Is Universality A Western Idea?

Most people acknowledge that human beings are essentially the same wherever they live on earth. Yet there’s also a strong belief that ethnic and cultural differences are primary, and that universality is a Western construct.

It cannot be both – people are either essentially the same, and cultural differences are secondary; or cultural differences are primary, and people are different in dissimilar places.

One of the characteristics of people with a philosophical bent (double entendre intended) is a low threshold for contradiction. So how is this contradiction resolved?

For the United States and its Western allies, universality means “the expansion of a liberal, rules-based international order” largely made in America after World War II. It has become inadequate to the point of harmful in a globalized world. But rather than think creatively about the future of humanity, China and Russia are reverting to 19th century forms of nationalism, while America hews to its “indispensible nation” bullshit.

The United States helped pave the way for the present economic (food and fuel) world war (which could explode militarily at any moment) with its hubristic, triumphalist notion that “we won the Cold War.” For three decades the fact that both the US and the USSR lost the Cold War, just in different ways, was denied. The American intelligentsia still hasn’t acknowledged it, and right-wing extremism has fully taken root in the USA.

The issue is not globalization, but the dominance of the kind of globalization that the United States and Western Europe promoted, and that China bought into, for awhile.

Now the forces of divergence are, to put it mildly, ascendant, at home and abroad. Commentators are proclaiming “an end to globalization,” and a “clash of civilizations.”

However just as serious people didn’t subscribe to the idea of global convergence around a set of America’s universal values in the 90’s, so too serious people don’t subscribe to the reaction of de-globalization and return to national interest” in the 20’s.

For one thing, and it is the first thing, man’s decimation of the earth is now fully globalized, and cannot be sectioned off into “spheres of influence,” as pundits are so compulsively inclined to do.

For another, technology cannot be completely controlled within national borders, despite China and Russia’s desperate attempts to do so, and America’s propagandizing the war in Ukraine. Information spills out and spills over, and insights leak into and leak out of nationally controlled spaces.

“Mr. Putin has sent history into reverse.” That’s the consensus of professors and pundits a few hellish months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But is it true? What is the actual trajectory of human history?

History hasn’t been sent into reverse; rather, Western ideas of progress, and the triumph of liberalism and capitalistic globalization have been shattered by Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine. Besides, the US media was perfectly willing to nearly ignore the slaughter in Syria, not to mention erase its complicity in America’s invasion of Iraq, which was a huge destabilizing factor in the Middle East and worldwide.

To my mind, human history is an intensifying cycle of crises, punctuated by lost opportunities to fundamentally change course. Since the emergence of the first cities, man has not been ascending but descending, not evolving but devolving. Psychologically, the darkness in human consciousness has been accumulating in inverse proportion to the advancement of science and technology.

Now it’s not only much more possible, but urgently necessary for a sufficient minority of people to emotionally perceive humankind as a whole. Man’s fragmentation is increasing outwardly as the endarkenment of human consciousness is increasing inwardly, and the right response is authentically universal perception and insight.

Like it or not, it’s one fragmented, disordered, violent human society now, and will continue to increasingly be so until a psychological revolution that changes the disastrous course of humankind.

The revolution in consciousness that changes the course of man has been millennia in the making, growing more imperative and urgent with each quickening turn of the wheel, each downward spin of the same basic shapes and cycles of human history.

So the idea that humans are essentially different in different cultures is patently false. Psychologically and emotionally, we are the same; differences can either make for diversity in the context of wholeness, or the continuation of division, conflict, fragmentation and homogeneity.

So the problem is not universality, but Western ideas about what universality means. Those ideas include personal freedom, superficial pluralism and degraded democracy -- the crumbling edifice built on the rotten foundation of “The Enlightenment.”

It’s an American conceit that “the rejection of Western liberalism, individualism, pluralism, gender equality and all the rest is not only happening between nations but also within nations,” as if these ideas represent the apex of human development.

A worldview based on separate nation-states has led to world war in the global society. “National interest” is a hideous thing, the fountainhead of conflict, colonialism and grotesque disparities of wealth. “Western values” have brought about a pervasive and palpable deadness in America and the West, which Putin and his followers are reacting to with delusions of Peter the Great and pre-revolutionary Russian Empire.

The core issue is tribalism, and its modern expression, nationalism. Tribalism is the universal, atavistic tendency to identify with a particular group, whether ethnic, religious or national, over the emotional realization of the actuality of human being.

Man is the unchanged tribal creature scaled up to nations with nuclear weapons. Human beings emotionally belong to the entire planet and world.

Martin LeFevre

© Scoop Media