Culture: Report:
Western Civilization
2004
The Three
Traditions of Western Civilization
From
Christendom to Western Civilization
The
American Redefinition of Western Civilization
The Cold
War Concept of Western Civilization
The Death
of the Classical Tradition
The
Ordeal of the Christian Tradition
The
Dominance of the Enlightenment Tradition
From the
Enlightenment Tradition to Post-Western Civilization
Defenders
of the Faith: The Role of Liberals, Conservatives, and Neoconservatives
==============================
Western Civilization, Our Tradition
James Kurth
Western Civilization, Our Tradition by James Kurth
THE INTERCOLLEGIATE
REVIEW—Fall 2003/Spring 2004 5
James Kurth is Claude Smith Professor
of Political Science at Swarthmore College.
==============================
Half
a century ago, Western civilization was a central idea, and ideal, in American
political and intellectual discourse. American political leaders frequently
said that the United States was the heir to Western civilization and that it
had a duty to defend the West against its enemies, most obviously the communist
bloc led by the Soviet Union (sometimes termed “the East”). American academic
leaders regarded the Western tradition with respect, and courses on Western
civilization were widely taught and often required in American universities.
The 1950s were an era when the leading institutions of America (and with their
support and guidance, the leading institutions of Europe as well) were
confident and articulate in identifying with and promoting the Western
tradition.
Today, Western civilization is almost never
mentioned, much less promoted, in political and intellectual discourse, either
in America or in Europe. When it is mentioned amongst Western elites, the
traditions of the West are almost always an object of criticism or contempt.
Instead, real discussion of Western civilization is usually undertaken by the
political, intellectual, and religious leaders of non-Western societies—
most obviously, Muslim societies. Indeed, the idea of the West seems to be most
charged with vital energy in the excited mind of our civilization’s principle
contemporary enemy, radical Islam. The most lively consciousness of the West
actually seems to be found within the East. But within the West itself (i.e.
the United States, Europe, and also Canada, Australia, and New Zealand)1 it sometimes seems that the Western
civilization of fifty years ago has become a lost civilization today.
What explains this great transformation in a
great civilization? Which of the West’s traditions remains a living reality
today? And what might be the fate of these traditions in the future?
Among scholarly
interpreters of the West, it has been widely understood that Western
civilization was formed from three distinct traditions: (1) the classical
culture of Greece and Rome; (2) the Christian religion, particularly Western
Christianity; and (3) the Enlightenment of the modern era.2 Although many interpreters have seen Western
civilization as a synthesis of all three traditions, others have emphasized the
conflicts among these threads. As we shall see, the conflict between the
Christian religion and the Enlightenment has been, and remains, especially
consequential.
The first of the Western traditions was
classical culture. In the realm of politics, for example, Greece contributed
the idea of a republic, while Rome contributed that of an empire. Similarly, Greece
contributed the idea of liberty, and Rome, that of law. When combined, these
ideas gave rise to the important Western concept of liberty under law.
Christianity shaped Western civilization in
many important ways. Christian theology established the sanctity of the
individual believer and called for obedience to an authority (Christ) higher
than any secular ruler (Caesar), ideas that further refined and supported the
concept of liberty under law. Christian institutions, particularly the papacy
of the Roman Catholic Church in its ongoing struggle with the Holy Roman
Emperor and local monarchs, bequeathed to the West the idea of a separation,
and therefore a limitation, of powers.
The third source of Western civilization was
the modern Enlightenment, which provided the ideas of liberal democracy, the
free market, and the belief in reason and science as the privileged means for
making sense of the world. More particularly, Britain’s “Glorious” Revolution
of 1688 emphasized liberty and constitutionalism, while the French Revolution
of 1789 emphasized democracy and rationalism. The differences between the
Enlightenment in Britain and on the Continent would give rise to important
divisions within the West during much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This was the case with regard to the Industrial Revolution and the different
responses to it: both state guidance of the economy and Marxist ideology played
a much greater role on the Continent than in Britain or the United States.
