This is the conformism of our times: it demands that we regard the West as the supreme evil, the most wicked civilisation of all, and that we be ashamed of it. Naturally, of all this too, because it is part of Western culture.
New York has been my home for 25 years; I have put down roots in America, even taken citizenship. I also lived in China for 5 years. While travelling in Africa, in Tanzania, I watched a young Maasai herdsman checking his smartphone: a Western invention. An invention whose evils and misuses we know all about, but for that young Maasai herdsman, out in the middle of nowhere with his flock, the gadget in his hand is a connection to the world, a lifeline out of loneliness and a tool for learning.
If you have this experience in the company of a Western tourist, you will unfortunately find yourself hearing comments such as: "What a shame, we're ruining them, we're making them abandon a traditional way of life...".
This is the typical attitude I call the idiotic, ignorant and arrogant snobbery of today's Westerners, who think the progress we have brought is rubbish. Traditional Maasai huts are being abandoned because they are made of dung and straw, catch fire easily, and their indoor wood fires cause lung cancer and emphysema. That Western tourist is nostalgic for a world where people died at birth, without vaccines or antibiotics.
Half of humanity would not even be alive on Earth today without our progress with a capital "P". In the '60s, we used to take collections in class for Indian children to stop them starving to death. Today India is an agri-food superpower that exports its surpluses. The turning point was the so-called Green Revolution of the '70s, which applied Western agricultural innovations to India. China under Mao suffered 30 million deaths from famine. Then Deng Xiaoping sent young people to study in the West to learn our science, technology and market economics.
I try to offer a restorative tonic and a dose of self-esteem because I am horrified when I see that young Chinese, Indians, Russians or Turks are taught from their schooldays to be proud of their history, while only here in the West is a process of self-demolition under way in schools and universities. The history of the West is distorted into a crime novel.
In American universities, the label of slavery is immediately slapped on the West. Slavery was a terrible stain, but we did not invent it: it already existed in African empires, in ancient Greece, in Rome and among the Aztecs. The greatest profiteers from the slave trade were the Arabs and the Ottoman Turks. And we were the first to abolish it, starting with England in the 19th century. Saudi Arabia abolished slavery only in 1962!
We should take pride in all this, particularly as Italians, because the history of progress runs through Humanism and the Renaissance, which paved the way for the Scientific-Industrial Revolution. Today young people are taught that the Industrial Revolution was merely the beginning of the environmental apocalypse, but it was in fact a magnificent advance that freed humanity from an average life expectancy of 30 years and a state of constant terror of hunger and disease.
Why did the industrial revolution happen here and not in China or India (which were extremely wealthy in 1600)? The answer lies in a single word: bourgeoisie. In the West, the figure of the merchant-entrepreneur gains a unique social and political legitimacy, turning science into practical applications.
Beyond material well-being, the West has given the world an idea of rights and values: schooling and mass education, the rights of women and minorities, the value of dissent and self-criticism. Even anti-Western regimes such as China or Iran use the term "Republic", a concept born in Rome and developed in the West.