The current world crisis has its roots in the hypocritical Western insistence on so-called “universal values.” Originally from the Enlightenment, these included such laudable concepts as juridical equality, political freedom, natural rights, and religious tolerance. But these political values have been interpreted in myriad ways by Western thinkers, and only rarely in the strict sense; as protection of private property. Worse still, the West is convinced it has a sort of monopoly on the way these political values should be implemented and has often used them as tools or pretexts to suit political agenda both at home and abroad.
Buried deep inside Western political minds is the belief that these Enlightenment values are quintessentially Western and that this gives the West an inherent moral superiority over others. The conventional wisdom is that these political values were implemented progressively in the West with the British Glorious Revolution leading to parliamentarism, with the US War of Independence and the French Revolution leading to republicanism, and finally with the 1848 revolutions leading to democracy. Yet, these momentous events were not the panacea for individual freedom, not least because they helped crystallize the modern state in the West, later expanding towards its current gargantuan size.
The protection of individual rights did improve in the West during the 19th century. But the Western oligarchies of those semi-democratic states violated “their” universal political values with their colonial adventures. If individual rights were discreetly flouted in the West itself, they were easily trampled upon in faraway lands. Inevitably, Western universal values were used to morally justify the colonizing missions of non-Western societies seen as primitive or backward. Western powers went about spreading “their” political values to “races” considered inferior for reasons both of nurture and nature.
Unfortunately, even the painful process of decolonization did little to weaken the deeply-held conviction that Western universal values must spread globally. The arrival of the United States on the world stage after WWII, rekindled the unhealthy, underlying Western sense of moral superiority of its political values. Further, during the 20th century, most Western nations adopted economic fascism—not only Germany and Italy—as John T. Flynn convincingly showed.
The problem the West is facing is that there are indeed grave difficulties with this entrenched view of Western-centric “universal values.” As has happened so often in the past, the West is now again engaged, not only in an economic and military confrontation, but also more profoundly in a moral one that it hardly recognizes and cannot win. The Western conviction of its civilizational superiority directly feeds its attempts at domination by force, currently so shockingly on display. The “Global South” has realized the hypocrisy and the double standards that have always stained these Western “principles.”
The hypocrisy of Western universalism is exposed by the great differences that have always existed between Western political thought and Western political action, along the lines of the old Latin phrase “Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.” Though many Western political systems constitutionally embed the founding documents from the Enlightenment, these have been mostly honored in the breach.
The Western worldview was once thought to be inclusive, embracing in its strong arms the variety of mankind’s cultural or historical experiences. An argument could be made that some colonial experiments tended to confirm this view, at least to Western publics. But it is obvious with hindsight that Western universal political values are not so inclusive after all. Indeed, Western ruling minority is to this day often intolerant and condescending towards political systems that follow another path than the Western one.
Against the Current of Enlightenment Values
In his work “Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder,” Isaiah Berlin retraced the writings of three philosophers who already in the 18th century proposed an alternative view. For them, the Enlightenment values were not as absolute and universal as many in the West think:
The denial…of absolute and universal values carries the implication, which with time has grown increasingly disturbing, that the goals and values pursued by various human cultures may not only differ, but may, in addition, not all be compatible with one another; that variety, and perhaps conflict, are not accidental, still less eliminable, attributes of the human condition, but, on the contrary, may be intrinsic properties of men as such.
If this is so, then the notion of a single, unchanging, objective code of universal precepts – the simple, harmonious, ideal way of life to which, whether they know it or not, all men aspire (the notion which underlies the central current of the Western tradition of thought) – may turn out to be incoherent; for there appear to be many visions, many ways of living and thinking and feeling, each with its own “centre of gravity”, self-validating, uncombinable, still less capable of being integrated into a seamless whole.
Briefly, Giambattista Vico (1688-1744) did identify universal human patterns, but with the insight that different societies express them differently. Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) argued that truth is always local, particular, and rooted in language, arguing against a “universal reason” that exists apart from specific cultures. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) considered that humanity rises through the flowering of individual civilizations, followed naturally by the inevitable cyclical withering. All three thinkers rejected the Enlightenment’s universal yardstick, as expressed by 18th century thinkers in Paris and London.
It is obvious that these ideas inform today’s concept of “multipolarity,” as laid out by China and Russia, but which Western political culture simply cannot accept. China’s rise, which remains puzzling to Western politicians since it doesn’t correspond to the Western development template, is a typical example of Herder’s phased societal flowering. These two countries have laid out their view of multipolarity many times, for instance in these words of Putin’s from July 2022:
I would like to underscore that multipolarity as we see it—is, first and foremost, freedom. Freedom of countries and nations, their natural right for their own path of development, for preservation of their own individuality and uniqueness. In this world order model, there is no place for diktat, templates, imposed by someone, ideas of exclusiveness of certain nations or maybe even certain blocs.
In other words, just like the concept of “unipolarity” is based on Western-centric universalism, the concept of multipolarity was also theorized in the 18th century in the West, namely, by these contrarian thinkers. Multipolarity also harks back to the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty-Year War and established the principles of sovereignty, non-intervention, territorial integrity, and legal equality of all nations. Ironically, it is the rest of the world that is defending this international system today, first defined in that document signed in Münster and Osnabrück in 1648, and now represented by the UN Charter of 1948. Thus, for those who see freedom as the highest political value, multipolarity is undoubtedly a step in the right direction compared to unipolarity centered around the corrupt and dysfunctional US capital.
West, Know Thyself
The Western ruling minority, however, is clearly rejecting what it perceives as the challenge from multipolarity to its centuries long position of domination. Led by Washington and the big three European capitals, the West is even ready to go to war in order to try to maintain this domination. When states are ready to take any measure to control other states, individuals everywhere suffer.
The West needs to be reeducated. All levels of Western societies need to unlearn past political values and start seeing the politics of other nations with acceptance and respect, in accordance with the UN Charter. This may only happen if the West goes through a humbling psycho-cultural crisis; which could finally begin to dissolve its entrenched superiority complex that grew out of the universal political values of the Enlightenment. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said already in 1978, “Today it would be retrogressive to hold on to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Such social dogmatism leaves us helpless before the trials of our times.”
The point is not to denigrate the Western world that has contributed so much to the wealth of the world. China certainly is not reciprocating the kind of condescension it has long been subjected to from its erstwhile colonizers; it has simply taken over the mantle as the world’s premier contributor.
As the international system moves towards multipolarity, there are inevitably going to be severe political and social shocks in the West. It will be difficult for the West to abandon the mindset of Western-centered universalism, as inevitably it will be forced to do. The near future looks bleak now, as most Western states slowly consume themselves in statist militarism and oligarchic corruption, and as it drowns in welfare policies and positive “rights” that it can never fulfill. But the process of breaking the illusion of Western universal values is a necessary step to allow the whole world to move further towards freedom.
