The West’s historical encounters with Asia and the wider world are much maligned, with sins such as slave-trading and empire-building extensively catalogued in academia and the media. Of course, European populations also engaged with foreign cultures in more positive ways, nurturing a pluralist interest in other civilizations which was globally unprecedented and remains largely unique. Today, even such positive engagement is frequently traduced as ‘Orientalism’ or ‘cultural appropriation.’ This raises the question: how should Westerners interact with the non-Western world?
For much of the past century, the answer was liberal universalism. This ideology distils Western identity into a set of abstract values that might appeal to people from disparate civilizations, and aligns with the rationalist precept that everyone will acknowledge the superiority of liberal values, given the right education and opportunities. In practice, liberal universalism has faced similar resistance as Christian universalism did in earlier times. Meanwhile, recent years have seen more radical calls to jettison the Western inheritance entirely.
Given the difficulties of this cultural exchange, some might prefer to retreat altogether. But there is another path, which engages with the non-Western world while appreciating Western distinctiveness: conservative cosmopolitanism. This was the approach exemplified by the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton. As described in Mark Dooley’s The Philosopher on Dover Beach, this “appreciates human life in all its peaceful forms, and is emotionally in touch with the customs, languages, and culture of many different peoples.”
This attitude is not new, and has deep roots in Western history. In fact, it helps explain how Westerners in earlier times could evince genuine interest in other cultures without denigrating their own. A particularly vivid example is the Romantic Sinologist, Thomas Manning.
Born into the liberal gentry of East Anglia, Thomas Manning (1772-1840) was an early enthusiast for the French Revolution—as were more famous Romantic acquaintances such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Robert Southey. Manning would later join the Coleridge Circle both in its rejection of the revolutionary experiment, and in the quest for new sources of cultural inspiration. Manning aimed to enrich British culture through global knowledge while preserving what made Britain unique. It was impossible to study Chinese in England, and his search took him from the salons of Paris to the Far East; eventually, it led to encounters with Napoleon and the Dalai Lama, an Embassy to Peking, and shipwreck in the Java Sea.
One of England’s first scholars of Chinese, Manning sought what he called a “moral view of China,” attempting to discover what might serve as “a model for imitation, and … as a beacon to avoid.” He compared Chinese with ancient Greek, to shed light on “the Metaphysics of Language, i.e., the Metaphysics of the Human mind.” And while language might unfold metaphysical truths, he hoped that studying China’s social life “may elicit moral truths.”
Manning was unusually open to learning from other cultures, criticising those who held England in “exclusive” regard while showing “supercilious contempt for all other nations.” But he did not place China above his own country. He believed in national pride without national chauvinism, and rejected the notion that appreciating one’s own culture must mean dismissing all others: a pervasive error that contributes both to cultural introversion, and to the learned self-loathing rampant across the modern West.
This cultural self-hatred has a long history. Since World War II, the hostility of Western elites towards their cultural inheritance escalated into what Roger Scruton called ‘oikophobia’: systematic aversion to home, and preference for other cultures. But while Scruton established oikophobia as part of the modern conservative lexicon, the term was previously coined by another English conservative during an earlier era. This was Manning’s friend Robert Southey, whose satirical Letters from England (1808) observed the Western tendency to pursue status in the search for the new.
Southey described the holiday mania of middle-class Britons who left their comfortable homes for fashionable seaside resorts, oblivious to the irony of trading the best houses in Europe for “the narrow apartments and dark streets of a little country town.” Every Summer, said Southey, “the tribes of wealth and fashion swarm down to the sea coast as punctually as the land-crabs in the West Indies.” Although this form of ‘oikophobia’ was relatively harmless, Southey insightfully observed that it was driven by status incentives, even to the detriment of material comfort: just like today, when oikophobia still signals loyalty to the taste of Western elites, but with less frivolous consequences.
Besides criticising such behaviour, early Romantics also challenged the deeper philosophical implications of Utopian universalism that gained prominence after the French Revolution. This was exemplified by thinkers like William Godwin, whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) argued there was “one best form of government, which all intellects, sufficiently roused from the slumber of savage ignorance, will be irresistibly incited to approve.” Godwin’s dogmatic universalism even led him to urge that people ignore family ties: “I ought to prefer no human being to another, because that being is my father, my wife or my son.”
The Romantics rejected such doctrinaire altruism as both unrealistic and inhumane, as it threatened the personal relationships that underpin human attachment. These attachments radiate outward from the nuclear family, through the ‘little platoons’ of social life, to constitute local and national communities and shape the social order. For Manning and other early Romantics, this perspective justified a form of enlightened patriotism. But this did not blind Manning to his compatriots’ shortcomings. During his years in Asia, he had been frustrated by the arrogance of some British travellers and had lamented that many Englishmen abroad “won’t submit to the tabula rasation of their minds, on any subject.” Manning was determined to encounter China on its own terms—even if, in reality, he could never truly do so with an epistemic blank slate.
