Alphabets and colonialism

It is historically true that logogram-and-syllabogram-dominated writing systems preceded syllabogram-dominated systems, and that alphabets come last. This priority does not mean that the later types of system are superior or are features of superior cultures. To believe in such superiority is at base naive ethnocentrism.… The specious historical corollary of this distinction leads to sharp separations among the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean basin, and the forms of ethnocentrism at hand can be named with an unfortunate precision: colonialism, Eurocentrism, anti-Semitism.—Michael O’Connor, in Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew, 244–45

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This seems especially appropriate in our current cultural war.
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