On the Brink of a New Dark Age: The Clash of Two Western Civilizations
Rudyard Kipling once wrote: “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.”
In his poem, Kipling was expressing his belief that cultures of the east and west were so intrinsically different that any hope for harmony or mutual interest was little more than a delusion.
As an unrepentant racist and British imperialist, Kipling was quite certain that he exemplified the best of western civilization, founded as it was upon global submission of the dark-skinned races to a British hegemon which was mandated to rule the world as overlords. This imperial view was founded upon a ‘master-slave’ ordering of society, an intense racism and a tendency to treat the individual members of society like hedonistic pleasure-seeking creatures incapable of acting upon any higher principles of justice, or goodness beyond their local immediate concerns.
None other than arch priest of British free trade, Adam Smith had laid out this view in his 1759 ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’:
“The care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible
Article from LewRockwell
