From On Identity (Amin Maalouf, 2000) pp58-9
At what moment did the predominance of Western civilisation become virtually irreversible? In the fifteenth century? Not before the eighteenth? But from my present point of view it doesn’t matter. What is both certain and crucial is that one day a certain civilisation seized the reins of the planet. Its science became Science, its medicine Medicine, its philosophy Philosophy, and from then on that trend towards concentration and standardisation has not stopped. On the contrary, it has gone on accelerating, spreading simultaneously to all fields of activity and all continents.
I insist on the point that we are dealing here with an event unprecedented in history. True, there had been times in the past when one civilisation – Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Chinese, Greek, Roman, Arabic or Byzantine seemed to be in advance of all the others. But what has been set in motion in Europe during the last few centuries is a completely different phenomenon. I see it as a kind of fertilisation. That is the only comparison that comes to mind: a lot of spermatozoa make for the ovule and one of them succeeds in piercing the membrane. All the other “suitors” are then rejected; henceforth there is just one “father” and it is him that the child will resemble. Why him and not another? Was this particular “suitor” superior in some ways to his neighbours and rivals? Was he healthier or more promising than the rest? Not necessarily; not in any obvious way. All kinds of factors are involved, some of them linked to ability, others to circumstance or chance.
But this isn’t the most significant part of the comparison. What matters most is what comes next. The question is not so much why Aztec or Islamic or Chinese civilisation did not manage to become the dominant one – each of them had its hang-ups, its weaknesses, its strokes of bad luck. What we need to know is why,, when European civilisation took the lead, all the others began to decline, and why they all became marginalised in a way that now seems irreversible. Probably – though this only begins to provide an answer – it was because mankind as a whole now had at its disposal the technical means of worldwide dominance. But let us leave aside for the moment the word dominance and say instead that mankind was ripe for the emergence of a worldwide civilisation. The egg was ready to be fertilised, and western Europe performed the deed.
To such effect that we have only to look around us to see that the West is everywhere: in Vladivostok as in Singapore, Boston, Dakar, Tashkent, Sao Paolo, Noumea, Jerusalem and Algiers. For half a millennium everything with a lasting effect on the ideas of men, their health, the landscape that surrounds them and their daily lives has been the work of the West. Capitalism, communism, fascism, psychoanalysis, ecology, electricity, aviation, automobiles, the atomic bomb, the telephone, television, computers, penicillin, the pill, human rights and gas chambers. Yes, all of it, the weal of the world and its woe all of it has come from the West.
Wherever on the planet one happens to live, all modernisation is now westernisation. And this trend is merely accentuated and accelerated by technical progress. True, monuments and other great achievements bearing the imprint of other civilisations are to be seen everywhere. But everything that is newly created – buildings, institutions, aids to knowledge or improvements to life-styles – all is produced in the image of the West.
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