Western civilization legitimizes dominance by narrating itself as temporal superiority

Evidence

The fact that most people (including many a social theorist) instinctively choose the first, rather than the second, approach, is a testimony to the remarkable success of the etiological myth which, in one variant or another, Western civilization has deployed over the years to legitimize its spatial hegemony by projecting it as temporal superiority. Western civilization has articulated its struggle for domination in terms of the holy battle of humanity against barbarism, reason against ignorance, objectivity against prejudice, progress against degeneration, truth against superstition, science against magic, rationality against passion. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 281

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels Said’s Orientalism — the West’s self-image as reason/progress vs. Oriental barbarism — the very foundational text the reader’s Islamophobia module scaffolds on. — connects to: Conquest is rationalized by theorizing geography as dividing civilized from uncivilized peoples; The West concept classifies, represents, compares, and evaluates societies — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 509; Western civilization discourse was built on a constructed binary of superiority and inferiority (+10 more)
• SEED: The ‘etiological myth’ concept — a civilization legitimizing spatial hegemony by projecting it as temporal superiority — is a deployable analytic for framing how Islamophobia discourse casts the Muslim world as ‘behind’ or pre-modern.

Related

• Western civilization discourse was built on a constructed binary of superiority and inferiority (similarity 0.88)
• Orientalist discourse frames Westerners and Orientals as absolute binary opposites. (similarity 0.84)
• The West’s entitlement to own the nonwhite world rests on defining it as subhuman (similarity 0.84)
• Western imperial particularism was disguised as universal civilization (similarity 0.83)
• Modernity’s logic defines those outside Western norms as less than human (similarity 0.82)
• Western scholarship constructed the East as savage to justify imperial conquest. (similarity 0.81)
• Modernization theory repackaged Orientalist racism in social-science guise (similarity 0.81)
• The West required the Rest as a conceptual opposite to define itself. (similarity 0.80)
• The West defined itself as the mirror opposite of the Muslim world. (similarity 0.80)
• Cultures are hybrid and interdependent, making civilizational essences an ideological fiction. (similarity 0.80)
• Civilizational theory defined all non-Western peoples as inferior by default (similarity 0.80)
• Empires justify themselves by claiming superiority over prior empires (similarity 0.80)
• Conquest is rationalized by theorizing geography as dividing civilized from uncivilized peoples (similarity 0.80)
• A shared East-West binary grounds vast and diverse bodies of thought (similarity 0.80)
• Even sympathetic Orientalists denied the Orient modernity by casting it as ancient and Semitic. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Western modernity is a hegemonic particularism disguised as universalism #corroborates (0.90) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 153
• The clash-of-civilizations paradigm serves to prolong dominance #corroborates (0.85) — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 233
• Claims of Western ethical superiority rest on self-serving and false contrasts #corroborates (0.85) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 222
• Orientalism’s paradigms confirm rather than contest imperial domination #corroborates (0.80)
• Orientalism is a political doctrine arising from Western dominance #corroborates (0.80)