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Defining the terms of ignorance
Defining the terms of ignorance
Good to hear today someone who challenges the use of the term the West and Western.
As Architects for Peace, we strive for knowledge, understanding and respect among nations. Unfortunately, the acceptance and use of such absurd terms prevents us from real understanding of complex issues - and this may well be the intention behind the use of terminology that artificially divide the world in two.
Can anyone seriously define any of these?
1. East and West: sometimes defined by income, others by religion, other times by philosophical roots (as if the philosophers who we pride on as Westerners hadnt lived in todays Turkey).
2. Developed and developing countries: does it mean that the developed world is not longer developing, therefore is stagnating? (hum... perhaps)
3. Muslim and Christian worlds: as if there was such a thing as homogeneous Muslim world or Christian World
4. Latin America: when simply referring to America, a large continent with a diversity of countries and cultures and where Latin languages (Spanish and Portuguese) are the rule and not the exception. And by the way, America is a continent, with American people living in it, as the Europeans or Africans live in their continent - there is not such a country called America! There is a country called United States of America
Questioning the terms we use, is our tool in the defiance of todays conveniently promoted ignorance and it is the least we can do.
So, have a read at Stephen Fairwheather essay and let me now what you think, I hope you find it as refreshing as I did .
Beatriz C. Maturana
Good to hear today someone who challenges the use of the term the West and Western.
As Architects for Peace, we strive for knowledge, understanding and respect among nations. Unfortunately, the acceptance and use of such absurd terms prevents us from real understanding of complex issues - and this may well be the intention behind the use of terminology that artificially divide the world in two.
Can anyone seriously define any of these?
1. East and West: sometimes defined by income, others by religion, other times by philosophical roots (as if the philosophers who we pride on as Westerners hadnt lived in todays Turkey).
2. Developed and developing countries: does it mean that the developed world is not longer developing, therefore is stagnating? (hum... perhaps)
3. Muslim and Christian worlds: as if there was such a thing as homogeneous Muslim world or Christian World
4. Latin America: when simply referring to America, a large continent with a diversity of countries and cultures and where Latin languages (Spanish and Portuguese) are the rule and not the exception. And by the way, America is a continent, with American people living in it, as the Europeans or Africans live in their continent - there is not such a country called America! There is a country called United States of America
Questioning the terms we use, is our tool in the defiance of todays conveniently promoted ignorance and it is the least we can do.
So, have a read at Stephen Fairwheather essay and let me now what you think, I hope you find it as refreshing as I did .
Beatriz C. Maturana
Tuesday 25 October 2005. ABC Perspective
Topic: What is the West?
By Stephen Fairweather
I have been intrigued for sometime now by the repetitive usage of such terms as the West or Western civilisation by numerous politicians, intellectuals, and international commentators. Its as if the West was as easy an idea to conceptualise for the average punter on the street as an inanimate object like cloud or sky. Such usage rarely seems to tell us what exactly it is this so-called West signifies, nor does it convey in cultural or historic terms the significance that such ideas hold for Australians today. What someone means when they talk of the West is particularly important in the current climate of geo-political and cultural unrest, a climate where our political leaders are constantly measuring our own Western ideals and values against others which are in some ways different and often deemed to be contradictory to the West's -- ideals espoused, for example, by Islamic cultures, China, or even global terrorism . Many leading intellectuals have decisively delineated the West into a set of pre-conceived ideas. Intellectuals such as Samuel P. Huntington, who in his book Clash of Civilisations clearly and systematically divides humanity into groupings based primarily on religious traditions and some kind of intrinsic cultural heritage.(....)
continue reading: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/perspective/stories/s1490444.htm
Comments
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... and if anyone is interested, I found some more arguments supporting the above position:What is Orientalism? Said identified it as the political, cultural and intellectual system by which the West has for centuries managed its relationship with the Islamic world. The central stratagem of this process, Said wrote in Orientalism, his foundational 1978 book on the phenomenon, has been the Wests reductionist misrepresentation of the East. In brief, according to Said and the many critics and journalists he inspired, Orientalism has transformed the East and its people into an alien Other. That Other usually a Dark Other was in every way the inferior of the West: unenlightened, barbarous, cruel, craven, enslaved to its senses, given to despotism and, in general, contemptible. Having established an Eastern Other in these degrading terms, the West emerged at the center of its self-serving discourse as, by obvious contrast, enlightened and progressive. Charles Paul Freund. Edward Said: The debate continues. The Daily Star, 9/27/03
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion editorials/2003 Opinion Editorials/September/27o/Edward Said, The debate continues Charles Paul Freund.htm
and more by Professor Marwan Obeidat from Bilkent University in Turkey. His work deals with education, check it out at: http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~jast/Number4/Obeidat.html
I tend to understand the use of these as explained by Daniel Dennett, "greedy reductionism""Greedy reductionism is a term coined by Daniel Dennett, in the book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, to distinguish between acceptable and erroneous forms of reductionism. Whereas reductionism means explaining a thing in terms of what it reduces to, greedy reductionism comes when the thing we are trying to understand is explained away instead of explained, so that we fail to gain any additional understanding of the original target." Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_reductionism -
This issue is something we should all note in our language, and is of particular importance in the way today's media reports on the rest of the world. I belive the complacency in changing the way we refer to different regions comes from most people knowing 'wink-wink, you know...the "third world", everyone knows what that means'. It's a 'feeling', above anything else that anyone would care to admit. We don't question, because we know what it means. However by doing this we avoid ackowledging the fact these terms are intrinsically linked to generalisations, stereotypes and possibly worse, racism.
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