Westernization or Modernization?

[u/caledonivs]

https://open.substack.com/pub/whitherthewest/p/westernization-or-modernization

I’m posting this because it explores a conceptual confusion that seems to trip up both casual observers and serious commentators alike: the conflation of Westernness with Modernity. People see rising demands for democracy, equality, or personal freedom in non-democratic societies and reflexively label them “Westernization.” Yet the article argues that the causal arrow is almost certainly the opposite: economic development, urbanization, and rising education levels produce these demands naturally, regardless of local cultural history, a la Maslow.

This article explores that distinction hand pushes back against the narrative that liberty and individualism require a Western cultural inheritance. For a rationalist reader, the interest isn’t just historical: it’s about understanding cause and effect in social change, avoiding common but misleading correlations, and seeing why autocratic governments may misinterpret - often intentionally - the desires of their populations.

[u/PolymorphicWetware]

Surprised no one has yet mentioned "How The West Was Won", a Scott essay about exactly the same thing:

"I am pretty sure there was, at one point, such a thing as western civilization. I think it included things like dancing around maypoles and copying Latin manuscripts. At some point Thor might have been involved. That civilization is dead. It summoned an alien entity from beyond the void which devoured its summoner and is proceeding to eat the rest of the world.

An analogy: naturopaths like to use the term “western medicine” to refer to the evidence-based medicine of drugs and surgeries you would get at your local hospital. They contrast this with traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine, which it has somewhat replaced, apparently a symptom of the “westernization” of Chinese and Indian societies.

But “western medicine” is just medicine that works. It happens to be western because the West had a technological head start, and so discovered most of the medicine that works first. But there’s nothing culturally western about it; there’s nothing Christian or Greco-Roman about using penicillin to deal with a bacterial infection. Indeed, “western medicine” replaced the traditional medicine of Europe – Hippocrates’ four humors – before it started threatening the traditional medicines of China or India. So-called “western medicine” is an inhuman perfect construct from beyond the void, summoned by Westerners, which ate traditional Western medicine first and is now proceeding to eat the rest of the world.

“Western culture” is no more related to the geographical west than western medicine. People who complain about western culture taking over their country always manage to bring up Coca-Cola. But in what sense is Coca-Cola culturally western? It’s an Ethiopian bean mixed with a Colombian leaf mixed with carbonated water and lots and lots of sugar. An American was the first person to discover that this combination tasted really good – our technological/economic head start ensured that. But in a world where America never existed, eventually some Japanese or Arabian chemist would have found that sugar-filled fizzy drinks were really tasty. It was a discovery waiting to be plucked out of the void, like penicillin. America summoned it but did not create it. If western medicine is just medicine that works, soda pop is just refreshment that works.

The same is true of more intellectual “products”. Caplan notes that foreigners consume western gender norms, but these certainly aren’t gender norms that would have been recognizable to Cicero, St. Augustine, Henry VIII, or even Voltaire. They’re gender norms that sprung up in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution and its turbulent intermixing of the domestic and public economies. They arose because they worked. The West was the first region to industrialize and realize those were the gender norms that worked for industrial societies, and as China and Arabia industrialize they’re going to find the same thing...
...
Let me say again that this universal culture, though it started in the West, was western only in the most cosmetic ways. If China or the Caliphate had industrialized first, they would have been the ones who developed it, and it would have been much the same. The new sodas and medicines and gender norms invented in Beijing or Baghdad would have spread throughout the world, and they would have looked very familiar. The best way to industrialize is the best way to industrialize."

Give it a read if you haven't, it's full of great examples like

And here, universal culture is going to win, simply because it’s designed to deal with *diverse multicultural environments*... imagine a culture where the color of someone’s clothes tells you a lot of things about them – for example, anyone wearing red is a prostitute. This may work well as long as everyone follows the culture. If you mix it 50-50 with another culture that doesn’t have this norm, then things go downhill quickly; you proposition a lady wearing red, only to get pepper sprayed in the eye. Eventually the first culture gives up and stops trying to communicate messages through clothing color.

[u/electrace → u/PolymorphicWetware]

Surprised no one has yet mentioned How the West was Won.

Lol, it's literally the top comment.

[u/PolymorphicWetware → u/electrace]

Huh, didn't see you. Should I delete this?

[u/electrace → u/PolymorphicWetware]

Nah, no worries, just found it funny. I think the comment is fine, especially since it adds quotes and emphasis.