From: josh@aris.ss.uci.edu (Josh Stern)
Subject: Re: World Culture and Western Culture
Newsgroups: soc.history,soc.culture.indian
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 28 Sep 92 12:41:47 GMT

> John McCarthy writes:

> The following is a response to the idea that Western Culture courses
                                               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> should be replaced by multiculturalism.
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^?

I presume that you mean to say that you are responding to something like
the idea that (mandatory or optional?) courses in Western Universities 
which provide introductory surveys to Western Culture should be (replaced or)
supplemented with survey courses that describe the culture and achievements 
of both Western and non-Western cultures.  

Assuming that one is comfortable with the idea of evaluating, in the abstract,
the merits of a generic course on Western Culture and a generic course on
non-Western Culture (I'm not really comfortable with this but I'll leave that
issue aside) there are at least eight grossly different positions which one
might take: university students should be (pick one of the following:)  
a) required or b) able to enroll in (pick one of the following:) i) a survey 
course on Western Culture, ii) a survey course on non-Western Culture, iii) a 
survey course on both Western and non-Western culture, iv) any or none of the 
above depending on which makes sense coupled with the choice of a) or b).

Below, you argue, roughly, that Western Culture is "superior" to other
cultures.  I disagree with many of the points you make on this topic - 
some of which I elaborate on below - but since it is unclear exactly which of
the eight positions you are arguing for or against and which of the eight
positions you identify "multiculturalism" with (assuming again that you
do not literally mean that multiculturalism is some kind of a curriclum 
item), I will refrain from extensive commentary on the issue of how the 
proposition 'Western Culture is superior to non-Western culture', even if 
both sensical and true, should be taken to bear on the aforementioned 
positions concerning educational curriculum.  That (perhaps non-) issue 
seems to me to be a complex one worthy of its own debate, and, again, may 
not be most judiciously discussed in the abstract, and independently from 
consideration of both particular courses, the particular curriculum, and 
the particular students in question.


> I'll bet that some of the responses will be to accuse me of saying
> things I don't say.

I'll settle for trying to charitably ascertain what it is that you do say.

> \title{WESTERN TECHNOLOGY---WORLD TECHNOLOOGY, WESTERN CIVILIZATION---WORLD CIVILIZATION}

Ah!  LaTEX!  Another gift of the West. 8-)

> 	Today we have a world technology that is a descendant of
> Western technology.  Before 1500 non-Western countries contributed a
> lot to the technological base of Western technology, and today many
> non-Western countries are very good at world technology.  However, for
> about 500 years, say between 1450 and 1950, almost all significant
> technological advances were made in the West.  It isn't very
> controversial that the reason Western technology won out is because it
> was better.  The ships carried more goods faster and more safely, the
> guns worked better, fewer babies died, literacy became universal.  It
> is also non-controversial that today this technology is no longer the
> property of Western countries.

It isn't controversial that SOME of the Western technologies worked better.
The guns and the ships for instance.  Continuing with your examples
however, it seems likely that Western medical technology was more 
widespread in, say, the year 1860, than Chinese medical technology even
though it was technologically inferior.  The fact that Western guns and ships 
were superior was sufficient by itself to insure this.  Some technologies 
seem to be decidedly more important to the propogation of cultural artifacts 
to foreign sites than others.


> 	The same is true of culture and the institutions of
> civilization though not to the same extent as in the case of
> technology.  There is a world culture today that is mostly a
> descendant of Western culture.  Moreover, the superiority of Western
> culture and civilization contributed to Western political pre-eminence
> almost as much as did the superiority of Western technology.  The use
> of the word ``superiority'' rather than something softer is
> intentional; this debate has a tradition of vigorous language.

When one asserts that "technology A is superior to technology B" one 
is, implicitly, acknowledging that both technologies are attempts
at achieving some material purpose and that technology A is generally more
effective in that attempt.  Typically when someone asserts that "culture A
is superior to culture B" they are, implicitly, stating that they, and maybe
their friends, like culture A better than culture B.  For example, I might 
assert the superiority of Japanese cuisine to, say, Scottish cuisine and
support my assertion with the observation that ``everyone'' prefers
unagi maki to haggis.  

