Western Civilization: The White Man's Burden

[This is the third of eight articles about the book “The World Created the West”, by Josephine Quinn. The previous ones can be read here:]

“Help them walk the path of civilization…”

The vision of the white man as a superior being, invested with the noble and thankless mission of civilizing the remaining peoples of the planet, had its most famous synthesis in the poem “The White Man's Burden” by Rudyard Kipling, published in The New York Sun on February 1, 1899, and in London's The Times three days later, and which, although originally written three years earlier to celebrate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and the glories of the British Empire, was interpreted, in the geopolitical context of 1899, as inciting the United States to unreservedly embrace the colonization of the Philippines (see chapter “The White Man's Burden vs. The White Man's Guilt” in What the Modern World Owes to the Exploitation of Africa and Africans ).

Kipling’s poem was imbued with the spirit of the times: on 28 July 1885, in the aftermath of the Franco-Chinese War of 1884–85, sparked by France’s claims to Vietnam (then a vassal state of the Chinese Empire), the then French Prime Minister Jules Ferry, an enthusiastic promoter of colonial expansion, had made a famous speech in parliament that was in tune with Kipling’s poem: “It must be said plainly that the superior races have a right over the inferior races […] And I say they have a right because they also have a duty towards them. It is the duty of civilising the inferior races. […] In preceding centuries this duty has often been misunderstood, and there is no doubt that when Spanish soldiers and explorers introduced slavery into Central America they were not up to their duty as men of a superior race. But I maintain that today the European nations are fulfilling their duty with generosity, greatness and justice this higher duty to civilize”.

The famous disagreement between Portugal and its historic ally, Great Britain, also dates back to 1885, involving the “Pink Map”, a document in which the former expressed its ambition to appropriate the vast territories between its colonies of Angola, to the west, and Mozambique, to the east. After a number of misunderstandings, prevarications and petty quarrels, Great Britain ended up rejecting Portugal’s claims outright in 1890, by presenting an ultimatum to the Government in Lisbon, ordering it to withdraw any troops that might be present in what is now Zimbabwe (although, at the time, the presence of whites, Portuguese or British, in the disputed territory was extremely rare and not permanent). The British Government's decision, seen by Portuguese public opinion as an unforgivable betrayal, was apparently motivated by the intention of obtaining control over African territories that would allow the establishment of a rail link between Cairo and Cape Town. The decision-making process was probably influenced by the lobbying of the magnate Cecil Rhodes, who was not only an ardent promoter of the idea of ​​an uninterrupted zone of British influence stretching from the Mediterranean to the southern tip of Africa, but also, in 1899, founded the British South Africa Company (BSAC), which, among other plans, aimed to exploit mineral resources in what is now northern Zimbabwe – part of the territories claimed by Portugal would eventually be placed under the control of the BSAC and, although initially called “Zambesia”, became informally known as “Rhodesia”, a name that Great Britain would formally adopt in 1898. The main interested parties – the “natives” – were, of course, neither heard nor found in this dispute between European powers and would only gain independence in 1964, as Zambia, and in 1980, as Zimbabwe.

This was one of the many conflicts between European powers during the “Scramble for Africa”, in which they, driven by uncontrolled greed and fuelled by rivalry, attempted to grab as much of the African continent as possible, in what can be seen as the culmination of Western imperialism. It was these disputes that the Berlin Conference (1884-85) attempted to resolve peacefully, while at the same time creating a legal framework to legitimise the dismemberment of the continent. The prominent Belgian jurist Ernest Nys (1851-1920), professor of international law at the University of Brussels and author of a robust and respected bibliography on the subject, would proclaim that the decisions of the said conference demonstrated “the determination of the European powers to care for the Africans and help them to follow the path of civilisation” (see the chapter “Degrees of civilisation” in Governing the world: How shall we live together? ).