The very term
“Western civilization” is something of an anomaly. It was invented only a
century ago, and it is not really comparable to the terms commonly used for
other civilizations. Most other civilizations (e.g., Islamic civilization,
Hindu civilization, and Orthodox civilization)3 have retained a religious identification; and indeed, before the
Enlightenment the term that people in the West commonly used for their
civilization was “Christendom.” The story of how “Christendom” became “Western
civilization” is significant for understanding the changing nature of our
civilization, and perhaps its fate.4
The Enlightenment brought about the
secularization of most of the intellectual elite of Christendom. This elite
ensured that their civilization was no longer called that, even though much of
its ordinary population remained Christian. The French Revolution and the
Industrial Revolution spread Enlightenment ideas to important parts of that
population, but the Christian churches continued to be a vital force within the
civilization. Ever since the Enlightenment, however, it has not been possible
to refer to our civilization as Christendom.
For about a century, the preferred term for
our civilization was “Europe.” But this was also the period that saw the rise
of European settlements in the New World moving to the status of independent
nations. This made the term “European civilization” unsuitable. In the early
twentieth century, a few Europeans conceived of a new and more appropriate term:
“Western civilization.” Almost as soon as it was invented, however, the term
began to be used in the pessimistic context of civilizational decline, notably
in Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918). Had the term been
left to Europeans alone, it would probably have had a short and unhappy life,
particularly given the devastating moral, as well as material, consequences of
the First World War.
It was the New World
that was called in to redress the pessimism of the Old. The Americans breathed
a new meaning into the concept of Western civilization, first as they dealt
with the great surge of European immigrants to America, and then as they dealt
with the European nations in Europe itself in the course of the two world wars.
For Americans in the first decades of the twentieth century, Western
civilization consisted principally in the ideas of liberty and individualism,
institutionalized in liberal democracy, free markets, constitutionalism, and the
rule of law. Americans referred to this ensemble of ideas as “the American
creed,” and they promoted this creed as a principal means to “Americanize” new
immigrants from Europe. These ideas were, of course, direct descendents of the
British Enlightenment, but they were also indirect descendents of elements in
the classical and the Christian traditions as well.
The American intervention on the side of the
Western Allies in the First World War and again in the Second World War brought
about a redefinition of Western civilization. The new conception has been
described as “the Allied scheme of history,”5 but its central pillar was the peculiarly American sense of historical
mission. The new content of Western civilization became the American creed.
Conversely, the new context for the American creed became Western civilization
as a whole. The combination of American energy and European legacy gave the
idea of Western civilization both power and legitimacy in both America and
Europe. The power helped the United States win the First World War against the
German Empire, the Second World War against Nazi Germany, and the Cold War
against the Soviet Union. The legitimacy helped to order the long peace within
Western Europe that was very much intertwined with the Cold War. With its
appropriation by America, therefore, the idea of Western civilization
experienced its heroic age.
The Cold War
clarified and crystallized the political and intellectual division between the
West and the East. The “Allied scheme of history,” the product of the two world
wars, was elaborated and institutionalized into what we might call the “NATO
scheme of history,” which fit nicely with the Cold War. Almost all of the
members of the North Atlantic Alliance appeared to be heirs of each of the
three great Western traditions, and they seemed to be comfortable and confident
in this identity and role.6 (NATO
did include a couple of cultural anomalies—Greece and Turkey—which were
obviously outside some of the elements of the three traditions, and the United
States did have another, immensely important ally—Japan—which was obviously
outside all three traditions, as well as outside any plausible geographical
definition of the West. But these anomalies became acceptable with the argument
that each of these countries was now engaged in the grand project of
“Westernization.”)
