The ideal of a universal civilization serves Western dominance interests

Evidence

The concept of a universal civilization is a distinctive product of Western civilization. In the nineteenth century the idea of “the white man’s burden” helped justify the extension of Western political and economic domination over non-Western societies. At the end of the twentieth century the concept of a universal civilization helps justify Western cultural dominance of other societies and the need for those societies to ape Western practices and institutions. Universalism is the ideology of the West for confrontations with non-Western cultures. As is often the case with marginals or converts, among the most enthusiastic proponents of the single civilization idea are intellectual migrants to the West, such as Naipaul and Fouad Ajami, for whom the concept provides a highly satisfying answer to the central question: Who am I? “White man’s nigger,” however, is the term one Arab intellectual applied to these migrants, and the idea of a universal civilization finds little support in other civilizations. The non-Wests see as Western what the West sees as universal. What Westerners herald as benign global integration, such as the proliferation of worldwide media, non-Westerners denounce as nefarious Western imperialism. To the extent that non-Westerners see the world as one, they see it as a threat. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 176

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘universalism’ as the West’s ideology for confrontation with other cultures.
• XREF: Echoes Edward Said’s Orientalism and postcolonial critiques; also connects to the concept of cultural hegemony. — connects to: Universal quantifiability is a prerequisite for the domination of nature. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 608; The Talented Tenth ideal assumed northeastern white culture as the universal standard — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 161; Nineteenth-century theory defined every civilization in relation to a singular Western ideal — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 169 (+1 more)
• SEED: The phrase ‘the non-Wests see as Western what the West sees as universal’ is a strong thesis sentence worth building an essay around.