How The West Grew Rich
By Dinesh D'Souza
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 5, 2002
The idea that America and the West grew rich through oppression and
exploitation is strongly held among many intellectuals and activists. In
the West, the exploitation thesis is invoked, by Jesse Jackson and others,
to demand the payment of hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations for
slavery and colonialism to African Americans and natives of the Third
World. Islamic extremists like Bin Laden insist that the Muslim world is
poor because the West is rich, and they use Western oppression as their
pretext for unleashing violence, in the form of terrorism, against American
civilians.
Did the West enrich itself at the expense of minorities and the Third World
through its distinctive crimes of slavery and colonialism? This thesis is
hard to sustain, because there is nothing distinctively Western about
slavery or colonialism. The West had its empires, but so did the Persians,
the Mongols, the Chinese, and the Turks. The British ruled my native
country of India for a couple of hundred years, but before the British
came, India was invaded and occupied by the Persians, the Mongols, the
Turks, the Afghans, and the Arabs. England was the seventh or eighth
colonial power to establish itself on Indian soil.
If colonialism is not a Western institution, neither is slavery. Slavery
has existed in every known civilization. The Chinese had slavery, and so
did ancient India. Slavery was common all over Africa, and American Indians
had slavery long before Columbus arrived on this continent.
What is uniquely Western is not slavery but the movement to abolish
slavery. There is no history of anti-slavery activism outside of Western
civilization. Of course in every society, slaves have strongly resisted
being slaves. Runaways and slave revolts occurred frequently in all slave
cultures. But only in the West did a movement arise, not of slaves, but of
potential slave-owners, to oppose slavery in principle.
The unique Western attitude is captured in Abraham Lincoln’s remark, "As I
would not be a slave, so I would not be a master." Lincoln understandably
doesn’t want to be a slave, but interestingly, he doesn’t want to be a
master either. He rejects slavery altogether, and he is willing to expend a
good deal of treasure and ultimately a great deal of blood to destroy the
institution. During the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of white men died
to bring freedom to African Americans-a group that was not in a position to
secure freedom for itself.
Considering these undisputed facts, how should we think about the issue of
reparations? My own view of the subject was rather tersely expressed by
Muhammad Ali. After defeating George Foreman for the heavyweight title in
Zaire, Muhammad Ali returned to the United States where he was asked by a
reporter, "Champ, what did you think of Africa?" Ali replied, "Thank God my
grand-daddy got on that boat!"
Ali’s point was that although the institution of slavery was oppressive for
the slaves, paradoxically it benefited their descendants because slavery
was the transmission belt that brought African Americans into the orbit of
Western freedom. And the same is true of colonialism: against the
intentions of the European powers, who came mainly to conquer and rule,
colonialism proved to be the mechanism by which Western ideas like
democracy, self-determination, and unalienable human rights came to the
peoples of Asia, Africa, and South America.
These truths cast a new light on the issue of reparations. Reparations are
a bad idea, not only because people living today played no role in the
evils of slavery and colonialism, but also because the descendants of those
who endured servitude and foreign rule are vastly better off than they
would have been had their ancestors not endured captivity and European
rule. Reluctant though he would be to admit it, Jesse Jackson has a much
better life in America than he would have had in, say, Ethiopia or Ghana.
If oppression and exploitation did not make the West rich and powerful,
what did? The answer is that the West invented three institutions that
never existed before: science, democracy, and capitalism. Each of these
institutions is based on a universal human impulse that took on a very
specific institutional expression in the history of the West.
First, science. Of course people everywhere want to learn about the world.
The Chinese recorded the eclipses, the Hindus invented the number zero, the
Mayans developed a sophisticated calendar. But science--which means
experimentation, and verification, and a "scientific method" that one
writer has termed "the invention of invention"--this is a Western
institution.
Just like the impulse to learn, the impulse to barter and trade is
universal. People in every culture exchange goods for mutual benefit. Money
is not a Western invention. But capitalism--which implies property rights,
and courts to enforce them, and free trade, and stock exchanges, and
institutions of credit, and double-entry bookkeeping--this system developed
in the West. Finally tribal participation is universal, but democracy--
which requires elections, and peaceful transitions of power, and separation
of powers, and checks and balances--is a Western institution.
None of this is to deny that the West, like every other culture, has shown
itself to be arrogant and oppressive when it had the chance. Oppression and
exploitation, however, were not the cause of Western success; they were the
fruits of that success. Those who say that America and the West have grown
rich at their expense are simply wrong. The real cause of Western wealth
and power is the dynamic interaction of science, capitalism, and democracy.
Working together, these institutions have created our commercial,
technological, participatory society.
Dinesh D'Souza's new book What's So Great About America is published by
Regnery. He is the Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
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