Laws of progressive thought: 1- the Law of the Abject West

Door Bart Croughs

10 juni 2019

Intellectuals, who are overly sympathetic to the unpleasant habits of other cultures, claim that we cannot impose our values on immigrants simply because values are relative and it is extremely imperialistic and paternalistic, if not racist, to think that our values are better than those of other cultures - these same intellectuals often show a high degree of steadfastness of values with regard to the past.

The colonisation of Africa was particularly scandalous, the American slave owners were huge bastards, Columbus was a major bastard, and so on. These bastards, too, lived in a culture that, this time because of the distance in time, deviated significantly from ours, but strangely enough, that is no ground for clemency.

A remarkable phenomenon, because one would expect values to be considered either absolute - valid in all places and at all times - or relative - both place-bound and time-bound. The combination of relativism with respect to place, and absolutism with respect to time is thus rather puzzling.
 
But this enigma soon disappears as soon as the first law of Croughs is applied: 'The law of the abject West'. This law reads: 'In a conflict between western and non-western, the progressive intellectual opts for non-western'.

By applying the law of the abject West, the combination of cultural relativism and `time-absolutism' is adequately explained. Columbus versus the Indians, American slave owners versus the slaves, colonials versus the colonized - these are all cases of conflict between `Western' and `non-Western'. In these cases, value relativism would be too much in favour of 'the West'. (For example: `you have to see the actions of the colonialists in their time, then it was considered normal', et cetera.) Today's conflicts between `western' and `non-western' do merit value relativism, because this is to the advantage of `non-western'.
  
The remarkable phenomenon that the oppression of the black population in South Africa could count on a constant stream of severe condemnations from our intellectuals, while the often much heavier oppression of the black population in other parts of Africa barely aroused any interest, can easily be explained with the help of the law of the abject West.

In South Africa there was a conflict between western (white) and non-western (black); this was in contrast to the other parts of Africa, where the conflict was between non-western and non-western - and therefore of no interest to our intellectuals. The welfare of the black population clearly was irrelevant for our humanitarian intellectuals, whose only concern was to attack the 'West' and pose as an 'anti-racist'.

Another peculiar phenomenon can also be explained by this law: the fact that enlightened minds still daily bemoan the shameful injustice of the Western slave trade, while the slave trade by Arabs is rarely mentioned; and this while in the West the slave trade has already been abolished in the 19th century, while several Arab states did not begin to abolish the slave trade until the sixties and seventies of the 20th century. (In Mauritania, slavery was only abolished in 1980, while in Sudan, in 1990, the slave trade was still taking place; see The economist, 6 January 1990). 'The law of the abject West' can easily explain this remarkable phenomenon.