The West is the Best

[egb_hibs]

This relativist pish - I think it'll be the death of us myself, so I'm going to start fighting back.

I'll start by coming out of the closet and making the following heretical assertions:

1) I generally think western values are superior to other cultural value-sets that I am aware of.

By 'western values', what i mean is the inherited and evolved product of greek philosophy and judea-christianity, via the enlightenment and liberalism, that underpins the governing philosophy, legals systems and moral culture of contemporary european and american societies.

2) 'The West' for all it's gross failing and monsterous darksides has done more for science, human progress and social justice than any civilisation that i am aware of.

3) Western values are worth preserving and developing. And threats to them from without and within should be opposed.


Right. Who agrees? Who is mixed up? Who is full of self-loathing? And who has a genuine preference for oppression in one form or another.

[Keepitgreen]

Originally Posted by egb_hibs
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This relativist pish - I think it'll be the death of us myself, so I'm going to start fighting back.

I'll start by coming out of the closet and making the following heretical assertions:

1) I generally think western values are superior to other cultural value-sets that I am aware of.

By 'western values', what i mean is the inherited and evolved product of greek philosophy and judea-christianity, via the enlightenment and liberalism, that underpins the governing philosophy, legals systems and moral culture of contemporary european and american societies.

2) 'The West' for all it's gross failing and monsterous darksides has done more for science, human progress and social justice than any civilisation that i am aware of.

3) Western values are worth preserving and developing. And threats to them from without and within should be opposed.


Right. Who agrees? Who is mixed up? Who is full of self-loathing? And who has a genuine preference for oppression in one form or another.

And this is you in a 'breezy' mood egb? Hate to imagine what you think about when you miss your bus or stub your toe on the couch
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[Burbank Lilywhite]

I fimly believe the west is the best. After living in both NYC and LA its much better on the west coast. We've got sun, surf, and California girls. 78 sunny degress is January can't be beat.

This is what this thread is about right?

[cavalier]

Originally Posted by Burbank Lilywhite
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I fimly believe the west is the best. After living in both NYC and LA its much better on the west coast. We've got sun, surf, and California girls. 78 sunny degress is January can't be beat.

This is what this thread is about right?

I thought it was about Ayrshire??
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[Brainwrong]

I saw the title and thought this was going to be about the stands at ER...

East is best!

Regarding the actual question. I think we need to vastly improve the west, we are however (in my opinion) far better off in the UK than the US. A funny point that I was totally unaware of regarding the US; Self Esteem and Self Image in men and women are far better when compared with UK citizens. Interesting, they really invest in making their kids happy with who/what shape they are. That might explain the high levels of obesity though... hmmmm off on a tangent, two espressos......

[Archie]

Hey EGB

Are you bored? Can you no just watch the Hearts implode?

[Smurf]

Originally Posted by egb_hibs
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This relativist pish - I think it'll be the death of us myself, so I'm going to start fighting back.

I'll start by coming out of the closet and making the following heretical assertions:

1) I generally think western values are superior to other cultural value-sets that I am aware of.

By 'western values', what i mean is the inherited and evolved product of greek philosophy and judea-christianity, via the enlightenment and liberalism, that underpins the governing philosophy, legals systems and moral culture of contemporary european and american societies.

2) 'The West' for all it's gross failing and monsterous darksides has done more for science, human progress and social justice than any civilisation that i am aware of.

3) Western values are worth preserving and developing. And threats to them from without and within should be opposed.


Right. Who agrees? Who is mixed up? Who is full of self-loathing? And who has a genuine preference for oppression in one form or another.

I agree with all of that. Sooner we realise that we and our values are under threat the better.

[Bill Oddies Beard]

Firmly believe that west is best. As, i bet, do the vast majority of immigrants. Or they wouldn't come here, would they? It's the few
religious fanatics who ruin everyones chances of a 'live and let
live' society here and also hold back their own countries IMO

[arthurduncan]

i fundamentally disagree with relativism and think democratic liberalism may well offer the best current option but don't know enough about all the possible cultural, historical and philosophical options to say for sure. For example, maybe Inuit culture is wonderfully supportive like a sort of hyper-Sweden? Not sure the lack of either democracy or liberalism would necessarily make me rebel against a culture in which everyone was respected, supported and decisions were made on expertise and practical necessity. Equally, philosophically, quite keen on anarcho-syndicalism. Obviously if your question is about power and what's practically possible, you are probably right, the western values are the best game in town. One thing I'd be interested in is a better understanding of a better, more humane Islam in line with what I've read on the Quran - seems to me it's heading the way of communism, i.e., ambushed by thugs and dictators.

