problem.
I am talking about a new inner attitude, a new way of thinking, seeing and doing, that all of us must cultivate in ourselves. This is nothing like impossible, should anyone here wonder as to the formidability of the task.
Here I speak from experience. I spent just short of three decades as a correspondent abroad, almost every day of it in non–Western nations, mostly but not only in East Asia. And when I finished those years I discovered, a little to my surprise, that I was no longer truly a Westerner.
My physiognomy — round eyes, fair hair, and so on — had nothing to do with it. I was entirely myself, of course: I had surrendered or disavowed nothing. But I had “changed my mind” — or life and experience had changed it for me. I was no longer entirely Western. It had to do with the way I thought, the way I saw the world, and how I acted in it.
The thought that the West was superior to all those gathered in the name of the non–West, had come to seem to me ridiculous. The Western insistence on the primacy of the individual seemed to me problematic at the very least, especially as Americans thought of the matter.
I am not suggesting one must spend three decades wandering among Asians to accomplish the project of de–Westernizing oneself. Not at all. It is a question of cultivating one’s self-awareness. What matters is one’s honesty, one’s independence of thought, and one’s determination to be nothing more nor less than oneself regardless of prevailing orthodoxies.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote somewhere — The Gay Science, perhaps, and I am sorry I cannot be more precise — of “taking off the garb of the West,” a wonderful way of putting it. And somewhere else he wrote of rowing our boats out beyond our shores so we can look back from a useful distance, and see ourselves as we are.
This is part of what he meant, and only part, by “the pathos of distance.” Only from a distance, he thought, can we see our flaws and altogether ourselves. And this is what I mean — to reconsider who we are, top to bottom. Again to Nietzsche, it is part of what he meant when he wrote of “the revaluation of all values.”
He urged us, as I put it, to skate out on the thin ice of the modern age and think again of all we have assumed to be so.
Portrait of Nietzsche in 1882 by Gustav Adolf Schultze. (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
I will turn here to some specific steps I think we need to take. They are all aspects of what I think is the fundamental process to which we must submit ourselves as individuals. This we can easily name: Let’s call it “the process of overcoming,” or maybe “self-overcoming.”
The first of these matters I have already suggested. It concerns the ideology that binds the West as we have inherited it, even if this ideology resides within our unconscious.
To defend the humanity of all humanity requires us to overcome in ourselves all the presumption that our ways of life and our institutions are the superior paradigm to which others aspire, or, if they do not so aspire, they ought to aspire, or at the extreme, they must be taught or made to aspire, and if they do not so aspire it is only because they are primitive and, so, ignorant.
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The purest expression of this presumption I know of is called “Wilsonian universalism,” after the president who advanced the idea in the early years of the last century. We — we Americans — are humanity’s gifted ones, Woodrow Wilson professed, and it is our responsibility to spread our light to all the dark corners of the world.
It is easy to deceive ourselves as we consider this point. It is easy to say, “How foolish and extravagantly narcissistic a thought.”
I know this because, during my years in Asia I discovered many times, and always bitterly, that I had been fooling myself when I assumed I held to the equality of those among whom I lived. When I look back now I am ashamed at the many occasions when my true views of others emerged and turned out to be nothing like what I thought they were. They seemed, on the worst of these occasions, even a touch Wilsonian.
It takes, as I suggested just earlier, a kind of raw honesty to look at ourselves, to look within, and see exactly who we are and what it is we have to overcome.
It is a question of shedding an ideology within which we have been immersed the whole of our lives. And if you have breathed a certain kind of air or drunk a certain kind of water the whole of your life, it is difficult indeed to imagine any other air or water. But this is what we must do.
The second matter I want to raise has to do with politics. Here I have a couple of points to make.
We hear a lot these days about inclusivity and diversity. We hear so much about these things it is difficult to take these words seriously. Listen closely. The people who speak most loudly about diversity and inclusion are typically talking about skin color, gender, or some other superficial marker of identity.
They entertain no notion whatsoever of inclusion or diversity when it comes to any substantive value. One can be different in all sorts of ways, but not, heaven forbid, different in thought or belief or tradition or culture.
This is of no use. If we are to defend humanity’s humanity we must take back these words from the supercilious people who use them most — who make them mean their opposite, indeed — and make them mean something new and serious.
This requires not merely accepting but embracing true diversity and true inclusion, and this means, in turn, embracing those who may not think at all like us, or whose values are fundamentally at odds with ours.
And the more we find others to be strangers in these ways, the more important it is for us to overcome our proclivities.
My third concern here is maybe the most important. Perhaps I should have put it first. This has to do with history. History, as we will always find in all circumstances, is once again our friend.
