...
Rather than engaging Persian sophistication on its own terms, the Western imagination reconfigured it as a constitutive antagonist, a necessary shadow against which its own self-image could be defined and illuminated.
...
This essay concerns itself with a recurring structure in Western historical consciousness: the production of fear as a precondition for domination. Fear, in this tradition, is rarely spontaneous. It is cultivated, narrativised and subsequently moralised until it acquires the character of providence. Before conquest, a story must be told; before plunder, a justification secured. This grammar is not unfamiliar to those who have experienced its consequences most directly.
I. Africa and the psychology of diminishment
The historical relationship between Europe and Africa cannot be adequately understood without attending to its psychological prehistory. There existed a period in which Africa occupied a position of genuine rivalry within the Mediterranean world. The Punic Wars remain instructive in this regard. In Hannibal Barca, Rome encountered a commander of exceptional strategic intelligence, whose campaign across the Alps constituted a military threat of profound disruption to Roman self-understanding. Hannibal was not simply an adversary; he functioned within the Roman imagination as a figure of dread.
Rome’s ultimate victory over Carthage – and the city’s subsequent destruction – accomplished more than the securing of imperial dominance. It effected a psychological clearing. Africa, having once been feared, could now be subordinated. The transformation proceeded methodically: from rival, to subject for economic raw materials, to something positioned outside the full category of the human. This epistemic reclassification was not incidental to the subsequent history of enslavement and extraction; it was its conditional possibility.
Brutality, as a general observation, requires psychological distance, and such distance is first achieved discursively. Once a people have been abstracted – diminished, narrated downward – violence against them proceeds without the friction of moral burden.
II. Persia and the civilisational counter-image
In Asia, a structurally analogous process came earlier in a different register. The Western fixation on Persia was strategically civilisational. Rather than engaging Persian sophistication on its own terms, the Western imagination reconfigured it as a constitutive antagonist, a necessary shadow against which its own self-image could be defined and illuminated.
The genealogy of this construction is traceable to specific moments that have since acquired the status of founding myth, like the Battle of Marathon (490 BC). Conventionally narrated as the improbable triumph of a small Greek force against the overwhelming machinery of the Persian empire, its significance was never exclusively military. Marathon planted within Western historical consciousness the suggestion that Persian defeat carried a moral sanction – that history inclined westward, that victory disclosed virtue and that power revealed providential favour. These inferences were not yet systematised, but they established a durable disposition thereafter.
At the Battle of Salamis (480 BC), a decade later, this emergent disposition hardened. The Persian defeat by the Greeks – attributable in significant measure to contingency (narrow straits, miscalculation and the ordinary accidents of warfare) – was retrospectively absorbed into a narrative of civilisational destiny. The West subsequently inherited, and repeatedly reproduced, a self-understanding organised around this moment. It saw itself as a small, enlightened polity holding the line against an encroaching despotism from the East. It is here that their civilisational grammar crystallises.
This grammar is, however, intellectually untenable. It depends upon selective retention and the transmutation of historical contingency into moral legibility. The Persia of the historical record – administratively complex, culturally plural and, by the standards of its time, often notably tolerant – is reduced to caricature, functioning as the required villain in a narrative whose conclusion was determined in advance. The West’s own histories of expansion, enslavement and internal contradiction are correspondingly softened or suppressed beneath the retrospective lustre of these formative victories.
What was produced here is not a historical record, but a template to justify domination – reproducible, adaptable and available for deployment across successive contexts. As we are well aware, the current president of the USA, shadowed and instigated by Israel, has picked his own context for it as justification to attack the Islamic Republic of Iran, once an important part of the Persian Empire.
The West’s construction of an external threat has always functioned as a mechanism for stabilising internal identity. The “other” is not encountered, but manufactured, shaped to meet the requirements of a prior story as a threat to Western hegemony. In this sense, Persia has always been, within the Western imagination, less a geographical and historical reality than a structural function: the necessary adversary in an ongoing narrative of embattlement and virtue, against which claims to Western survival are rehearsed and renewed.
