WHITE DUDE'S BURDEN

Abstract

Together with bold calls for reinstating outright colonial rule, many scholars and critics have turned to late nineteenth century categories to justify the so-called GWOT (Global War on Terror) carried out by the US and Britain. Led by the Canadian liberal Michael Ignatieff, the Scottish conservative-turned Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson, and the US neo-conservative Max Boot, as Marx warned in The 18th Brumaire, ‘they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language’ (Marx, International Publishers, New York, 1852/1963, p. 15). One of the old-fashioned battle cries preferred by these scholars is Rudyard Kipling's ‘White Man's Burden.’ However, much has changed in the ideology of imperial rule between the time of Kipling's poem and now. My essay delineates the most important of these changes and argues that rather than the hierarchical humanism that overdetermined the endeavors of propertied white men in the age of ‘White Man's Burden,’ a new relativistic anti-humanism is pervasive in liberal and conservative ideology in the global North. I nominate the new dominant logic of propertied white men ‘White Dude's Burden.’

Keywords:

• relativistic anti-humanism
• development
• mission impossible
• Society must be defended
• white dude
• epistemology

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Srinivas Aravamudan, Brett de Bary, Diane Nelson, Arturo Escobar and Walter Mignolo for helping him think through this argument.

Notes

1. The conclusion to Ferguson's 2003 text Empire is called ‘Bearing the Burden’ and repeats Rudyard Kipling's 1899 invitation to the US to ‘take up the white man's burden.’

2. This is an expansion of Diane Nelson's brilliant upgrade of Spivak in her A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (1999).

3. This is described in David Harvey's The New Imperialism (2003).

4. Edward Said explains this impulse of Theroux better than anyone I am aware of: ‘to build a conceptual framework around the notion of us-versus-them is in effect to pretend that the principal consideration is epistemological and natural – our civilization is known and accepted, theirs is different and strange – whereas in fact the framework separating us from them is belligerent, constructed and situational’ (Said 2000, p. 577).

5. This last quote is taken from Neil Larson's superlative review of Kaplan's text in his ‘Poverties of Nation,’ Cultural Logic #3, 1999, online version.

6. Ferguson, ‘Welcome to the New Imperialism,’ Guardian, October 31, 2001.

7. The Iraq invasion was also marked by the absence of any planning for post-war humanitarian and relief operations. Rumsfeld justified this by claiming ‘I don't believe it's our job to reconstruct that country after 30 years of centralized Stalinist-like economic controls.’ ‘Rumsfeld: Rebuilding up to Iraqis,’ Seattle Times, September 11, 2003.