| | Hi Hong,
I am certainly no advocate of murder and obviously I think it disingenuous to think I am merely because where matters of fundamental human rights are concerned I believe "western" culture has some more merits than what people call "eastern culture" It's convenient that you leave out the Mongols, as clearly Genghis Khan was a world conqueror of his time and clearly a subscriber of "eastern culture" (as was Alexander the Great for "western culture" by the way you might define it) but clearly the vastness of the kingdom, as you say, plays an important role as well. For as far as area and number of people conquered are concerned, the emperor that unified china certainly stands as a strong contender in historical conquerors.
I am not talking about the aggressiveness of "western culture" either, but it's non-isolationism, the fact that it involved itself with other cultures, even non-violently, to a much greater extent than other cultures did, almost all of which were and still are extremely xenophobic. Aggressiveness and passivity are only one part of a list of things which we can judge a culture on, including isolationism vs openness, internal oppression and violence vs internal peace, or the embracing of progress, reason, and technology or the embracing of stagnation and mysticism. All cultures land at various parts on these scales with some bad and some good, but the thing we are trying to convey is that there is more good, by these fundamental standards of human rights, liberty, science, progress, than bad, and more good in "western culture" (again, in regard to these fundamentals) than in many eastern cultures. It was, after all, the west's embracement of OTHER cultures and the value they could derive from them that propelled them past many other cultures in material and technological progress.
As far as the genocide of Native American peoples, would it be fair for me to be accused of murder when I go up to you, shake your hand, and give you some incurable disease I had no Idea I had and that didn't effect me? Genocide is the willful eradication of people. I have read estimates that around 10 million people inhabited the Americas before Europeans arrived. No one is sure of that number but the number that were here when actual colonization begun was under a quarter million. The estimates I have read suggest 90 – 95% percent of the indigenous population was wiped out by various diseases Europeans brought with them. The following article relates the same sentiment.
http://hnn.us/articles/7302.html
"To address this issue properly we must begin with the most important reason for the Indians' catastrophic decline—namely, the spread of highly contagious diseases to which they had no immunity. This phenomenon is known by scholars as a "virgin-soil epidemic"; in North America, it was the norm. The most lethal of the pathogens introduced by the Europeans was smallpox, which sometimes incapacitated so many adults at once that deaths from hunger and starvation ran as high as deaths from disease; in several cases, entire tribes were rendered extinct. Other killers included measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet fever. Although syphilis was apparently native to parts of the Western hemisphere, it, too, was probably introduced into North America by Europeans. About all this there is no essential disagreement. The most hideous enemy of native Americans was not the white man and his weaponry, concludes Alfred Crosby, "but the invisible killers which those men brought in their blood and breath."
It is thought that between 75 to 95 percent of all Indian deaths resulted from these killers. Remember that Europeans and "western culture" suffered through numerous plagues that wiped out huge portions of their population, many of which were brought to Europe by other cultures accidentally. Should we accuse them of genocide as well? Native Americans had until the onset of settling the new world been shielded from those pathogens. Of course there were many incidents of individual atrocities and local and state sanctioned atrocities committed against indigenous people, and these are all unforgivable and horrendous and stand as a huge black mark on western culture for sure. But the mass death of indigenous people was primarily caused by disease, not by war or intentional genocide.
Certainly native American cultures, lacking the technology and agriculture of Europeans needed to survive in groups and bands in a collectivist sense, but that by no means necessitates the savage brutality that these tribes inflicted upon each other. I assert that these native American tribes were warlike and barbaric because all hunter gathering nomadic tribes have been in human history, Native American Indians were not peaceful nature lovers living in harmony with the earth and each other.
The fate that befell the individuals in these groups is sad and tragic, but I feel no sympathy for the death of their culture as cultures per se have no value except as ideas adopted and valued by individuals. If an individual chooses to leave a culture or stop speaking a language it is nothing worth mourning. I certainly don’t advocate spreading good ideas through force and killing either, but that doesn’t negate that many ideas both good and bad have been spread throughout history by western and eastern cultures, by force and otherwise, but the western ones were on average better. Stating that “western culture” is “superior” to “eastern culture” does not mean I am insisting westerners bash everyone on the head and put them into re-education camps, it is only stating that by objective principles the ideas adopted by western culture in history have been more positive than negative, and more positive than the ideas adopted by eastern cultures, specifically in the areas of science, reason, progress, capitalism, and human rights.
I sincerely admit you have made a great deal of good points on this matter that have made me think and I am glad you have taken the time to discuss it even though some of our comments have at times bothered you enough to cause you to shake. But the conflict in our discussions seems to originate in how we define these terms. Would you have an interest in trying to agree on an explicit and clear defition?
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