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The ruling class thinks this way. I am not reifying their moral framework, I'm describing it. If you want to play as a man against time do go ahead. Though I'd appreciate it if you did so relating to any other topic than this one. As it only serves to carve out an exception for a people who do not deserve it.
The same impulse that guides the west today guided the colonial powers away from properly settling the lands and pushing the locals away. There is still plenty of resource to be had in every one of these places. And gathering it is still being hindered by the people who occupy the areas. To imagine that the decision to abandon fertile lands was taken because no one needed these resources anymore is silly. There was plenty of need and plenty of poverty to go around in the homelands. But that was also the case for the colonies. Which is why the people there weren't robbed and slaughtered but aided.
You're still playing with the same piece of yarn regardless of how far you drag its thread.
I don't look back at the past with rose tinted glasses, imagining that the complete and utter failure of the past is somehow venerated by the same failure in the present, just because I happen to be alive. As if the two aren't holding hands. The moments in time you see as highs are the moments in time everything was fated to this point. If you don't like how things are today I'd ask you to take a more critical look at the past.
Of all of the users on this forum, I think I’m one of the ones to whom this accusation applies the least. I’m on record here advocating for the racial partition of the United States, and for the reintroduction and expansion of public executions for a massively wide range of crimes. Whatever else you want to say about my worldview, I very obviously do not believe that only the Jews should be allowed to return to the tried-and-tested methods of the past.
All good points! I don’t dispute that the European powers could have been far more brutal and exterminationist than they were. Their sentimentality, for right or wrong, did prevent them from really going all the way, even though many of the peoples whom they conquered, if given the whip hand, would never have hesitated so.
I struggle a lot with whether I think “Western values” even refers to any real and reliably identifiable category at all - and, if so, what jettisoning such values would mean for the societies who supposedly believe in them today. Would I actually want to live in a society where the concept of “inalienable human rights” was abandoned? Sure, it’d certainly mean less homeless people in my neighborhood. Probably less disorder. Certainly less refugees and welfare recipients. What would be its other knock-on effects? To what extent are the soft-headed liberal values you’re decrying actually load-bearing cultural infrastructure underpinning the best parts of our society, versus simply luxury beliefs that could easily be discarded or de-emphasized without impacting the parts of my society that I care about? Certainly I personally don’t believe that every individual human life has significant intrinsic moral value. But do I want to live in a society where everyone in power agrees with me? I’m not actually certain.
Then we can chalk it up to poor timing.
I don't know why you bother yourself with these questions. You don't need lofty universalist principles or imaginary rights to live. National Socialism works just fine. Direct the compassionate towards their own and you will never speak poorly of a 'liberal' again.
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This section to me is particularly dangerous. You can't untangle "western values" from the societies that have been created by them and the benefits conferred to billions through that process. Many times when you pull on a few seemingly unrelated threads in a system it turns out that they were actually load bearing threads and the whole thing unravels. There is certainly a secret to western success, and a large part of it has been trust and cooperation beyond clan and family; if you abandon those values you're right back to it. It is all fun and games until you're the one up against the wall with no due process. Everyone always imagines they'll be the boot instead of the human face, most people don't end up being the boot.
When England led the world in coal and textile production, we proselytised for Free Trade. It became one of our great societal convictions, and as a country we became very rich.
Then the coal started running out and we didn’t have oil. Factories in other countries could take advantage of cheap labour and generous subsidies. And suddenly Free Trade meant globalisation hollowing out our economy.
Because the West is in many ways an ideological concept, and the US is an explicitly ideological state (reflected in the constitution), and because western countries have historically been rich and pleasant places to live, we have avoided asking ourselves if our ideologies caused our success or were contingent on it.
I don’t think we can assume that due process causes high trust societies (rather than vice versa), and that free markets produce prosperity. They may! But I’m not currently willing to take it as an axiom in the way that I was 20 years ago.
England was a trading empire long before coal and textiles. It was already very rich by Euro standards before the industrial revolution. It wasn't the coal and the textiles. It was the people and the culture that developed in a place that could only be reached and lived in with some expeditiousness.
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