bloggedy blog: the personal weblog of a music lover and aging punk wannabe

:: Friday, May 28, 2004 ::

The decline of western values
We live in tumultuous times, but we in the West are barely cognizant of the shifts in values that are occurring on a global scale. (In the USA in particular, we're also clueless about our rapid descent from global hegemony, but that's another topic, though the two are interrelated.) From Australia's The Age comes this wake-up call from UK economist Martin Jacques, who writes of the rise of Asian (both East and South Asian) virtues. I figure that if anyone should know about the decline of Western powers, it should be a London intellectual who has witnessed said decline in his own culture. So, pay Jacques heed when he writes:
After the collapse of communism, the victorious US increasingly came to see itself as the saviour of the world, and the arbiter of each and every nation's future. If this proposition was less explicit during the Clinton era, it became the organising principle of the Bush regime.

Where nations were not prepared to bend to the American will, they were classified as "rogue states" and threatened with force. Barely had the world entered the 21st century than it found itself returning to a century earlier and the exercise of naked imperialism - all in the name, as a century earlier, of Western moral virtue.

Such was the shift in the ideological climate that the new imperialism gained a band of adherents from the liberal wing of politics, as it had in the late 19th century. They not only regarded the US as the only game in town; more importantly, they saw it as the embodiment of virtue in a failed or failing world. ...

Already the West has been reminded by growing Iraqi resistance of the forgotten lesson of the anti-colonial period, that people of different races and cultures do not want to be ruled by an alien power from the other side of the world. Meanwhile, the revelations of widespread criminal behaviour by American troops are a poignant illustration of the fact that "Western moral virtue" is only one element of the Western story.

Link via ChristianityToday.com weblog.

:: Andrew 10:02 + ::
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