Seriously, what are you proposing as semi-objective criteria for assertions
of cultural superiority?  Lack of civil strife?  Avoidance of wars?
Resistance to external perturbations?  Listing such things does not
exactly bring one immediately to conclude that Western Civ. is preeminent.


> 	Today the inheritance of Western culture and civilization is
> not the property of Western countries.  In many of its aspects it is
> the basis of a world culture, and this needs to be evaluated in each
> area separately.  Thus the Western music presently dominates the world
> except for India, while Western cooking traditions don't.  Chinese
> cooking has penetrated the West to a greater extent than any Western
> cuisine has penetrated China.  Indian cooking penetrated Britain more
> than British cooking penetrated India.  The purpose of these examples
> is advance the idea that Western culture is winning where it is better
> and not winning where it isn't.

It seems that you are implicitly proposing that culture A should
be judged superior to culture B if it becomes more widespread. This
is an objective criteria but not a very good one. One reason, alluded
to above, is that military strenth and economic structure have a 
disproportionate influence on whether cultures spread or die out.  

For example, if Tribe A successfully completes a genocidal massacre of 
Tribe B then the culture of Tribe B will die out and that of Tribe A will 
be able to spread.  But all we really know about these two cultures is that
the military might of A could best the military might of B, at least so far 
as the members of B were disposed to organize their military.  The importance
of economies is demonstrated by the history of European Imperialism.
Imperialism, of course, is a phenomena that primarily (for a Marxist, 
definitionally) occurs only when the agressor nation possesses an economy 
of a type which can directly benefit from the subordination of the 
victim state.  The point here is that cultures which are disposed to fight, 
good at fighting, and have reasons to fight will be to more widespread.

Similar examples also operate at the level of individual rather than societal 
competition (and hence which pertain to the cultural values directly held by 
individuals) we can consider any of the situations which are well described
by mathematical models such as `sheep vs. wolves' and `prisoner's dillemna'.
Very often in such situations there is one way of behaving which is 
globally most beneficial for all of the players in the game IF everyone adopts
that strategy, but which is not a favorable strategy in the presence of
some other strategies.  This is typically true of pacifistic behaviors.
In competitive situations such behaviors are not stable strategies (because
they lose out in the presence of fighters), and hence, by the criteria of 
widespreadness they will inevitably come to be judged as ``inferior'' to more 
agressive strategies once the latter are introduced.  But this suggests either
that the criteria is wrongheaded or that ``superior'' is being used in a
very technical sense which we should take pains to strip of all value-related
connotations.


> 	Most important is the fact political electoral democracy
> has turned out to just as much of a necessity for a decent life
> in China, Russia and Burma as it is in the West.

China did not have an electoral democracy last I checked.  Perhaps you
are referring to the state of Taiwan, whose semi-indigenous ethnic population
is governed by an opressive oligarchy representing a dominant minority 
population which fled from mainland China when Mao came to power there, and 
massacred over 20,000 Taiwanese for political reasons shortly thereafter with 
the tacit support of the U.S. government.

I miss your general point also.  Since marxism, communism, fascism,
and military totalitarianism have as much claim as electoral democracy,
republicanism, and parliamentarianism to be systems of government and
political philosophy with Western origins, how does the ascendance of
the former over the latter provide evidence of the ascendance of Western
culture?

> 	An early example of a cultural superiority contributing
> to political domination is the conquest of Mexico by Cortez with
> 500 men.  The decisive battles were fought when the
> Conquistadores were out of ammunition for their firearms and
> using Aztec cotton armor that had proved superior to their metal
> armor.  Sixteenth century Spanish Catholicism had many faults
> and has long been intellectually and morally obsolete.  It was
> intolerant as shown by the Inquisition, and moreover, its
> adherents often violated its moral precepts.
> 
> 	Nevertheless, the Spanish victory was substantially a
> consequence of Spanish Catholicism's intellectual and moral
> superiority to Aztec religion and ideology.  
> In the first place, it
> proclaimed universal religious and moral principles.  These principles
> were asserted to be applicable to Mexican Indians just as well as to
> whites.  In particular, it proclaimed that human sacrifice was
> universally wrong, not merely that it wasn't the Spanish custom.
> These principles and the religious organizations that promulgated them
> enabled the Spanish to gain allies and to gain converts. 