We share a tendency across the West to ignore or dismiss the histories of non–Western peoples. If you doubt I am being fair in saying this, pick up a mainstream newspaper and study how it treats Palestinians, Iranians, Russians, Venezuelans.
Note my choice of examples. Our societies are typically inclined to erase the histories of those we stand against. This is a very pernicious practice leading to all sorts of problems. Deny the history of another people and we deny those people — their complexity, their aspirations, indeed, in the end their humanity.
We so license ourselves to affix a label to them — “terrorist state,” “oligarchy,” “theocracy,” what have you — and there is no more need to understand them. Their histories instantly disappear. We have, in a word dehumanized them.
The obvious project here is to allow others their histories. This is instantly transforming. Look what happens in the ready-to-hand case of the Palestinians of Gaza, when we put the present crisis in the context of 1948.
Israeli damage to Gaza, January 2009. (DYKT Mohigan, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
Our understanding is immediately changed. We have, in our terms today, de–Westernized our perspective on this question. And this is why, I have to add, we are encouraged — incessantly, relentlessly, every day — to leave the history of this crisis out of it.
If we are to defend the humanity of humanity properly, we must be willing to acknowledge that humanity has countless different histories, all of which we must honor as valid. In this cause I urge we make ourselves vigilant, vigorous defenders of history, insisting, in whatever circumstance we find ourselves, that it can never be left out.
As another example of what I mean, we must look at a nation’s system, a system such as China’s, and refrain from concluding without elaboration or reflection that it is objectionably “authoritarian” and content ourselves to say it is run —as I read in The Times of London the other day — “by a totalitarian clique.”
If we propose to defend humanity’s humanity and indeed our own, to think in this way is a hopeless case. It is failure right out of the box. This may be what China looks like to the unreconstructed Western mind, but it amounts to a cartoon rendering of reality. It is no longer acceptable, if ever it was, on two grounds.
One, if we persist in cultivating our blindness to this extent we will lose touch with the 21st century and all its currents. Two and more obviously, we will fail utterly to understand others.
In the case of China, you have to look not at a map of the mainland, one, but a great pile of maps from different periods. Then you see that China has a long history of tension and conflict between integration and disintegration, going back many centuries, such that the China of one period scarcely resembles the China of another.
Maintaining territorial integrity and defending China’s sovereignty has been a constant challenge over a long, long period of time. With these maps and what we learn from them in mind, we can understand why a strong centralized government has been so long part of Chinese reality and why it is broadly accepted even among Beijing’s domestic critics.
And we can then see that the unity and integration of the present-day People’s Republic is a great achievement.
Lightning over China and Taiwan, July 27, 2014. (NASA, International Space Station, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
As part of this achievement, I will add, we find the guiding precepts by which modern China conducts itself among others. I am thinking here of Zhou Enlai’s famous Five Principles, formulated in 1954, about which most Westerners know as much as they know of Chinese history — more or less nothing.
Respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, non-aggression, noninterference in others’ internal affairs, interacting to mutual benefit, peaceful coexistence: This makes five. These are irrefutably admirable ideas.
They are 21st century ideas, too. And they arise out of China’s long experience throughout its history.
As I reflect on them, I will mention, another passage in Nietzsche comes to mind. I have a lot of “Fritz,” as his family called him, for you today, because he was greatly concerned with the matter of what made us Western and the need to transcend our “Westernness.”
A word often associated with him is “perspectivism.” It means the capacity to see from the perspectives of others, and I have long argued this is paramount among our imperatives if we are to make any kind of success of the 21st century.
This is from Twilight of the Idols. It bears more or less directly on our task of de–Westernizing ourselves:
“The whole of the West no longer possesses the instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which a future grows: Perhaps nothing antagonizes its ‘modern spirit’ so much. One lives for the day, one lives very fast, one lives very irresponsibly: Precisely this is called ‘freedom.’ That which makes an institution an institution is despised, hated, repudiated: One fears the danger of a new slavery the moment the word ‘authority’ is even spoken out loud. That is how far decadence has advanced in the value-instincts of our politicians, of our political parties: Instinctively they prefer what disintegrates, what hastens the end.”
Think about this. These are the remarks of someone who has rowed his boat beyond the shore, turned back, and saw something other than what he was supposed to see.
I have one further point to make in the matter of history.
When I urge we value and defend it, I do not mean merely remembering. Memory and history are closely related, and this relationship is among my favorite topics. Here I will say only that when we speak of defending history and making use of it, I mean making sure we attend to written history. We must insist on de–Westernizing our histories by insisting that events now neglected— al–Nakba a prime example — are neither minimized nor distorted nor excluded altogether.
