Self-critical history can be as arrogant as self-glorifying history

Evidence

It is, however, perfectly acceptable to insist with the same self-centered arrogance that the United States is the source of all evil. Only we make mistakes or commit crimes, because—by unstated implication—only we make decisions or cause events. The rest of the world is passive and inert, and its fate is determined by what we do. In this sense, the currently fashionable self-flagellatory school of history is, at the very least, as arrogant and self-centered as the more traditional kind of self-serving history. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1820

Categorization

• XREF: A sharp structural point on how agentic-centrism survives even in critique — the US as the sole cause of evil still renders the rest of the world ‘passive and inert,’ a mirror image of Orientalist knowledge production that casts non-Western peoples as acted-upon rather than actors.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: well-meaning Western self-critique (atonement literature, ‘America is the source of all evil’) covertly reproduces the very agentic-centrism it condemns by denying agency to everyone else.