There Are No Noble Savages

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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.

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Murica: The Strange Persistence of Anti-Americanism

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If you’re a user of any social-networking site, you will be as familiar as I am with the ‘Murica’ meme. The prevalence of this trope is such that lately even celebrities, intellectuals and political figures are making use of its lazy appeal. In case you don’t use social networking, or haven’t otherwise had the pleasure of coming across the slur, the KnowYourMeme database explains it thus: “Murica or occasionally ‘Murika’ is a slang term for America which is used to denote extreme patriotism, coupled with aspects of a redneck or southern American stereotype.”

The cartoon above is a famous expression of this vulgar sentiment. It crudely depicts the mythical America of robotic flag-wavers, mountain dew-soaked knowledge haters, and obese gun-nuts. By the presence of the flag, the image also makes comedy of the country itself, together with everything it stands for, such as the notion of liberty and being grateful for the blessings of capitalism.

I’m getting rather sick of the meme myself. It isn’t fair, valid or reflective of anything beyond the ignorance of those who make use of it. Anti-Americanism of any kind can be refuted very easily by recounting basic realities. .

• Americans are stupid? The United States has been the homeland of 357 Nobel Prize winners. This can be compared to the UK (118 winners) and France (67 winners). If the issue of population size is raised, one can compare the figure against that of India (13 winners) and China (12 winners).
• Americans are lazy? In terms of economic productivity, the US dwarfs the rest of the industrialised world. The GDP per capita in the United States is USD$55, 904, while the GDP per capita in the European Union (its closest economic and political rival) is USD$36,392.
• Americans are unsophisticated? In the related fields of science and technology, America has led the world for more than half a century. The achievements of NASA form the standard to which all other space projects are compared. And just a few blocks away from there, the Texas Medical Centre leads the world in healthcare innovation, providing the most advanced cancer treatment and surgical expertise in the developed world.

One could go on. One could mention the awe-inspiring extent of the modern American Military, with its 15,000+ aircraft, 272+ ships, 40,000+ armoured vehicles and 1,000,000+ fighting personnel. One could recount the heroic acts achieved by said military, such as the routing of Hitlerite racialism, Soviet Communism, and Baathist Arabism, etc… The list of American virtues puts the rest of the world firmly in its shadow, making them seem pathetic, retrograde, undeveloped.

Given that this is so, why then does such low and unrefined anti-Americanism persist? Jealousy? Perhaps, but surely not that alone. My inclination is that a very old sentiment still flourishes in the hearts of all who dwell outside the Western Hemisphere: namely, the idea that the US is fundamentally synthetic, an artifice, an incoherent dustbin of old-world apostates; that it isn’t a real country at all, but a jumble of stolen elites from other lands – lands which can more rightly lay claim to the achievement of their despoiled expatriates. That’s what I think.

This misfiring of the imagination is persuasive enough that many great minds, from Nietzsche to Freud, have found truth in it. Even for these it wasn’t enough to note that America is as old and distinguished an experiment as modern France, Bismarckian Germany and post-Imperial Russia. Rather, such minds have insisted on believing that America arrived out of a clear blue sky sometime in the midst of the first world war, before which it was only a dreamy concept of green prairies and hopping Indians.

In modern times this prejudice is implied by the sarcastic emphasis (in anti-US humour) on specific products like spray-on cheese and the Big Mac Hamburger. These products are brought up because they are themselves chemically enhanced and artificial, much like the world conceives America itself to be. To anti-Americans, the USA is not merely the home of the Big Mac, the USA is a Big Mac. Just as the beef patties once belonged to real, natural cows, but are now so processed and altered as to be illegitimate and fake, so did America’s Germans, Frenchmen and Anglo-Saxons once belong to real, natural countries, but are now so processed as to be illegitimate and fake.

The reality, of course, is very different. German-Americans are not synthetic Germans. They are real Americans. German-American achievements are not German achievements. They are American achievements. America is a real country, as old and legitimate and unique as any other, and with a population that is as native and peculiar to its soil as the Chinese are to China.

D, LDN.

On the Shooting at Planned Parenthood

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It didn’t take long for the shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, Oklahoma on Friday to be exploited for cynical political ends. After three bodies were carted away to the morgue Colorado Springs, memes began to spring up everywhere (on facebook, twitter, reddit and other places) comparing the shooting to Islamic terrorism, and in doing so downplaying the suffering of its victims. A truly shocking exercise in cold, emotionless manipulation if ever there was one.

The memes, though multitudinous, differed from each other only very slightly. The most popular ‘Willy Wonka’ variant was typical: against the backdrop of a smiling Gene Wilder (taken from my favourite childhood movie), the text read as follows: “Christian extremist kills 3 people at an abortion clinic…Tell me again how Syrian refugees are a threat.”

You don’t need more than a few operational brain cells to perceive the startling un-worldliness of this sentiment. Indeed, many people on social networks have recoiled from the image in revulsion or responded to it with loud mockery. How on earth can one tragic, stupid action – the first of its kind in years – measure up to the daily bloodbath of Political Islam? How can one action – brutal, awful and yet discriminating – be placed in the same ethical category as the bombing of market-places, funeral parades, Parisian restaurants and concert venues?

Since the outrage in Colorado was committed, Christians across America have disowned the force behind it, branding him ‘psychopathic’, ‘crazed’, ‘lunatic’ and (most crucially) ‘un-Christian’. Compare that to the icy silence and tacit approval of Muslims communities after outrages in the West.

Let’s be clear – there has been no major Christian terror attack (that is, a terror attack committed explicitly for Christian theological motivations) in Europe or America for the last 100 years. There have been murders, random and cruel all, but nothing of the same malevolent grade as Islam manages to inspire on a daily basis.

The attacks in Norway in 2011 were not Christian. I don’t believe Anders Behring Breivik had a Christian bone in his body. The troubles of Northern Ireland don’t count either (despite the enthusiasm with which Islamic apologists bring them up). The Catholics of Ulster do not hate the Protestants of Ulster for religious reasons, but for ethnic and national reasons. Ulster Protestants are descendants of British colonisers and remain loyal to their imperial sponsors. The Catholics are native Irish who wish to have the northern corner of their island back under Irish control. Whichever way you lean on this, you can surely agree that religion plays no part (apart from the total coincidence of the religious divide between Scots-Irish and Irish which serves as an excuse).

Adherents of Christianity have certainly been violent at various points in history, but the period since they behaved in a way comparable to the adherents of Islam is measured in centuries. Let no one deny reality, or history, or seek to deform them into a reality or history synchronisable with their bigotries.

Islamic violence has no equivalent in other faiths.

D, LDN