Indigenous Atomists

How, asks Adam K. Webb ( Beyond the Global Culture War (Global Horizons) ), did the ethos of “atomism” spread throughout the world? Atomism “rests on the two principles of homogeneity and detachment” and has as its “two pillar principles . . . a lack of transcendence and a lack of embeddedness.” Webb argues that atomism is a trans-historical ethos, but prior to the last two centuries it was held by a small minority of eccentric movements – Sophists, for instance. How did it become the dominant global ethos?

Colonialists imposed it on unwilling traditionalists? No, says Webb. Rather, the atomism of the modern colonial West found accomplices all over the world, accomplices who drew on indigenous atomist traditions to attack the traditions of their own culture. It wasn’t only the colonialists who subverted traditional cultures. The colonized – some of them – helped.

In India, for instance, reformed disdained the Indian past: “They thought what most of humanity held dear was dated and irrelevant. ‘Amin [Khan] wrote that people who measured the shortcomings of their own era against past ideals had a mental deficiency, in which nostalgia blocked them from thinking for themselves. The vitriol that bridgehead atomists poured on history [their own history – PJL] is striking: ‘unmitigated slavery,’ ‘illusory traditions,’ ‘ocean of blood and pitch darkness.’ Studying ethical traditions was a waste of time, they thought At most, it could help activists on their own side know the enemy better. As [Chilean revolutionary Francisco] Bilbao inimitably put it, ‘we familiarize ourselves with history in order to know how to curse it.’”

The West was not the only culture to endure the trahison des clercs .