Steven Erlanger in the New York Times, asks: Are Western Values Losing Their Sway?
Here’s my two cents:
The problem with our “Western values” is not the values in themselves, although some are certainly questionable. The real problem is the triumphalism that came with them after the West’s ‘victory’ at the end of the Cold War, a dangerous triumphalism that continues today. We have utterly convinced ourselves that everyone else wants what we have and we will use any methods, from the most bloody and overt, to the most quiet and covert, to pass them on.
We convince ourselves it’s the “right” thing to do because, we tell ourselves, the end will justify the means. So we shut our eyes to the side-effects and carry on with our righteous mission. This kind of skewed thinking is how you get so-called bleeding heart liberals calling for a humane solution to a massive humanitarian crisis on one hand, while urging more NATO bombing on the other.
It’s a contradiction that has its roots in that very idea that we need to rid the world of the ‘bad’ guys we don’t like and fill it with the ‘good’ ones we do like. We rarely consider that this might indeed be an impossible task, or even, God forbid, wrong. Because of course, Western values are always “right”. Or as historian Paul Robinson put it yesterday in a blog post about the failures of Western foreign policy:
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