A few days ago, I proposed using the anthropological definition of civilization: understanding it as a broad, interconnected body of customs, together with the supporting institutions and tools required to sustain and practice them. In some places, it is customary to commute by tram. Elsewhere, it has been customary to eat members of a defeated tribe. In other societies, it has been customary to stone unfaithful wives. One way or another, the overwhelming majority of these customs concern ordinary daily life.
That perspective allows us to defend a civilization even against its own elites. It also allows us to defend Western civilization while rejecting, for example, its colonial expeditions. I also tried to explain that if we are unable to distinguish between everyday life, the banking system, and colonial campaigns, we commit a conceptual error with far-reaching consequences.
Today I want to return to the subject in order to explain something that does not fit into such a simplified picture. Customs do not concern daily life alone. Throughout history, there have been civilizations in which, alongside family and religious customs, slave-raiding expeditions were also an accepted practice. In our own society, customs include overseas military deployments or debt enforcement proceedings—effectively the arbitrary transfer of property from poor people to wealthy interests. A generation ago, this did not exist. Today it does. A generation from now, it may well disappear again. These are customs that can emerge and vanish without fundamentally altering the character of a civilization.
The same cannot be said of marriage. Nor can it be said of support for jihad in Muslim societies. A Western society without marriage would no longer be recognizably Western, just as Islamic societies without jihad would no longer be recognizably Islamic.
This also provides an opportunity to clarify another point. I oppose colonial expeditions because they bring no real benefit to the people of the West. They do not make Western societies safer, nor do they ultimately improve access to raw materials. At best, their effects are neutral. In the overwhelming majority of cases, however, they make matters worse.
That said, colonialism is certainly not something that makes the West morally worse than other civilizations. When people speak of “colonial crimes,” they are usually comparing Western conduct against moral standards that were themselves developed within the West. Very few societies, of course, fully live up to their own ideals. If we compared Western colonialism with the actual conduct and capabilities of other civilizations, the picture would look very different.
We may rightly criticize European colonialism in Africa, but it is difficult to deny that being attacked by a neighboring tribe was often far more devastating than being colonized by Europeans. Even the horrific atrocities committed in the Belgian Congo were largely carried out by rival Black African groups themselves; the Belgians’ principal culpability lay in failing to prevent them.
We must also take into account a lesson that every country, empire, and civilization has eventually learned. Again and again, they discovered that the attitude of “we will ignore whatever lies beyond our borders” leads to disaster. New waves of raiders inevitably emerged from those regions, until passive indifference became impossible and a more active approach proved unavoidable.