Arab labor organizer Monadel Herzallah at Nakba at 60 concert in San Francisco Civic Center, May 2008. (Hossam el-Hamalawy, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
When Nietzsche wrote of taking off the garb of the West he did not mean we had to forget who we are or in any way surrender our identities. Quite the opposite. The exercise was intended as a process of self-discovery, not self-denial. Culture is part of what it means to be human, and as we learn to honor the cultures of others we must also honor our own.
And so, as we think about de–Westernizing our consciousness we must also think of “re–Westernizing” ourselves.
Here I want to put forward a radical idea.
In the mid–19th century, as the West was industrializing and learning to place its faith in science, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, gave way to the Age of Materialism. Our age is an extension of this latter, fair to say. Material consumption is an abiding value now. We honor the market as if it always knows best — as if it can do our thinking for us, as if what the market dictates will always yield the right outcome.
We have, in other words, more or less lost sight of the ideals of the Enlightenment. We profess to live by them, but as I noted in an earlier lecture, every age professes rather hollowly to honor the values of the preceding age even as it has abandoned them.
Daylight Music – Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment Experience Ensemble in London, January 2016. (Paul Hudson, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
Here I will invoke Nietzsche’s notion of the revaluation of all values.
When I speak of re–Westernization as the companion of de–Westernization, and both in the cause of defending the humanity of humanity, I am proposing nothing less than the transcendence of the values we inherit from the Age of Materialism and a return to the ideals our societies left behind when, as Western nations industrialized, “progress” acquired aspects of an ideological cult. We have ever since mistaken material progress for progress by way of our values — the progress altogether of humanity.
We are left now with all the gadgets we can think of but, as the Zionists grimly remind us, we find our conduct toward one another as barbaric as it ever was. Steve Jobs used to boast that Apple was going to “change the world.” How impoverished can our thinking get? Technologies — cellular telephones and all the rest — have changed nothing that has to do with human values. If you consider the Gaza case, technologies have changed the world by going some way to destroying human values.
The Enlightenment’s ideals — humanism, rational thought, natural law, toleration, “liberty, equality, fraternity,” and so on — are what we in the West can bring to the world not unlike the way China offers the world its Five Principles. I am not talking about, I must hasten to add, any kind of nostalgic return to the past. I am talking about a return to ourselves.
Here I have to take care to qualify my thinking.
There are some very intelligent people who tell us that the Enlightenment project was, in fact, a misconceived failure and the source of a lot of the problems humanity has since faced. It was from the Enlightenment, this argument runs, that there arose the impulse to universalize Western civilization as the glorious destination of all humanity. The extent to which Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson elevated the individual to a position of sovereignty seems to me another problem.
John Gray, a British intellectual, published a book called Enlightenment’s Wake in 1995 and in it went a long way toward demolishing commonly accepted notions of what the Enlightenment was about. I not only acknowledge this line of thinking. I endorse many aspects of it.
And this is why I bring Nietzsche’s notion of revaluing our values into the matter. The Enlightenment’s ideals are enduring. It is how they were interpreted and applied that produced the failures. Ho Chi Minh admired Jefferson’s Declaration. But America betrayed Ho, let’s not forget. Jefferson, to go straight to the point, was a slave owner.
I speak, then, of the manifestation of Enlightenment values in a new, 21st century context. This may appear a bold idea, but there is nothing terribly complicated here. Advancing beyond the values of the Materialist Age is, yes, a new thought. But I am talking merely about revaluing — and so living up to —ideals we continue to profess but abjectly fail to honor. Living up to these ideals means, before it means anything else at all, acting according to them while not imposing them on anyone else. You cannot profess liberty — and certainly not democracy — while insisting others accept your version of these.
This is what I mean by “re–Westernization” as the companion of our de–Westernization project, and both in the cause of defending the humanity of humanity.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
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I want to read all the comments, but first I must take issue with “I think of myself as Westerner.” I DO NOT. When I was a child I read Ashley Montagu pointing out that a small percentage of people anywhere in the world had more in common with each other than with all their country’s inhabitants. I find the West abhorrent, its values empty, its people sadly falling for sleazy propaganda. I simply do not think of myself as anything other than the female human being I am. I am of course an American and that may have something to do with my hatred of oppression, domination, and exploitation, but I think my fierce mother and grandmother had more to do with that than “my country.”
Actually Christianity has always been an expression of this presumption. One can be “saved” and enter Heaven by “accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior”, and only by doing so, and only by doing so in this present life.
“Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” (John 14:6)
“Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12)
Too bad for those who, for whatever reason, do not come to “accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior” during this present life. And too bad for those who adhere to any religion other than Christianity. Such as those, for instance, who are born and brought up in a locale where Christianity is not the predominant religion.
Hence the need to evangelize, to send missionaries. To reach the so-called “heathen”. To reach the so-called “lost” for Christ.
