On Mon, 28 Oct 1996 wally@cats.ucsc.edu wrote:
>
> While we're at it, let's abolish anthropocentrism, primatocentrism
> mammalocentrism, biocentrism, and perhaps galaxocentrism. How about
> cosmocentrism?
>
> w
>
Hey, good point! And all us historians had better get busy and
stop writing Eurocentric histories of the French Revolution, the
Industrial Revolution, and the Great War of 1914. It's also Eurocentric
to blame Hitler for World War II. If you think Europe is the source of
most of the evil and misery in the modern world, I suppose that makes you
Eurocentric, too. Sure. This is the kind of idiocy that white liberal
guilt and mindless multiculturalism inflict on academe. The world
capitalist SYSTEM originated in Europe. So did the secular rationalism of
the Enlightenment. Denying this makes about as much sense as denying that
in the 8th to 12th centuries CE T'ang and Sung China (perhaps together
with Abbasid Islam in the first half of that period) was the greatest
center of world civilization.
W. Warren Wagar
Binghamton University