Our Society Isn't Euro-centric, It's Reason-centric
While our history is Euro-centric, in the sense that the main focus of North American history is the history of the people who founded our nations, I never had the sense that our society rejected or ignored ideas from outside of Europe. Yet despite this, I hear people who are strong proponents of intersectionality and critical race theory constantly say that our learning and society is Euro-centric, and ignores discoveries and knowledge that don’t come from white people. I find this astonishingly biased, and it’s one of the reasons that I think these are terrible ideas that are poisoning the minds of a new generation of thinkers.
I mean for one thing, our main religion is still Christianity, which isn’t a European idea. The idea of the Mormons which was basically a North American white reboot of Christianity isn’t all that popular in our society. One would think if we were obsessed with only white ideas, this would have been a huge hit. Instead, our favorite theology comes out of the middle-east. There’s also our fascination with eastern religions and medicine as well, with Buddhism and Taoism being popular, as well as meditation and yoga making up a significant part of our society. Who has never heard of One-Thousand and One Arabian Nights? Those stories are filled with mythology from the middle-east, clearly not European or even Christian at all.
This leads us to great thinkers and philosophers that we revere. While you could argue that people like Socrates and Plato are in fact European, we weren’t settled by Greeks and Romans, these were great thinkers of their era, so they are well known. To show this, Sun Tzu and Confucius are also equally well known. What I’m trying to get at is that as much as we have some historical biases, like our love of Christianity, which was the predominant religion of the settlers, and the teaching of their history taking precedent because it’s part of the founding story, we focus on reason and fascinating ideas more than anything. We are obsessed with finding great tales of moral strength and courage, as well as great deconstructions on what it means to be human. We always want to know more about ourselves and the world around us, no matter where the information comes from.
It seems like this obsession with trying to discredit western thought by saying it’s focused on white ideas is not based in good faith, but instead is used to attack reason in order to subvert it. A reasonable person can see that dividing people by race is contrary to the development we have achieved through the knowledge we have gained from all over the world. If you start to question reason and the pursuit of knowledge and objective thought, then it is much easier for ideology to be pushed upon you. This is how we’ve had reason subverted, people have made us question the very idea of trying to reach objectivity, saying that it is actually a white concept made to discredit people of colour. This idea is of course ludicrous, the idea of reason is universal, as I’ve pointed out. What these people want is for you to not question them, and instead to take their arguments at face value. These are dangerous, disingenuous people, and they should not be allowed to dictate what goes on within our society. Just as we have removed religion from our government, we must not let other dangerous ideologies infect it.