Islam as a threat to the “civilization of modern Europe”

In 1899, the year of the publication of Kipling's poem mentioned above, another British man of letters, who would later be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, published a book in which he made these observations about Islamic civilization: “How fearful are the curses which Mohammedanism heaps upon its devotees! Besides the fanatical frenzy, as dangerous in man as hydrophobia in a dog, we have also the fatalistic apathy, no less frightening. These effects are evident in many countries. Improvident habits, careless agricultural practices, indolent business methods, and insecurity of goods and property reign where the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A decadent sensuality deprives these lives of elegance or refinement, and even of dignity and sanctity. […] Some individual Muslims may display splendid qualities. A few thousand of them become brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen, for they all know how to face death. But the influence of religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. There is no more retrograde force in the world. Far from being moribund, Islam is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors in its wake. And if Christianity were not protected by the robust arm of science – the science against which it fought in vain – the civilization of modern Europe could be overthrown, as was the civilization of Ancient Rome.”

The book in question, The River War , is a detailed account, stretching over two volumes and a thousand pages, of the conquest of Sudan between 1896 and 1899 by an Anglo-Egyptian army commanded by Lord Kitchener. The author, who witnessed the conflict firsthand for a few months in 1898, in his dual role as an officer in the Royal Regiment of Horse Guards and a war correspondent for the Morning Post, was, at the time of The River War's publication, just 25 years old and would go on to become one of the most prominent statesmen of the 20th century – his name was Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill.

The fact that Churchill, a symbol of Western civilisation’s resistance to Nazi barbarity and a figure who commands the appreciation or at least the respect of various ideological quarters (one often hears political commentators lamenting “There are no more leaders like Churchill!”), put such thoughts into writing has been exploited by some far-right politicians to lend credibility to their own Islamophobic convictions. This was the case with the British Paul Weston, of the nationalist Liberty GB party, and the Dutch Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party (who, being a provocateur, made a point of quoting an anti-Islamic excerpt from The River War in a session of the House of Lords to which he had been invited).

“Among civilized people…”

In his famous essay On Liberty (1859), the British philosopher John Stuart Mill makes a passionate defense of individual liberty, proclaiming that, as far as he is concerned, “the individual is sovereign”, and defending limitations on the control exercised over the individual by society and the State, understanding that they should only determine or restrict the individual’s conduct if it is harmful to others. However, in the following paragraph, Mill introduces a caveat: “This doctrine should only be applied to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. […] Those who are still at a stage requiring the care of others must be protected from their own actions, as well as from external threats”. Thus, “despotism is a legitimate form of government when dealing with barbarians, provided the end is their advancement and the means are justified if that end is served. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things prior to the time when mankind became capable of advancement by free and equal discussion,” a level that, for Mill, the peoples of Africa, Asia and Oceania had not yet reached.

Mill would reinforce this idea that same year, in the brief essay “A Few Words on Non-Intervention”, in which he discusses the circumstances in which it may be legitimate for a country to interfere in the sovereignty of another: “To suppose that the same international practices and the same standards of international morality applicable between two civilized nations apply also between a civilized nation and a barbarous nation is a grave error, into which no statesman should fall. […] To characterize any conduct towards a barbarous people as a violation of international law only shows that those who advocate it have never thought about the subject. It may be a violation of the great moral principles, but barbarians have no rights as a nation. […] The only moral laws between a civilized government and a barbarous government are the universal moral rules between one man and another. But between civilized peoples, members of an egalitarian community of nations, such as Christian Europe, the question assumes another aspect and must be decided on the basis of entirely different principles. It would be an affront to discuss the immorality of wars of conquest, or even of conquests resulting from a legitimate war, the annexation of any civilized people by another, except in the case of a spontaneous choice by the first”.

