Michael Wood's weird disdain for the West

I see Wood rejoices on the first episode of "The Story of India" (for the millionth time) that the "brief heyday of the West" is supposedly ending, and India is reclaiming what he seems to believe is its "rightful place" (along with China) of hegemony in the world's new order.

Since the series was canned in 2007, it's rather hard to see what he means. It was hard even then, since India's economic boom, like China's, was so export-driven, and India doesn't seem to be creating any new technologies. But now that the supposedly useless and kaput nations of North America and Europe are no longer in a position to gobble up consumer goods from East and South Asia, I think we are going to see a mysterious contraction of Indian and Chinese growth.

I don't understand Wood AT ALL. He travels by Boeing or Airbus jets to the scenes of past glories, records himself and all that scenery on high-tech western cameras to be shown on high definition western TV sets on flourishing western television broadcast and cable systems, and sucks up to present-day Indians and Chinese as if they were were the brothers of Ashoka and Confucius instead of English-speaking graduates of western style Asian universities based on Oxford and Humboldt's Prussian educational system.

When he strolls around India (notably not immersing himself along with all those other Indians in the picturesque but polluted Ganges), ignoring the squalor and romanticizing the country's industrial future (which looks like it's going to consist in the near-term of a lot of smokestack industries using last-generation western technology), he is in a country where millions might have starved decades ago if it hadn't been for the development in the West of miracle crops and new industrial fertilizers.

A belching smokestack and a polluted skyline in any western city is a sure shorthand for doom with Wood, but the same thing in China or India isn't, because Wood would rather die than include it in one of his documentaries.

Wood's own religious views we don't know, but he likes anybody else's non-western ones, and he'll put up with absolutely anything as long as it's based on a non-western religion. That includes the horrendous sacrifices of the Aztecs. Presumably he will also put up with present-day amputations of thieves' hand or stoning of adulteresses or executions of homosexuals in the middle east and Africa. Non-western peoples are just acting according to their cultural natures. Even their atrocities are justified by their deep spirituality.

That it was the cultural nature of a 16th Century Spaniard to lay waste to Peru is not similarly legitimate, and that his religion required him to burn at the state the same Aztecs who had just been cutting out people's hearts and bathing their temples with fresh blood is a manifestation of the ugliness Wood always associates with the West he comes from. Its atrocities are justified by nothing.

He is willing to write a pass for the Greeks, because they are a comparatively poor country, and so many corners of Greece seem to him lands that time forgot. If he can find in present-day Greek folkways a survival of the Eleusinian Mysteries, there may be hope for the Greeks. They'll have to regress to save themselves, but if they can only relocate themselves outside of modern western culture and stay as pagan as possible they might meet in the middle with eastern countries he thinks have cleverly managed not to surrender to Logical Positivism.

The thing is, Wood himself reminds me a heap more of Descartes than of Lao Tzu. Does he loathe himself? Or does he just displace his self-loathing onto people like you and me whose classical education hasn't led us to the conclusion that a madrasa or a yurt beats a campus or a highrise apartment?

Mind you, Wood is good at what he does. He has a deep appreciation for all these old cultures, and thank God, he hasn't recoiled yet at his own reliance on western philology, DNA analysis, archaeology, etc. to elucidate it all, or on high tech equipment and media to disseminate his testimony. So I really like his shows.

But I'm a little sick of being blamed for everything. Wind farms, solar panels, etc., are being developed and brought on line in western countries at the very time athletes in Beijing are wearing masks to protect them from pollution, when China is killing its lakes and rivers and supporting genocide in the Sudan to get at that country's fossil fuels. Western countries are stable and functioning with adequate constabularies while Indians (with sympathetic police looking on) are razing historic mosques to the ground, and Hindus and Muslims are burning one another alive.

It's not just the modernistic manifestations for rising Asian economies (those western infections) that are the problem, either. Traditional Chinese medicine is wiping out the African rhino, and whoever's to blame for bride-killing and honor slaying in India and Pakistan, it isn't Henry Ford or John Dewey.

Did Wood notice how beautiful the neoclassical home of the British-founded Asiatic Society of Kolkata must once have been, and how shabby it is now? Somebody really should raise some funds to renovate it. I'm sure somebody in the decadent and dying western democracies will get right on that.