It is important in our political and social moment to stay away from extremes. One extreme is the belief that the specific character traits and virtues that Western culture prizes actually represent universal values, ones that ought to be exported and adopted across the globe. This view “holds that peoples in all societies want to adopt Western values, institutions, and practices,” wrote Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations. The Western universalist attitude toward the world is to reshape it in its own image. Should the people of these nations resist, “if they seem not to have that desire and to be committed to their own traditional cultures,” he writes, they are said to be “victims of a false consciousness.”
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