[ALBSA-Info] Affirming Western Greatness

[Kreshnik Bejko]

War of the Worlds
By Shelby Steele. Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, 
is the author of "A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in 
America" (HaperCollins, 1998).

A week ago today, I set out to write a piece for this page on the recent 
United Nations conference against racism and intolerance in Durban, South 
Africa. My point was to be that the conference was an absurd and theatrical 
confrontation of First World guilt and Third World anger born of 
ineffectuality. Then, after last Tuesday morning, I put all that aside. 
Against the horrors of that day, the conference seemed remarkably trivial.

But now I believe there is a relationship between that bizarre little 
conference and Tuesday's horrors. After all, Tuesday's events were also a 
collision of the First and Third worlds, and I believe their subtext was 
also one of Western guilt and Third World ineffectuality.

Decisive Heritage

In looking at difficulties in the black American community over the years, 
it has always astounded me how much white Americans take for granted the 
rich and utterly decisive heritage of Western culture. There is no space 
here to reiterate the vast and invisible web of ideas, principles, values 
and understandings that have evolved over the millennia to undergird the 
American civilization.

To mention only the fewest highlights, there was the magnificence of Greek 
thought, the Roman development of law, a renaissance of reason, the concept 
of a social contract, the idea of the individual as a self-contained and 
free political unit with rights and responsibilities, free markets, the 
scientific method, separation of church and state -- all this and so much 
more converging to make the American and Western way of life successful in 
so many ways. It is not too much to say, as Francis Fukuyama did a few years 
back, that the West now represents -- all things considered -- the Hegelian 
"end of history." If the Second and Third worlds now "Americanize," it is 
more out of Darwinism than a love of blue jeans and Big Macs.

The evil of slavery and colonialism was that these oppressions kept their 
victims out of history, disconnected them from the evolutionary struggle. 
The great white advantage has been living inside history, adapting to its 
constant demands, nurturing the values and the habits of life that allow one 
to keep pace. This is the cultural capital that whites too often take for 
granted and rarely think of insisting on in the former victims of exclusion. 
It is so easy to look at minority weakness and think of sweeping 
programmatic solutions when a simple insistence on responsibility for one's 
own development might serve far better. (After all, this is how Israel came 
to thrive after the Holocaust.) Oppression made such attitudes irrelevant, 
so that even when freedom came there was an incomplete knowledge of how to 
seize it.

And this is where a new kind of trouble began. Where slavery and colonialism 
once imposed inferiority, new freedom has too often only added the fresh 
embarrassment of inferiority without the excuse of oppression. I think the 
Durban conference was inspired by this embarrassment. Its founders realized 
they would never get reparations of any significance. The wiser among them 
know that reparations are no answer anyway. I believe this conference -- 
with its almost religious embrace of victimization -- wanted to keep racism 
alive as a face-saving excuse, to let it temper the shame of so much 
ineffectuality in the face of freedom, so much correlation between 
independence and decline.

Today the First World is dealing with an embarrassed Third World that is 
driven to save face against the anguish of an inferiority that is less and 
less blamable on others. The deep appeal of a Jesse Jackson or a Yasser 
Arafat, one reason they hang on as leaders despite every kind of public and 
private failing, is their ability to hide inferiority behind blame, to be 
the parent who sees no wrong in the child.

But blame is only the most common defense against this embarrassment. 
Terrorism is another. The shame of languishing in the midst of freedom 
generates a touchy, narcissistic sensibility and an abiding faith that, but 
for the evil of others, one's superiority would be self-evident. The 
terrorist act is a self-referential event, a self-congratulation that 
smothers the feeling of inferiority in one glorious blaze of spite. Here, 
finally, is the effectiveness that is so absent elsewhere. Even if you 
cannot build the World Trade Center's towers -- emblems of demonstrable 
Western superiority -- you can come along of a Tuesday morning and, like God 
himself, strike them down.

But there is another actor in this drama -- white guilt; one of the most 
powerful yet under estimated forces in modern societies. At least 50 whites 
have told me in the same conversation both that they feel no racial guilt 
and that on some occasion they have not said something they truly believed 
for fear of being marked a racist. But white guilt is precisely the latter, 
not a belief in one's guilt but a vulnerability to being stigmatized as a 
racist because of one's skin color alone. And this is the larger terror that 
hangs over the Western world.

White guilt is what causes minority and Third World "inferiority" to stand 
as a negative moral judgment on the Western way of life. It presumes that 
Western success is the result not of three millennia of cultural evolution 
(much of it enhanced by contributions from what today we call the Third 
World) but of the ill-gotten gains of slavery and colonialism. Western 
success is presumed to have come at the price of Third World inferiority.

This doesn't just mean that Western moral authority is hostage to helping 
the Third World overcome inferiority. More importantly it means that Western 
culture is inherently sinful, that its superiority is a measure of its 
sinfulness. Thus, the World Trade Center towers become monuments not of a 
great civilization but of a great evil.

Moral Equivalency

White guilt pushes the West into a place where it can redeem its moral 
authority only by making a virtue of moral equivalency. This means that 
weakness, backwardness, even sinfulness in minorities and the Third World 
are unmentionable. Yasser Arafat visited the Clinton White House more than 
any other world leader. American civil rights organizations almost entirely 
live off white corporate and foundation money despite their total 
ineffectiveness in solving black problems. Western money has gone to 
blatantly corrupt Third World leaders for decades.

White guilt morally and culturally disarms the West. It makes the First 
World apologetic. And this, of course, only inflames the narcissism of the 
ineffectual. In the vacuum of power created by guilt, a world-wide class of 
guilt hustlers has emerged. America and the West must cease this 
three-decade-long indulgence in guilt, moral equivalency, and apologia. None 
of this redeems the West or uplifts the Third World.

In the place of this there should be only a profound commitment to fairness. 
Here, something like fanaticism is not out of place. After this, America and 
the West should unapologetically pursue their self-interest, let others take 
the lead in their own development, and allow the greatness of Western 
civilization to speak for itself.


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