Michael Perrone

There has been a marked decline in the power of the Western mind. The late 19th century imperialists were self-satisfied high racialists. Moderns are Boasian antiracists seemingly committed to universal human rights etc. But how do the two compare in their powers of comprehension? Take the problem of understanding the power of the Houthis. A British imperialist from 1890 would have no trouble at all classifying them as 'a martial race'. Even if coded in racialist terms, there was a clear *recognition* of the anthropological variation in the world. They understood that the Gurkhas and the Pathans were not like the Baniyas and the Brahmins. That something distinguished the former from the latter. And that this anthropological variation had *operational significance* to the running of the empire. You could not get the Brahmin to hold the front any more than you get the Gurkha to understand Shakespeare. Modern Westerners reject out of hand the very idea of systematic anthropological variation. Populations are only distinguished, if they are distinguished at all, by how free (Westernized) and unfree (traditional) they are. You have either thrown off the yoke of tradition and embraced the ideas of the Enlightenment. Or you live under the oppressive weight of misguided traditional ideas like not wanting your daughter to have the right to fuck whoever she wants, whenever she wants. I do not mean here to suggest that the turn-of-the-century imperialists intuited the discoveries of midcentury social anthropology. Evans-Pritchard only wrote about the Nuer in 1940. I mean instead that the European imperialists *paid attention to the world*, instead of being lost in their own internal world. No doubt they had their own discourse of self-congratulation. But they knew that the world was strange and worthy of attention. That there was something about the world that they did not teach you at Eaton and Harrow, and that you had to learn in the field, so to speak. There was a certain empiricism in their attitude. A curiosity about the world. To the modern West, there is no outside world worth paying attention to. All that exists is conformity or incongruence with Boasian antiracist universalism, ie the modern Enlightenment. The peoples of the world cannot be distinguished in any interesting way at all. The world is flat in an essential sense. The Moderns are, strictly speaking, morons by the standards of the late 19th century.