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wester[w88,jmc]		The Superiority of Western Culture

The Decline of Western Culture

More hypocrisy

	The advocates of reforming the Western Culture requirement will
probably get their way.  The cohort bulge of arrogance, stupidity and
obsequiousness to thuggery now making its way through the faculty
population is too large and insistent to avoid it.  It will result in
increased hypocrisy as will be described.  All that can be done about it
is to recommend to students ways of protecting themselves individually
from its worst aspects.  How many will choose to do so is unknown.

	One trouble is that serious 

Seiji Ozawa is just as much Beethoven's heir as any German conductor.

	The advocates of integrating the study of non-Western cultures
into the required freshman course probably don't contemplate a serious
comparison of Western culture with the others.  A serious comparison
would show that in many important area, Western culture is superior
to others, and this fact accounts for its worldwide dominance just
as much as the Western technological and organizational superiority
of recent centuries.

	Today the inheritance of Western culture is not the property
of Western countries.  In many of its aspects it is the basis of
a world culture, and this needs to be understood in each area
separately.  Thus the Western music presently dominates the world,
while Western cooking traditions don't.  Thus Chinese cooking has
penetrated the West to a greater extent than any Western cuisine
has penetrated China.

	Consider the Spanish conquest of Mexico.  I maintain that
the moral superiority of 16th century Spanish catholicism to
Aztec and other Amerindian religions was a major cause of Spanish
success.  This is in spite of the fact that by modern moral standards,
16th century Spanish catholicism was pretty bad.
Its intolerance gave rise to the Inquisition, and the Conquistadors
often didn't even live up to their own beliefs of what was moral.
Nevertheless, it had some important universal moral principles, and
maybe the Aztec religion didn't have any.  Most important for the
particular case, it held that human sacrifice was immoral.  This
got the Spanish allies and enabled them to win even when they were
out of ammunition for their firearms and had discovered that the
Aztec cotton armor was superior to their own.

	The further development of Western political morality has
had worldwide importance.  18th century Western moral
objections to slavery led to the British navy undertaking to
suppress the African slave trade.  In 1829 the British decided
to suppress the Indian custom of Suttee in which widows were
pressured into throwing themselves on their husbands' funeral
pyres.  In spite of the anti-Western politics of India, this
Western moral inheritance persists today in the Indian undertaking
to use police to suppress the practice of burning brides whose
dowries are judged insufficient by their in-laws.

	Of course, the equalitarian ideas that contribute some of
the motivation to the opposition to the Western culture requirement
are a Western development.  It is only within Western culture that
the idea developed that other cultures have something to contribute.

	I remarked that some of the opposition comes from equalitarian
ideas.  Another part is presumably a turf battle by the people
who need a compulsory audience for their over-expanded programs
in minority cultures.  Another motivation is the usual power-grabbing
tendency of insufficiently educated intellectuals.

	I don't wish to argue that the interaction of Western culture
with other cultures should take up very much time in the Western
culture sequence.  Before one can discuss its interactions, one has
to study what Western culture is.  Probably not enough is known about
these interactions to allow definite conclusions.  Anyway the faculty
who will have to teach the courses are mostly too timid and too
affected by ideological fashion to do an honest job.