However, although most nineteenth-century statesmen and thinkers – even those who are celebrated as champions of freedom – did not question the altruism, idealism, kindness and legitimacy of the West's civilizing mission among “barbarian” peoples, by the end of the nineteenth century dissent was already beginning to simmer among some Western intellectuals. One of them was Georges Clemenceau, who, on July 31, 1885, distancing himself from the republican left-wing parliamentary group of which he was a member, harshly responded to the famous speech made by Prime Minister Jules Ferry three days earlier: “Here we have the French Government exercising its right over the inferior races, waging war on them and converting them by force to the benefits of civilization. Superior races! Inferior races! For my part, I have been particularly suspicious since I saw German scholars scientifically demonstrating that France was doomed to defeat in the Franco-Prussian War because the French race was inferior to the German. Since then, I confess, I have always thought twice before looking at a man or a civilization and declaring them an inferior man or civilization!”

Another sceptic of the superiority of Western civilization was the Anglo-American cartoonist Victor Gillam, who, two months after the publication of “The White Man’s Burden”, presented, in the American satirical magazine Judge, a much more acidic vision of the “white man’s burden”, in which John Bull and Uncle Sam, personifying British and American imperialisms, respectively, lead the “primitive” peoples up the steep and rocky slope of “ignorance”, “superstition”, “oppression”, “barbarism”, “cruelty”, “vice”, “brutality” and “cannibalism”, towards the summit where, resplendent, Civilization awaits them.

Edward Burnett Tylor, author of Primitive Culture (1871), a founding work of cultural anthropology and one of the first in-depth reflections on the nature of “primitive” and “civilized” societies, adopted a position midway between critics and apologists of Western civilization. Tylor proposed an evolutionary vision that catalogued societies in three stages of development – ​​savagery, barbarism and civilization – but argued, against the prevailing thinking in the scientific community at the time, that humanity is one, that is, that the intellectual capacities of human beings are the same in all parts of the globe, regardless of the stage of development in which their societies find themselves. Tylor also rejected the idea (also current) that “the condition of the savage results from a degeneration from a higher stage” ( Researches into the early history of mankind and the development of civilization , 1865), since “history shows that the arts, sciences and political institutions originate in rudimentary forms and, in the course of time, become more intelligent, more systematic, more perfectly arranged or organized” ( Anthropology , 1881).

Europe as a missionary agent of civilization

In the 1920s and 1930s, far-right ideologies, then in full bloom, were busy painting a disturbing picture of a Western civilization in decline, either because it had “lost faith in its intrinsic superiority” (Salazar) or because it was being undermined by the machinations of Asian Bolshevism and international Jewry (Hitler).

The Nazi perspective on the civilizational question assumed that 1) Racial conflict was the determining factor in the history of humanity; 2) The superiority of Western civilization – or rather, of Germanic/Aryan civilization – was unquestionable (“all human culture, all products of art, science and technology are almost exclusively the fruit of Aryan creativity”, proclaimed Hitler in Mein Kampf ); and 3) The outcome of the “clash of civilizations” would be dictated by the law of the strongest: “he who is not capable of fighting for his life has his end decreed by providence. The world was not made for cowardly peoples” ( Mein Kampf ).

For historian Ian Kershaw, one of the pillars of the Nazi imaginary was the feeling “that Germany was the last bulwark of Western civilization against Asian Bolshevism”, a paradoxical perspective, since Nazism represented “a seismic break with the humanitarian Judeo-Christian values ​​that had been the basis of European civilization” (lecture “Hitler's place in history”, Open University, 2014). Nazi propaganda engaged for years in the most outrageous historical revisionism, with the aim of obliterating this blatant contradiction and promoting the idea that the Third Reich represented, rather, the culmination of Western civilization. To this end, he appropriated the legacy of leading figures of European culture, whether Germanic (such as Luther, Dürer, Goethe, Beethoven, Wagner or Nietzsche) or not (such as Socrates, Leonardo, Michelangelo or Shakespeare), and subjected it to polemic treatments, in order to demonstrate that this long chain of creators and thinkers had laid the foundations of the Nazi worldview (the grotesque rewriting of the history of culture and the arts by the Nazis was dissected by David B. Dennis in Inhumanities: Nazi interpretations of the Western culture , from 2015).