We should also take account of the Western ``advances'' in the arts of 
treachery and spread of deadly viral and bacterial agents that the naive 
New World immunological systems were not equipped to deal with. 

> (I don't
> suppose that I would avoid charges of being pro-imperialist even
> without saying anything about the results of the Spanish conquest, one
> way or the other.  Actually, I think that both the establishment of
> the Spanish empire and its overthrow after 300 years were both
> advances for the Latin American peoples.)

What's the harm in a little plunder, rape, and pillaging if it's in
a good cause?  8-)


> 	The superiority of Western civilization over traditional Asian
> civilizations seems to be real though not so overwhelming.  The idea
> of democracy is Western, but its application to non-Western countries
                                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Careful, your language is showing.  8-)/2

> only began in the late nineteenth century, so that can't account for
> the earlier Western cultural superiority.

I'm missing the logic behind this sentence.  Did you mean to say that
the Western countries did not, in general, have democracy until that time
so that this factor couldn't account for their earlier ``superiority''?


> 	An early example of generally exploitative colonialism doing
> good might be the British suppression of {\it sati} in 1829.  {\it
> Sati} is the Hindu custom of a widow throwing herself on her husband's
> funeral pyre.  Its suppression was triggered by Indian widows fleeing
> to the British to avoid the enforced suicide.  This illustrates that
> the British already had a reputation in India as people to whom one
> could flee to avoid some kinds of injustice.  Before suppressing {\it
> sati} the British argued among themselves about whether the evil of
> the custom justified interfering with Indian religion.

I mainly leave comment on the `sati question' to other posters, but
my understanding is that sati was not widespread enough in Colonial
times so that it should appear as a significant point in a discussion
of Western vs. non-Western civilization.  It would take an awful lot
of sati suppression to make up for the Crusades, 400 years of African
slavery, much genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and
Australia, and the A-bomb detonation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to 
mention a few highlights of Western interaction with non-Western 
cultures.  Also, I don't know how much of sati suppression was motivated 
by compassion for "the heathen" and how much was motivated by the same 
sort of attitudes which made the British feel a need to supress semi-nudity 
wherever they encountered that ``evil'' practice.


> 	Here are some of the items which the West has contributed
> to world culture and civilization.  With each of the following, the
> reader should consider (a) whether it developed primarily in the
> West and (b) whether today it is a part of world culture and civilization
> and not just a phenomenon in Western countries.
> 
> 	1. In politics.  The rule of law rather than the rule of
> autocrats or conspiratorial political parties.  The idea of democracy
> and many ideas about human rights.  The idea of national rights and of
> international law.  The idea of political struggle for social goals
> rather than just the oriental ideas of how rulers can be virtuous.

A little more objectivity is called for here.  Basically all traditional 
cultures have laws which their people respect, and grant their people 
rights which they feel are important and to which they are entitled.  
Cultures typically differ substantially in what these laws and rights are.
Unfortunately there are many countries now in which people do not have
many of the rights to which they think they are entitled because they
are ruled over by a small minority using military force.  There is
no question in my mind that the latter type of situation (e.g. Haiti,
Iraq, South Africa) occurs more often in non-Western countries and is
a bad thing, but there is also no question that these situations are
more attributable to the de-stabilizing influences of Western military
technology and economic exploitation than to differences in indigenous
political cultures.  It is Western military technology which makes it
possible for so few to subordinate so many, and, to some extent, it is
Western economics which gives them the material motivations to do so.


> 	The idea that slavery was immoral was followed by
> the suppression of the slave trade and then of slavery itself.
> This required a civil war in the United States.  Perhaps the
> American Civil War was the first war that was even partially
> about the rights of third parties, i.e. the northern whites
> fought the southern whites at least partially about the rights of
> southern blacks.

