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If the reader is a user of facebook or any comparable website, he or she may be familiar with the following viral post:
“An anthropologist proposed a game to the kids in an African tribe. He put a basket of fruit near a tree and told the kids that who ever got there first won the sweet fruits. When he told them to run, they all took each others hands and ran together, then sat together enjoying their treats. When he asked them why they had run like that as one could have had all the treats for himself, they said: “Ubunto. How can one of us be happy if all the other ones are sad?”. ‘Ubunto’ in Xhosa culture means ‘I am because we are'”
Though the authenticity of the Ubunto story is uncertain, the word appears to be real and to have roughly the same meaning attributed to it. If this is the case, the concept is surely pleasant, even admirable. But is it really so original or sophisticated?
If the adoring Westerners cooing over this story could stop crying with happiness for one moment, they might recall the similar Western phrase ‘all for one, one for all’ – or indeed many hundreds of other equivalents around the world.
Human solidarity, yet another way of describing ‘Ubunto’, is an innate quality invested in the human condition by the legacy of biological evolution. It is not something one needs to give a name to. It just exists – ineradicably, albeit in differing endowments from person to person.
As many cynics have noted, the only reason Western audiences are so enamoured of the Ubunto story in particular is because it appears to align with a very old and sentimental fallacy; that of the ‘Noble savage’.
The Noble Savage has been part of Western art – particularly literature – for centuries. Put simply, the idea is that undeveloped cultures (especially African, Amerindian, Asian and Middle Eastern cultures), though on the surface less sophisticated and morally developed than those of Europe, nevertheless retain valuable ancient wisdom the West may profit by relearning.
You can see the cultural effects of this notion everywhere you look; from fridge magnets emblazoned with Confucian and Native American spiritual maxims, to the kind of the meme mentioned above. The West cannot seem to get enough of ancient non-European ‘wisdom’. It is substantially more popular even than Western philosophy, including the immortal works of Nietzsche, Kant and the ancient Greeks – (when was the last time you saw a Plato fridge magnet?).
Of course, being the cultural bigot that I am, I do not believe that Crazy Horse is the equal of Nietzsche. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I don’t think they even belong in the same category. Nietzsche was the greatest philosopher of the last 500 years. Crazy Horse, though undoubtedly noble in the military sense, made only commonsensical remarks about his own life and about a political struggle he ended up losing (to Europeans).
Historic Third World philosophers, like historic Third World mathematicians, physicists and inventors, are extremely thin on the ground. The vast majority of celebrated non-European thinkers are products of the past 100 years, a century marked by non-European adaptation to European domination and cultural hegemony.
This is not a coincidence. When European civilisation – now de-racialised as ‘The West’ – made the first breakthrough from localism to worldliness, the broader world was still filled with savage darkness. And long after the enlightenment began, Asians (including those dwelling in the now impressive Japanese and Korean cultures), Africans and Amerindians continued to exist in a twilight condition of subsistence agriculture and mind-numbing ritual.
In India, now home to internet entrepreneurs and industrialist billionaires, widowed women hurled themselves onto burning funeral pyres to satisfy perverse notions of marital duty. In Japan, now the epicentre of global technological innovation, Samurai (normal people in strange clothes) cut their stomachs open to amend for ‘dishonourable’ failures in martial etiquette. There is evidence of cannibalism in Southern Africa as late as the Victorian era. And so on…
The European explosion – the multinational enlightenment – was the beginning of true civilisation. Though periods of greatness in North Africa, the Middle East, Mexico and China had been observed centuries before this point, it is only after this seismic event that civilisation in its contemporarily recognisable form began.
So why do Westerners, those to whom the most credit belongs, now look back at pre-civilisation with such a powerful nostalgia? Why do Brits and Americans, looking at memes on Apple Mackintosh computers, interpret the word ‘umbunto’ as a proof of Third World superiority? And why are non-Europeans, Asians especially, increasingly more cognizant of Western superiority than Westerners?
