What’s wrong with western civilization?

kropotkhristian:

kropotkhristian:

Nothing is wrong with western civilization specifically except for the designation “western civilization.” It is a meaningless term that is more meant to exclude whoever is deemed “bad” at any given time in the United States and Europe. Western philosophy, as an example, is normally traced back to Socrates and the Ancient Greeks up through Foucault and the Postmodernists. But classical “Western philosophy” is only even knowable at this point because of the translations of the Islamic world during the Middle Ages. Yet, Islam is not considered part of “the West” right now just because the dominant imperial governments have decided they don’t like Islam at this particular historical moment. Go back 900 years, and Baghdad would have been considered the most beautiful and important city in “the West.” Now the people who live in Baghdad are considered threats to the continued existence of “the West” by people who obsess over its preservation, even though they are literally chasing after a ghost in their own mind.
Stop being haunted by ghosts of your own creation. There is one world, we all live in it. Nothing can happen to “the West” because it doesn’t exist. Stop lining up behind phantoms.

As another example of this – often when people use the term “western civilization,” they use it to denote all of the things they like about Europe and the United States, with literally none of the bad things. Like, “the West” normally means “democracy, freedom, secularism,” especially when people want to compare it with some part of the world they don’t like, but it usually never means “authoritarianism, mass killing, genocide, eugenics” – even though all of those things also happen and have happened in the United States and Europe.

Just another reason why the term is meaningless. Just tell me what you like about the world, and how you envision our best future, and we can find examples of it literally anywhere. Designations like “the West” are meaningless and just another way to get people to feel connected to a ghost instead of actually being connected to each other.