In the peaceful Portuguese rectangle, Arianism, radical and violent proclamations, bombastic-hysterical style and Hitler’s unpredictability displeased António de Oliveira Salazar, but the Portuguese leader was also an unwavering defender of Portugal’s “missionary and civilizing” vocation in Africa and Asia (see chapter “Portugal’s civilizing mission” in Thus Spoke Salazar: How do we read today what the dictator said? ) and regretted that “this Europe, which was the cradle of nations and a missionary agent of the civilization that we so strenuously served and propagated”, had abandoned such commitment, because it was “tired of its own greatness, partly softened by the easy things in life” (message to the Portuguese Legionaries, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the organization’s creation, 03.12.1956). Salazar also subscribed to the thesis that “Western civilization was being dismantled to its foundations and beaten in its fundamental principles and creations by other philosophical concepts, other ways of looking at man and life, new measures of value for the achievements of the spirit” (message to the Portuguese Legionaries, on the same occasion).

Throughout the 20th century, and with increasing speed and intensity after the end of World War II, the idea that Western civilization was superior to all others and that it was invested with the mission of bringing light and progress to the rest of the world began to lose credibility, at the same time that 1) The importance of the Christian faith (usually considered a central element of Western civilization) diminished in society; 2) Globalization and advances in communications technology promoted the circulation of elements from all over the planet and diluted the cultural identity of the West and its member nations; and 3) The territories colonized by European powers regained – peacefully or by force – their independence and were, at least formally, admitted as equals in the concert of nations. The ferocity and barbarity demonstrated by some of the beacon nations of Western civilization – especially Germany – during World War II also undermined the Western world's claim to superiority in terms of values.

Yet, until the last decades of the twentieth century, most citizens of the Western world were reasonably proud of their history and considered that the West had made a generally positive contribution to the world.

Was Western Civilization Invented in 1917?

However, at the end of the last century, theories inspired by postmodernism and neo-Marxism were already brewing in academia, devaluing Western science (since, it was claimed, there are no absolute truths and all knowledge is relative) and attributing to history the purpose of fighting for social justice, repairing centuries of oppression of “indigenous peoples” by Western civilization. A founding moment of this revisionist movement took place in 1982, when the American historian Gilbert Allardyce, in the article “The rise and fall of the Western Civilization Course” (published in The American Historical Review , vol. 87 no. 3), postulated that “the concept of Western civilization was a modern invention, cooked up during World War I as a way of tricking young American soldiers into fighting and dying in the trenches of Europe” (Stanley Kurtz, in The lost history of Western civilization , 2020). According to Allardyce, the concept of “Western civilization” did not exist before the creation of the “Western Civilization” course (informally referred to as “Western Civ”) in American universities, which, being mandatory in many courses, served as a way of inculcating “civilizational thinking” in a large part of the population with higher education.

Since the late 1960s, humanities departments at American universities have devoted a considerable amount of their time and energy to the creation of intellectual impostures that, unfortunately, have been enthusiastically received by international academia and have then spread to society (see Plato, Nietzsche and Mick Jagger: Between Culture Wars and Civilizational Crises ), but Allardyce's thesis manages to stand out negatively among so much stupidity and mendacity.

Allardyce had to know that 1) The notion of Western civilization had been gradually constructed over centuries; 2) The USA has always been aware of its civilizational affinities with Europe (see, for example, the marks of the Roman Republic in its political system, in the architecture of the buildings of power and in its toponymy), so it would be useless to invent an argument that would highlight them; 3) German emigrants and their descendants were (and are) very numerous in the USA (especially in the Midwest) and were as integrated into American society as any other ethnic group of European origin; and 4) Promoting the idea that all Western nations share a solid and venerable core of values, beliefs and ways of life would work as an argument to dissuade (not persuade) Americans from fighting the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, since the Austro-Germanic world is not only one of the oldest and most robust pillars of Western civilization, but, in 1917, its contribution to it was far more important than that of the USA.

In fact, most of the war propaganda produced by the American government at that time did, as would be expected, the opposite of what Allardyce's thesis defends: it tried to dissociate the Germans from the civilized world, presenting them as “barbarians”, “brutes” or “wild beasts”.