[Bartok]

I think that western values as defined by egb are pretty much the only cohesive set of values most of us have experienced in any comprehensive way. In fact I don't think many in the west are aware of the alternatives beyond a few negative or stereotyped 'samples' presented by the (western) media as representative of the wacky worlds of non-westerners. All we hear about is the (to western values) excesses of Sharia Law or the (to western religious thought) absurdities of Buddhist reincarnation or the injustice of the caste system. These cultural aspects are plucked from their contexts and held up as patent absurdities without reference to the frameworks of belief and history that produced them. I blame neither the media nor the consumer in the west for that; it is just a fact of life that it is hard to judge a different value or belief on the basis of your own.

[Hibsean]

Originally Posted by Burbank Lilywhite
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I fimly believe the west is the best. After living in both NYC and LA its much better on the west coast. We've got sun, surf, and California girls. 78 sunny degress is January can't be beat.

This is what this thread is about right?

Apart from everything that is great in life , do you have anything that anybody cares about
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Okay!, okay! I'm jealous!!..........................................






Really enviously jealous!!!




You don't have room on your floor for an un-jealous person, do you!!!
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[egb_hibs]

Originally Posted by Dixie Chicken
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I think that western values as defined by egb are pretty much the only cohesive set of values most of us have experienced in any comprehensive way. In fact I don't think many in the west are aware of the alternatives beyond a few negative or stereotyped 'samples' presented by the (western) media as representative of the wacky worlds of non-westerners. All we hear about is the (to western values) excesses of Sharia Law or the (to western religious thought) absurdities of Buddhist reincarnation or the injustice of the caste system. These cultural aspects are plucked from their contexts and held up as patent absurdities without reference to the frameworks of belief and history that produced them. I blame neither the media nor the consumer in the west for that; it is just a fact of life that it is hard to judge a different value or belief on the basis of your own.

show me the context that mitigates murdering homosexuals, relegating women to a secondary caste at best or castrating and murdering them at worst, one that justifies the complete subordination or the indivdual (at worst) or the central philosophical pursuit of the total obliteration of inviduality (in a benign way) at best. fuck me, i thought i was the illiberal mccarthyite round these parts.

incidentally i'd like them doubly contextualised as a) iwhere the more cuddly bits can in a western culture-tourist way be co-opted (out of orginal context) to an extent that they can pass as a self-serving opt-out personal choice.

but more importantly b) (not - as in their manifest failure to be) a socio-economic engine for the type of human advance that ultimately affords the luxury of a)

liberalism will destroy itself.

ps I acknowledge the influence of my upbringing on my outlook - i am not one of those giddy fools who imagine that had i grown up in 30s germany i'd have been the one to stand up and proclaim that 'hey, this isn't really cricket is it chaps'.

with that in mind i also acknowledge how feckin lucky i am that i have grown up where i have. but i dont let the recognition of these facts beguile into relativism. sure, any individual will be conditioned to define 'good or bad' by their environment, but that doesn't mean that those respective environments are not themselves morallly judegable. sure, this will fail your objectivity / subjectivity thing, but in the face of the manifest differences in the human condition afforded by different systems, then such trains of thought can rapidly derail and in the process a useful form of self-restraint can turn into a suicidal wreck.

to appeal to your reason, another way of putting this is that a relativistic assement of systms based up an acknowledgement of the conditioning, and thus equal conviction, of their various participants is a logical fallacy old bean.

[egb_hibs]

Originally Posted by Archie
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Hey EGB

Are you bored? Can you no just watch the Hearts implode?

I dont give a fuck about the yams. I wouldn't cross the road for them, unless to slap the feckers.

[egb_hibs]

Originally Posted by arthurduncan
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i fundamentally disagree with relativism and think democratic liberalism may well offer the best current option but don't know enough about all the possible cultural, historical and philosophical options to say for sure. For example, maybe Inuit culture is wonderfully supportive like a sort of hyper-Sweden? Not sure the lack of either democracy or liberalism would necessarily make me rebel against a culture in which everyone was respected, supported and decisions were made on expertise and practical necessity. Equally, philosophically, quite keen on anarcho-syndicalism. Obviously if your question is about power and what's practically possible, you are probably right, the western values are the best game in town. One thing I'd be interested in is a better understanding of a better, more humane Islam in line with what I've read on the Quran - seems to me it's heading the way of communism, i.e., ambushed by thugs and dictators.