During the first decade of the Cold War, the
struggle between the West and the East took the form of a struggle between “the
Free World” and “the Socialist World,” as the two antagonists referred to
themselves. With the de-colonization of the European empires, a new region, the
global South, emerged “between” the West and the East, and now the struggle was
said to be between the First World and the Second World for the future of the
Third World. Both the West and the East offered the South a particular version
of the Enlightenment project, a particular secular doctrine of progress. The
West promoted liberalism, which was largely a product of the British
Enlightenment, while the East promoted Marxism, which was largely a product of
the French Enlightenment. Significantly, however, the West decided that in its
struggle with the East it could not promote to the South the other Western
traditions, classical culture and the Christian religion.
The 1950s, the high Cold War, was the golden
age of the Allied or NATO conception of Western civilization. With the 1960s,
not only this conception but any conception of Western civilization came under
sustained assault, and the Western traditions have been on the defensive ever
since. Indeed, by now, even “defensive” may be too strong a term, since today
very few defenders of Western civilization can be found within the political,
intellectual, and economic institutions of either America or Europe.
What were the causes of this great rejection
of the great traditions? We will begin with the rejection of the classical one,
which even in the seeming golden age was the most vulnerable of the three
traditions.
The classical
tradition was still taught to some extent in American and European universities
in the 1950s. But deep within this classical education was a problematic
assumption—that this tradition was relevant, even practical (at least as
“practical wisdom”), for a particular part of society. This was the elite who
would become the governors, administrators, and judges of the rest, the mass,
of society. The classical tradition valued aristocracy and hierarchy, honor and
duty. (The ideal career for the student of the classical tradition during the
modern age was to become a colonial administrator, such as the legendary young
men who went out from Oxford and Cambridge to become district officers of the
British Empire in India.)
Antithetical to the classical spirit are both
the democratic spirit and the commercial spirit, spirits which were greatly
strengthened by the Enlightenment. They were, of course, especially prevalent
in the United States. Whatever might be made of “classical republican” ideas at
the time of the American founding, by the 1830s most of America was thoroughly
democratic and commercial in its spirit, as Tocqueville famously observed in
his masterpiece, Democracy in America.7 Although the America of the 1950s was the leader of the West during
something of a golden age of selfconsciousness about Western civilization, the
classical tradition was by that time almost wholly invisible in almost every
aspect of American life. This meant that there would be no substantial interest
to defend that tradition if it were ever subject to a substantial assault. And
this assault did come as early as the 1960s.
The classical culture of Greece and Rome, so
integral to both Western civilization and to the quite different civilization
shaped by Eastern Orthodoxy, formed no part of the history of most other
cultures or civilizations. It meant almost nothing to the peoples of Asia or
Africa, or even to the Indian and Mestizo peoples of Latin America. But the
United States had living within its borders many descendents of these
non-Western peoples, and it would come to have vastly more as a result of the
Immigration Act of 1965. The political and intellectual leaders of these groups
saw classical culture (and even the broader Western culture) as a device by
which the traditional elite excluded them from equal participation and respect
within what should be a democratic society. With regard to the classical
culture, therefore, the American civil-rights movement became an uncivil
wrecking operation. At the same time, the anti-colonial movement performed a
similar operation for Europe.
The political and economic elites of America,
and also those of Europe, who were now following American leadership in many
ways—imbued as they were with the democratic and the commercial spirit— had
already ceased to believe in the classical tradition, since it was so remote
from the actuality of their lives and livelihoods. Now, in order to maintain
their political and economic positions in the face of the civil-rights and
anti-colonial movements, they were quick to appease these anti-Western forces
by abandoning the last remnants of the classical tradition. This meant
expelling the classics from their last redoubt in the higher educational
institutions of the West. In effect, this marked the death of the classical
tradition within Western civilization.
The Christian
tradition also came under systematic and sustained assault in the 1960s, and
the Enlightenment was at the intellectual and ideological center of the
assault. The Enlightenment had always believed in reason and science as the
privileged means of making sense of the world. Driven by pride, many of the
Enlightenment’s adherents were possessed by an animus to overthrow all
traditional authority, both secular and religious—and to appropriate all
authority for themselves. This drove them to use reason and science in a biased
way to deny any Biblical and spiritual basis for truth and therefore to denigrate
the Christian religion.
