Best Western: A Response to the Haters

It may surprise you to learn that people are arguing on X. Brace yourself for an additional shock: they are reaching neither conclusions nor agreements.

Lately it’s been about defining “white culture,” which really is not the best way to put it. The discussion concerns Western civilization and what characterizes it -- if anything! Some say it has no culture at all. Everything was stolen, its triumphs are false, and its sins are unique. Western civ should only be mentioned between the phrases “hey ho” and “got to go.”

It’s all very tiresome. But when the all-seeing and all-knowing algorithms noticed that I was reading some of these stories, my news app served up a BBC piece from a while ago that contained a rather startling admission.

“My Nigerian great-grandfather sold slaves.”

It took some gumption to write that piece -- credit to the author for facing an uncomfortable fact that the current dialogue prefers not to discuss. An inconvenient truth, to coin a phrase. If you view the world purely in terms of power dynamics, where the top-dog oppressor is forever lifting a leg on the designated victims, then it grates to think that human beings captured in war might have been cheerfully sold for gold or silver or bullets or such. Maybe the slave-sellers were somehow infected by some tick-borne strain of capitalism that carried the mad desire for profit from Europe?

Or -- and hear me out here -- slavery has been practiced everywhere by everyone because man is a fallen creature hardwired to care no more about the world beyond his immediate clan than a fly in New York sunning on a windowsill cares about a fly in Shanghai that was just swatted to mush. The Romans had a highly sophisticated society, adept in science and art, and even though they knew slaves were human, that didn’t prevent them from keeping a houseful of shackled silent souls stripped of will and agency.

One line about the author’s great-grandfather stood out, and I’m surprised it hasn’t caused more controversy.

“It would be unfair to judge a 19th Century man by 21st Century principles.”

Thank you. Of course, a lot of people have been saying that for a long time, ever since the modern Red Guards started pouring through the streets looking for statues to pull down. Look! It’s Sir William Merrierocke, a philanthropist who founded Christian orphanages. We now know he ate a crumpet smeared with jam sweetened by Jamaican sugar in 1817, so he was complicit in slavery! Lop off the head and roll it in the river!

But there’s something else in that statement that seems obvious. Opposing the trade of human beings is not a 21st-century idea. What the author is really saying is that we should not judge a 19th-century man by the standards of . . . the 19th century, when bad ol’ Western civ moved decisively against slavery.

Granted, there was no “19th century” in Africa as there was in the Western world. It’s possible that some king sat brooding atop a throne of skulls and thought: “It is 1848, and the revolutionary spirit that has filled the sails in every major European city foretells of a rearrangement of the relationship between citizens and the ancient structures of nobility. How much of this is a result of post-Enlightenment rationality, and how much owes its origin to the echoes of the French Revolution’s revision of the social order?” But that’s about as likely as a Mayan ruler having an opinion on Martin Luther.

Different places evolve differently, according to culture, external influences, weather, disease, and so on. Or they don’t evolve much at all. But everyone thinks the slave-selling king was wrong according to Western cultural values of the time, which had evolved. And if slavery is wrong, then the societies that arrived at that conclusion were morally superior to the ones that had not. This makes some people shift uncomfortably in their seats. They might say, “Okay, okay, granted, but then there was colonialism, which was worse, so it’s equal. But colonialism is more recent, so the West must be found wanting, and also hand over lots of money.”

But . . . why, then, is it wrong to judge the 19th-century colonial project by the standards of the 21st century?

The answer is quite simple: FREE GAZA ACAB F*** ICE (screeching whistles, professionally printed placards waving).

Any questions?