Furthermore, it is a fact that several American universities already offered courses with curricula similar to the “Western Civilization Course” (although not with this title) 20 or 30 years before the official date of birth of 1917, stipulated in Allardyce's thesis, which he tried to minimize through painful argumentative contortions.

The fact that Allardyce’s thesis is flawed in its reasoning and intellectually dishonest has not prevented it from being adopted and promoted by prominent historians such as Lawrence W. Levine, author of The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Cultures and History (1997), Lynn Hunt, author of Writing History in the Global Era (2014), and Andrew Hartman, author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of Culture Wars (2015). According to Stanley Kurtz ( The Lost History of Western Civilization ), Allardyce’s thesis is a good paradigmatic example of “how an unlikely bit of academic radicalism, completely unknown to the general public, can turn the academy upside down and transform American education.”

Less Petrarch, more Samora Machel

Levine's The Opening of the American Mind was a multiculturalist response to The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students , a work published ten years earlier by the philosopher Allan Bloom, which denounced the degradation of American university education, resulting from the promotion of relativism and nihilism, the contempt for the great authors of the Western canon, and the fact that students, allied with extremist professors, had taken away from the faculty the power to define "the aims of the university and the content of what they taught" (see Plato, Nietzsche and Mick Jagger: Between Culture Wars and Civilizational Crises ).

By bitter irony, 1987, the year The Closing of the American Mind was published, also witnessed a key episode in the intellectual decline of the American university denounced by Bloom and in the discrediting of the concept of Western civilization. At Stanford University in California, students, dissatisfied with what they perceived as the lack of diversity in the syllabus of the “Western Culture” course, which was mandatory for first-year students in all courses, demanded that it be reformulated, invoking Allardyce’s feeble thesis in their favor. On January 15, 1987, the discontent materialized in a demonstration with half a thousand participants and led by the Reverend Jesse Jackson – famous civil rights activist and disciple of Martin Luther King –, who protested against Eurocentrism and the dominance of what is now known in woke circles as “cis-heteropatriarchy” in the “Western Culture” program and demanded the inclusion of authors from ethnic minorities and women in it. While displaying signs that read “Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkumah, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Samora Machel: A legacy of progressive leadership ignored by the [curriculum of] Western Culture!”, the students repeatedly chanted “Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture's got to go!”

The Stanford students’ demands, which can be seen as a prefiguration of contemporary Wokist demands, eventually produced the desired results, and in 1988 the university senate overwhelmingly approved the restructuring of the contested course (which one columnist at the time considered “an affront […] to women and members of minority groups”). The course was renamed “Cultures, Ideas, and Values” and included a significant representation of women and authors and ideas from non-Western cultures. The new program came into effect in the 1989–90 academic year and, despite negative reactions from conservative quarters, eventually prompted other American universities to undertake similar revisions of their humanities curricula in the following years. This reorientation was perhaps not unrelated to the revelation, coming out of the 1990 census, that 25% of American citizens identified themselves as “non-white” (i.e., African-American, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, etc.), when, just ten years earlier, this category represented 20% of the population (in the 2020 census, the proportion of non-whites had risen to 38% and surveys from 2023 suggest that it may have already reached 58%).

In the words of Stanley Kurtz, in The Lost History of Western Civilization , the “revolution” at Stanford “set in motion a multiculturalist movement that drove Western Civilization chairs from most American universities and set the terms of the culture wars for decades to come.”

