Western self-centered history remains the dominant conceit despite a century of scholarly critique

Evidence

Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history. This has been perhaps even more true of the West than of other cultures. Such monocivilizational viewpoints, however, have decreasing relevance and usefulness in a multicivilizational world. Scholars of civilizations have long recognized this truism. In 1918 Spengler denounced the myopic view of history prevailing in the West with its neat division into ancient, medieval, and modern phases relevant only to the West. It is necessary, he said, to replace this “Ptolemaic approach to history” with a Copernican one and to substitute for the “empty figment of one linear history, the drama of a number of mighty cultures” A few decades later Toynbee castigated the “parochialism and impertinence” of the West manifested in the “egocentric illusions” that the world revolved around it, that there was an “unchanging East,” and that “progress” was inevitable. Like Spengler he had no use for the assumption of the unity of history, the assumption that there is “only one river of civilization, our own, and that all others are either tributary to it or lost in the desert sands.” Fifty years after Toynbee, Braudel similarly urged the need to strive for a broader perspective and to understand “the great cultural conflicts in the world, and the multiplicity of its civilizations.” The illusions and prejudices of which these scholars warned, however, live on and in the late twentieth century have blossomed forth in the widespread and parochial conceit that the European civilization of the West is now the universal civilization of the world. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 151

Categorization

• XREF: Spengler’s Ptolemaic/Copernican history distinction connects to Fernand Braudel’s longue duree historiography and to critiques of Whig linear history.
• SEED: An essay angle: how the ‘universal civilization’ conceit survives in tech and globalization discourse despite explicit scholarly demolition — the same egocentric-illusion pattern modern evangelists repeat.