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In defence of cultural imperialism

Other races aren't backward. As America shows, western culture belongs to all races. But other cultures are backward, and hopefully will die out. Nobody plans to force them, of course, because forcing would be against western culture (though not against traditional cultures). Instead, we plan to seduce them. It is strange but companies like McDonald's and Coca-Cola, shows like Baywatch, and people like Madonna do deserve a medal of honour in the struggle for human freedom.

Cultural imperialism

• Anti-racism - It's culture, not race.

• Culture of shame (also here) by Matthew Leeming - on the tyrannical, backward Afghan culture, which is really no different from the medieval European culture of our ancestors.
  • We have abandoned the culture of our ancestors - and they should do the same. Every Afghani should abandon the culture of their ancestors and embrace reason, freedom of thought and freedom of religion.
  • Leeming expresses well how I view the world: "Of the 16 billion people who have been born since homo became sapiens, I doubt if more than 500 million have lived in a world free of belief in magical causation or the threat of arbitrary imprisonment and death at the hands of religious police for thought-crimes. Afghanistan is a good place to ponder one's good fortune in being born in the modern West and not in a culture where malaria is treated by yelling, or the best cuts of meat are reserved for the dead, or it is believed that the motions of the stars are controlled from the liver of a rogue elephant, or divine honours paid to shallow depressions in the ground. We have the Enlightenment to thank for this, the moment when the West achieved intellectual maturity (or rediscovered that of the classical world) and reduced religion to a matter of opinion and turned the mullahs into comic turns like Rowan Williams."

• Culturist not Racist: Battered Westerner Syndrome inflicted by myopic Muslim defenders by Mark Steyn - "As one is always obliged to explain when tiptoeing around this territory, I'm not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture - rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. - is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic."
• I could add that capitalist culture is also superior to communist culture. That's why Cubans try to get to America, but Americans don't try to get to Cuba.

• Cultural imperialism
  • An Empire of Ideals (formerly here) by Robert W. Tracinski - In defence of "cultural imperialism".

  • In Praise of Vulgarity by Charles Paul Freund - vulgar capitalist consumerism and low culture are not bad things - they are fundamental promoters of human freedom and enlightenment. Ask anyone who lived under the Soviet jackboot.

• Why the Muslims Misjudged Us (also here) by Victor Davis Hanson - We do understand the Muslim world. We understand it very well. They don't understand us. They don't understand why we are rich and free and powerful. And followup here.
• Eastern Middle School, by Thomas L. Friedman, makes the same point, just not as well.

The superiority of the west

My ancestors didn't invent this culture either. But I have adopted it. My ancestors were Gaelic Catholic Irish peasants. Modern scientific culture was invented mainly by English Protestant gentlemen. I don't care. I recognise something good when I see it. What I say to the non-western world is: Abandon the culture of your ancestors, like I have, and adopt something better.

• Anti-racism - It's culture, not race.

• Lost in the swamp of modernity, Peter Watson, New Statesman, Monday 29th October 2001 - author of A Terrible Beauty - "outside the west, there were no new ideas in the 20th century". He describes the frustration that must be felt by many people in the unfree world: "modernity is .. like a swamp, a treacherous landscape where some civilisations can't get a footing". The solution to all their woes is simple: intellectual, political and economic freedom. And yet they will fight and oppose this solution to the death.

• Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States by Ralph Peters, Spring 1998, lists seven attributes of failed states:
  1. Restrictions on the free flow of information.
  2. The subjugation of women.
  3. Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure.
  4. The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization.
  5. Domination by a restrictive religion.
  6. A low valuation of education.
  7. Low prestige assigned to work.

• Charles Murray
  • Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950
  • "Human Accomplishment" - Murray lists the 4,000 most important inventions and discoveries in history, and calculates that:
    1. 94 percent of all the inventions and discoveries of history come from the West, and almost all of the non-western 6 percent come from antiquity.
    2. In the last 1000 years, 99 percent of inventions and discoveries have come from the West.

• The decline of the Islamic world:
  • The Islamic Golden Age (c. 8th - 13th centuries AD), when the Islamic world really was at the frontier of human knowledge, before the torch passed to Europe.
  • Timeline of Islamic science and technology - Almost nothing since 1500.
  • If you know of any major idea or invention or discovery in the Islamic world (i.e. not by individual Muslims in the West, but in the Islamic world itself) in the 1500s or 1600s or 1700s or 1800s or 1900s or 2000s, tell me here.

