Consider the neo Spenglerian argument that not only science but also secularism, free speech, due process and democracy are inherently and exclusively Western ideas, applied inappropriately as yard sticks to other cultures. (In his book on Jesse Jackson, Adolph Reed brilliantly critiques such assumptions by the white left towards blacks in this country.)
According to Achin Vanaik in the Furies of Indian Communalism (Verso, 1996), the recent incarnation of the Subaltern School, introduced originally to the West by Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, is now propounding such a thesis. Gyan Prakash and Partha Chatterjee are criticized; the former subalternist and historian Sumit Sarkar has joined Vanaik in his criticism.
In my opinion, what we tend to forget is that democracy, secularism, feminism and a rational outlook are actual historical conquests of the working class as it wrested new rights and freedoms from the bourgeois order even as the bourgeois order made its organized struggle possible (the Gramsci scholar John Hoffman makes such an argument in one of his books).
These rights do not belong to the Western or any other collective Mind or simply to The West. Non Western religions are made to take all the blame for unfreedom in the world today. This is a perverse Idealism and a bourgeois evasion of the class struggle as the lever of historical progress. There is also a distrubing hubristic racism--take Fareed Zakaria's hero Samuel Huntington as an example--in that many Westerners imagine that such ideas are simply foreign to incommensurable OTHERS, forgetting the exceptionally more difficult conditions the proletariat faces in developing itself through struggle and realizing, much less materializing, its interests and outlook in under-developed conditions. Isolated and forced into alliances with upper peasants and the like, the Indian proletariat often cannot articulate its own goals and vision. In the Journal of Peasant Studies Jairus Banaji, otherwise known as Grossmann's English trans., has argued this with particular force.
It is in global racism and the racist ideology of the incommensurability of the other in the form of references to the Indian mind or the Islamic mind that the postmodern retreat from the class analysis of history and politics ends. So it is quite nice to see Ellen Wood who warned of all this long ago end up as editor of Monthly Review. Whereever capitalism develops so does a proletariat, no matter how more difficult its struggle may be in particular conditions.
Indeed racism becomes a convenient excuse not to lend solidarity to workers and human right struggles in backward countries.
And in the West racism even softens crititicsm of the AFL CIO when it has sabotaged such struggles abroad (see Beth Sims, Workers of the World Undermined) or when the US govt has propped up a reactionary govt. "Oh after all, authoritarianism and mysticism are woven deeply into the fabric of their national life; they don't really want the burdens of freedom or democracy or rights"!!! Meanwhile, the postmodern left lays the epistemological foundations for such arguments in the name of facile celebration of multiculturalism while denying the real consequences--I know this is a banal criticism, but it strikes me as true that multiculturalism is a conscious evasion of the material class struggle. At any rate, it is not surprising that Sarkar and Vanaik, both rooted in working class struggle, would come out as critics of what they argue is a new obscurantism. Meera Nanda has done so as well. I don't think the case is closed, but I am not hiding where I stand.
yours, rakesh