Today, the poor behaviour of some British tourists attracts frequent comment, sometimes being cited as a legacy of Empire. But Scruton also indicted elite oikophobia for having helped to cause this behaviour, as “loutish belligerence” proceeds from the common man’s desire to affirm national identity while being “deprived of the culture that would enable them to feel proud of it.” Hence, “Those disinherited savages,” Scruton claimed, “owe their condition to the fact that their mentors and guardians have repudiated the national idea.” As with Scruton, Manning’s perspective shows that one can critique boorishness without embracing an asymmetric multiculturalism that romanticises foreign cultures while denigrating our own.
Manning’s approach was influenced by Enlightenment authors, including Montesquieu and Edward Gibbon, who sometimes combined conservative temperaments with sympathy for non-Western cultures. Perhaps the most notable exponent of this attitude was Edmund Burke, who advocated respect for non-European traditions and social structures, rather than imposing British norms. Manning shared Burke’s ambivalence about empire, remarking that he would only work with the East India Company if he could do so “without acting hostilely to the real interests of other nations … too many gentlemen in the King’s Council, think it sufficient if England gains.”
Burke’s approach offered a more respectful model for cultural interaction than later forms of Western universalism. In the early decades of the 19th century, this approach gave way to a new paradigm shaped by socio-economic changes in Britain and the influence of Utilitarian thinkers like James Mill and Evangelicals such as the Clapham Sect. This urged the temporal and spiritual benefits of extending British rule and customs to non-European peoples. Conservative cosmopolitanism was out; imperial humanitarianism was in.
This shift coincided with an epochal transition in Western history. In Decline of the West (1918-22), the German polymath Oswald Spengler identified the Age of Empire as a pivotal moment in the West’s transformation from vibrant Culture to ossified Civilization, “the living body of a soul and the mummy of it.” With its inward eye and ‘return to Nature,’ Romanticism might seem to have presaged cultural renewal at the threshold of the imperial century. But Spengler claimed similar movements are common to all cultures in their latter stages, and no more than a presentiment of the end.
Spengler presented a radical challenge to Western universalism. He argued that universals could only apply within a particular Culture: “Truths are truths only in relation to a particular mankind.” True ‘conversion’ of ideas between cultures was impossible. Spengler argued this applied even in supposedly pure intellectual fields, and meant the notion of universal mathematics, for example, was no more than an “illusion.”
Spengler thereby anticipated postcolonial theorists who would later argue that ideas, values, and norms are context-dependent and cannot be applied across all societies. Moreover, Spengler’s scepticism about the transmission of complex ideas was echoed in postcolonial critiques of cultural imperialism. His assertion regarding mathematics anticipated allegations that Western ways of thinking about the world are inherently biassed. Such refrains have become staples of discussion about ‘decolonising’ Western education, including claims that fields such as maths are inherently racist.
Such claims seek to explode universalist projects of intercultural exchange. However, they cannot negate the pragmatic wisdom of conservative cosmopolitanism, which accepts the existence of cultural difference while seeking common ground and shared values where possible. This attitude led Samuel P. Huntington to counsel that “Instead of promoting the supposedly universal features of one civilization, the requisites for cultural coexistence demand a search for what is common to most civilizations.”
Unfortunately, despite the undeniable diversity of creeds and religions across today’s multi-polar world, Western elites remain wedded to universalism. Long a cornerstone of Western intellectual life, this was enshrined after World War II when the United Nations proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations.” By the 1990s, liberal universalism had expanded into ‘Davos Culture,’ which is now championed by transnational institutions and corporations, and incorporates progressive ideas about the environment, multiculturalism, and sex and gender.
This has proven controversial, both within the West and around the world. In The Clash of Civilizations (1993), Huntington estimated that Davos Culture was shared by less than 1% of the world’s population outside the West. In recent decades, numerous non-Western voices have denounced Davos Culture as a form of cultural imperialism; and, within the West, there has been a resurgence of movements emphasising local and national traditions.
New forms of localism and nationalism mirror how earlier forms of universalism were contested by Romantics and others. While developing in very different contexts, such movements can inform contemporary approaches which respect the distinctiveness of the West and the non-West. Thomas Manning, for example, while pioneering the British study of China and exploring similarities between East and West, never lost sight of his Western identity. His cultural self-confidence provided a solid basis for intercultural understanding.
This sort of self-image is especially rare among young Westerners today, who often experience uncertainty when encountering other cultures. This is partly due to shame about the imperial past, but also because they are taught to be avatars of disembodied and desiccated universal values, instead of educated in a specific and bounded cultural inheritance. Embracing their own national behaviours and peculiarities, paradoxically, is what helps Westerners to engage with other cultures with suitable humility. This accords with the idea that if Western culture has value—and should be conserved—it is not because it is universal, but because it is distinctive.
Despite the many failures of universalism, some Western institutions have found receptive audiences around the world, who have refined or adapted them in accordance with local needs. This is especially true in North-East Asia. Westerners should resist the vanity of self-abasement which ignores that Western ideas and practices have sometimes been implemented elsewhere, often at great cost, by the free choice of local people.
Contrary to William Godwin and other Utopians, traditional wisdom teaches that our sympathy is naturally greatest for those who are closest to us. Westerners who accept this universal reality will discover special affinity towards particular peoples and places. By applying our affections in an enlightened manner that goes with the grain of human nature, we can therefore align with meaningful intercultural values and pursue a conservative cosmopolitanism of which Burke, the Romantics, and Roger Scruton might have approved.
