Western culture suffers from a historical narrative of self-hatred.

Thank you for accepting, tumeric. This is my first go on this website, so some elements of my original post might be a little messy, but this is obviously because I am still inexperienced with this kind of format. I will appreciate any suggestions you have concerning presentation etc. I think that the three arguments you make in your first post are interrelated. As you say in point 3, Western culture has been the most dynamic in terms of political and technological change. I interpret this as a) industrialization in terms of technological change and, b) the Enlightenment as the ideals to which we judge ourselves. In this regard the development of Western culture has been different from that of other parts of the world. The question is, however, whether this is part of an internal struggle within Western culture itself or a historical anomaly. With this I am not questioning the main tenets of the Enlightenment, I am merely trying to trace back the origin of what I perceive to be a form of cultural discontinuity. In the past few decades economic globalization (in terms of a rapid increase in cross-border movement of goods, services, technology, and capital) have not resulted in the globalization of the ideals of the Enlightenment. Cultures that have always been rather traditional, and who are now quickly catching up in a technological sense, are condescendingly admired by the West as 'exotic' and it is often argued that these cultures and their customs need to be preserved and protected. This is where we can see the double standards I referred to in my original post. When it comes to traditional European culture there is no room for this kind of exotic admiration or endearing nostalgia. There is only the battering ram of political censorship. To give you an example: in our society it is perfectly acceptable to criticize the Catholic Church, to ridicule its leaders, to attack its moral code, and to make offensive statements about Christ. When it comes to Islam, however, the same kind of criticism is considered completely unacceptable and anyone who participates in it is immediately decried as an Islamophobe. Take for instance the public debate after the Charlie Hebdo shooting. Many claimed that the satirical magazine was insanely offensive to Muslims, but nobody cared about the fact that it was equally offensive to Christians. In other words, one religious group is to be protected from public criticism, whereas the other should simply endure it. Relating to the examples you have given above, I would say that the sunni-shiite conflict is actually a conflict within traditional Islam, and so there is no threat of a secular power hostile to the Islamic religion as a whole. In the case of China there is obviously a secular power that threatened traditional culture, but in this case the threat came (again) from Marxism which we could definitely consider to be a product of the Enlightenment. The difference is that the attacks of the Chinese government were never part of a culture of self-hatred, rather it was part of an aggressive program to try and modernize China. In fact, the Communist Party of China is currently promoting a return to traditional Confucianism.