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The events in New York City and Washington on September 11 exposed more than the foundations of the World Trade Center towers. Revealed as well was a dark underside of North American life: anti-Arab and anti-Moslem racism (not that the terms “Arab” and “Moslem” are synonymous, as not all Arabs are Moslems and by no means all Moslems are Arab, but in the minds of many people the two are one and the same). Within a week of the attacks, reports surfaced of assaults and threats against Arabs and Moslems in the United States and Canada. A more subtle yet no less real phenomenon that emerged was Western ethnocentrism. Newspaper after newspaper decried the destruction of the World Trade Center as an attack on Western society, even though the attack was aimed at the United States, not the West as a whole. (I would suggest that if Osama bin Laden had wanted to make a statement against Occidental values, he should have chosen Greece as a target; after all, that’s where the whole thing we call Western civilization started.) The theme of these articles was, to quote from The Doors’ song The End, “the West is the best,” though the song was obviously referring to the western United States. Columnists and editors contrasted the civilized, progressive West with the cultural backwater that is the Middle East, trumpeting the former region’s ideals of secularism (“secularism” here meaning not the absence of religion but the formal separation of church and state), democracy, and individual liberty. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi echoed as much: in his view, the Occident is superior to Islamic civilization because the former “has as its core freedom, which is not the heritage of Islamic culture” and the latter is “stuck where it was 1,400 years ago.”

The “West is best” refrain has not gone unchallenged. Multiculturalists and leftists in general have always disputed the notion that Europe’s cultural heritage is any better than that of other societies. They cite imperialism, racism, capitalism and even unbridled individualism as examples of the Occident’s less than perfect track record. In the alternative Toronto weekly Eye, columnist Sky Gilbert summed it up in a few catch phrases: “To be rich, Western and white is not, in fact, always to be right,” and “we are certainly not supreme, super-evolved, Western beings.” He expressed fear that Westerners’ horror over the attacks will cause the already existing “demonization of the Third World… to spin out of control.”

Those who praise Occidental civilization as the pinnacle of human achievement frequently do lose sight of a few important points. For instance, Boston Globe columnist Cathy Young — who by the way is not Western herself; born Ekaterina Jung to a Jewish family in the former Soviet Union, she immigrated to the United States in her late teens — pays homage to the “uniquely Western ideal… of the technological mastery of nature.” Absent from her paean is the fact that for a long period of time Europe was far from being the most technologically advanced region in the world. Indeed, many of the discoveries by Europeans in the Renaissance and afterwards were made possible by the Moslem Arab world’s revival of Greek and Roman learning as well as scientific advances of their own in the Middle Ages. China also boasted an impressive tradition of scientific endeavour during the same period, giving the world what are now staple items like paper, gunpowder and the compass. Nor are modern non-Western societies averse to technological progress; witness for example the industrialization of Japan.

Even from a social and cultural point of view, Western countries are not necessarily more evolved than their non-Occidental counterparts. The claim has often been made that women enjoy higher status in the West than in any other part of the world. But that’s not always true on a nation-by-nation basis. As late as the 1970s the Philippines had a higher percentage of female physicians than the United States did. Similarly, a Gallup poll of sixteen nations found that Thais were more likely to approve of unmarried couples having children than Americans were (and don’t tell me that opposition to out-of-wedlock childbearing isn’t sexist; as American feminist Ellen Willis says, trying to set a single sexual standard is like letting the rich sleep under bridges too).

Yet as much as I find the “West is best” crowd unenlightened at best and embarrassing at worst, people like Sky Gilbert also leave me with a plethora of unanswered questions. In their haste to distance themselves from what they see as the imperialistic oppressor, leftists appear to forget that many of the values they hold dear are shared more by the Occident than by any other part of the world. Never mind lofty ideals like freedom, secularism and the importance of the individual. Take something as concrete as capital punishment — a practice that leftists and liberals almost universally oppose. Though a smattering of nations around the globe have abolished the death penalty, the only region as a group to do away with it is the West — Western Europe itself and the so-called neo-Europes abroad, like Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Latin America. Even liberals who would abhor Berlusconi’s glorification of the Occident are forced to admit that the elimination of the death penalty is largely a Western phenomenon. One American abolitionist site wonders aloud why the US continues to execute its citizens when the “countries with which we identify socially” — i.e. those in Latin America and Europe — have ceased to do so.

Anti-Western leftists also seem somewhat confused as to what is West and what is East. Sky Gilbert describes the destruction of the World Trade Center as “East destroying West.” But what does he mean by “East?” Apparently not East Asia (Japan, China, Korea and so on), which so far has had nothing to do with the attacks, but the Middle East. And here lies the rub: when people praise the West to the high heavens or chide others for doing so, they’re usually comparing the Occident to the Middle East, not East Asia. Perhaps this is because even though in some ways the Far East is much less similar to the West than the Middle East is (for instance doctrinally Islam resembles Christianity far more than Buddhism does), so-called “Asian values” appear less extreme and thus less threatening. Most Westerners can live with the fact that a woman in Japan who has a child out of wedlock is going to face more social disapproval than she would in Europe or the Americas. Yet they’re horrified by accounts of women in Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern countries being executed for adultery. And some Westerners actually like “Asian values.” When Singaporean authorities caned a young American man for spray-painting cars in the 1990s, many people in the United States and Canada applauded. Sure, the sentence was harsh, but in some respects it came as a welcome contrast to the laughably short jail terms young offenders in the West face for much worse crimes.

Gilbert isn’t clear on what the West is either. His combination of the words “rich,” “Western,” and “white” effectively excludes the many white people in the West who don’t happen to be rich as well as non-whites who have lived there for generations, such as American blacks. Gilbert similarly overlooks the fact that some Western nations, such as most of those in Latin America, do not have a white majority population. Nor does his “rich, Western and white” paradigm account for the mainly white inhabitants of Eastern Europe, who are neither Western nor in many cases wealthy.

The September 11 tragedy seems to have divided Western observers into two groups: the anti-Western, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist faction on one hand and the rah-rah West crowd on the other. But maybe it would be best to acknowledge that the West is simply one culture among many and that it needs neither to be demonized nor unduly glorified.

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