> 	The idea of a written constitution is American in origin
> but owes much to the British tradition that began with the
> Magna Carta in 1215.
> 
> 	2. Harmony and counterpoint in music.  This has
> penetrated all countries, and Seiji Ozawa is just as much an heir
> of Beethoven as any Austrian.  Whether the Western musical
> advances have any necessary relation to other cultural advances,
> I have no idea.
> 
> 	3. The novel as a form of literature.
> 
> 	4. Analytic philosophy.  All other important philosophies
> reached dead ends in which they are still stuck.
> 
> 	5. The business corporation, the free market and
> limitation of government power.
> 
> 	6. The idea of progress in science, technology and
> human affairs.

I like Western Culture too.  But you claim to be arguing that Western
culture is ``superior'' to other cultures.  Comparable lists of
cultural highlights can be compiled for many cultures (especially if
one makes the categories as broad as Western Culture).  Why are the
achievements of Western Culture ``better''?  More importantly, what does 
``better'' mean?


> 	7. Of course, the West has contributed its share of bad ideas
> and regrettable cultural phenomena.  These include Marxism, various
> forms of racism, Fascism, the balance of nature, Heavy Metal and
> multiculturalism.

If the criteria of ``superior'' is still widespreadness then Heavy Metal
music certainly beats up on baroque music and madrigals.  While we are
at it then the Big Mac is the best food recipe in the world.  "Dallas"
was among the best dramatic productions ever, and Astrology is the best
form of personal decision-making.


> 	The multiculturalism idea, that all cultural traditions are
> equally valuable is today being overcome at great cost in the former
> colonial countries.  Arbitrarily trying to invent alternatives to
> democracy and capitalism are just as unlikely to succeed as trying to
> invent alternatives to the airplane.


Which planet are you living on?  
Since when does Earth have a big problem with people thinking that 
"all cultural traditions are equally valuable"?
As far as I can tell, almost all Earthlings have firm beliefs about which 
cultural tradition is the most valuable - their own.  And that is the way 
it has always been.  Issues of multiculturalism in the educational system
aside, do you really doubt that a little more multiculturalism - as you
define it above - in the world wouldn't do the planet some good?


> 	As you see, I find great virtues in Western culture
> and civilization.  Since Western culture and civilization form the
> basis of present world culture and civilization, it make senses
> to emphasize their study.  

It's hard to disagree with a statement of the form "It's good to study X,"
for most choices of X, Western culture included.  But you want to argue
that it is more important to study Western culture than other cultures
because it has more virtues.  The argument for the latter seems to be
a) it is more widespread and b) John McCarthy finds more good things
in it (we'll assume for the basis of argument that he has had adequate
exposure to other cultures to make the comparison a fair one).
In regard to point a), one could just as easily make the opposite case.
If Western Culture is more widespread then there is more need to emphasize
the study other cultures that students will be less likely to encounter
through other routes.  It's hard to say too much against point b) but
it does seem to lack a certain objectivity.


> Of course, it doesn't follow that requiring
> the study of these subjects will instill corresponding virtues in
> college students.  It doesn't even seem to instill them in the people
> who teach the courses.  If these ideas are correct, we
> should add to the study of Western Culture the history of
> its world-wide application.  This could include the study of
> writers like Sun Yat-sen and Kemal Attaturk and the politics
> of Westernizers like Peter the Great.  Opponents of Westerization
> also need consideration.
> 
> 	I have used rather provocative examples in this essay, and
> perhaps I should change them.  Lest you think I haven't read any
> contrary opinions, let me finish by quoting the writer Susan Sontag,
> who may have changed her mind since she wrote the following.  After
> all, what's an essay without a little racism.
> 
>      ``The white race is the cancer of history.  It is the white
>      race and it alone---its ideologies and inventions--- which
>      eradicates autonomous civilizations whereever it spreads,
>      which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which
>      now threatens the very existence of life itself.''
> --
> John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
> *
> He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.


Josh Stern  josh@aris.ss.uci.edu