III. Continuity and the grammar of empire
What follows from this ancient grammar shifts the theatre from the Aegean to the Atlantic. The script remains curiously intact. The same moral sleight of hand, the same capacity to narrate domination as destiny, underwrites the rise of the modern Western empires.
By the time of the Age of Discovery, Europe had already inherited a well-rehearsed habit of transforming encounters into hierarchy. Africa, which had once stood as rival, reappeared in the European imagination as absence of civilisation, of reason, of soul – in short, a Dark Continent. This was not ignorance, but reconstruction. The intellectual labour of empire required that Africa and the Americas be diminished in order that Europe might colonially expand without internal contradiction.
The trans-Atlantic slave trade did not emerge in a moral vacuum; it was scaffolded by centuries of narrative conditioning. And so, the old grammar returned – the externalisation of savagery and the internalisation of virtue. Europe, increasingly confident in its technological and maritime superiority, cast itself as a custodian of order, of Christianity, of civilisation and, hypothetically, of humanity. The violence to maintain this illusion was brutal and systematic; the language surrounding and justifying it redemptive.
In the British Empire, this logic reached a kind of administrative refinement. Here was an empire where the sun never set, and which governed through brutal force and narrative discipline. Its officials produced reports, its missionaries wrote letters and its intellectuals composed treatises, contributing to a vast archive in which empire appeared less as exploitation than as obligation – the white man’s burden, in the parlance of the era. The colonised were seldom encountered as equals; they were problems to be managed, populations to be improved, souls to be saved and savages to be civilised.
Yet, beneath the rhetoric lay contingency – fragile supply lines, local alliances, resistance movements and constant improvisation. The empire’s aura of inevitability was, in truth, a performance sustained by repetition. It is this performance that allowed Britain to speak, with apparent sincerity, of liberty while presiding over dispossessions; to celebrate parliamentary democracy at home while denying its very premise abroad. The contradiction was not incidental, but structural, to the imperial project.
IV. The American refraction: Jefferson and the architecture of moral compartmentalisation
It is tempting to imagine that with the emergence of the United States, something fundamentally new entered the stage – a republic rather than an empire, a revolution against tyranny rather than an extension of it. But here, too, the older grammar persists, refracted now through the language of Enlightenment.
Thomas Jefferson embodies, almost too neatly, the contradictions at the heart of this inheritance. By all available evidence, he understood himself as a man of reason, of progress, of moral seriousness. He spoke against slavery in the abstract, gestured toward its eventual disappearance, and imagined a future in which the republic might transcend its founding contradiction. He could, in certain moments, act with a degree of restraint or intellectual openness that resists easy moral dismissal.
And yet, his material world – his land, his social position, his very capacity to think and write as he did – rested upon enslaved labour from beginning to end. He recognised the wrongness of slavery, at least intellectually, but lacked the will and the moral imagination to dismantle it. Instead, he deferred the task to time, to future generations, to the vague moral arc of history. The contradiction is not simply personal; it is Western-civilisational.
Jefferson helped to found a nation that declared, with almost liturgical force, that all men are created equal, while simultaneously participating in a genocide against native Americans, and materially benefiting from a system that denied that equality in the most absolute terms to those not of European descent. Legislative gestures such as the Northwest Ordinance – restricting the spread of slavery into new territories – operated paradoxically as instruments of preservation rather than abolition, managing the contradiction rather than resolving it. Limitation became a means of deferral; reform, a mechanism of continuity. What is most striking is not the inconsistencies, but the self-perceptions of righteousness that accompanied them.