Looking back in 2015 at the Stanford student demands of 1987, and the questions of identity and civilization that they triggered, Andrew Hartman, a committed promoter of multiculturalism, considered that “the conservative reaction to the Stanford curriculum revision was overblown. […] The idea that the Western Civilization course represented a long-standing tradition was patently false […] The Western Civilization course was a recent American invention. Before World War I, Americans had sought to distinguish themselves from Europeans, an ambition that humanities curricula tended to reflect. When American politicians drew the United States into war in Europe [in 1917], American curriculum designers followed suit and tied the nation’s cultural destiny to Europe (in A War for the Soul of America: A History of Culture Wars ). Similar ideas were expressed by historian Lawrence W. Levine in The Opening of the American Mind – “the Western Civilization curriculum, portrayed by conservative critics of the academy in our time as apolitical and extremely ancient, is none of these things. It was a 20th-century phenomenon that originated in a wartime government initiative and whose acceptance period lasted less than 50 years” – and by historian Lynn Hunt, who, in 2016, reiterated the idea that “Western civilization was invented during World War I as a way of explaining to American soldiers why they were going to fight in Europe” (in an interview with Time magazine, 19.07.2016). This proves that the academic environment in the humanities has become so lax and morally corrupt that a crazy theory can enjoy widespread acceptance within it despite having been discredited and proven to be factually incorrect for more than three decades.

Allardyce's thesis has known variants, which, while maintaining that the concept of “Western civilization” was invented in the early twentieth century, justify their confection, not with the intention of galvanizing Americans for the fight against Germany, but to promote the assimilation of the masses of migrants from all over the US (see chapter “a scratch and paradox cloak” In America? ) and to justify the newly uncovered US imperial vocation, which, in 1898, completed the territorial expansion and the “pacification” of the “original peoples” on the American continent, had attached the archipelago of Hawaii and, in the removal of the 1898 Hispanic War, assuming the control of Spanish colonies of Cuba, Philippines, Porto Rico and Guam.

These theses from the American Academy tell us less about Western civilization than about the sickly self-centered US, a country that is ecstatic in contemplation of its own belly button, in which only 3% of published books are translations of foreign languages ​​and which baptized as “World Series” the series of games that puts the winners of the two league-league-leagues, the American League, National League, of which only US and Canada teams are part (the eventual 51st state of the US). The disputes around these abstruse and ridiculous theories have provided fuel for “cultural wars”, so expensive to American intellectuals, activists and politicians, but do not make valid contributions to understanding the world as they are completely disconnected from reality.

The first registered mention of the expression “Western World” precedes the “date of birth” of the Western civilization proposed by Allardyce in more than 300 years: its author was the Englishman William Warner, who employed her in Albion's England (1586), a long patriotic tone poem that tells the story of England through an entrance of historical facts, legends, biblical episodes and figures and figures and figures and figures and figures and figures and figures and figures and episodes and figures and figures and episodes and figures and figures and figures and figures and figures and figures and figures From Greco-Roman mythology and which extends chronologically between the Patriarch Noah and the time of the author himself (with some license, it can be said that Albion's England is to the history of England as the Lusíadas are to the history of Portugal).

Throughout the Middle Ages, the Opposition Christendom/Islam had contributed to the incipient form of the identity of the European kingdoms, although some of them to alliece the Muslim kingdoms to combat rival Christian kingdoms (and the Muslims did the same). Jara the concept of “humanist education”. The overseas expansion of the European maritime powers, from the 16th century dealbar, was marked by the “contact and convergence between civilizations that had been developed so far on different spheres” (Quinn, p. 445), an exchange that could have aroused Europeans to the idea that humanity would be one in their kaleidoscopic diversity, but rather led them to consolidate the consciousness of one belonging to a consciousness Civilization, which was not only distinct from other civilizations but was superior to them - even when Europeans were confronted with the sophistication, power and prosperity of Ottoman, Indian, and Chinese civilizations.

The distinction between Western civilization and the other would be emphasized, from the end of the seventeenth century, with the Enlightenment, which inculled in European societies the principle that reason is the main source of authority and legitimacy, promoted ideals of freedom, progress and tolerance and advocated the separation between state and church. find explanations for such differences.

