"Western Civilization" has demonstrated its superiority in many areas

The freedoms afforded to people in White Western civilizations is what allows things like Black supremacy to exist.

Imagine if a group like Black Lives Matter tried to start up in China...the government there would put their boot through it with a quickness.

Western civilization was built by the white male patriarchy.

Anything touched by the white male patriarchy must be destroyed and erased from history.

Therefore, western civilization must be destroyed and erased.

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The invention of the metal lathe and the discovery of penicillin were MAJOR advances in western civilization.

I have thought this for quite a while now. I agree with you 100%.

yes

only fools think that this abundant state (that patriarchal, Western culture has created) is NOT the reason why we can be so critical of "the West"

those who think that things like violence and aggression are simply toxic results of the patriarchal west are ignorant to the extreme. those who believe that by removing the culture, we will remove those externalities from society are dangerous

they want to create a system ripe for those who are strong and without empathy to takeover

Western Civilization, where would women be without it.

You have to understand the position of critique and where it comes from.

Those who are focused on concepts like "White supremacy" are rooted in their deep hatred of the West and Europeans.

It's simple, when viewed from their perspective.

1. Within the West, all other cultures are encouraged to have "pride", and every contribution is magnified, while every short-coming is explained as "oppression".

2. ANY pride in the West, or within European people groups, is called "white supremacy" and considered to be hateful and evil.

Those two points are illogical, unless you understand that the people driving the Left absolutely fricking hate the West and white people. Once you understand the basis, what you hear on NPR makes more sense. They hate you. They hate your parents, and they hate your children, and any future grandchildren.

Hate them back.

You idiots can't help yourselves can you?

The main area in which the West is far ahead of the rest of the world is the ability to be self-critical. Which is why takes like "the West is best" strike me as odd. The Enlightenment-era values developed in part as a rejection to Judeo-Christian norms in Western Europe. It was a self-critical movement, one which spawned every major -ism the world sees today, from capitalism to communism (Marx's point of departure was Locke, among many others) to fascism (the early Italian fascists specifically rejected materialism) to even Islamism (a self-critical movement started only when faced by Western superiority).

That self-critique is important, because unlike many other civilizations (literally every other civilization), Europeans realized the benefit of that criticism would manifest itself as progress, even if the results were horrible in of themselves. Divorcing the "Western Civilization" from things like colonialism is to ignore how immediately self-critical people were of the colonial project. George Orwell has this amazing essay of being in Burma (maybe, I can't remember right now) as a colonial administrator, and the tension he felt being both apart of the colonial project and fundamentally against it.

The lack of ability of self-critique is fundamentally why I can't support any Western chauvinists, because I think it is insecure for no reason. So what if women blame the "white patriarchy" for their station? I've never seen a chauvinist point out the history of women's liberation is tied to the history of the liberation of men as well. It isn't as though the lives of the peasant man was meaningfully much better than the peasant woman. Any Enlightenment era philosopher would support something like multiculturalism, as there is nothing more multicultural than the notion that "all men (and implicitly women, children, all races, all genders, etc.) are created equal." Locke specifically supported the notion of this sort of equality. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor goes into great detail about the Enlightenment and Multiculturalism in his book, but there is one fatal flaw in this metric; the whole project comes apart when one group demands special recognition, for any reason whatsoever.

Thus the real tension is that by suggesting that white men are owed something specifically by virtue of building this civilization, or that women are owed something, or that any specific racial, religious, ethnic, gender group are owed something, the whole project is thrown into disarray, because with recognition, the notion becomes not "all men are created equal" but "some are more equal than others."

The West, in order to remain as the superior civilization, must remain self-critical to the degree that it can withstand these critiques, and indeed, account for them under the terms the civilization has already established. Indeed, many critical movements started, from workers rights, to women's liberation, to modernism to postmodernity, from the tension and the disappointment of the ruling class failing to live up to the primary Enlightenment ideal, that "all men are created equal."