Belief in Western cultural universality is false, immoral, and dangerous

Evidence

In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous. That it is false has been the central thesis of this book, a thesis well summed up by Michael Howard: the “common Western assumption that cultural diversity is a historical curiosity being rapidly eroded by the growth of a common, western-oriented, Anglophone world-culture, shaping our basic values … is simply not true.” — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 859 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

From this perspective, he insists, we can then better see how a variety of vernacular modernities might displace the binary division between a static concept of fixed “Tradition” and an abstracted vision of “Enlightenment Modernity.” Thus, rather than accepting the conventional story in which particularistic backward traditions are replaced by a philosophically based set of universal principles, what we see is a process in which what had initially been a specifically Western form of particularism came to successfully hegemonize large parts of the globe while presenting itself as a form of global universalism. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 153 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Spurious universal entities are produced by unrepresentative social institutions — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 733; Kierkegaard’s moral universalism is class-bound bourgeois ideology, not genuine universality. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 178; Decoloniality rejects postcolonialism for complicity in Western universalist thinking — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 267 (+14 more)

Broader Connections

• Western belief in its own cultural universality is false, immoral, and dangerous. #corroborates (1.00) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 859
• Western modernity is a hegemonic particularism disguised as universalism #expands (0.92) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 153
• Cultures differ thickly while sharing a thin universal morality of prohibitions #complicates (0.80)
• Moral values may have a shared universal core beneath cultural variation #complicates (0.78) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 955