European freedom vs. Eastern Despotism

Montesquieu (Charles Louis Secondat, Baron of Montesquieu, 1689-1755), one of the most prominent figures of the Enlightenment, has written, over 14 years, a monumental dealt with politics and law, entitled by L'Eprit de Lois (1748), divided by 31 “books” and extending, in the original edition, by two plots with the politicians and legal from various regions of the world and presented explanatory theories for the differences between them. One of these theories, which became known as “theory of climates”, postulates that “it is the different needs in the different climates that shaped the different life forms; and it was these different life forms that determined the different types of laws” (Book XIV), and in the understanding of Montesquieu, the inhabitants of hot climates would be trendly indolent, while those of the cold climates would be more entrepreneur Such excessive way that the body is completely devoid of energy. This abatement is infecting the spirit itself: no curiosity, no noble enterprise, no generous feeling; In Montesquieu's understanding, the difference in contrasting moral predispositions: “The peoples of the hot regions are shy as the old regions are fearless as young people […] in the Nordic climates we find people with few vices and abundant virtues, very sincerity and frankness. but the crimes ”(Book XIV).

Despite attributing a major influence on climate on the formation of peoples' character, Montesquieu understood that it also resulted from the contest of other physical factors, such as topography (for example, the vast plane of Asia would favor, according to him, the constitution of great empires), as well as of human factors (eg, religions and Asian philosophies would favor passivity).

Montesquieu has contradicted the political systems and ways of life of Europe and Asia: “In Asia […] warrior, brave and active peoples live alongside effeminate, lazy and typos. In Europe, on the contrary, the strong nations confine with strong nations […] is the main reason for the weakness of Asia and the strength of Europe, the freedom of Asia. It never happens that freedom increases, while in Europe it increases or decreases the circumstances ”(Book XVII). In Europe,“ a spirit of freedom has been generated, which makes it difficult to subdue each of its parts and submit it to a foreign force […]. We will find another heroism other than servitude ”(Book XVII).

Montesquieu has associated “eastern despotism” with inertia (in despotism, “it is necessary that fear annihiles all the courage and extinguishes the tinned ambition”), corruption (the despotic government “corrupted itself incessantly, as it is corrupt by nature”), and to ignorance (“strict obedience presupposes ignorance of what”). Jacques Rousseau, although also seen the oriental governance systems as inherently despotic, had the opposite view of the effects of this despotism on the disposition of their peoples. In what is perhaps his most influential work, Émile or L'Education (1762), published 14 after L'Eprit de Lois , Rousseau, after stating (without any objective foundation) than the “Turks” were more human and hospitable than the Europeans, justified him for the former to live in a despotic regime: “Since, under the arbitrary governance, the importance and the accuracy of individuals are always the accuracy of individuals. And hesitates, they do not face relegation and misery as a state that is strange to them, for any of them can be seen tomorrow in the condition of the one who helps today. ”

Montesquieu's considerations on (supposed) moral superiority of Europeans in the face of other peoples of the globe were not through the ether ideas and abstractions; Montesquieu understood that this superiority would confer to Europeans special prerogatives in the “concert of nations”: thus, although it condemned the military conquest and slavery, advocated that the European power had legitimacy to indulge in “colonization” - that is, colonialism and extractivism.

It was not, of course, for the defense of the colonial exploitation that of L'Erprit des Lois was received with severe criticism by the conservative sectors of European society and that in 1751 the Holy See includes it in its index Librorum Prohibitorum ( Émile or L'Eduction would have equal luck), but for (allegedly) to replace religion with reason and promote the work, the work was, the work Rarely welcomed by the progressive sectors. Its popularity raised several pirate editions, some of them in the same year it was published, and made it quickly translated into other languages. By L'Eprit des Lois deserved the approval of great thinkers of his time (namely Voltaire and David Hume), he had a strong influence on thinkers and rulers of the following decades and their marks are present in the US Constitution (1788) and the Declaration of Human and Citizen Rights (1789), which leads to many experts to be elected as the most important work of the 17th century. From L'Eprit de Lois nursing from rigor failures, errors of perception and obvious prejudice, especially with regard to the extra-European world. Critics of the book.