This animus had existed in the Enlightenment
tradition since its origin. However, in the 1960s there was a massive expansion
in the number of students in secular universities, and also a massive expansion
of popular (actually pagan) culture promulgated by the secular media. The
Enlightenment mentality had penetrated much of the elite at the beginning of
the industrial age. Now, at the beginning of the information age, it expanded
its dominion over much of the young in the mass. These intellectual and
cultural developments were reinforced by developments in technology (the sudden
availability of new contraceptive methods) and in the economy (the sudden entry
of large numbers of women into the new fulltime jobs produced by the information
economy). These, in turn, resulted in a momentous political development: the
rise of a powerful feminist movement and, when contraceptive technologies
proved insufficient, its promotion of abortion as its central project.
Each of these developments, which surged in
the 1960s and which continue today, contradicted some teaching or practice of
the Christian religion. Overall, Western elites have justified and legitimated
them as the progressive fulfillment of Enlightenment ideas such as the liberty
and equality of the individual. Seen from a Biblical perspective, however, they
are really just new manifestations of the ancient forces of pride and
rebellion.
The assault on the Christian religion has
been institutionalized by changes, in the 1960s and afterwards, in the ethnic
structure of both America and Europe. In the United States, a series of Supreme
Court decisions erected a massive (and radically new) wall between church and
state, in effect driving Christianity from the public square. This development
was related to the collapse of the Protestant (“WASP”) ascendancy in the
American intellectual and legal elites. In Europe, large-scale immigration from
Muslim countries began in the 1960s and has continued ever since. The
consequence has been the establishment of large Muslim communities, which now
comprise five to ten percent of the population of many European countries. This
amplifies the preference of European political elites to drive Christianity
from the public square.
Although the forces assaulting the Christian
tradition have operated throughout the West, the effects have been different in
Europe and America. In Europe, the Christian churches had been bound up with
the traditional political and social authorities. As these authorities declined
with the spread of liberal democracy and free markets—the working out of the
democratic and the commercial spirits—the Christian churches declined along
with them. In contrast, in America the large number of different
“denominations” (a distinctively American term), which were independent of the
state and independent of each other, meant that almost from the origins of the
United States there was a kind of religious democracy and religious market. If
a particular church seemed to be bound up with a discredited and declining
political or social authority, Christians in America could easily move to a new
church, while keeping faith with the essentials of the Christian religion. This
helps to explain why today Christianity is much more vital in America than it is
in Europe. American elites may have rejected it, but the Christian religion is
meaningful and centrally important to large sections of the American
population. Thus, the Christian thread continues to have civilizational
importance in America.
Today, the only
Western tradition embraced by the political, intellectual, and economic elites
of the West is that of the Enlightenment. For American political and economic
elites, this largely means the British (or Anglo-American) Enlightenment, with
its emphasis on the liberty of individuals, institutionalized in liberal
democracy and free markets. For European political, intellectual, and economic
elites (and for the American intellectual elite located in academia and the
media), this largely means the French (or Continental) Enlightenment, with its
emphasis on the rationalism of elites, institutionalized in bureaucratic
authority and the credentialed society. Together, these elites promote the
contemporary version of the Enlightenment project. They are intent upon
imposing it around the world—and upon eliminating any vestige of the other
Western traditions, the classical and the Christian, within America and Europe
themselves.
The rejection of the Christian faith by Western
elites does not mean that they have rejected all faiths. Despite the claims and
conceits of rationalists and scientists, every human being believes in some
things that cannot be proven (and therefore cannot be established by reason) or
that cannot be seen (and therefore cannot be established by science) and that
therefore have to be taken on faith. Ever since the coming of the
Enlightenment, Western elites have adhered to a variety of secularist and
universalist faiths, which in effect have been religions without God.