• UN Human Development Reports
  • Arab Human Development Report
    • Summary (also here) - In 1980-2000, the Arab states together registered 370 patents, while Israel, with less than one fortieth the population, registered 7,652. South Korea registered 16,328.
    • The Arab World's Scientific Desert by Daniel Del Castillo - No more than 10,000 books were translated into Arabic over the entire past millennium, equivalent to the number translated into Spanish each year.
    • Again, to say this is not to gloat. It is to point out that the central issue of the current crisis is that the Arab Islamic world needs to change.

• List of Muslim Nobel prizewinners v. Jewish Nobel prizewinners (and here):
  • 1.4 billion Muslims have achieved only 6 Nobel Prizes.
  • A tiny 12 million Jews have achieved a staggering 161 Nobel Prizes.
  • Why is this? My answer is simple: Jewish culture is superior. Jewish culture is the western culture of freedom and science, and is therefore superior to all traditional culture. Other religions and races should abandon their culture and adopt the ideas that have made the Jews (and other westerners) so successful: free thought, free speech, free press, science, democracy and capitalism.
  • As the page above says: "There is not a single Jew that has destroyed a church. There is not a single Jew that protests by killing people. The Jews don't traffic slaves, nor have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the Infidels."

• Academic Ranking of World Universities - 2004
  • universities
  • countries
  • The tiny country of Israel has no less than 7 entries in the top 500.
  • The entire Arab world has not a single entry in the top 500. See discussion.

  • Only 35 countries have any entries at all in the top 500. They are all ranked as "Free" by Freedom House except for "Partly Free": Singapore and Argentina, and "Not Free": Russia and China.
  • That makes 31 Free, 2 Partly Free, 2 Not Free. 15 of the top 15 countries are Free. 10 of the top 10 universities are American or British. The relationship between political freedom and academic excellence is unarguable. If the Arab world wants to get on this list - and if China wants to move up the list - they need to adopt democracy, a free press, freedom of religion, and human rights.

• A View from the Eye of the Storm, April 2004, by unknown (possibly Haim Harari)
  • The total number of scientific publications of 300 million Arabs is less than that of 6 million Israelis.
  • "Is the solution a democratic Arab world? If by democracy we mean free elections but also free press, free speech, a functioning judicial system, civil liberties, equality to women, free international travel, exposure to international media and ideas, laws against racial incitement and against defamation, and avoidance of lawless behavior regarding hospitals, places of worship and children, then yes, democracy is the solution."
• More stats
  • The 280 million people of the 22 Arab countries combined have a gross domestic product less than that of Spain.
  • Total non-fossil fuel exports from the entire region amount to less than the total exports of Finland.

• The majority of Arab youth want to emigrate. 51 percent want to emigrate. The US and UK were the top destinations they want to move to. Only 13 percent of those wishing to emigrate want to move to another Arab country.

• The inability of the west to explain to its youth and its immigrants where its wealth and power comes from (not from empire and theft, but rather from science, democracy and capitalism) - article by Theodore Dalrymple.

• Why is the west rich?

• GDP v. Religiosity, survey, Oct 2007 - There is a high correlation between religiosity and low GDP, both in Africa and the Middle East.
• As a comment points out, there are a number of possible conclusions:
  1. Religion makes people poor.
  2. Poorness makes people religious.
  3. Un-religiousness makes people wealthy.
  4. Wealth makes people un-religious.

• Debate between liberal Syrian author Nidhal Na'isa and some idiot Egyptian cleric, October 30, 2007, contains this amusing exchange:
  • Cleric: "In Andalusia, which you say, the Muslims conquered by the sword, they left a civilization unparalleled throughout history to this day. Western civilization is not really a civilization".
  • Nidhal Na'isa: "Western civilization is not really a civilization?"
  • Cleric: "You listen to me! You listen to me!"
  • Nidhal Na'isa: "How did you come here from Egypt in two hours? On camels, it used to take you over six months to make a pilgrimage."

• Combat 'Westophobia', Barry Rubin, The Jerusalem Post, Nov 18, 2007, on the above exchange: "He might have added: Who developed the technology making it possible for you to speak to millions of people through airwaves to a box with pictures and sounds? Other Arab liberals have pointed out that the ability to build airplanes is superior to the ability to crash them into buildings". He lists the 4 main errors of modern Middle Eastern thought:
  1. That its problems arise from Western and Israeli oppression.
  2. That the struggles and violence of radical Arab nationalists and Islamists are based on genuine grievances.
  3. That the West behaves wrongly because it is hostile or ignorant about Arabs and Muslims.
  4. That Arab and Muslim society is vastly superior to the West - which justifies their rejection of it and will ultimately pave the way for their victory over it.

