The West: What Jordan Peterson and the Right Get Wrong

Reason, values, free markets, and one million other myths that have become a weaponized ideology as America and Europe flounder

I’ve been thinking about doing a piece on what I see as the main right-wing misconceptions and myths surrounding the term: the West. And highlight the problems that arise from its over-use in today’s political discourse in American Christian nationalism, European nativism, and the perceived ‘civilizational battle’ being waged.

In mainstream media, the West typically refers in geopolitical terms to the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but the definition, values, and pop history vary depending on who is speaking. It’s a catch-all term that wraps in some ahistoric Judeo-Christian roots mixed with Greek rationality, science, capitalism, and ‘Enlightenment values’ best represented by the US constitution surrounding rule of law, rights, and freedoms.

Whether it be the Proud Boys, famed white nationalists, far-right EU politicians, Jordan Peterson, or every right-wing nutty pundit on the internet, they claim any and all historical progress in the world has come from the West, that it is under ‘attack,’ and that we should be doing everything we can to ‘defend it.’

It’s extremely frustrating how many falsehoods there are surrounding the history and role the West plays in the world today.

It is claimed to be the shining ‘liberal democracies’ on a hill, trying their best to ‘share their values’ and bitchin’ economic systems with the hoards of inferior cultures who just can’t seem to ‘implement Western systems’ and climb the developmental ladder.

It can be a tough term and idea to pick apart because it’s so vast, all-encompassing, and malleable, but I’m going to take a swing because the modern use by right-wingers has become weaponized and is usually a simple and obvious stand-in for whiteness.

A litmus test to show it’s mostly about skin color is asking oneself: is Chile — or any other Latin American country — considered a ‘Western nation?’

It is in the Western Hemisphere. It has a similar history as the US, being invaded by a genocidal colonizing European empire that largely destroyed and supplanted the indigenous culture. It’s a nation that speaks a European language, practices Catholicism, and has a constitution that free-market demi-gods Milton Friedman and James Buchanan assisted in crafting.

Chile checks all the boxes. Why would it not be considered ‘the West?’

Because the modern use of the term is a dog whistle, which is why avowed white nationalists have learned to tone down the ‘white power’ chants and crank up the ‘West is best’ rallying cries.

It works because of the level of historical ignorance as to how the world got to where it is, what the West contributed, and why there is a tangible decline. That ignorance is being wielded by the Steve Bannons and Mike Pompeos of the world, who then literally call for a grand crusade against enemies both foreign and domestic to save the West and its supposed values.

It’s always the same rhetorical pretzel: the West is the best and the greatest cultural phenomenon in all of human history and the most rational and the strongest and other cultures contributed next to nothing and are inferior BUT the West is under constant attack and dying and fading and barely hanging on and losing the existential civilizational battle against those same inferior cultures.

It’s bananas, and I want to push back against this madness, but have yet to start my non-profit that has kind-hearted volunteers stand in front of Turning Point USA and Jordan Peterson events, give hugs, look these lost souls in the eyes, and gently say, “You’re suffering from late-stage financialized capitalism, my friend.”

So instead, I’ll work out some thoughts as to what I think the right gets wrong about the West, and why it is so damn dangerous.

What I mean to expose here is that there is no stable “Western” tradition at all. — Daniel Walden

The history is confused and, like many historical traditions, has always been shaped, manipulated, and used to advance the political aims of the wealthy and powerful. Writer, classicist, and philologist (one who studies historical linguistics) Daniel Walden wrote a great piece in Current Affairs a few years ago entitled, Dismantling the “West,” in which he gives an extensive breakdown of the origins and misaligned use of the term.

The idea of the “West” as a distinct and self-contained set of cultures and works is a deeply modern idea, and the gaps between contemporary articulations of “the West” and those from even the middle of the 20th century show how closely that idea reflects the twists and turns of modernity rather than any kind of unchanging body of historical tradition… What I mean to expose here is that there is no stable “Western” tradition at all. — D.W.

Walden does a great job showing that the idea of a linear line from Greece to Rome to Medieval Europe to the Enlightenment to America isn’t accurate and is a relatively new phenomenon. He explains that one cannot talk about European intellectual thought without mentioning the Golden Age of Islam and thinkers like Ibn-Rushd in Andalucia or that many Greek texts were translated into Arabic before any other European languages and one can’t imagine medieval scholastic work without the influence of Arabic philosophy.

Not to mention the ridiculously obvious truth that Europe had been engaged in trade and cultural exchanges for centuries with different groups throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Eurasia, and at different points in history, those influences had an immense impact on European populations and thought.