Kenneth Minogue has identified these ersatz
faiths as (1) the idea of progress, (2) Marxism, and (3) “Olympianism,” which
is the contemporary belief that an enlightened intellectual elite can and
should bring about “human betterment...on a global scale by forcing the peoples
of the world into a single community based on the universal enjoyment of
appropriate human rights.”8 As
Minogue demonstrates, each of these secular religions has identified
Christianity as its enemy. Indeed, the Olympian-ism which dominates in our time
sees the very idea of Western civilization itself to be an obstacle to its
grand global and universalist project.
The universalist ideology of Olympian elites
is largely consistent with, and perhaps reflective of, the expanding interests
of global corporations. During the first half of the Cold War, American
corporations had found their most attractive business opportunities in Europe
or other Western countries. This more or less corresponded to some definition
of the American alliance system and of Western civilization. During the second
half of the Cold War, however, American multinational corporations expanded
into non-Western regions. Finally, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the
end of the Cold War, the preferred arena for American multinational
corporations became the entire world, the great globe itself: hence,
“globalization.” For multinational, now global, corporations, it became
important to be identified with ideas and ideals that appeared to be progressive
and global, even inevitable and universal, and not to be identified with ideas
and ideals that were (merely) Western and traditional.
The result of these ideological and economic
developments has been the redefinition of the ideal economic arena from Western
to global, of the ideal society from Western to multicultural, and of the ideal
political system from Western constitutionalism to the “rule” of transnational
NGOs. Instead of Western civilization, there is supposed to be a global
civilization, in which multicultural and transnational elites will administer
(or impose) their notions of human rights. What is envisioned is a universal
empire—except that it will be called global “governance”—and a universal
religion— except that it will be called universal human rights.
Historians usually
date the beginning of the modern era to the end of the fifteenth century; the
Italian Renaissance and the European explorations of the non-European world
were major movements that inaugurated and shaped the new era. These were soon
followed by other developments, such as the Reformation and the scientific
exploration of the natural world. The postmodern era seems to have begun about
the end of the twentieth century, making the modern era just about half a
millennium in length.
Clearly, the modern era can also be seen as
the Western era. All of the great movements which defined the modern era
originated in Europe, and Europeans then spread them, even imposed them, over
the rest of the globe. Similarly, the post-modern era can also be seen as the
post-Western era, with most of the Western traditions not only rejected by
non-Western societies, but also abandoned by the elites of Western societies.
All of the elements of the postmodern movement originated in Europe
(particularly in France), where they could be seen as logical deductions from
elements of the French Enlightenment. Post-modern ideologues have engaged in a
compulsive anti-Western project in both Europe and America. They have been
joined by their post-colonial counterparts in the non-Western world. Together,
they have formed a grand alliance against Western civilization, and they seek
to obliterate it everywhere around the world, and especially within the West
itself.
The principle enemy of Western civilization
is within the West itself. The West’s great enemy today is the contemporary
version of the Enlightenment, especially the French Enlightenment. Because of
its universalist pretensions and illusions, its adherents have made the peoples
of the West undiscriminating about other cultures and unconfident about their
own. They have therefore made the West disoriented and vulnerable to assault
from the East, and especially from Islam. This assault may come from sustained
or catastrophic attacks by transnational networks of Islamic terrorists. Or it
may come from similar attacks by members of the large and alienated Muslim
communities now residing within the West, especially in Europe. However, for Western
civilization, Islam is merely a disease of the skin; the Enlightenment, has
mutated into a disease of the heart.9
Within the West
itself, who are the conscious defenders of Western civilization in all its
authenticity and fullness, and not merely of its Enlightenment universalist
heresy? Certainly not the liberals. Liberals in the intellectual sector
(academia and the media) are largely multiculturalists and transnationalists;
those in the business sector are largely globalists; and those in the political
sector (most obviously in the Democratic Party in the United States) largely
represent these post-Western intellectual and economic views. In any event,
liberals have never liked tradition—and therefore the Western
traditions—anyway. Indeed, they only accept their own tradition, that of the
Enlightenment, if they reconceive it as being not a “tradition,” but rather
“progress.”