Since these questions are interconnected, a single answer may suffice for all of them. The West, unlike the rest of the planet, is infected with a virus of civilizational exhaustion; a crisis of civilizational confidence. We Westerners have grown so used to the blessings of modernity that we have come to take them for granted. It takes real mental exertion for us to imagine (honestly and accurately) a world without the internet, refrigerators and Starbucks restaurants. And with a thick fog of relativism further obscuring our vision we are inevitably tempted by the idea that such a condition is more ‘wholesome’, ‘substantial’ or culturally complex than that in which we now live.
Westerners have become bored of affluence and modernity
But it isn’t more wholesome, of course, nor more substantial, complex, romantic… It is inferior by almost every measure. And if anyone needs evidence of this contention, one can experience pre-civilisation for a very paltry sum these days. One can fly over to Ghana, Chad, North Korea or Afghanistan and live cheaply for whole years at a time. The reason we don’t want to dwell in such places, would not even dream of doing so, is because anti-Western sentiment is based on lies, illusions and errors of logic.
The West (including the Western-inspired cultures of Japan and Korea) is the only true civilisation on Earth. The further you go away from it, the further you go away from all that is valuable, good and worth living for.
The Noble Savage myth is the first step down a very slippery slope. It is best not to take it, even if that means not sharing a heart-warming post on social media.
D, LDN.
Defend the Modern World 
One quibble of disagreement: For me, Nietszche is not the greatest philosopher of the last 500 years. Although Nietzsche recognized and foresaw our post-modern, moral nihilistic malaise that occupies contemporary Western society, Descartes, Kant and Hegel I think are all more influential.
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A good case can certainly be made for the philosophers you reference. My view of Nietzsche is perhaps inflated by the fact he was the first philosopher I read with any seriousness. Nevertheless, I do think he ranks very highly. Many of the great continental philosophers to have emerged since his death have grounded their philosophies in his work (Heidegger, Sartre – even Freud, who was more a philosopher than a psychologist in my opinion).
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That’s all very true. Nietzsche is just both very exasperating and exciting for me. He denies objective truth, but in doing so presupposes it. So oversights like that kind of can’t go unnoticed in my very amateurish opinion.
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Oh, and Sartre is a huge Cartesian.
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Descartes’s work hasn’t aged very well.
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His proofs for God and his high-standard-for-knowledge-standard epistemology has not aged well, no, but his underlying metaphysical assumption has. Descartes kicked off a revolution in removing the then dominant Aristotelian formal and final causes — teleology — for a mechanistic view of reality with Meditations on First Philosophy. Not only did this move setup what you and I consider to be modern science, but it also opened the door for deism and then later atheism. In other words, without Descartes, you don’t get Hume. And without Hume, you don’t get Kant. And without Kant, you don’t get Hegel and Nietzsche. And without those two, you don’t get Marx. I could go on, but simply, without Descartes you don’t get “modern” to current Western philosophy and many of its classic “problems” as we know them.
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He was certainly influential. I just regard his speculations as outdated and mostly incorrect. Nietzsche’s ideas, by contrast, are gaining in credibility with the passage of time. His prophecies of a post-religious and nihilistic Europe have all been fulfilled.
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That’s not to say that he was right about everything.
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Your article is very interesting. It seems to me though that you draw back from the clear inference of your argument, the racial dimension. Western culture is the creation of White Europeans. It may be that other peoples shall carry on this inheritance, the Indians and East Asians most likely. But the racial connection between modernity and the efforts of White Europeans is quite clear.
Having said that though, I well understand why you avoided spelling this out. There are times when inference is the best policy.
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Yes, modern civilisation is indisputably the product of Western European innovation (and therefore Western European intelligence). Though countries like Singapore, Japan and Korea now have all the hallmarks of Western civilisation – democracy, secularism, high technology, low corruption etc…, the credit still ultimately belongs to Europe. Most East-Asians would happily accept this. It’s only in the West that this notion has become taboo.
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Served multiple tours in Afghanistan. I saw tribal society first hand. I can say for absolute certainty, that tribal or subsistance agricultural societies have virtually nothing to contribute intellectually or spiritually to the rest of the world. They’re myopic, short-term thinkers, ant totally self-centered (family loyalty is nothing more than a defence mechanism for survival, there is no altruism in their society whatsoever). Weakness isn’t something to be sheltered but rather exploited. The only moral virtue is strength (and wealth, as it can buy strength).