There’s also the simple but uncomfortable fact that Indian philosophers developed systems of logic a few hundred years before Aristotle came around, and the way the Ben Shapiros of the world use the term ‘Judeo-Christian’ is also a 20th-century ‘Western’ idea that whitewashes thousands of years of systemic antisemitism that was perfected by Europeans and isn’t a framing most self-respecting historians would use.

A book could be written on any one of these myths alone, and a Medium essay can obviously only scratch the surface. One that was recently published, The Dawn of Everything by the late anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow shows that many of the highly-touted Enlightenment values were lifted from Native Americans and other cultures and then disseminated throughout Europe.

…even in cases where Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they were getting their ideas from foreign sources (as the German philosopher Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz did when he urged his compatriots to adopt Chinese models of statecraft), there’s a tendency for contemporary historians to insist they weren’t really serious; or else when they said they were embracing Chinese, or Persian, or Indigenous American ideas they weren’t really Chinese, Persian, or Indigenous American ideas at all but ones they themselves had made up and merely attributed to exotic Others.

The list goes on and on and on and one could write an encyclopedia series on the confused history alone. I highly recommend that book, the Walden piece, and the podcast episode ‘Western Civilization’ and White Supremacy: The Right-Wing Co-option of Antiquity by Citations Needed.

In short, it’s a modern creation used to give credit for all historical advancement to the West and neatly tie the histories of Europe, America, and often Israel that is then used for strategic geopolitical purposes.

Because the history is so all over the place and incorrect, Westerners largely have no idea how the world came to be and are receptive to the ‘West is best’ rhetoric that ignores the intellectual influence and contributions of other cultures and completely leaves out centuries of colonialism and genocide when trying to explain why Western nations are wealthier than others.

…even in cases where Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they were getting their ideas from foreign sources… there’s a tendency for contemporary historians to insist they weren’t really serious — TDOE

The lack of true understanding when it comes to colonialism, even here in Europe, is something that consistently surprises me. It’s like people think history started in 1990, and all nations were on an even playing field. Then, due to these awesome Western values and logical thinking, Europe, America, and the other settler colonial white majority states rose above the rest on their merits alone.

Check out this real quote from Jordan Peterson: People are afraid to say them. Here’s the first one: the fundamental assumptions of western civilization are valid. How about that? You know, it’s not (audience applause) you think it’s an accident? Oh, here’s how you find out. Which countries do people want to move away from? Hey, not ours. Which countries do people want to move to? Ours. Guess what? They work better and it’s not because we went around stealing everything we could get our hands on. It’s because we got certain fundamental assumptions right. Thank god for that. After thousands and thousands of years of trying and because of that, we’ve managed to establish a set of civilizations that are shining lights in the world.

Ignoring the stupid metric of people leaving one nation for another as a sign of cultural superiority, that level of confident ignorance comes from a man once heralded as ‘the West’s greatest intellectual’ and proves the point of this piece while serving as a clear example of why the West is in decline. There’s zero understanding of how the world got to where it is.

The obvious caveat must be made that there is merit in the values supposedly ‘invented’ and ‘embodied’ by the West that I assume Peterson is always referring to. Living in a country with rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, etc. is way way way better than living somewhere run by brute force gangsterism where we’re all subject to the whims of a dictator or warlord with the most guns.

But for a man born in 1962, in the heart of national liberation movements across the world, Jordan Peterson is weirdly obtuse or dismissive of the role of Europeans ‘stealing everything we could get our hands on.’ Huge portions of the developing world were still European colonies when that dude was a child.

The only historical reference ever made by Americans and Europeans is WWII, but somehow their history books forget to mention the part where once liberated from the Nazis, Europeans went right back to brutally subjugating colonies.

A very non-exhaustive list off the top of my head: the French went back and started murdering Tunisians, the Belgians resumed their slaughter of the Congolese, the Dutch loaded their guns and hurried back to Indonesia, and the Brits continued to starve India and steal what turned out to be an estimated $45,000,000,000,000 over the course of their colonial empire in that one nation alone.

European genocides throughout the developing world are not taught nor is the extent to which they pillaged every corner of the globe. Some of the most grotesque atrocities in human history are completely left out of history classes.

Then come the mid-20th century, it wasn’t cool to have colonies and they also couldn’t afford to subjugate so many indigenous populations any longer. European powers then tried to take credit for ‘giving’ them ‘independence,’ while imposing military dictatorships and setting up elaborate corporate control, financing schemes, and debt traps to continue extracting the wealth of the newly independent nations.

