WHILE PANIC IS SETTING IN THE “WESTERN WORLD”. WE MUST KNOW THAT THE WESTERN HEGEMONY IS MAINLY THE ANGLO/SAXON CULTURAL/CONTROL/GRAB PENETRATION Of THE HUMAN PLANET.

THE ENGLISH DEFEATED NAPOLEON AND THE ENGLISH/AMERICANS DEFEATED THE GERMANS, THEMSELVES NOW WELL-TACKED TO THE ANGLO/SAXON HEGEMONY. 

THIS ENGLISH HEGEMONY STARTED WAY BACK IN THE MIDDLE AGES WITH THE CONQUESTS OF COLONIALISM, UNASHAMEDLY CALLED “THE BRITISH EMPIRE” NOW THE “AMERICAN EMPIRE”. 

WE KNOW THAT WW1 WAS A SET UP BY THE BRITISH EMPIRE TO PREVENT GERMANY TO RISE ON THE COLONIALIST MARKET…

WHILE EUROPE WAS BECOMING ENLIGHTENED WITH PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHTS, THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN ENGLAND WAS MOSTLY MERCANTILE. BY THEN ENGLAND WAS READY TO DEAL WITH NAPOLEON, WHO WAS INVENTING HIS OWN STYLE OF COLONIALISM. HE FAILED. HITLER NEARLY WON, FOR IT NOT BE THE INTERVENTION OF THE RUSSIANS — THE EASTERN FRONT OF WW2 HAVING BEEN SECRETLY INSPIRED (DOCUMENTED) BY THE ENGLISH HEGEMONY TO KILL TWO BIRDS AT THE SAME TIME:

MAKE HITLER SUFFER IN THE EAST WHILE BEING HIT IN THE WEST, AND MAKE RUSSIA SUFFER BY HAVING TO FIGHT HUGE ARMIES OF NAZIS FROM GERMANY, UKRAINE AND OTHER LOONIES…

 

THUS ONE UNDERSTANDS BORIS JOHNSON’S DISGUSTING PLEA…

 

MEANWHILE:

 

The paradox of Western hegemony of human nature

The world faces unprecedented social and environmental challenges that demand a coordinated, global response. However, such a response is hampered by a conundrum. The challenges are partly the outcome of Western notions of what it is to be human, yet those very notions will probably dictate the spirit and strength of how the challenges are addressed. Dr Michael Zichy, a specialist in ethics at the University of Bonn in Germany, refers to this ‘Western hegemony’ around human values and suggests that they are in a paradoxical state of tension.

The world is experiencing significant environmental challenges brought about by the humans who inhabit it, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental pollution. Humanity, in turn, faces challenges around food, water, and energy insecurity, poverty and inequality, migration and refugees, political instability and conflicts, the digital divide, and a global health crisis. Addressing these issues requires collective action. However, such action is hampered by a Western hegemony around the very notion of what it is to be human.

To a large degree, the West, helped in no small part by its historic economic and political dominance, has shaped ideals of human values and expected the rest of the world to get on board. A leading Austrian philosopher, Dr Michael Zichy, says such ideals, including Western notions of capitalism, exist in a paradoxical state of constant tension, contribute to the current environmental and social challenges, and are at odds with human values elsewhere in the world. They are thus, at best, incomplete. If humans hope to address these challenges collectively, they must first agree on what it is to be human.

Zichy aims to tackle this conundrum. Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bonn, Germany, Zichy is an expert in ethics and philosophical anthropology, in particular the theory of different understandings of the human being. The concept may seem self-evident – humans can easily identify other humans – but the idea of the human ‘being’ is fraught with debate and deep introspection. It is also highly political and can steer policies that are arguably ‘inhumane’ but seemingly popular. For Zichy, a Western hegemony exists around what it is to be a human being, and its imperiousness is impeding a global response to the challenges we are all facing. There’s no quick fix; this hegemony is deeply embedded – its roots go back hundreds of years.

The West as a normative project 

The concept of ‘the West’ is not purely geographical; it stretches across parts of the globe and includes Western and Central European states, some Eastern European states, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It is also, to a degree, organic. Zichy invokes the German historian Heinrich August Winkler who describes it as a ‘normative project’ based on specific values and standards shaped by Christianity and expressed in epochal events in European and American history, such as the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, and the French and American declarations of human rights in the late 18th century.

The concept of ‘the West’ is based on specific values and standards shaped by Christianity and Enlightenment and expressed in epochal events in European and American history, such as the Reformation and US Declaration of Independence.
Notably, such events, and the values they shaped, had global consequences. These specific, Western values spread across the world as countries like France, England, Spain, Portugal, and later, the United States, used their economic and military strengths to stretch their empires, subjugating and supplanting the values of those they conquered.

The undisguised colonialism of the last two centuries may have seen its days, but the concomitant values around humanity are still evident – if maybe more disguised – in the West’s significant political and economic heft, powered by capitalism and globalisation. This is important because such perceptions about the human shared within a society – Zichy refers to ‘Menschenbild’ – determine how humans perceive the world and others within it. History holds examples of how, in its most perverted form, perceptions about superior human values and notions of what it is to be human can have horrific consequences – witness slavery, the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. Even today, ‘Menschenbild’ shapes how citizens see refugees wanting to enter their country. More than that, perceptions of the human being deeply influence society’s moral, legal, pedagogical, and political institutions, and how we self-identify as humans.

