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The main question of the second essay is the ethnocentrism often criticized in my anthropological perspective. Those who protest against "Western ethnocentrism" willingly imagine that they owe nothing to the West since they vehemently attack it. In reality, their perspective is the most Western that has ever existed, more typically Western than that of their opponents. The revolt against ethnocentrism is an invention of the West, nonexistent elsewhere. Its first great literary success is the famous essay by Montaigne on "The Cannibals," which is already over four hundred years old. The author's anti-Western rhetoric, not always in good faith, is the starting point of a long war against only one ethnocentrism, of course, that of the West itself. This endeavor produces its most beautiful masterpieces in the 18th century and resurfaces, more virulent than ever, after the Second World War. What characterizes the most recent phase is the abandonment of the elegance and humor of the great ancestors, in favor of very 20th-century neologisms, such as the word "ethnocentrism" itself. The rococo trinkets of the Enlightenment era are covered with a slightly thick veneer. Where Montesquieu said, "How can one be Persian?" our contemporaries roar "against Western ethnocentrism." The essence of the debate has hardly changed. "This debate is, moreover, legitimate. Western culture is ethnocentric too, it is obvious, as ethnocentric as all the others and in a more brutally effective way, of course, because of its power. It is not a matter of denying this, but why not also recognize an irrefutable historical evidence at the same time? Unlike all other cultures, which have always been straightforwardly and unapologetically ethnocentric, we Westerners are always simultaneously ourselves and our own enemy. We are the supreme Majesty and the opposition to His Majesty. We condemn what we are, or believe to be, with often ineffective fervor, but at least we try. What is happening today is another example of the passion for self-criticism, which only exists among beings touched by Judeo-Christian civilization." Excerpt from "The One by Whom Scandal Comes" by René Girard |
By Western, does he perhaps mean "almost Western but then a little bit East, and not all the cultures obviously" or something?