One would, of course, expect conservatives to
like and support tradition. But among purported conservatives today, it has
become important to make a distinction between traditional conservatives and
neoconservatives. From their origins (be it as followers of Leon Trotsky or of
Leo Strauss), neo-conservatives have seen the Christian tradition as an alien,
even a threatening, one. As for the classical tradition, their view of it has
been formed by the decidedly untraditional interpretation of classical
philosophy given by Strauss. The only Western tradition that the
neoconservatives actually want to defend is the Enlightenment. They have wanted
to defend it against attacks emanating from postmodernists, and in recent
years, they have wanted to advance it in the rest of the world with the
establishment of a kind of American empire. This latter is not a conservative
project but a radical and revolutionary one. For the most part, it might be
said that, with friends like the neoconservatives, Western civilization does
not need enemies.
The true defenders of the Western traditions
will be the traditional conservatives. They are able to recognize that the
central and crucial tradition of Western civilization is the Christian
tradition. The Christian religion assumed to itself and develWestern oped the best elements of the classical
tradition, while subordinating them to a higher Biblical truth. The Christian
religion also gave rise to the best elements of the Enlightenment tradition,
while also subordinating them to a higher Biblical truth. It is the Christian
tradition, in other words, that kept the other Western traditions in balance.
Perhaps in our time it is the calling of those few traditional conservatives
found within the educated elite to reach out to the large numbers of Christians
within the wider population, to help deepen their understanding of the major
issues before us, and to give voice to their Christian—and Western— convictions
and concerns.
The protagonists of the contemporary version
of the Enlightenment may think that they will create a global and universal
civilization, both abroad and at home, but the evidence is accumulating that
they have instead opened the doors to the barbarians, both without (e.g.,
Islamic terrorists) and within (e.g., pagan disregard for the dignity of human
life). The best defense against the new barbarians will be found in the
Christian religion. With the Christian tradition, Western civilization became
the most creative, indeed the highest, civilization in human history. Without
the Christian tradition, Western civilization could come to nothing. With a
revival of the Christian tradition, Western civilization will not only prevail
over the new barbarians, but it will become more truly civilized than it is
today.
Notes
1. Latin America fits ambivalently within the
West. Insofar as it is Latin, it is generally Western. Insofar as it is
American in the sense of Amerindian, it is something else.
2. This section draws upon my “America and
the West: Global Triumph or Western Twilight?” Orbis (Summer 2001),
333-341.
3. These are some of the civilizations
identified by Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the
Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
4. James Kurth, “The Real Clash,” The
National Interest (Fall 1994), 3-15.
5. J.C.D. Clark, “The United States, the
United Kingdom, and Germany: Some Intellectual Premises of Transatlantic
Alliances,” paper presented to the Foreign Policy Research Institute, April 7,
2003.
6. James Kurth, “NATO Expansion and the Idea
of the West,” Orbis (Fall 1997), 555-567.
7. For more than a century thereafter,
however, the classical tradition lived on in America in various ways, most
strikingly in the erection of numerous splendid public buildings designed
according to a succession of neo-classical styles. The most obvious of these
was the U.S. Capitol, but at least forty state capitols were built in some kind
of neo-classical style. By the 1950s, however, the hyper-modern (really,
anti-classical), functional (anti-esthetic), and “international” (anti-national)
style had completely supplanted the classical tradition in American and
European architecture.
8. Kenneth Minogue, “‘Christophobia’ and the
West,” The New Criterion (June 2003), 4-13.
9. On the challenge of Islam to the West, see
Roger Scruton, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat
(Wilmington: ISI Books, 2002); see also James Kurth, “The New Protracted
Conflict: The War and the West,” Orbis (Spring 2002), 321-331.
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