Abandon the culture of your ancestors

Throughout this site I encourage people in the non-western, tribal and traditional world to abandon the culture of their ancestors, and adopt the western ideas that have proven so powerful and universal. Dump your tribal and traditional beliefs, and betray your ancestors, is my simple message.

Why is this so shocking? We have all abandoned and betrayed the culture of our ancestors. Everyone on this planet has done this. Certainly all Muslims have. It is simply a matter of choosing which ancestors to betray.

Studies of the Common ancestors of all humans show that almost all Muslims on earth descend from Jews, and almost all Jews on earth descend from Muslims. Everyone on earth, without exception, descends from people who would be horrified by the religious and political beliefs of their descendant. Everyone on earth has betrayed their ancestors. It is simply a matter of choosing which ancestors to betray.

So there should be nothing shocking in dumping your family's culture and adopting a different culture. For your family's culture is itself a betrayal of their ancestors, who would be horrified by it.

In defence of a new form of imperialism

• The older western imperialism

• America is not imperialist in the old sense. It liberates countries instead of occupying them.
  • Jonah Goldberg - The Europeans were brutal imperialists. The Soviet communists were murderous brutal imperialists. The Islamic states are either brutal imperialists (Iraq in Kuwait, Syria in Lebanon) or would like to be brutal imperialists. America is unique in world history in being so strong and so powerful and yet not imperialist.
  • The American "Empire" by Victor Davis Hanson
  • Robert Locke's conservative optimism as a rebuttal to John Derbyshire's conservative pessimism. One interesting point is that Locke argues that America is powerful in the world partly because it is harmless (to innocent states): "One of the keys to American world dominance is that everyone knows - regardless of what they say in public - that we are a tame liberal democracy that's not going to hurt them."

• In fact, despite everything, France, Germany, Russia and China are remarkably relaxed about America being the no.1 power. Sure, they complain, and try to obstruct it at the UN. But they are not willing to actually do anything serious about it - such as re-arming, or allying with America's enemies. This tells us clearly what they really think. If America really was a malevolent power, they would not be relaxed like this.

• The case for a new form of imperialism that liberates its subjects:
  • Imperialism is the answer by Mark Steyn - spread democracy through the non-democratic world
  • The case for colonialism by Daniel Kruger - "This doctrine is driven by the firm belief - uncluttered by relativist self-loathing - in the universal principles of liberty and justice. It gives expression to our sense that everyone, not just the West, has a right to live in a decent country .. In particular, it gives substance to the vacuities of the "ethical foreign policy". .. This does not require perpetual territorial conquest; but it does require regime change"
  • Suddenly, serious people are rethinking an old idea that's time has come again: colonialism. - article by Jonah Goldberg.
  • The Case for American Empire by Max Boot
  • "on the whole, U.S. imperialism has been the greatest force for good in the world during the past century" - article by Max Boot.

• Niall Ferguson (see home page)
  • Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power - In defence of aspects of Britain's Empire.
  • Colossus: The Price of America's Empire - Urging America to adopt some imperial roles.

• Even if one is still sceptical of imperialism, no one can deny that sovereignty and self-determination can lead to tyranny and democide just as easily as they lead to freedom.

• Sovereignty and self-determination - the friend of tyrants and human-rights abusers

"I had decided I wanted to study political science. ... I wanted to understand why life in Holland was so different from life in Africa. Why there was so much peace, security and wealth in Europe. What the causes of war were, and how you built peace. ... Every contact I had with government, I thought, "How do you get to have a government like this?" ... This was an infidel country, whose way of life we Muslims were supposed to oppose and reject. Why was it, then, so much better run, better led, and made for such better lives than the places we came from? Shouldn't the places where Allah was worshipped and His laws obeyed have been at peace and wealthy, and the unbelievers' countries ignorant, poor, and at war?"
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, on arrival in Holland from the Islamic world. From her book Infidel.
If only every Islamic and third world radical had such humility and willingness to learn new ideas. All their problems would be solved.

"It is always difficult to make the transition to a modern world. It was difficult for my grandmother, and for all my relatives ... It was difficult for me, too. I moved from the world of faith to the world of reason - from the world of excision and forced marriage to the world of sexual emancipation. Having made that journey, I know that one of those worlds is simply better than the other. Not because of its flashy gadgets, but fundamentally, because of its values. The message of this book, if it must have a message, is that we in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life."
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali.