AT A SECONDARY school morning assembly, the teacher lectured the students about values. He warned against becoming Americanised and choosing violent role models like Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur. He suggested that instead they choose greats role models from history like Napoleon Bonaparte and Julius Caesar.
After assembly, I pointed out to him that while Biggie and Tupac rapped violent lyrics, Caesar and Napoleon brought violent death on thousands of thousands, notably Africans in Egypt and Haiti. Sometimes our ideas and values are distorted by the Western lens we see through. Assessing values can be tricky.
For many Barbadians, opposing Americanisation and Western values means defending things like the death penalty, corporal punishment and Judeo-Christian concepts of acceptable sexual relations. The irony is that these are some of the favourite causes of some European and American right-wing groups who see themselves as defending Western values.
On the other side, supporters of Western values often see themselves as supporting enlightenment, freedom, tolerance, equality and progress. The irony is that there is nothing uniquely Western about those values. A look at spiritual literature from around the world proves that. Western civilisation has a history of seeking to progress by fighting against those values. Even Abraham Lincoln said he didn’t believe in the equality of the races.
Western colonisation promotes the idea that all intellectual, technological, moral and social progress, are the gifts of Europe and America to the world. When we lose historical context it becomes easy to fall prey to false notions of the superiority or uniqueness of Western civilisation and values. This is why people still talk about “sugar made us free”, when it enslaved us in the first place.
My observation is that the primary Western values are power and domination, preferably disguised as morality and reason. All other values serve this purpose. Indentured servants became valued as men only after slaves could take over the work. Slavery was no longer valued once machines and industrialisation took over. Anything could work once the power of the Western rulers is assured.
So the debate about whether to accept or reject Western values takes a Western slant on both sides. Adherents of Western liberalism battle adherents of Western conservatism for power while shrouding their arguments in the veil of justice and morality. The West manages to corner the debate so that no matter who wins, it is the Western powers that prevail. Power and domination are maintained whether Trump or Clinton.
American comedian Bill Maher has an amusing rant about the superiority of Western values. Maher argues that Western religious fundamentalists are better than Islamic fundamentalists because in countries like Saudi Arabia “they have beheadings for such crimes as homosexuality” while in the West, the worst the fundamentalists do is, “Identify the gay Teletubbie.”
It’s true. Most Western conservatives and fundamentalists do not currently call for beheadings. They might, however, see homosexuality in the media as a sign of the decay in Western values. So for a liberal like Maher, the difference between the Western conservative and the Islamic fundamentalist is a matter of degree; how far they are willing to go to protect their values. In other words, the difference is in the level tolerance for difference.
Tolerance for difference could be based on how much of a threat you perceive the difference in question to be. Our tolerance is often a result of comfort and security rather than a deeply held value. Intolerant Western attitudes came out of the closet, empowered by the Trump campaign and Brexit. Surveys of Trump supporters show that 38 per cent wish the South had won the Civil War and one in five of them support the enslavement of blacks. Then there are the others who would not admit these views but voted for Trump anyway. Core groups of Americans, British and Europeans felt threatened and their intolerant slip showed. They respond like many other human beings from other parts of the world do when they feel threatened; intolerantly. Tolerance is a fragile virtue everywhere.
One wonders how threatened Westerners would have to feel to cause a resurgence of the kind of intolerance that led to the beheading of non-Christians during the Spanish Inquisition. Some argue the West has passed that stage. But maybe those medieval values have not been overcome, just exported.
Nearly 3 000 people were reported killed in the September 11 attacks. Westerners felt threatened. It inspired support for a so-called war on terror that has lasted 15 years. Over 100 000 Iraqi civilians were estimated killed during the Iraq War. Estimates of civilian deaths by US drones in the Middle East vary, but they run into the thousands. Some estimates suggest that close to 200 000 people were killed by US atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even if Western values were better, they are still far more deadly.
Maybe if Islamic fundamentalists had the means to do the damage that the West does they would do even worse. Or maybe if they felt as comfortable and secure as many do in the West they would do better. But herein lays another problem. Everyone covets Western comfort. The comfort and security enjoyed in the West was created largely by value extracted from slave labour and the exploitation of other nations. If you want what the West has you may be inclined do what the West did. You may encourage the children to be colonisers like Napoleon or Caesar.
I wish I could remember where I heard: “People care only about power. They care not how you got it, only that you have it.” Who on Earth would dare attempt to challenge the power of the Western value system which is now really global? Viva Fidel!
Adrian Green is a creative communications Specialist. Email: Adriangreen14@gmail.com
