EnglishIsWesternCivilizationUniversalPage08

7 policy problem has been for Middle Eastern leaders to choose between Mecca or mechanization and how they can be made compatible.

The concept of unrestricted accelerating change as the supreme good, based philosophically on Darwin’s theory of evolution and practically on the scientific and technological revolution, is the pretext always used to justify the wholesale and indiscriminate destruction of all non-European civilizations and the universal establishment of Western cultural domination. The following views, expressed by the best-known of all American anthropologists, are typical of this thought:

It is my firm belief that American civilization is not simply the last flower to bloom on the outmoded tree of European history, doomed to perish in a common totalitarian holocaust, but something new and different. American civilization is new because it has come to rest on a philosophy of production and plenty instead of saving and scarcity and because the men who built it have themselves incorporated the ability to change and change swiftly as need arises. For three centuries, men of vastly different ways of life have come to America, left behind their old language, their old attachments to land and river, their betters and subordinates, their kin, their old joint families and their icons, and have learned to speak, walk, to eat and dress in a new fashion.

As we have learned to change ourselves, so we believe that others can change also and we believe that they will want to change, that men only have to see a better way of life to reach out for it spontaneously. We conceive of them as seeing a light and following it freely (pp. 19-20)… The speed with which European immigrants adapted to American life was largely due to entering a world where everything was different, to which one brought only the clothes in which one stood and which were easy to discard. There was no old house style to remind one of the old social relationships that no longer held. Instead, a different kind of house lived in by those who