The Waning of the Western Worldview

PROLOGUE

THE CHANGING FACE OF CONTEMPORARY THEORY

THE WANING OF THE WESTERN WORLDVIEW Today, perhaps more than at any time since the Second World War, we live in an age of uncertainty and anxiety, an age characterized by rapid social and technological change and by the erosion of many customary boundaries and borders — whether these are geographical, political, cultural, occupational, racial, sexual, public or private. For many of us, the world has become an increasingly uncertain and precarious place where the assumptions and expectations of earlier generations — whether of stable employment and secure residence, or the validity of customary beliefs and social norms, or even our hopes and prospects for the future — have become unsettled and thrown into doubt. And although these feelings of crisis and confusion are far from unprecedented and have periodically arisen at other times of profound historical change, the shocks and aftershocks of these uncertain times reverberate through all aspects of our lives. As Karl Marx (1969 [1848]) said many years ago when he described the social impact of the rise of industrial capitalism: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” These shockwaves are felt throughout society: on factory shop floors, in corporate boardrooms and government offices — and even behind the cloistered walls of universities and colleges, at the desks of scholars and social theorists.

Social theory, like everything else in our anxious age, has been heavily impacted by the social, cultural, geopolitical, technological and environmental changes that are transforming our social worlds and redefining our ideas and our identities. Many of the assumptions and conceptual frameworks of past social theories are being critiqued by a new generation

of social thinkers whose ideas and experiences have, until recently, been overlooked or excluded by most Western theorists. Many theorists from this new generation are presently engaged in re-examining, nuancing and reworking earlier theories in order to reflect the complex, changing and different lived experiences from those that informed earlier theories. In many ways, this is an exciting yet challenging time to study social theory; there is much to consider and much to learn.

The most penetrating criticisms by the new generation of global social theorists target the “Eurocentric,” or “Western,” worldview, which, until fairly recently, was the dominant paradigm for constructing, teaching and learning social theory in North America, Europe and around the world. Most social theory — whether classical or contemporary — has remained embedded in this Eurocentric worldview. This worldview has come under increasing scrutiny, especially from social theorists and other scholars whose ideas have been shaped by their experiences of material, psychological and epistemic oppression and violence which

The Eurocentric Worldview: Reason, Liberty and Progress

The Eurocentric worldview emerged during the European Enlightenment (Age of Reason), which spanned the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. It was based on a number of assumptions and key concepts, the most distinctive of which are the following:

Rationalism: the belief that true knowledge of the world can only be gained through reason, rather than through religious faith.

Humanism: the belief that our understanding of the world and our moral and ethical values should be based on actual experience rather than on religious doctrine or mystical revelation.

Secularism: the belief that public life — government, education, the judiciary etc. — should be separated from all religious influence or authority and that religion should be relegated to the private sphere.

Modernity: the belief that modern societies — in contrast to traditional or “primitive” societies — have evolved institutions for greater technological innovation, greater economic growth and greater individual liberty.

Progress: the belief in so-called “human perfectibility”: that through the application of reason to human affairs, the history of humanity is destined to show continuous linear advances in self-improvement and in the solution of natural and social problems. Humanity, rather than God, shapes its own fate.