Culture talk in the War on Terror

Mahmood Mamdani gave an excellent lecture at the London School of Economics a while back on the 'cultural framework' of the War on Terror. Here's a snippet:

The public debate [in the United States] was defined...by a presumption that the world we live in is divided in two: between those modern and those pre-modern. It is said that those modern make their culture; they have a reflexive attitude to it; they can separate the good from the bad, build on the good and correct the bad; their culture develops historically; and the story of that historical development is what we call progress. The pre-modern peoples, in contrast, are said to be born into a culture; they are said to have a tendency to internalize their culture rather than have a critical attitude to it. Rather than make their culture historically, they seem condemned to live it uncritically, and content to pass it on from one generation to another. Pre-modern peoples are said to wear culture as a badge, or to suffer from it, like a twitch, even a fever.

You can read the entire speech here. Definitely required reading.