It is a practice that continues to this day, and Jason Hickel at the University of London School of Economics estimates the Global North steals roughly $10 trillion per year from the Global South.

Not only were reparations never paid, colonialism never ended; it simply became neocolonialism.

That historical fact cannot be ignored and must be centered in every discussion of poverty, development, and inequality between nations. But according to people like freaking Jordan Peterson, we’re rich because we’re smarter and have better values.

It’s an infuriating, condescending, and incredibly ignorant worldview.

It is a practice that continues to this day, and Jason Hickel at the University of London School of Economics estimates the Global North steals roughly $10 trillion per year from the Global South.

This shouldn’t have to be said, but those purported values are also something that have never been put into practice with any consistency at home or abroad. The Constitution guaranteeing the right to vote only to land-owning white men, slavery, Jim Crow laws, Japanese internment, colonial concentration camps, the domestic spy regimes of COINTELPRO, red-lining, countless coups, countless invasions, Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition, extra-judicial murder, McCarthyism, drone strikes, torture programs, Operation Mockingbird, everything the CIA and MI5 have done since their inceptions, and the modern corporate-assisted surveillance states are again an incomplete list off the top of my head.

It’s a historical reality that the rule of law is applied differently to rich and poor — even at a global International Criminal Court level — or that non-Europeans living in the West have experienced those cultures differently from people who look like me and Jordan Peterson.

Again, America and Europe tend to do a better job than most when it comes to justice systems and protecting rights, and they are important values to strive for and uphold, but let’s stop using the ‘shining light on a hill’ metaphor while completely ignoring historical and contemporary atrocities both foreign and domestic. Right-wingers are so offended by their own freaking history that they’re trying to keep it from being taught.

Ask a Native American or any developing nation how much the West values the sanctity of a contract or believes in democracy and the right to self-determination. Or ask any refugee how much the West values the rule of law as mothers and children, who have a legal right to seek asylum, are pushed back out to sea at gunpoint.

Even the free press has always been a joke and is recently being exposed as such. The ‘liberal democracies’ don’t look anything like Athens in structure or practice and have been proven to not be democracies at all.

Science that doesn’t fit a right-wing political ideology, like climate change, is completely ignored, just like the long history of Christian mystics, creationism, and thousands of episodes of seeing a crying Virgin Mary in a Waffle House BLT Melt — it all sounds super rational to me.

All of that is to say the highly touted values are nice ideas but in effect are marketing terms used by the West to wave at their citizens as proof they’re the chosen ones living in the great nations while those same nations support neocolonial corporate extraction of wealth, military interventions to guarantee it continues, and outright murder that leads refugees to flee those Western-backed wars to which Jordan Peterson-types then again use as justification that we’re better than them, and they’re coming here because our countries run better and they don’t have the culture or ability to properly manage their own nations.

The wealth the West enjoys was not created on free market capitalism alone. Colonialism, protectionism, regulation, and the counter-balance of radical socialist parties were instrumental but are all ignored.

The role free market capitalism played is another area rife with bullsh*t. Have you ever wondered why Europe could rebound so quickly after being completely destroyed in WWII while developing nations have had ‘independence’ for decades but can’t seem to achieve the same results? Do we really believe they can’t just copy the European or American economic model?

A very simple study of post-war Europe and the Marshall Plan shows that what rebuilt European economies was not ‘free markets.’ There was the nationalization of key industries and highly protectionist regulation that fostered domestic production against cheaper foreign goods — and, of course, colonialism.

Economist Michael Lewis wrote the book on America’s 19th-century development entitled, America’s Protectionist Takeoff, detailing how America got its economy going by basically doing the opposite of what free market fundamentalist principles would recommend.

But those are economic policies and paths to development that poor nations are explicitly prohibited from enacting. Any move in that direction opens the door for a coup, sanctions, or direct military action from the freedom-loving West. Do you think a country with such vast resource wealth as the Congo is poorer than a tiny state like Belgium because of values, culture, or the always-blamed corruption? They’re being systemically held down.

They’re not underdeveloped; they’re over-exploited. — Michael Parenti

Again, entire books are written on the myths of capitalism, but one of my favorites that’s not necessarily on that theme but runs parallel is The Rise and Fall of American Growth by economist Robert Gordon.

In it, he talks about what he calls the special century of 1870–1970. In that period, humans figured out germ theory, vaccines, antibiotics, combustion engines, and got running water and electricity in hundreds of millions of homes — mostly through government initiative.

