….melts or dissolves or is simply shown to be the historical confabulation that it is.
After the Storm, written by Ben Ehrenreich, is a well-written gloss on the historical construction of the delusion called “Western Civilization”. The author demarcates what are obvious, but downplayed links between the Greeks and their Middle Eastern and African antecedents.
In acts of deliberate forgetting and linguistic agenda setting, it has been a common reflex to think that classical Greece provides the origin story of a particular historic social and political formation blithely called the West. The latter has been deemed by its own white confabulators to be superior, exceptional and foundational.
The author points out that this overheated delusion not only seeks to culturally raise it members above other civilizations, but also perceives its imaginary intellectual project, rationalism, to be the method for successfully grasping the workings of the cosmos where others, caught up in metaphysical fantasy, have failed. In this way, Western Civ is scientifically, objectively superior. As a consequence, the exponents of Western values deem themselves entitled to lay claim to the notion of progress, and have its approach to the world justifiably understood to be the prime contributor to knowledge and human interests. How delusional is that?
The historical gloss makes for a captivating read. The interesting thing for me is that I am currently reading Rorty’s last collection of published essays, Truth and Progress, where he, along with Donald Davidson, in another context, tear apart the notions of exceptionalism and objectivity from inside the intellectual project. Rorty, as does Ehrenreich, shows that the notion of objectivity is just another expression of exceptionalism.
Whereas, the latter shows how this confabulation was constructed out of the vicissitudes of history, the former exposes the shortcomings of the actual intellectual project. Truth, objectivity are limited, context bound notions. Consequently, any notion of progress to be derived from the discovery and operationalizing of objective knowledge must be regarded with a questioning eye. It is by no means a given, contingent at best, and likely reflects a disposition favouring the one making the proposition, masquerading as foundational, that is, essential to all. The extent and force of the intellectual edifice that struggles to maintain this exceptionalism, and take on for itself the label realist, is remarkable.
Though the strongest proponents of the notion and perspective of realism are to be found in the Anglo-American world, the extent of how those in the West have colonially infected the rest of the planet is also remarkable. All kinds of folks, from all kinds of places, are certain that they “know”, that they have the methods to know, that they have the disposition and experience to know the real, what’s really going on, what is really happening. Some even claim this ability for themselves while condemning Western exceptionalism. In that very moment, they adopt for themselves the latter’s most seductive conceit, the imaginary capacity to know, objectively, where others dawdle wantonly in illusion. Funny stuff.