Climate, character and civilization

De L'Eprit de Lois was not the first occasion when Montesquieu explained the “theory of climates”, which had already emerged in another of his great works, the Lettres Persanes (1721, Persian letters ). In the fourth century AC, Aristotle defended, in book VII of the political treaty, that in Europe, “those who inhabit the cold climates are usually well endowed with courage, but are disabled in intelligence and mill, so they enjoy some freedom, but not having political organization, they are unable to rule other peoples. Slavery. But the Hellenic race, which is located between them, is also intermediate in character, combining courage with intelligence.

The idea would be resumed, among others, by the architect and Roman engineer Vitrúvio (Vitruvius, c.80-c.15 BC), who, in the treaty of architectura , made considerations about the relationship between the climate and the character of the human being (and even their tone of voice): “The southern peoples have, as a result of the heat, an acute intelligence, so they are free and leds, while dense atmosphere and are paralyzed by the moisture of the air, so their intellect is indolent. We can see this in the snakes, whose movements are alive in warm time and in winter are numb by cold and fall inactive and immovable. S sucked by the sun. On the contrary, the natural men of regions Frigid, although they have greater predisposition to get involved in war confrontations, with great courage and without tibieza, they are so slow with reasoning that they will be exhausted in foolish and clumsy investers, to their own damage. Indeed, the peoples of the Italic Peninsula are the most perfectly constituted, in terms of body, mental acuity and courage. It was divine discernment that installed the city of Rome in a seasoned region, in order to obtain the right to command the whole world. ”

The most remarkable common element between these associations between climate and civilization is not the solidity and ingenuity of argument (which makes it immense to desire), but the chauvinist spirit that impregnates them: each author understands that it is the climate of his country that provides the most favorable conditions for the flowering of civilization and virtues - to Aristotle, Greece, for vitur, Rome, and for Montesquieu, Western Europe.

Do not think, however, that this bias and presumption are unique to the West. Historian Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), one of the largest scholars in the Islamic world, born in North Africa, in an Arab family originating from Al-Andalus, assumed analogous point of view in Muqaddimah ( Prolegómeni ), the introductory volume of Kitāb, the introductory volume of Kitāb volume of Kitāb Al-Ibar ( Book of Examples ), a compendium of universal history in seven volumes that Arnold Toynbee has classified as “the most important of its gender” and where, besides a detailed history of the Arabs, Persians, Berber and other peoples of the Islamic world, pioneering ideas are developed in the domain of sociology, demographics, anthropology, economy, political science and cultural history.

Ibn Khaldun also postulated the existence of an intimate connection between the climate and geography of a region and the physical and intellectual characteristics of the people inhabiting it after establishing, after establishing the southern hemisphere of the land that would not allow the human beings to live any civilizational development, Ibn Khaldun divided the northern hemisphere into seven climatic regions, from Equador regions, Polo, being regions 1 and 2 inhabited by “blacks” and the 6 and 7 regions by “Slavs”, including regions 3 to 5, with less extreme climates and understanding southern Europe, Machreb, Syria, Anatolia, Iraq, India and China. According to Ibn Khaldun, "the inhabitants of the intermediate zones are more tempered in their bodies, colors [skin] and qualities of character […] tend, in all their attitudes and in all circumstances, to remain removed from evil and recognize prophecies, property, state, religious laws and sciences." Homes with clay and reeds dress with animal leaves or skins and their qualities of character are close to those of the Ignaras beasts. of humanity. It applies to their attitude towards religion: they are unaware of prophecy and have no religious laws. ” In another passage, he states that "blacks are generally characterized by volubility, excitability and emotionality. They have great appetite for dance […] and are, everywhere, pointed out as stupid"-these characteristics result, according to Ibn Khaldun, of "heat dominates their temperament and formation.

These are instructive passages, especially for those who, in our time, impute to Europeans the invention and theorizing of racism and the invocation of racist theories as justification for the slavery of Africans, as if the Islamic world did not even see racist visions of humanity and were not, since its genesis, based on the slavery of "black" (see slave: guilt and stories told , Chapter “In the period of slavery” in classical music: a story of bleaching or creative merit ?

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