According to Zichy, there are currently two dominant human ‘images’ in the West: a normative human rights image and a capitalist image, and they exist in something close to a paradoxical state of constant tension. As a result, they are an impedance to any collective response to address significant global challenges.

Incongruence of the incontestable 

While ‘the West’ is by no means socially homogenous, its diversity is threaded together by a priority on individual human rights – the understanding that every human is equal and endowed with dignity, reason, freedom, and morality. This normative state may sound incontestable, and an ideal, but it differs in some respects from some non-Western and indigenous principles that prioritise the rights of groups over individuals, for good reason. Prioritising individual human rights, as Zichy argues, makes individuals ‘relatively independent entities’ and allows each individual strong subjective rights, which they can assert against the state and society. For those imbued with a Western sense of human values, this may sound incontrovertible, but as Zichy points out, this focus on individual human rights brings with it ‘the caveat that the individual takes precedence over the community.’ 

 For Zichy, a Western hegemony exists around what it is to be a human being, and its imperiousness is impeding a global response to the challenges we are all facing. 

Such promotion of individual rights endemic to Western cultures clashes with the norms of collectivist societies, such as those in parts of Africa and the East, where the community – the family, the clan, the village, and even the state – takes precedence over the individual. In some countries where the state is non-functional and unable to protect individual rights, communities actively ensure individual rights are secondary to those of the broader society.

For Zichy, Western hegemony around the human image is due to its largely secular nature, which ignores or depreciates how deeply ingrained religion is in some non-Western cultures, and the assumption that its concept of human nature is self-evident and therefore universalistic. This is tantamount to arrogance; it is also anthropocentric. Placing humans at the centre of the world paradoxically separates them from it, something incompatible with, especially, indigenous cultures that value the connectedness between humans, other living creatures, and the environment.

The capitalist priority promotes individual rights but is at odds with human values held by others.
This anthropocentrism, says Zichy, has encouraged the West’s ‘instrumental relationship with nature and the environment’ and led to the large-scale resource exploitation and degradation that has accelerated biodiversity loss and environmental pollution and is also evident in factory farming and animal experimentation. The priority of individual human rights and the comodification of our natural environment are also tied to the other dominant – the capitalist – Western image of what it is to be human – what drives us.

 

The capitalist priority
Ideals of capitalism sit at the core of many Western notions of what it is to be human. The striving for personal exceptionalism, with the supportive ethical undercurrent that this is a good thing and should be encouraged, is tied to values of profit. Zichy argues that exceptionalism is a virtue unless it is at the expense of others, and promoting (this misguided kind of) personal exceptionalism lays the foundation for egoism, greed, and the pursuit of fame – arguably morally wrong vices.

Western evangelising that everyone has equal rights sits uncomfortably next to capitalistic notions that economic power entitles more rights.
Placed within a capitalistic construct, Zichy argues that these vices are a breeding ground for selfishness and anti-social behaviour in the quest for economic power and, with it, feelings of superiority and expectations of rights over others. This is encapsulated in the notion of homo oeconomicus – humans as utility-orientated and calculating egoists.

The capitalist priority points to a further contradiction in the Western notions of human values: promoting individual rights within the broader framework of capitalistic ideals costs wider society by undermining the basic tenets of those rights. The normative and capitalist human images prevalent in the West are in a paradoxical state of constant tension. Western evangelising that everyone has equal rights sits uncomfortably next to capitalistic notions that economic power entitles more rights. To paraphrase George Orwell: everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. 

Zichy’s question is whether this is a suitable ethical construct and notion of humanity to tackle the significant social and environmental challenges it has largely brought about. Furthermore, Western hegemony around what it is to be human still carries considerable authority within international organisations, but because its dominant images are at times incongruent and in a state of tension, they can also induce inertia – something we can ill afford when we need global, coordinated action.

Personal ResponseIf the Western notion of humanity is incomplete, briefly, how would you describe a more inclusive global understanding of the human being?
A global understanding of the human being is a work in progress and a matter of political and cultural debate which requires a good portion of flexibility and tolerance on all sides. However, there are some basic tenets which are preconditions of such a debate and are thus indisputable: the human-rights-based understanding of the human being – the understanding that every human is equal and endowed with dignity, reason, freedom, and morality – is now as ever indispensable. However, to limit its concomitant, potentially dangerous individualism, the existential human embeddedness into the social and natural world and, hand in hand with this, the human responsibility for it, needs to be emphasised. In particular, the capitalist values must be replaced. Instead of fostering egoism, accumulating money and power, and excessively consuming material goods, cultivating moral and spiritual virtues, accumulating and fostering intangible goods like healthy and caring relations to humans, non-human creatures and nature, education, creativity should be valued. https://researchoutreach.org/articles/paradox-western-hegemony-human-nature/ Blah blah blah... THE ANGLO/SAXONS WANT TO OWN THE WHOLE WORLD. FULL STOP.... THE EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTS HAVE CAVED IN.... THE EUROPEAN POPULACES ARE NOT SO HAPPY ABOUT IT... THE RUSSIANS AND THE CHINESE AND  THE IRANIANS ARE FIGHTING THE HEGEMONY FAIR AND SQUARE... THE "WESTERN" (ANGLO/SAXON) HEGEMONY IS A FULL HYPOCRITICAL PSYCHOPATHIC SAMPLE OF HUMAN NATURE GONE BAD. OTHERWISE JULIAN ASSANGE WOULD BE FREE....it's time for being earnest.....