by Patrick Lawrence, The Unz Review:
This is an edited version of the second of two lectures the author gave recently on “Defending the Humanity of Humanity.” He spoke Oct. 10 at Mut zur Ethik, a twice-yearly conference held in Sirnach, near Zurich. His first lecture can be read here.
The barbarities of Zionist Israel force fundamental questions upon us: Where is our humanity as the Israelis prosecute their terror campaigns before us daily? What shall we do as we find ourselves powerless to react meaningfully because, as the West Asia crisis has suddenly forced us to realize, our institutions have failed us?
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Now many of us recognize the need to defend our humanity — the humanity of humanity, as I think of it.
I previously addressed this question as it relates to public space and argued that it is time to look again at multilateral institutions, the United Nations chief among them, with a view to reviving them after a long period during which they have been discounted and devalued.
Now I want to turn the questions just posed in another direction and suggest we consider the matter from a personal, individual perspective.
What must each of us do, in the privacy, so to say, of our consciences, our thoughts, our surmises and judgments, to take up the work of defending humanity’s humanity? It is at bottom a psychological question. It is a matter, very simply, of “changing our minds.”
We must begin, it seems to me by recognizing who we think we are. Note right away: I speak not of who we are but who we think we are, who we assume ourselves to be.
We live in “the Western world,” as it is called, and it follows naturally we are Westerners. Who can argue with this? To be Westerners is absolutely integral to our identity, I think I can say without further explanation.
This has been so for many centuries. I take my date in this connection to be 1498, when Vasco da Gama set foot along the Malabar Coast, in southern India, making himself the first modern Westerner to arrive in the non–West.
And then it follows easily enough that when we declare what we are we declare what we are not. I have just suggested the result: The world is divided between Westerners and non–Westerners. This division, fundamental as it is to how we think, is by and large the West’s doing. Let us take care to note this.
This line between West and non–West is very old, going back much earlier than 1498. It dates at least to the 5th century B.C., when Herodotus recorded the Persian Wars in his famous Histories. And it is remarkable how intact this line between West and East comes down to us.
The Biden regime and the rest of the West think of it today as the line dividing democracies and autocracies. Cast the Israel–Palestine question in a larger context and you find that, whatever else it is, it is another confrontation between West and non–West.
We may not accept the Biden regime’s contention that it is waging war against the non–West’s autocrats in behalf of the West’s democrats, but this does not mean we do not nonetheless conceive of ourselves as fundamentally “Western.” We have in this way inherited our past, consciously or otherwise.
