What should you do if you have back pain? You can do what many people did in the village where I grew up. Find an old religious woman, lie face down on the floor, and let her step on your back three times while she recites her prayers. Or you can do what my father used to do, throw away your mattress, put something solid like a tile under your back, and sleep on it until the pain gives up before you do. Or you can go see a doctor and get medication.
If you are Alexander Dugin, the author of The Fourth Political Theory, you will tell me the three methods are equal. You will tell me that the people who invented the third option, and dare to impose it on everyone else, are racist, imperialist and hegemonic. And you will tell me it is a colonization of consciousness.
Dugin rejects the assumption that all societies walk one road that ends in Western liberal, secular, individualist society. To him, that destination is a Western particularity, not a universal law. If he read my example, he would call me an idiot and reject my assumption that Western civilization is the doctor with the medication.
Dugin is free to call me whatever he wants. I am not in China or Russia. Western civilization taught me to respect opinions I despise, never to use violence against my opponents, and never to abuse whatever power I may have to punish dissent. Let him criticize Putin while living in Russia, or criticize the Ayatollah while living in Iran, and see what happens. But for Dugin and many other anti-Western ideologues, criticizing the West is the safest thing they can do. So they become experts at it.
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker presents extensive quantitative evidence that Western civilization was both the womb and the driving force behind everything that made the modern world a better place. Read Pinker next to Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World and Tom Holland’s Dominion, and you will see how the Western Church spent a thousand years breaking the power of the clan, banning cousin marriage and polygamy, and pushing Europeans out of the tribe and into towns, guilds, and universities, where they learned to trust strangers and obey laws rather than fathers. You will also see that the very instincts many people now use to attack the West are themselves Western: the victim matters, the weak have rights, and the slave is equal to his master.
Look at the world today, and you will realize that almost everything good in it carries a Western fingerprint.