Third Worldism recast the golden-age myth of Western innocence lost

Evidence

And when Soviet influence began to fade, there was yet another to take its place, or at least to supplement its working—the new mystique of Third Worldism, emanating from Western Europe, particularly France, and later also from the United States, and drawing at times on both these earlier philosophies. This mystique was helped by the universal human tendency to invent a golden age in the past, and the specifically European propensity to locate it elsewhere. A new variant of the old golden-age myth placed it in the Third World, where the innocence of the non-Western Adam and Eve was ruined by the Western serpent. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1555

Categorization

• XREF: The “European propensity to invent golden ages elsewhere” connects to the noble-savage tradition from Rousseau through Margaret Mead, and echoes topics in my reading on primitivism.
• SEED: Article angle: the search for innocence in the Third World as a recurring Western projection that shapes both Left and Right politics of foreign aid and authenticity.