“Calvin’s emphasis upon discipline makes it obvious that he saw in it another method for controlling the liberated conscience. By means of discipline the believer was to be reinserted into a context of restraints and controls; he was to be reshaped into a creature of order. This was to be accomplished by minutely regulating his external conduct and by indoctrinating him in the basic teachings of the religious society. And buttressing this comprehensive system of controls was the supreme sanction (severissima ecclesiae vindicta) of excommunication. In Calvin’s system, excommunication implied a great deal more than the mere severance of external ties. The expelled were condemned to a life without hope, a life outside the circle of fellowship.”
-Sheldon Wolin
Politics and Vision p.156
I read the book quite awhile ago. My notes in the margin next to this highlighted section reads:
“Calvin was an a$$hle”
You might enjoy reading Jonathan Fisher’s biography. He was a Calvinist minister in Blue Hill, Maine, spanning the late 18th century into the early 19th century. Fascinating human being, not exactly a Calvinist stereotype.
First, the Jesus Seminar — a group made up of very liberal to very conservative theologians — agreed unanimously that nothing in John were Jesus’ words. Second, Acts was Paul speaking, I believe, and Paul has always been problematic, being a Pharisee and not fully grasping that Jesus didn’t think much of “the Law.”
I would suggest you read Jesus Before Christianity by Albert Nolan, to understand what Jesus was trying to say. It becomes clear why so many “Christians” avoid the Gospels and eschew the message, preferring to wallow in the Old Testament. I’ve even read clergy who clearly do not understand the parables and complain about Jesus’ preferred teaching method! If you accept that money, power, position, status, are what is important, then Jesus’ teaching that none of those things matter will not appeal to you. Remember, “Christianity” is more accurately called “Constantinity” for the man who made “Christianity” into a state religion. And all popular religions avoid upsetting the status quo.
I was watching an old rerun of the Johnny Carson Show last night. One of the guests was a film actor who had done some filming in Europe. This was in the 80s. Post Vietnam. He said the people in these European countries told him they found crowds of Americans at sporting events shouting “USA, USA, USA!” frightening. He answered it was just people trying to feel good about their country after its reputation suffering from so much criticism.
Those European critics were feeling something authentic that was indeed disturbing. It was the rallying cry of our coming turn to fascism. In truth of course, it was already here. The public just hadn’t quite embraced it yet until those chants became commonplace.
The indoctrination in the US runs very deep. It will take a lot of serious hardship to turn them around. We are on our way.
Well, watch a current football match in Europe (they seem to be all over the TV). There they are shouting whatever the team’s name is, or their country’s name, or whatever. I don’t take European criticism of the USA very seriously! And they seem just as fascistic as we are.
Spot on. The West’s contempt – at best, its condescendence – towards the rest, is inculcated in most of us from birth. And our leaders – who would not be our leaders if they thought otherwise – do all in their power to enshrine the principle that we are living in the garden, while all outside is the jungle. I fear that changing us from within, against all the power of propaganda and peer pressure, is too much to hope for. Any suggestion to my friends – intelligent, highly educated, kind-hearted – that western freedom and democracy are not inevitably superior to Chinese authoritarianism is met with disbelief. Clearly, they think, such ideas and their proponents are not to be taken seriously. History appears to be on the side of the Global Majority, unless humans destroy our world through nuclear war or environmental collapse. But I fear it will not be until external pressures weaken the grip of the Western Establishment on the flow of information that significant numbers among the Golden Billion will be able to free themselves from the lingering belief in their civilisational superiority.
Justifications for western imperialism, with the quiet parts said aloud, is laid out in Samuel Huntington’s 1996 book //The Clash of Civilizations.// A summary at Wiki with map showing the “civilizations.” Vietnam is part of the Sino bloc; so rightly an enemy. Another is the entire Eastern Orthodox world–thus Russia will always be enemy. The north and eastern part of Africa is part of the Islamic world, another enemy, while the rest is an amorphous gray that doesn’t count, really. Western Europe, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand are a civilized solid blue.
Obviously the indigenous peoples are irrelevant…even though they’re the ones the world should be listening to. People who live in one locale for thousands of years pretty much have it down as to how best to relate to a local ecosystem. Unlike most white people in the Americas who can’t even identify the dominant native tree species; living on top of the land with no roots in it and thus no feel for it. As a Comanche elder and shaman explained to Carl Jung: “The difference between the Red man and the White man is that we see everything as alive while you think everything is dead. Including other people.”
