The End of the West and Other Cautionary Tales

Sean Meighoo

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231541404
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Most historical accounts of "the West" take it for granted that the guiding principles of the Western tradition—reason, progress, and freedom—have been passed down directly from ancient Greece to modern Europe, evolving in isolation from all non-Western cultures. Today, many political analysts and cultural critics maintain that the Western tradition is fast approaching its end, for better or worse, as it becomes more and more integrated with non-Western cultures in an increasingly globalized world. But what if we are witnessing something else entirely—not the "end" of the West but rather another historical mutation of the idea of the West itself?

This groundbreaking work shows that whether the West is hailed as the source of all historical progress or scorned as the root of all cultural imperialism, it remains a deeply problematic concept that is intrinsically connected to an ethnocentric view of the world. In a critical reading of the continental philosophers Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida as well as the postcolonial thinkers Said, Mohanty, Bhabha, and Trinh, Sean Meighoo strikes at the intellectual foundations of Western exceptionalism until its ideological supports show through. Deconstructing the concept of the West in his provocative interpretations of Martin Bernal's controversial publication Black Athena and the Beatles' second film Help!, Meighoo poses a formidable question to philosophers, writers, political analysts, and cultural critics alike: Can we mount an effective critique of Western ethnocentrism without reinforcing the very idea of the West?

Part I

The End of the West

The end of the West has been in the air for quite some time now, and yet the meaning of this phrase, this idea, or this event—whatever it is—has still not been decided. The meaning of “the West” itself remains very ambiguous. It is, of course, the name of one of the four cardinal directions, a basic concept of geographical knowledge, a fundamental experience of the world bearing a presumably global validity. It indicates the path of the sun’s daily journey across the sky and the place of its nightly setting on the horizon. The West is thus associated with the end of the day, the final goal or destination point of the sun, the last ray of light. Even in its most common sense, then, the West is an end in itself.¹ The cardinal directions are not symmetrical, nor are they neutral. The geographical inscription of the earth as such is the foundational act of all geopolitics.

“The West” is also a name given to more properly defined geopolitical formations, although these formations, too, betray an underlying asymmetry. There is the geographical region of West Africa as distinguished from the regions of East Africa, North Africa, and South Africa, the last of which, however, is also the name of a political state—a name, moreover, that became practically synonymous with apartheid during the latter part of the twentieth century and that has perhaps still not freed itself from this association. There is the geographical region of West Asia as distinguished from the regions of East Asia and South Asia, notwithstanding the effective absence of any comparable region bearing the name “North Asia,” a name that remains much less widely used even than “West Asia” itself, which seems to have been rather deliberately coined in order to replace—as if things were not already complicated enough—the “Near” or “Middle East.” There is also—or rather there was—the state of West Germany, as the Federal Republic of Germany was commonly called, distinguished from East Germany, as the German Democratic Republic was similarly called, along with the city of West Berlin as distinguished from East Berlin, until the spontaneous destruction of the Berlin Wall and the formal reunification of Germany toward the end of the twentieth century—a reunification, however, that was much less an integration between West and East Germany than an absorption of East Germany into West Germany, which is now simply called “Germany.” And within the United States, there is the state of West Virginia as distinguished from Virginia, from which it seceded during the Civil War after the state of Virginia had already seceded from the Union, which was also called “the North”—to further complicate matters once again—and joined the Confederacy, which was also called “the South.”

“The West” has also long stood on its own as a name for large historical and cultural blocs, detaching itself, as it were, from any more substantive geographical place-names. Since the end of World War II and its political aftermath, the West has stood for the alliance struck between the United States and the largely western European states represented by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in direct opposition to the East, which stood for the alliance struck between the Soviet Union and the eastern European states represented by the Warsaw Pact. The West has thus become synonymous with capitalism, individualism, and democracy, and the East with communism, totalitarianism, and bureaucracy. Following the nearly simultaneous dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself toward the end of the twentieth century, it seems that the West and its ideological associations have not only survived the collapse of the East but indeed been vindicated by it. But the West has long stood alone, more or less apart from any such Eastern counterpart, since well before the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Iron Curtain. The West also stands for the American and Canadian frontier lands that were settled after the colonies on the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean and the St. Lawrence River had achieved political independence. While the territorial expansion of both states required the subjugation and forced relocation of the indigenous populations who already lived on these lands, it promised the beginning of a new life for the American and Canadian settlers who made the westward pilgrimage, as though they had been guided there by the sun itself. Even today, this promise of the West continues to lure “Old World” citizens to the “New World” and New World citizens ever farther westward.

