Why We Judge the West Differently
For some time now, I’ve noticed something rather strange.
We seem to judge Western civilisation differently from every other civilisation.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying the West shouldn’t be criticised. It should. Like every civilisation before it, the West has committed terrible acts throughout its history. Empires have conquered. Nations have oppressed. Innocent people have suffered. That is the story of humanity, not of one particular civilisation.
What I find curious is something else.
Why do we seem to judge the West by a different standard?
When we talk about Western history, we rightly demand honesty. We expect it to confront slavery, colonialism, racism and every other dark chapter in its past. We expect its mistakes to be taught in schools, debated in public and remembered for generations.
But why do we expect so much less of everyone else?
Why is it that the civilisation most willing to expose its own failures often finds itself under the greatest moral suspicion, while many societies that have never seriously confronted their own histories seem to escape the same level of scrutiny?
The West doesn’t simply tolerate criticism.
It preserves it.
Walk into almost any major museum in Europe and you’ll find exhibitions dedicated to colonialism, slavery, antisemitism or war. Open a history textbook and you’ll find entire chapters devoted to the darkest moments in Western history. Turn on the television and you’ll find documentaries, debates and investigations examining the failures of Western governments and institutions.
When you stop and think about it, that’s actually quite remarkable.
The West has built societies where people are free to criticise their own civilisation—often more harshly than anyone else ever could. It publishes books questioning its own history, opens its archives, allows journalists to investigate those in power and teaches its children about the worst things it has ever done.
History suggests that this is far from normal. Many societies have responded to uncomfortable truths very differently. Some denied them. Others buried them. Many simply carried on as though nothing had happened. The West, by contrast, gradually developed a culture in which examining its own failures became an expectation. Looking honestly in the mirror became one of its defining characteristics.
Could that be part of the reason we perceive the West so differently?
Could it be that we know more about the failures of Western civilisation simply because Western civilisation has spent so much time exposing them?
The West actually preserves the evidence against itself.
The Other Half of the Story
Take slavery as an example.
Few institutions have left a darker stain on human history. For centuries, millions of people were bought, sold and treated as property. It remains one of humanity’s greatest moral failures.
Yet the story we tell about slavery often begins surprisingly late.
For many people, it begins with European ships arriving on the west coast of Africa and transporting enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. That story is true. But it isn’t where the story begins.
Long before Europeans became involved, slavery was already deeply embedded in many parts of Africa. Rival kingdoms and tribes enslaved prisoners taken in war and sold them through established trading networks. European demand undoubtedly expanded that system, but it did not create it.
Nor was Africa unique.
Slavery was one of humanity’s oldest institutions. It existed across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. For most of recorded history, it was not regarded as a moral outrage. It was regarded as a normal part of civilisation.
That changes the picture.
Slavery was not a uniquely Western evil.
It was a human one.
But if slavery was so deeply woven into human history, why did it begin to disappear?
That is the part of the story we rarely stop to consider.
In Britain, a growing abolitionist movement began arguing that slavery was fundamentally immoral. Men like William Wilberforce spent decades campaigning against the slave trade, driven largely by Christian convictions about the inherent worth of every human being.
Britain eventually abolished the slave trade and later slavery itself. It then spent decades using the Royal Navy to intercept slave ships and pressure other nations to abandon the practice. Across the Atlantic, America would eventually fight a devastating civil war with slavery at its heart.
One of humanity’s oldest institutions, accepted for thousands of years across countless civilisations, was no longer simply criticised.
It was rejected.
That moral revolution changed the world.
Yet when slavery is discussed today, that transformation often occupies only a small part of the story. We remember, quite rightly, that the West participated in slavery. We spend far less time asking why the West became the civilisation that helped bring one of humanity’s oldest institutions to an end.
If one civilisation spends centuries documenting its own failures while another buries them, future generations will inevitably know more about the first than the second. Over time, transparency itself begins to distort our perception. We mistake openness for greater guilt, when in reality it often reflects a greater willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. That doesn’t make the West innocent. But it may explain why its failures occupy such a disproportionate place in our understanding of history.
When Self-Criticism Becomes Self-Contempt
Why does any of this matter?
Because the stories a civilisation tells about itself shape the way it sees itself.
Imagine growing up learning almost exclusively about the failures of your civilisation. You learn about slavery, colonialism, racism and oppression. Those things should be taught. They are part of the story.
But what if that becomes almost the entire story?
What if you hear far less about the ideas that challenged those injustices, the movements that corrected them, or the values that made those reforms possible?
You don’t inherit a balanced understanding of your civilisation.
You inherit a picture of it that is almost entirely defined by its failures.
It should hardly surprise us, then, that many young people now struggle to believe there is anything uniquely valuable about the civilisation they have inherited.
The problem isn’t that we teach the West’s failures.
