After
all, such individuals do not accept social and economic advancement
as the main thing in life and therefore their sanity must be suspect
as well! The new globalism therefore is a pseudo- globalism
projecting one model of civilization, though giving it many masks in
different countries through people of different races and languages.
It ignores the spiritual dimension and futuristic vision of
non-Western traditions and reduces them to a medieval image, as if
what is non-Western is non- modern, anti-scientific and incapable of
any further growth.
The same Western groups whose armies
occupied the Third World until recently, and whose businesses
continue to dominate them economically, now criticize the countries
they have long victimized for not living up to the Western moral
standards of a free society! Just the as old colonialism had
its facade of modernism and Christian compassion, so does the new colonialism have its facade of
economic opportunity and democracy.
Western academics fail to see how
much they are promoting a Eurocentric view and ignoring other
perspectives. They portray themselves as the defenders of minorities
or the oppressed all over the world, while at the same time they
ignore the cultural achievements and spiritual values of these same
peoples. They may be trying to help the oppressed
economically or politically but they are often destroying their
culture and spiritual traditions along the way.
This liberal Western humanism has
become predominant in universities all over the world. Eastern
intellectuals naively pick up these new trends in Western thinking
and fail to see how much they remain intellectual slaves of the
West. Western humanism has become the religion of the mass media as
well, which likes to highlight human rights violations in
non-Western countries. The newspapers of India promote these views,
criticizing the backwardness of their own traditions in favor of
communist or capitalist models that are hardly enlightened or
refined. These are taken as inevitable side effects of growth,
but they reflect this progressive economic exploitation of the
planet, and the reduction of human beings to mere commodities or
vote banks. |