The meaning of “the West” that interests me in this book, however, refers to an even longer historical and cultural tradition, a tradition beginning in ancient Greece, transmitted through ancient Rome and medieval Europe, and ending in modern Europe and its civilizational outposts in North America and Australia—a civilization that provides the very measure of civilization. This tradition of the West is marked by its historical continuity and cultural coherence, having been united by an indissoluble bond that was originally forged by the ancient Greeks with the invention of philosophy, science, and democracy all at once, a truly singular event that has come to be known, commonly enough, as the “Greek miracle.” “The West” as European tradition, then, is inevitably implicated with all the other meanings of “the West” that we have just teased apart—the West as capitalist bloc, the West as American frontier, even the West as cardinal direction. The West binds together reason, progress, and freedom in a way that remains absolutely unique to itself. The West is thus clearly distinguished from the East, although, again, this distinction attests to their decidedly asymmetrical formation. The East is marked precisely by its lack of historical continuity and cultural coherence or, indeed, by the absence of “history” and “culture” altogether—at least in the proper sense of these terms—by its essentially barbaric traditions, by its merely rudimentary forms of civilization at best. This distinction between the East and the West, between the Orient and the Occident, between Asia and Europe endures in spite of their frequently shifting geographical boundaries, for, once again, the distinction is geopolitical through and through. After all, there is no strictly geographical or geological basis for the division between the continents of Asia and Europe, a distinction that might seem to be the least politically charged of all. By all accounts, Asia and Europe are formed from a common tectonic plate, the Eurasian Plate, which itself excludes, however, the Arabian and Indian Peninsulas, both of which are formed from separate plates and yet considered “subcontinents” rather than continents themselves. Europe is not, then, a purely geographical concept—whatever that might mean—but an intrinsically geopolitical concept that denies any historical trace or cultural hybridity between the European tradition and non-European traditions, on one hand, and conceals all the historical discontinuities and cultural incoherencies that undermine this ostensibly singular European tradition, on the other. The geographical concept of Europe has perhaps outlived the philological concept of the Aryan and the anthropological concept of the Caucasian, but it thrives on their remains.

“The end of the West” thus alludes to many things at once, without simply meaning any one of these things. Yet some of these allusions are obviously more salient than others. There seems to be little sense in declaring the end of a cardinal direction inasmuch as all four cardinal directions remain rather instrumental for any long-distance navigation, whether by land, by sea, or by air, and inasmuch as the sun still continues to travel across the sky along its westward path. And there seems to be only little more sense in contemplating the end of a geographical place-name insofar as nomenclature is an essentially arbitrary procedure even if a change in name is itself related to more significant geopolitical shifts. But some of the recent declarations on the end of the West do indeed concern such momentous geopolitical transformations. The transatlantic alliance between western Europe and the United States does appear to have been seriously compromised not only by the ongoing incorporation of both western and eastern European states into the European Union since its establishment in the last decade of the twentieth century but also by the consistently unilateral actions of the United States during the first decade of the twenty-first century, actions that flagrantly disregarded the international mandates of both NATO and the United Nations. And the mythical freedom of the western frontier is hardly tenable any longer, if it ever was in the first place, with the increasing corporate accumulation of agricultural lands in the West itself over the past few decades as the latest turn in globalization brings the dubious benefits of the Green Revolution back home.

However, the meaning of “the end of the West” that especially interests me concerns what appears in many ways to be the imminent loss of European as well as American economic, political, and cultural hegemony throughout the world. Certainly, the Western colonial and later neocolonial social order was continually upset over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by popular movements for political independence in the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Africa; by massive waves of migration from these same regions to Europe and North America themselves; and by the gradual emergence of many non-Western nations as important economic and political forces in the global arena. All these events seem to have culminated by the beginning of the twenty-first century to threaten, if not to have actually produced, the very end of Western civilization. “The end of the West” has become something of a rallying cry, then, both a cry of distress and a cry to action, a cry that is often heard not only from the defenders of Western civilization but also from its detractors. For whether it is declared in the name of colonialism or anticolonialism, globalization or antiglobalization, what “the end of the West” announces is that there has already occurred or else will soon occur a decisive rupture or break from the Western tradition, entailing, for better or worse, the dissolution of this great tradition itself. The end of the West in this sense constitutes nothing less than the end of reason, progress, and freedom, whether it comes as boon or bane.