A product of Enlightenment thinking. From which the ideas of science and of representative democracy, but at the cost of a felt connection to life. It has to do with how the hemispheres of the brain work. Check out neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist’s two volume magnum opus //The Matter With Things (Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World)//. The left hemisphere processes linearly, dislikes ambiguity and uncertainty, seeks to grasp–knowledge by physically manipulating, seizing, and separating in order to control things. The right hemisphere is about symbols, metaphors, and meaning. It processes gestalts, connections, the arts, and spiritual experiences. The right understands the left, whereas the reverse is not so. Which explains lots about the narrowness of neolib and neocon reality tunnels.
Another good assessment of the illness is the Canadian John Ralston Saul’s 1992 book //Voltaire’s Bastards (The Dictatorship of Reason in the West.)// In 2014, he wrote //The Comeback// which is about how Canadian First Nations have gone from a horrible low point to regain recognition by others of their influential power and as he says “civilizational creativity.” Saul’s map of the Americas sees many shades besides Huntington’s solid blue.
Does ‘de-westernizing’ include discarding distinctly western pursuits like gay rights, women’s rights, democracy, freedom of association, freedom of speech, etc? Because I honestly have no interest in de-westernizing and following the Chinese model of human rights, or the Islamist model of human rights, or sub-Saharan African model of human rights. I’m probably in the minority here but I will take western civilization, warts and all, over the available alternatives.
What you seem to take, “warts and all”, from your other comments here, is neoliberalism.
With a “woke” justification.
Far from it.
I’m more of an isolationist than a neoliberal. I believe the job of an American government is to make life better for Americans, not to run around playing ‘world police’ and picking fights overseas. Let Israel and Hamas settle their own disputes. Ditto for Russia and Ukraine. And Sudan. And every other global war where America sticks their nose in. George Washington had it right. America should avoid ‘foreign entanglements’ and look after it’s own. Sometimes, in extreme circumstances such as WWII, it might make sense for America to involve itself in foreign wars. But most of the time, America getting involved and swinging it’s
‘big stick’ makes things worse.
Neoliberalism is about economic policy, a new Laissez- faire, keeping government out of the economy, not about foreign policy. That is neoconservatism.
The definition varies depending on who is doing the talking and who is being talked about. Most people consider blood-soaked ghouls like Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland to be neoliberals because they have a (D) next their names or got their start in and have spent most of their careers in Democrat administrations. Personally, I don’t think there is a whit of difference between them and neocon warmongers like John McCain, Dick Cheney, or John Bolton, but most Democrats would disagree. Then again, the Democratic party has become the home of all the Never Trump neocons anyway, so it is a distinction without a difference. Two wings of the same bird.
Also, I would say that ‘Laissez- faire, keeping government out of the economy’ is more of a definition of libertarians, not neoliberals. That’s kind of their whole reason for existing, to pretend there is some kind of utopian world where a true free market exists. And like most utopian visions, it’s only a hair’s breadth away from being a dystopia.
But libertarians are neolibereals. Reagan and Thatcher were neoliberals. Clinton and Blair brought neoliberalism into their parties. Neoliberalism has zero to do with politics. It purely is to do with an economic theory and practice, known in an earlier age as Laissez- faire. So it has nothing to do with who is doing the talking. Anyone who says neoliberalism is about politics or political parties is just dead wrong.
Thank you for the distinction.
I believe the Author’s point was de-westernizing to re-westernize … in other words, lose the imperialism (which I know you are not a fan of) and get more intimately familiar with the “true west”.
Western civ has produced a lot to be legitimately proud of and happy to have, including the natural rights you mentioned and more broadly the concept of limited govt beholden to the people. When we stop proselytizing by force and start just living the life, I feel we will immediately be better westerners.
I read the text with heightened interest and felt enlightened by its content. And, then a sobering thought enters the picture: Kamala Harris, our potential leader as president of the USA. Now, raw your boat out in the distance and glance back at this.
Thank you P. Lawrence.
Very wise ,intelligent ,and well informed perspective for an extremely important subject matter in the age we are living in .Much to ponder and live up to so as to aspire to be true humans .I couldn’t agree more with Patrick ,the struggle to understand the other is a must in order to know ourselves .Many thanks to CN for this article from Patrick Lawrence .
an interesting point of view comes from Emmanuel Todd, in french, 2 hors hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG_WZcBarIg&t=3306s
“The edifice within” is a great term. The westerner’s tendency to virtuous self-regard, and what it is intended to hide, is what must be dismantled. This includes the western “left” who’s lineage seems more Jesuit missionary than anything else – “I do what I do because I care too much”.
Karl Jaspers’ “Innere Umkehr” and also his Weltphilosophie come to mind.
The West/East concept has always been a human construct. Henry Kissinger attempted to justify “western” hegemony by quipping “we went through the Enlightenment, they didn’t”. “They” are backward, WE are enlightened and all that. History has destined the West to dominate and teach the savages how to be ‘civilised’ . A century after Rudyard Kipling, and the sentiment continues. Nothing has changed it seems.