Like many of his contemporaries, Jefferson understood himself as a moderating force – more enlightened than those around him, progressive within a less progressive age. He could identify prejudice in others while retaining, to a significant degree, the opaqueness of its operations within himself. This is not hypocrisy in the crude sense of deliberate deception. It is something more structurally significant – a moral compartmentalisation that permits the simultaneous inhabitation of contradictory positions without full confrontation of their implications. Hence Jefferson founded a nation in his own image, and that nation has been living in contradictory multitudes ever since as the land of the free and home of the brave, but only those who come from Europe or have white skin.
The ancient Western pattern reasserts itself with particular clarity. Just as Persia functioned as the necessary “other” against which Greek identity was formed, and Africa as the diminished field upon which European power was exercised, so, too, did the early American republic require its own constitutive others – enslaved Africans, displaced indigenous peoples – against which its ideals could be articulated and its freedoms defined. Freedom, in this configuration, is not universal, but relational. It exists for some because it is denied to others.
The West does not forget its own contradictions, but incorporates them in every encounter. It constructs systems in which moral aspiration and material domination coexist, each lending the other a strange kind of legitimacy. The language of liberty softens the fact of unfreedom; the persistence of unfreedom, in turn, makes liberty appear all the more precious and worth defending. What began at Marathon and Salamis as a narrative of improbable victory matures, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, into a global doctrine that the West, however imperfect in practice, remains uniquely entitled to define the terms of civilisation and humanity’s progress.
V. Coda: Isaac Watts and the hymnody of innocence
This quiet, enduring certainty, this belief in one’s own exceptionalism even in the midst of evident contradiction, finds its most revealing expression – even beyond Western political philosophy or imperial administration – in devotional culture. My sitting at Mass on Good Friday, listening to a pious song composed by Isaac Watts, inspired this essay.
Isaac Watts, the eighteenth-century hymnodist, composed what would become one of the most celebrated pieces of Christian devotional verse in the English-speaking world, and may be sung by every Christian denomination on Good Friday: “When I survey the wondrous cross” (1707). The song meditates on the crucifixion with genuine literary sophistication and apparent spiritual depth. Watts was, by the standards of his age, an accomplished thinker – a nonconformist divine of considerable intellectual range, attentive to questions of conscience and the inner life.
He was also a man whose social world was entangled with the institution of slavery, and whose moral imagination, acute in certain registers, remained organised around the very hierarchies his culture had naturalised. He probably would belong to the MAGA movement, were he living in the USA today. Perhaps his saving grace would have been the fact that he was a brilliant scientist also.
That a hymn of such apparent self-abnegation – “my richest gain I count but loss” – should emerge from within a civilisation simultaneously engaged in the most systematic theft of human persons in recorded history is not, on reflection, surprising. It is, rather, revealing. The devotional intensity of the lyric performs precisely the kind of inward turn that allows the outward violence to remain unexamined. The soul surveys the cross; it does not survey the slave ships. Contrition is real, but carefully bounded to one’s own worldview.
This is the deepest structure of the grammar this essay has attempted to trace. The West does not lack moral feeling; it possesses it in abundance. What it lacks, or rather what it has historically cultivated, is the capacity to lack the willingness to allow that moral feeling to travel beyond the boundaries of its own self-regard. The language of sacrifice and redemption, of liberty and progress, of civilisation and obligation, has not been merely a cover for material interest. It has been sincerely held, earnestly sung and devoutly believed, with the self-regarding duplicity of a psychopath. That is precisely what makes it so formidable and so difficult to dislodge.
The deeper difficulty, therefore, lies not in the fact that such narratives are constructed – all cultures narrate themselves for self-interest – but in the persistent confusion of those narratives with innocence. And it is that confusion, as ancient as Marathon and as proximate as last Sunday’s hymnal, that continues to animate the hypocrisies of the present, as we watch on our screens the Gaza genocide and the endless wars aimed at mauling the Middle East which the US perennially engages in.
See also:
Zubayr Charles se Haram is ’n waarskuwing aan almal, gelowig of nie: ’n lesersindruk
America and Israel could have lived with a nuclear-armed Iran