Keep Right – Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
I am a proud descendant of European settler colonizers, the kind of people who came close to civilizing a savage planet. Thanks to this Western heritage of Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan I have inherited freedom. Thanks to the Judeo-Christian legacy, I live among people who know that all human rights come from God.
These days, what I have just said is shocking. Increasingly since World War I, we children of the West have been taught to hang our heads in shame over the crimes of our forebears. We Westerners are told to see ourselves as the serpent in the Garden of Eden, bringing temptation and sin into paradise and setting up mankind for its great fall from grace.
Was the non-European world an idyllic utopia before Europeans made first contact? Of course not! Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, Hernan Cortez, Ferdinand Magellan, and Francisco Pizarro all bravely expanded the limits of what was known in the great Age of Discovery. What did they find?
Only in China and Japan did Europeans encounter civilizations that were more advanced than themselves. Southeast Asia, India, and the Islamic Middle East were all roughly equivalent in sophistication to Renaissance Europe. All of these ancient civilizations were quickly eclipsed by a rapidly developing Europe on its way to building the first global human civilization.
Elsewhere, in sub-Saharan Africa, central Asia, Australasia, the Pacific islands, the Arctic, and the Americas, were cultures and civilizations thousands of years behind the leading societies of Eurasia. From nomadic Paleolithic hunter-gatherers to the megalith-builders of Central and South America, no one in these wild regions had transcended the cultural and technical achievements of Hammurabi’s Babylon.
In these societies, the lives of those outside of the local elites were often fit fodder for endless warfare, victims for human sacrifice, and even occasionally food for cannibalistic consumption. Only when leavened by the ideas of Judeo-Christian monotheism, which insists that every human being is an immortal soul made in God’s image, was the definition of a fully real person
with intrinsic value expanded to include everyone.
Most men and women were born into hereditary servitude as peasants, serfs, and slaves. It took the West’s philosophical Enlightenment to develop concepts of inalienable human rights to life, liberty, and property to end feudalism and form the foundations for all modern freedom.
Everywhere in the wider pre-industrial world, slavery proliferated. It was only European Industrialism that made it possible to replace muscle power with machine power and end human bondage.
Europe was once plagued with all of these savageries. However, alone among human civilizations, the West developed ideals and institutions that have ended most of these oppressions.
Only in the West did the Greeks practice Athens’ creative democracy, the Romans their lawful Republic, and the Germanic conquerors of Rome a free lifestyle under their tribal kings. Most especially, only in the West did an independent Christian Church evolve that had the power to stand against the Kings when they transgressed Judeo-Christian norms. In the West, even the
most powerful ruler was under God’s law.
One great treasure of this heritage is an unflinching self-criticism that refuses to abide what is seen to be unjust. These bold critiques have made the West more close to the colorblind meritocracy that so many of us aspire for our society to become.
I am proud of my heritage as a man of the West. I glory in my ancestors’ many achievements which has produced the most free and prosperous society in human history.
We in the West do have many shameful crimes in our past, to be sure. Even now, we consistently fail to live fully up to our ideals. We still have much to learn. But, our Western traditions insist that we keep struggling to try to do better.
Like never before, the West is under attack from outside and from within. We are being beguiled into hating ourselves and wishing that we had never been. This is an attack designed to undermine our capacity to defend human rights and genuine freedom. It is a pretext to return the world to the darkness of tyranny, where human beings are mere resources for the elite to consume.
I refuse to accept shame or guilt for my cultural ancestors conquering the world. I have enough sins of my own to be willing to take on the sins of others. More than this, even with all of our faults, I am grateful that it was the West that unified mankind, and not the bloodstained Aztecs, the hierarchical Chinese, or the theocratic Moslems. If there is to be a better future where individual lives are worth living, it will be because of the uniquely Western notion that every life matters.