Human history is not linear, as many “westerners” conceptualize. Recent events underline this. Genocide, economic warfare, starvation tactics etc. are used as we speak, yet many criticize the atrocities of the 1940s as if nothing similar is going on right now. History looks very cyclical, not linear.
Reading this article made me think of the classic work of the Palestinian American scholar Edward Said: Orientalism and subsequent works. The East/West is defined by the imperialists, history is written by the victors, and to the victors go the spoils. The demarcations and nomenclature of the “East” the “Middle East” “Far East” etc. Greenwich prime meridian, maps etc. have all been defined by the “West” especially the British. The borders of many nations were drawn by the Brits or other imperialists.
Silly hubris-filled imperialist humans fancy themselves as some sort of gods, but they have a rude awakening coming that is inescapable: sickness and death.
What is disturbing though is that millions of misinformed, desperate, and gullible US voters will go to the polls and “vote”. No matter what the outcome of the sham election, the genocide, proxy wars, will continue. The health care crisis, housing crisis, distribution of wealth crisis, environmental crisis etc. will continue to worsen. No matter if the Ds or Rs prevail, or DT or KH: they all agree: the genocide MUST continue. So, you will vote genocide, there is no alternative.
Absolutely timely and terrific! I studied with Anna Halprin for a time. She relished people of different cultures and races moving and dancing together strengthening and enriching us with alternative ways of seeing and understanding. And China! Such a deep deep culture! You beckon to us to open to our own authenticity freed from the limitations imposed by a value system and an identification with an inflated, distorted sense that “Western” is superior. That inflation a defense against the massive collective shadow found articulated in the histories written by the conquered that denies soulful inspirations. A hearty thank you. Please. Deepen this gold nugget by sharing your explorations more and more.
Zhou Enlai is one of the most important and most accomplished political leaders of the last 100 years. I doubt if 1 in 20 American adults could tell you anything about him. That’s the state of the Western mind. And that’s exactly where Washington DC and national news media want it to be.
“What must each of us do, in the privacy, so to say, of our consciences, our thoughts, our surmises and judgments, to take up the work of defending humanity’s humanity?”
Noting that this phrase suggests humanity is capable of humanity, or the humane, the compassionate, I suggest we start by acknowledging people as equals instead of assuming supremacies and giving in to insufferable ideas such as we are “the one indispensable nation” etc. etc. or the Wilsonian egotism. That is, that the globe’s nations are neighbors with whom we should strive for decent relations–as neighbors. Second, that we recognize that “humanity” has a proclivity for the most extraordinary delusion and violence. Currently we are told Israel is murdering children by deliberately targeting them with bullets to the chest and the head, and just yesterday Israel burned children and families in their flimsy tent shelters, burned them alive, and all in the spirit of “self-defense” and conducting a genocide.
“Humanity’s humanity” unfortunately is not all rosy and likely to produce positive development via some meditation and study of history. We’re a flawed, limited species. Start by looking at the worst and determining not to be it.
I think I can see the outlines of a new book, Patrick … “the humanity of our humanity” … these ideas need to be explored in depth.
Western governance has always lacked a moral core. Christianity divorced itself from governance à l’outrance when Christ commanded his disciples to ‘Render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God that which is God’s”.
Confucius made Chinese governance an exercise in self-sacrificial compassion, “ren”: “The administration of government lies in getting men of strong moral character, who can be attracted only by means of the ruler’s own character. That character is to be cultivated by his treading the ways of duty. And the treading those ways of duty is cultivated by practicing compassion. Confucius”. Analects.
The 100,000,000 dues-paying volunteer CPC members swear this oath when they are admitted: “I promise to bear the people’s hardships first, to enjoy its comforts last, and to work selflessly for the public interest”. Sharp-eyed readers will recognize the words of Fan Zhongyan (989–1052 AD), statesman, writer, scholar, and reformer of the northern Song dynasty.
As vice chancellor to Emperor Renzong, Fan’s philosophical, educational and political contributions continue to be influential to this day. His attitude towards official service is encapsulated by his oft-quoted line on the proper attitude of scholar-officials: “They were the first to worry the worries of all-under-Heaven, and the last to enjoy its joys”.
As JM Keynes said, “Planning should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers, wholly share your own moral position. Moderate planning will be safe if those carrying it out are rightly orientated in their minds and hearts to the moral issue.”
Christianity’s assumed separation of the the world from the Divine was a time bomb that is now exploding.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment. I made signs with the words of Zhou Enlai and stood on street corners for many months. I did not know about Fan Zhongyan. Thank you and thanks to Mr. Lawrence for this great piece.
