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In the previous chapter, I referred to an alienated natural environment as the essential source of the habit of othering in the Western liberal tradition—the attitude through which it secures its own superior identity by looking down on a supposedly non-civilized, nonindividual other. This latter entity, the other, represents the childhood of the Western individual and rational self; this entity is seen as standing at a level of moral development that is closer to nature, from which the self emerges in its full primitivity. Nonwhite peoples (and also women and children) were seen as lagging behind the occidental identity and its civilized superiority; and would be deemed as "peoples without history," primitive, even barbarian, and marked as such. The powerful figure of the "universal" individual in Western imagery is not racialized, nor gendered, nor othered—and is associated with white, male, rich people. We may think that we have left this story of supremacy behind in our cosmopolitanism, but it is still with us in the structure of our universalist liberal thought. Uncivilized peoples have been construed as different using markers that can be racial, physical, geographic, ethnic, gendered, deviant, or ideological; and I argue that even when such markers have been transformed today to be given politically correct names, our awareness of them continues to construct human difference.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230111424_5

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