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permitted--indeed, stands out among human cultures by condemning as barbaric--
such enlightened customs as foot-binding, female genital mutilation, the veil, or suttee.
To try to put our imperfect record on human rights in perspective thus would be to
imply that there is some absolute standard by which all societies, including our own,
can be measured--and that, being a particularly Western idea, must itself be a "Tool of
the Oppressor." When the mind is its own place, perception counts as reality. And
many women and members of minority groups do perceive themselves,
understandably given the mistreatment to which they have been and can still be
subjected, as oppressed.
So how, my post-modernist friends might ask me, are black persons who feel
marginalized and excluded by a still WASP-dominated society
1
to consider the heritage
of Western Civilization as their patrimony? Perhaps by considering that there could
have been no "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" if there had not first been Thoreau's
"Essay on Civil Disobedience." And there could have been no "Essay on Civil
Disobedience" unless there had first been Milton's "Areopagetica." And there could
have been no "Areopagetica" unless there had first been Plato's "Apology of Socrates."
Thus they might come to see certain Dead White European Males as their potential
liberators rather than as merely the engineers of patriarchy and white hegemony. Thus
they might come to see Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as a fruition of the Western
Tradition, not its negation. And to realize that, if they do value equal protection under
the law and at least the chance to be judged by the content of their character as opposed
to the color of their skin, it is precisely Western Civilization, that horrible WASP (in its
American form) phenomenon, that they had better defend, protect, and transmit to the
next generation.
Thus the Traditionalist rests his case. But the Post-Modernist is unimpressed. To
her, the mere presence of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, ongoing racism, sexual
harassment, etc., in the history and in the present of the West, is sufficient to reduce the
traditionalist case to the self-serving set of rationalizations she perceives it to be. When