Our humanity is gone already.
Shame on those who are calling themselves advanced democracies!
Stop the killings!
As opposed to all those peaceful non-democracies throughout history?
Homo sapiens are violent alpha predators, and their entire history is one of violent conquest and subjugation, no matter what political system they operate under. Every great kingdom from around the globe for the whole of human existence has been soaked in blood. No political system can free us from our base nature. We can only do that for ourselves.
“And so their spirits soared
as they took positions down the passageways of battle
all night long, and the watchfires blazed among them.
Hundreds strong, as stars in the night sky glittering
round the moon’s brilliance blaze in all their glory
when the air falls to a sudden, windless calm…
all the lookout peaks stand out and the jutting cliffs
and the steep ravines and down from the high heavens bursts
the boundless bright air and all the stars shine clear
and the shepherd’s heart exults-so many fires burned
between the ships and the Xanthus’ whirling rapids
set by the men of Troy, bright against their walls.
A thousand fires were burning there on the plain
and beside each fire sat fifty fighting men
poised in the leaping blaze, and champing oats
and glistening barley, stationed by their chariots,
stallions waited for Dawn to mount her glowing thrown.
-Homer
The Iliad (Fagles translation 8.638-654)
But war used to be a noble thing, an honorable thing.
It wasn’t neoliberalism committing one mass murder after another of innocent civilians with stand-off weapons for profit.
War was never ‘noble’ or ‘honorable’. The Illiad itself is about a war fought over infidelity and ownership of a wife as property. ‘Nobility’ and ‘honor’ were lies our ancestors told themselves in order to justify their depraved violent natures. Lies we still tell ourselves when we ‘must destroy the village in order to save it’ or when we are ‘bringing democracy’ to a country at the end of a gun.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
You miss my point.
Benard Knox in the Introduction describes the passage below as a recognition of “..the equality of men of war, all of whom who must face violent death.” It shows a grudging respect for an enemy soldier who fought well, and will die well.
The mass killing of non-combatants, collective punishment, is a war crime. To kill women and children using stand-off modern weaponry, there’s no equality in that, no respect, no honor.
No matter how the Zionists, and Ghouls who serve them in the current administration spin it.
“Come friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so?
Even Patroclus died, a far, far better man than you.
And look, you see how handsome and powerful I am?
The son of a great man, the mother who gave me life
a deathless goddess. But even for me, I tell you,
death and the strong force of fate are waiting.
There will come a dawn or sunset or high noon
when a man will take my life in battle too -”
-Homer
The Iliad (21.119-26)
If every great kingdom has been soaked in blood, perhaps we should look for a better way to organize society. Because human nature is not particularly violent or aggressive, any more than the nature of any other hominid. Or, for that matter, any other animal.
And the recorded history is a poor guide to human nature, as it only goes back about 5000 years. Humans have been walking the planet in their most modern form for a good 50,000 years, and our close hominin cousins for 500,000 or more. The earliest evidence for controlled use of fire goes back to about 1.0 million years ago, with Homo erectus (hxxps://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1117620109).
War requires a strong central government and the indoctrination of its subjects to the idea that it is good and honorable to die in battle for the preservation of the state. In societies without such a government (e.g., tribal societies), conflicts between neighbors involve raids and skirmishes where individual fighters have a relatively low risk of death, and extermination of the other group is not a goal. Of course, a lot depends on the resource base and the intensity of competition for scarce resources.
The happiest arrangement for humans would be to maintain a low population density so that there is always a generous plenty of resources to go around. And to keep the social group size small enough to have an egalitarian structure, as seen in the remaining hunter-gatherer groups around the world.
And enough already with the ‘Alpha-Male Killer Ape’ trope. That was discredited by the mid-1970s.
What a beautiful and clear reckoning you provide in your speech, Patrick Lawrence. Yes, when Nietzsche sailed into the clear waters outside the sulfurous west, he did see clearly the “revaluation of all human values.” He knew that religion was dead, and that all the churches were but the sepulchers of God. They had been so for a very long time across history. As Bob Dylan’s grandmother said to him when he was barely beyond being a teenager, “the Pope is just the king of all the Jews.” There is no barren land shining beyond the fecund soil of ourselves. But as Spengler pointed out in “The Decline of the West,” all cultures tug the shore of their own ruin in their inevitable evolution. The question is this: can we overcome the constant demand for the eternal and the infinite as our final historical end, and somehow gain for ourselves a here and now that doesn’t seek a destructive transcendence? If any culture has the chance to overcome its own command to extinction, it should be one like ours which pursues technology (at least occasionally) for its own sake, and not just for the sake of the rich individual silently expiring in the corner of the room. Your words come as quite a welcome surprise in the hope of attaining just such an outcome. You certainly give Nietzsche, a profound thinker, his due. Thank you.
you speak of de-westernizing, then reference Nietzsche. Come on. Also, the ideals of the enlightenment, liberal values and so on, are not possible under capitalism. This has been known and established for over 100 years.