Through those developments, humans were able to harness cheap yet extremely powerful energy while working more efficiently and throughout the night and no longer had to cut off an arm or die when a sliver got infected. All of that led to massive population increases, productivity gains, and crazy economic growth.

Again, that’s not to say free market capitalism isn’t a revolutionary force that can drive immense innovation in some sectors but our historical analysis of the role it played in creating the world is reductionist and propagandistic. There were other elements at play.

I love to ask a free marketeer how the Soviet Union, in a few short decades, without an ounce of capitalism, was able to go from an illiterate agrarian society to building a massive industrial force, defeating the Nazis, housing tens of millions, and putting the first satellite and man in space, then watch their gears grind and smoke come out of their ears.

We’re taught an over-simplified version and ignore the role worker movements and socialists played in forcing labor policies into law that created fairer working conditions and helped create the middle-class wealth we used to enjoy but, due to not being taught the real history, have lost as we backslide into Robber Baron-era unregulated free markets and feudal levels of inequality.

Again, we have no idea how the world got to where it is, on any level. And that is why the West is in decline, and there’s growing anger in Europe and America.

We need to re-learn the lessons of the early 20th century, enforce already-on-the-books anti-trust laws, and reel in corporate greed. Economic growth is meaningless if we don’t know the distribution of the gains.

That anger is a dangerous thing and is being harnessed and pointed at any number of ‘existential’ non-Western ‘enemies’ when the very obvious culprits for much of the decline are the corporate capture of government and neoliberal economic policies. The voice and needs of the people are completely ignored when they are even remotely in conflict with shareholder value maximization.

GDPs have steadily risen and corporate profits are at all-time highs while wages have remained stagnant and the cost of living has steadily increased, reducing the quality of life for the majority and squeezing the middle class into the working poor.

Meanwhile, the right will claim the decline is because of a deviation from Western values, or Jordan Peterson hilariously says a secret cabal of Marxists are to blame, and Donald Trump and the far right in Europe say it’s multi-culturalism, immigration, and China, but closing the border, rooting out the Marxists in a McCarthyism 2.0, or banning Chinese goods or head scarfs won’t do anything to curb corporate control and the lack of democracy.

Without an ideological shift, profits will always come before the well-being of society even as the entire planet is burning and reaching a point of no return when it comes to global warming.

The solutions discussion appears to be ‘open,’ when in reality it is a false debate within a very narrow neoliberal framework, limiting the imagination and available paths forward.

Because the history is so propagandistically wrong and we have no idea how we got to this place, most have no clue how to remedy the situation. That leaves them susceptible to the far-right ‘populist’ anti-this-that-and-the-other messaging.

It’s simply casting blame outside while Europe drives its economy off of a cliff with self-imposed sanctions and geopolitical rivals are sitting back and waiting for the US to implode from the inside.

The anger in America and Europe is justified but is being weaponized in a very dangerous fashion.

Rather than have a real conversation about the history and role the West plays in the world, an open debate about free market capitalism, and a humble discussion about the cycle of empires while acknowledging that, due to their size, China and Russia have historically always been and will continue to be influential players, we’re constantly bombarded with talk about an ‘inevitable’ WWIII.

But superpowers directly clashing in the 21st century means the end of humanity, so we should be doing everything we can to push back on that suicidal mayhem.

Instead, everyone continues to speak in ‘the West versus the rest’ terms and is driving humanity towards extinction.

The values are valid and have merit, and the West has contributed many great things to the human project. We can love the history and culture and embrace the unbelievably unique force that is America while learning the horrifically dark side and acknowledging the contributions and realities of other traditions. There’s even something to learn from them.

We need cooperation now more than ever to not leave the planet an unlivable burning heap of garbage and avoid nuclear war. Those are the existential threats, not immigrants, Marxists, or nations with a different governmental structure.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a proud American, Canadien, Brit, or Czech, but the problems arise when claims of cultural superiority and demands of subjugation are made.

The West can be itself while allowing the rest to do as they see fit. But if true sovereignty were granted to all nations tomorrow, we’d see how much our economies run on the exploitation of weaker developing countries.

We’d also see how all Western claims to being virtuous are complete bullsh*t. America, Europe, Canada, and Australia have no moral high ground to stand on.

We need to retire ‘the West is best’ propaganda and stop living in an ahistorical fantasy land of eternal exponential growth and capital accumulation on a limited planet.

There are 8 billion of us.

If we don’t, we’ll soon be nuking each other over freaking fresh water.

Summarize

The West: What Jordan Peterson and the Right Get Wrong

Reason, values, free markets, and one million other myths that have become a weaponized ideology as America and Europe flounder