And yet does this rallying cry not simply reaffirm the geopolitical concept of the West itself? Is “the end of the West” not just another way of declaring the absolutely unique origin of the West? Has the concept of the West not always contained within itself, from its very beginning, its own end? For what “the end of the West” presumes is that there has indeed existed a historically continuous and culturally coherent Western tradition, beginning in ancient Greece and ending in modern Europe, a long and broad tradition that has nonetheless been bound together by the singular invention of philosophy, science, and democracy—the “Greek miracle”—and set apart from all other historical and cultural traditions by this same event. The end of the West would have thus been preordained at the very origin of the West, the final goal of a tradition destined to extinguish itself by universalizing itself, by emptying itself of all historical and cultural particularity, by imparting its axiomatic values of reason, progress, and freedom to the rest of the world. This concept of the end, far from undermining the historical teleology of the West, would only fulfill it. Even the radical denunciation of Western civilization, an end so often declared in the name of antiethnocentrism, would remain complicit with the most ethnocentric concept of the West.

This book, then, attempts to respond to the question that is surely left hanging after our short exposition on the end of the West: Is there any sense of the end that would not conform so readily to the historical teleology of the West? Such an end would not stop at merely declaring the end of the West but turn to dismantling the origin of the West as well. It would not only trace the emergence of philosophy, science, and democracy back beyond the “Greek miracle” to other historical and cultural traditions but also check the privilege that is routinely accorded to these civilizational pursuits in defining the Western tradition itself. It would not seek primarily to disprove the actual existence of the West but instead to provide some account of the performative force by which the West is generated. “The end of the West,” at least in the sense that I want to consider it in this book, would not simply mean that there is no longer any such thing as the West but rather that there has never been any West as such.

It is thus only fitting that I should begin my book not at the end but at the origin of the West, the “Greek miracle” itself, an origin that has recently become subject to much scholarly dispute as well as to more public scrutiny but that, even so, remains no less fabulous. In chapter 1, I turn my attention to the publication of Martin Bernal’s massive three-volume work Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization and the widespread controversy surrounding it, sparking a phenomenon in the world of academic publishing and public scholarship that has become widely known as “the Black Athena debate.” Bernal presented his general argument in the first volume of Black Athena, proposing not only that ancient Greek civilization was profoundly indebted to both ancient Egyptian and Phoenician civilization but also that the modern theory of the Hellenic origins of Western civilization was itself a rather late invention of racist European scholarship. Although I do not intend to contribute any historical evidence as such to Bernal’s argument, I do hope to discern more precisely what was at stake in the ensuing controversy. I suggest that the lasting significance of Bernal’s work lies not in its stated aim to locate “the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization,” as it is put in the subtitle of Black Athena itself, as much as in its deconstructive effects on any idea of historical or cultural origins or “roots” at all. In other words, what is at stake in the Black Athena debate is not only the concept of the West but also the concept of the origin. For whether Bernal and his critics articulate it quite so clearly or not, the concept of the West is an origin as much as an end in itself, an intrinsically teleological concept that requires both a starting point and a final goal, the very movement between which defines all history. What I am saying, then, is that to declare the end of the West without attempting to dismantle the origin of the West as well is merely to provide the West with a new beginning. In the end, of course, this task of dismantling the teleological concept of “the West” may perhaps turn out to be just as difficult as dismantling the cardinal direction that goes by the same name.

1

The Black Athena Debate

Bernal and His Critics

The first volume of Martin Bernal’s work Black Athena was published in 1987 under the even more provocative title The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985. In his ambitious introduction to this volume, not only does Bernal present his argument on the construction or “fabrication” of what he calls the Aryan Model of ancient Greek civilization by European scholars over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but he also offers an extensive outline of the remaining two projected volumes of Black Athena, under the working titles Greece European or Levantine? The Egyptian and West Semitic Components of Greek Civilization and Solving the Riddle of the Sphinx and Other Studies in Egypto-Greek Mythology, respectively. While the titles as well as the contents of these two volumes would undergo some significant revisions during the nineteen ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: The End of the West
• Part II: From Teleology to Negative Teleology
• Part III: From Continental Philosophy to Postcolonial Theory
• Part IV: The Limits of Antiethnocentrism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index