Totally agree. Humanity can only defend itself by throwing off the yoke of capitalism’s ghouls.
… and throwing on the yoke of collectivism’s ghouls?
I hate to break it to you, but awful humans rise to positions of power in ALL political systems.
Besides, capitalism is already dead. We are already living in a fascist society where government and capital have merged into a single entity. Capitalism has been destroyed by rent-seekers looking for the latest government subsidy to power their business. Elon Musk and Tesla was one of the most prolific early adopters, Big Pharma made an absolute killing off government graft during the Covid pandemic, and energy companies are cashing in on wind and solar payola for projects that will never work (and many won’t even get built). Modern companies spend as much time chasing after government largess as they do chasing after end consumers. That has distorted the supposed ‘free market’ into a mockery of the concept. And with all that government largess comes at a price … compliance.
“Capitalism has been destroyed by rent-seeking”
-Above
Rent-seeking is Capitalism.
“It’s the ‘private tax’ that the owners of property or services can charge, above and beyond any investment they’ve made, to the people who wish to use them.”
-George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison
Invisible Doctrine The Secret History of Neoliberalism p.33-34
“Modern companies spend as much time chasing after government largess as they do chasing after end consumers. That has distorted the supposed ‘free market’ into a mockery of the concept. And with all that government largess comes at a price…compliance.”
-Above
“So what did freedom, in this case, mean? Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means freedom for bosses to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to exploit and endanger workers, to poison rivers, to adulterate food, to design exotic financial instruments, to charge exorbitant rates of interest. It leads to train wrecks-both literally and figuratively…”
-Ibid p.28
“It [neoliberalism] recognized that, in the face of widespread resistance, the state would have to intervene to impose its desired political outcomes on an unwilling population, to liberate ‘the market’ from democracy.”
-Ibid p.29
So you imply the state requires compliance from the corporations. When it enforces the “freedom” described above on the people. If we could get half the country to understand even a fraction of the atrocities put upon us by neoliberal capitalism, you couldn’t find a pitch fork in any hardware store in the country.
So, perhaps we can overthrow capitalism, too, when we have taken off our blinders and reorganised our perceptions? Worth a try…
Overthrow capitalism and replace it with … what?
Tearing down the existing system is the easiest proposal in the world. Replacing it with something that works better is a bit more complicated. The Soviets tried it, and failed. The Chinese tried it, and failed until they allowed some limited/controlled capitalism. Hitler and Pol Pot tried it in two very different ways (one fascist, one communist) and wound up in the same genocidal place. Various middle eastern, African, and south American countries have tried variations on left-wing and right-wing autocracy without much success. I suppose we could go back to feudalism, but I doubt modern serfs would like it much more than their ancestors did.
Replace it with a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work. Instead of exploitation.
Commerce instead of Financialization.
Regulation of Corporations instead of deregulation.
The People voting on Policy, instead of the “..dirtiest, most antisocial and damaging companies..”, insulating their identities and dictating policy through Lobbyist groups and bought and paid for politicians.
Repatriating all privatized public services.
Instituting a wealth tax.
Stopping colonial looting.
Stopping domestic looting of natural resources and land.
Stopping the commodification of everything.
Helping The People understand being poor is not somehow their fault. That 60% of the rich have not done a thing but come out of the right birth canal. That they haven’t come by their wealth by enterprise and virtue.
Help people understand that Capitalism is responsible for destroying what we had of democracy. That the enemy of neoliberal capitalism is true democracy.
@steve:
… and replace it with
DARING to CARE and to SHARE
FAIRLY WHAT’S THERE among
all people, as they are created equal.
it sounds naive and impossible,
given that human beings are quite
– or even irremediably? – selfish.
still, i think, it is well worth a try.
Was going to post this comment on it’s own. But saw yours:
“But he who endeavours to lead others by reason does not act from impulse, but with humanity and kindness, and is always consistent with himself.”
-Benedict Spinoza
Ethics p.183
“Humanism was proving itself unable to balance reason. The two seemed, in fact, to be enemies.
A civilization unable to differentiate between illusion and reality is usually believed to be at the tail end of it’s existence.”
-John Ralston Saul
Voltaire’s Bastards p.5
Capitalism would have us believe it is reasonable to destroy the world and the people of the West and Non-West for profit.
Capitalism is the problem.
That realization should be kept in mind as we think about “re–Westernization”
Deeply thought provoking. Thank you, Patrick.