Western man, and “man”?

From an exchange with a Misanthropic Correspondent:

Misanthropic Correspondent to LA:

At some point, we’ve got to confront key liberal myths—like the idea that “man” is essentially a white middle-class American—or we will lose.

LA to MC:

Are you saying that we think of man as essentially a white middle-class American, and so we falsely project that onto the whole of humanity, thinking that everyone is like that, and because we believe in “man,” that makes it impossible for us to exclude people wholly unlike ourselves, whereas if we recognized that “man” is much more like the base being that you described earlier, we would stop being open to “man” as such?

MC to LA:

That’s a part of it.

More fundamental is just the brute fact that human beings, as such, are not noble or even particularly admirable beings. They are mostly smelly stupid peasants and only a small percentage rise to meaningful states of civilization.

I am a misanthrope, but not an unthinking one.

LA to MC:

There is a further angle on this. The very concept of “man” as we know it comes from the West and its parent cultures in ancient Israel and Greece. Thus Genesis 1:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Or Psalms 8:

What is man, that thou art
mindful of him? and the son of man,
that thou visitest him?
For thou hast made him a little
lower than the angels, and hast
crowned him with glory and honour.
Thou madest him to have dominion
over the works of thy hands; thou
hast put all things under his feet.

The Bible shows man as an exalted being in the plan of God’s creation.

But Jews and Christians, you’re suggesting, have a skewed picture. Westerners had these higher qualities, and so formed an exalted concept of man based on themselves. But since in fact Westerners are not typical of man, their exalted concept of man is a dangerous delusion.

This explains Western suicide. Westerners cannot grasp that their noble concept of man is based to a considerable degree on themselves, not on the whole human race. Their fateful error is to universalize from their own particularity, not realizing that much of what they’re valuing is really their own particularity, and as a result, they end up destroying their own particularity by being suicidally respectful of and open to the Other.

MC to LA:

Well, I’m not sure I agree with these scriptures. I see most homo sapiens as peasants, of whom a small percentage do anything worthy of respect.

Unlike my Misantrophic Correspondent, I do not deny or doubt the concept of man, and the essential dignity of man. That the essence of man, the form of man, is made in the image of God is one of greatest of all truths. But obviously human beings vary greatly in the degree to which they fulfill the concept of man. There is also something to the idea that Westerners project their own qualities and standards onto the rest of the human race who do not necessarily share our qualities and standards, and the result is a suicidal double standard, in which we, acting on the basis of our standards, are sacrificing ourselves for the sake of people who don’t.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 12, 2005 11:28 AM | Send