Anarchism may well finally see a postive incarnation in the 'personalised economy' that some see as the successor to capitalism (in the original sense that marx would have recognised, in respect of power belonging to owners of capital versus the broader colloquial meaning of 'market based')

I actually have increasing sympathy with some basic anarchist principles though not with the nihilist, least practicable of all forms of socialism with which the term has been formally associated in the past. that version is the most insane political credo of all time. give me stalin anyday in comparison.

[Dunc89]

Originally Posted by egb_hibs
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show me the context that mitigates murdering homosexuals, relegating women to a secondary caste at best or castrating and murdering them at worst, one that justifies the complete subordination or the indivdual (at worst) or the central philosophical pursuit of the total obliteration of inviduality (in a benign way) at best. fuck me, i thought i was the illiberal mccarthyite round these parts.

What set of values, and in what cultures are you on about there?

And when you say how our western values are the best set around, do you include all the other wee tribes etc. from around the world, that you most likely wont know the first bit about concerning values and culture?

[snoots]

Originally Posted by egb_hibs
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This relativist pish - I think it'll be the death of us myself, so I'm going to start fighting back.

I'll start by coming out of the closet and making the following heretical assertions:

1) I generally think western values are superior to other cultural value-sets that I am aware of.

By 'western values', what i mean is the inherited and evolved product of greek philosophy and judea-christianity, via the enlightenment and liberalism, that underpins the governing philosophy, legals systems and moral culture of contemporary european and american societies.

2) 'The West' for all it's gross failing and monsterous darksides has done more for science, human progress and social justice than any civilisation that i am aware of.

3) Western values are worth preserving and developing. And threats to them from without and within should be opposed.


Right. Who agrees? Who is mixed up? Who is full of self-loathing? And who has a genuine preference for oppression in one form or another.

Tad ethnocentric but broadly I agree with you. You are however forgetting that these values - "greek philosophy and judea-christianity" only survived to us in "the west" via 8th-10th Century Baghdad. Without that accident of history we'd be stuck with a 4th-13th Century Western version of "greek philosophy and judea-christianity" - which was a whole different kettle of fish to what we have today.

[egb_hibs]

Originally Posted by Dunc89
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What set of values, and in what cultures are you on about there?

I've tried to summarise already - here's another effort:

- christian synthesis of judeaic monotheism and greek enquiry leads to first notion of a rational universe, worthy of rational interrogation

- second big christian innovation; notion of self-sacrificing god and egalitarian theme of gospels revoltionises idea of worth of the individual

- these core seeds of individualism and reason form the basis of all that follows and lead to invention of modern science (prior achievements of greeks, chinese and islam notwithstanding) and increasing social egalitarianism driven by philosophical ramifications of both of these original positions and enabled by economic success proceeding from the second.

- prods come along and reinvigorate the whole shebang via de-centralisation

- thence come the secular-christians or humanists who take that process a bit further

- western civilisations invents modern technology, through the extension of principles and practices that have inexorably evolved from the intial seeded state described above, and everything goes mega

loads of missteps, fuckups and atrocites long the way of course, but signal to noise ratio still pumps every other civilisation seven ways to sunday

And when you say how our western values are the best set around, do you include all the other wee tribes etc. from around the world, that you most likely wont know the first bit about concerning values and culture?

ok - if you don't mind the usual things that go with wee tribes - subordination of females, rule by force, infant mortality rates that make every survivor a feckin lottery winner, everybody dying when a mild summer cold, or poor crop occurs, and no takeaway curries, beer or cable tv, then i guess my argument is indeed a loadae pish.

[egb_hibs]

Originally Posted by snoots
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Tad ethnocentric but broadly I agree with you. You are however forgetting that these values - "greek philosophy and judea-christianity" only survived to us in "the west" via 8th-10th Century Baghdad. Without that accident of history we'd be stuck with a 4th-13th Century Western version of "greek philosophy and judea-christianity" - which was a whole different kettle of fish to what we have today.

Snoots - good to see you bro. I'll get back to you on this point in aday or two when I've finished a book i'm reading which argues quite persuasively that -

- greek enquiry was limited by their belief that the universe was 'chaos'

- christian addition of jewish monotheism to this idea, created the crucial blend that converted this notion to the idea of a rational universe, the product of a raional creator, which totally opened the floodgates for science, which of course ended up ditching it's roots

- islam's view was/is less of a 'rational god' but rather one that orders the universe continually according to his will

- islam was thus unable to make the critical step to recgonition of a rational order, despite great work (but fundamentally limited) expanding orignal aristotlean view.

could all be bollocks, but the it's quite convincingly put.

doesnt of course take away from the critical role islam played as a conduit for the re-insertion of greek ideas. 100% agree with you there

[Bartok]

Originally Posted by egb_hibs
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