Hollywood in particular reinforces the falsehood that somehow this iron-age barbarity is noble. It underpins the success of such garbage films that grossed mega profits like Dances with Wolves, and Avatar.
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Yes, Avatar is a perfect example. I would also point to Apocalypto. It seems the trope never goes out of fashion in Hollywood.
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Afghanistan sounds nightmarish. It’s absurd to think that the West can reform such a place.
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The ‘noble savage’ is a very ancient trope and is not confined to the modern West.
The ancient Romans, in spite their complex political and military machine, their vast network of roads, their majestic and functional buildings, looked to the mud-hut-living, human-sacrificing Germanic tribes as noble savages, living good ‘clean’ lives uncontaminated by the ‘evils’ and ‘softness’ of Greco-Roman civilization.
There were some Romans, (probably the DefendTheRomanWorld bloggers of Ancient Rome), like Cicero and others, who decried these over- glorification of the Germanic tribes, particularly, when the Roman armies were engaged in deadly duels with the same over-hyped Germanic tribes.
It’s the same story in ancient China! Many ancient Chinese intellectuals, in spite of the tremendous achievements of ancient China, looked to the northern ‘barbarians’ of the steppe with dread and strangely with admiration.
Again, the northern steppe horsemen were considered to be ‘pure’ and ‘uncorrupted’ by the ‘soft’ living of the Chinese cities. They were seen as refreshingly ‘direct’ and ‘honest’ unlike the ‘deviousness’ of their own compatriots.
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Very true. Ancient Greece is another example. The Spartans, though in reality a brutal and uncivilised tribe, are now promoted as somehow more impressive than the peaceable, scientific and rationalist Athenians.
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Without what one might call ‘Jerusalem’, what we call ‘the west’, or what V S Naipaul called “The universal civilisation” would *not* exist. Pagan Rome and pagan Athens and the barbarian human-sacrificing slave-taking warring tribes of the dark forests of northwestern Europe would never have become what we think of now as ‘the West’, had Jerusalem never existed; had the House of Israel never existed; had Yehoshuah of Nazareth never lived and taught. Read G K Chesterton, “The Everlasting Man”, and read the chapter called “The End of the World”. Then read David Bentley Hart, “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies”, particularly part three, entitled “Revolution: The Christian Invention of the Human”, and within that, the two chapters entitled “A Glorious Sadness” and “The Face of the Faceless” and “The Death and Birth of Worlds”; if one wants a more detailed account, one should read “The Beauty of the Infinite” which among other things in its first half – in two successive chapters entitled “The Will to Power” and “The Covenant of Light” – confronts Nietzsche at length, and then, judiciously, dismisses him. Along with *that*, read Tom Cahill, “The Gifts of the Jews”. And the work of an Indian Christian, Vishal Mangalwadi, “The Book That Made Your World”. By ‘your’ he means, the ‘west’ that is the child and heir and product of what used to be called Christendom. By ‘the book’ he means not Aristotle or Plato or Virgil or the pagan epics of barbarian Europe but the Bible: a book that was not created by white westerners but by the House of Israel. Jesus/ Yehoshuah of Nazareth, born in Judaea, of the tribe of Judah, was not Aryan; he was not Indo-European. What He offers he offers to Africans, to Asians, to the tribes of the South Pacific and the Australian interior, to Europeans and Amerindians; to the primitive or the civilised, ancient or modern, he offers an equal transformation. It has been the experience of the church that persons of all ethnic backgrounds and degrees of technological and social complexity are capable of becoming followers of Jesus… with all that that ultimately entails. (Incidentally, the practice of monogamy as opposed to polygyny has an enormous ‘knock-on’ positive effect on any society that adopts and practises it; google up an article entitled “The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage” and bear in mind that of all faiths Christianity – the invention of a Jew – has most rigorously taught and demanded monogamy of all its adherents, no matter who, where or when).
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Yes, Jerusalem has been a very important influence on the West. I imagine it will be long into the future.
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