The problem is that we increasingly teach them in isolation from the ideas and institutions that made the West capable of recognising those failures in the first place.
Self-criticism is one of the West’s greatest strengths. A civilisation that cannot examine itself cannot improve.
But when criticism becomes detached from the story of self-correction, it slowly becomes something else.
It becomes self-contempt.
There is an important difference between believing your civilisation should become better and believing it deserves to disappear.
I worry that we are beginning to lose sight of that distinction.
A Civilisation Without Confidence
That change in attitude doesn’t remain in classrooms or history books.
Ideas have consequences.
A civilisation that no longer believes there is anything uniquely valuable about itself will eventually struggle to explain why its culture should be preserved, why its values should be defended or why newcomers should be expected to adopt them.
That is one of the reasons immigration has become such a difficult conversation across much of the Western world.
For years, slogans like “diversity is our strength” were presented as self-evident truths. Diversity can indeed be a strength. Diversity of ideas, backgrounds and experiences often is. But diversity is not a magic ingredient that automatically strengthens every society, regardless of the cultures, values and beliefs involved.
Successful societies depend on more than diversity.
They depend on trust.
They depend on shared values.
And they depend on enough people believing that those values are worth preserving.
That is why integration matters.
Integration is not simply about learning a language or finding a job. It is about joining a shared civic culture. But that becomes remarkably difficult when the host society itself has become uncertain about what that culture is—or whether it is even appropriate to expect others to embrace it.
Across Europe, we are beginning to see the consequences.
France has warned about the long-term influence of the Muslim Brotherhood on national cohesion. Sweden continues to grapple with unprecedented gang violence. Britain is still reckoning with the failures that allowed the grooming gang scandals to continue for years. Even countries like Finland, where I now live, are beginning to ask questions that would once have been dismissed as alarmist.
These are different countries with different histories and different challenges.
But they are increasingly wrestling with the same underlying question.
What does it actually mean to become part of our society?
That question becomes remarkably difficult to answer once a civilisation loses confidence in itself.
None of this has happened in isolation.
A civilisation that loses confidence in itself inevitably becomes more vulnerable to those who would like to see it weakened.
That should not surprise us.
Throughout history, rival powers have always looked for weaknesses in their competitors. Sometimes those weaknesses were military. Sometimes they were economic. Increasingly, they are cultural.
Russia has become adept at exploiting political and cultural divisions within Western societies. China invests heavily in shaping international narratives while tightly controlling discussion within its own borders. Qatar has poured vast sums of money into Western schools and universities, extending its influence into institutions responsible for educating future generations.
None of these countries are doing anything unusual.
They are pursuing what they believe to be their own national interests.
The more important question is why those efforts have become increasingly effective.
Hostile influence rarely creates divisions from nothing.
It amplifies divisions that already exist.
Propaganda is most effective when it has something to attach itself to. A society that has become deeply uncertain about its own history, identity and values presents fertile ground for anyone seeking to deepen those doubts.
That is why I do not believe this story is ultimately about Russia, China or Qatar.
It is about us.
Our rivals did not invent the cracks.
They simply noticed them.
There Must Be Something Worth Preserving
Perhaps this is why I find the current mood in the West so unsettling.
I grew up in South Africa.
I know what it looks like when trust between people begins to erode. I know what happens when crime becomes normal, when communities retreat into themselves, and when people slowly stop believing that tomorrow will be better than today.
Too many people in Europe and North America speak as though peace, prosperity and social trust are the natural state of human affairs. They are not.
They are achievements.
They were built over centuries, fought for, protected by generations before us, and sustained by ideas and institutions that too many of us now take for granted.
Civilisations are far easier to inherit than they are to build.
They are easier to dismantle than they are to restore.
The purpose of understanding history is not to flatter ourselves.
It is to understand ourselves.
The West should continue examining its failures honestly. Its capacity for self-criticism remains one of its greatest strengths. A civilisation that cannot examine itself cannot improve.
But honesty demands that we tell the whole story.
We should remember not only the West’s failures, but also the ideas and institutions that enabled it to confront those failures. That story did not end with abolition, nor does it belong only to history.
Even today, the West continues to host its own criticism. Journalists investigate those in power, governments are challenged in court, citizens openly protest their leaders and elections allow governments to be removed without violence. People are free to change their religion, criticise their own country and question those in authority in ways that remain impossible in many parts of the world.
These freedoms have become so ordinary to many of us that we barely notice them. Yet millions of people can only dream of living in societies where such things are possible.
The West remains imperfect. It always will. But its imperfections are not evidence of a civilisation beyond saving. They are evidence of a civilisation still capable of recognising its failures and striving to correct them.
That tradition is worth preserving.
Because a civilisation can only preserve itself if its people still believe there is something worth preserving.