Is There a “Western Civilization”?
Michael Otteson | PhD Candidate in Philosophy | University of Kansas
Many people have heard or used the term “Western Civilization” at some point in their lives. It has often been associated with Greece and Rome in textbooks, and it is still not unusual for someone to take a college course on “Western Civilization” at some point in college. People periodically attack or defend Western Civilization with great enthusiasm in the public sphere. Others assert that it is itself an artificial construct that certain academics created about a hundred years ago. Given the disagreement about the exact nature of Western Civilization as a concept, it is worth determining which ones, if any, are worthwhile or useful in a historical, intellectual, or sociological context.
Recently, several white nationalists have claimed Western Civilization as the creation and exclusive inheritance of white individuals. They associate Western Civilization and the various accomplishments they ascribe to it with the alleged innate superiority of white people. This is ridiculous on a number of levels. Beyond the false appeals to racial difference and hierarchy, this notion of Western Civilization is deeply confused in that it associates Western Civilization with a particular race. If they want to trace Western Civilization back centuries, then the white nationalists will find that many different linguistic and ethnic groups contributed to Western Civilization. The Greeks and Romans, for instance, speak different languages and have distinct cultures. They never would have said that they belonged to the same racial group. Insofar as any definition of Western Civilization needs to include both of these groups, the white nationalist account of Western Civilization fails. This of course is not limited to ancient societies; there are many different groups and populations that are clearly part of Western Civilization, which is not surprising given that the “white race” is a social construct that has no biological basis.
There are other less odious accounts of Western Civilization in the aether, however. One approach is to take the word “civilization” as decisive and say that Western Civilization is a political project or society. This definition holds that there is some entity that began a long time ago and existed to this day. A defender of this view would probably identify the beginning of Western Civilization with the Greeks or Hebrews and assert that it has grown and developed since. However, this view is problematic because there has been no unified political entity or government that has existed over this period of time. There have always been multiple civilizations and governments in what are commonly called “the West,” such as France, Germany, Britain, or Spain.
To avoid these concerns, we might assert that Western Civilization is not a unified political entity but instead a set of principles or ideals that have been preserved or passed on from ancient times to the present. Some defenders of Western Civilization in the public sphere assert that a concern for liberty, human dignity and rights, the rule of law, and democracy are all characteristics of the inheritance of Western Civilization. Others associate it with great artistic achievement, such as Notre Dame, Michelangelo, or Mozart. The difficulty here is that there is no unified set of principles that has existed across the vast tapestry of Western Civilization. While there certainly have been proponents of individual liberty and rights (for instance) in places like France or England, there have been just as many seminal figures in the West who have eschewed or ignored them. Plato, for instance, argues for a kind of aristocracy in which philosopher-kings rule over everyone else. At no point does he show any concern for the ability of individuals to make choices about how they want to spend their lives. Furthermore, there have been many advocates of absolute monarchy and despotism in the history of Western Civilization, as the examples of Louis XIV, Oliver Cromwell, and Adolph Hitler would attest to.
The problems with the above views has led some individuals to claim that there is no Western Civilization. The term itself didn’t appear until about a hundred years ago when certain humanities professors and academics attempted to paint a unified picture of various countries in Western Europe and America as the descendants of older political and philosophical ideas and movements. Given that the term itself is so new, why think that there is anything to Western Civilization at all?
This is a serious challenge, but there is another possible definition of Western Civilization that can accommodate both the unifying impulse and the criticisms of it. Western Civilization can perhaps best be understood as a kind of conversation or dialogue that has emerged over time. At some point, people in certain parts of the world started to write down stories that they found compelling. Some of the earliest examples of this in this tradition would be epic poems of Homer in Greece and the Hebrew Bible in Israel. When this happened, it allowed later generations to read and think about what their predecessors had said. They then in turn wrote their own works in a way that responded to or incorporated insights from the previous generation. A play like Sophocles’ Antigone is an example of this. Sophocles read the story of Oedipus in earlier myths and decided to write his own take on the story. Staying with Greece, Plato read about the conception of justice in the Iliad and believed it to be inadequate. He then decided to write is own account of justice in the Republic. In Israel, later writers read the Torah and wrote their own religious texts in light of it, as in the case of Jeremiah or Malachi. Eventually, political and military developments allowed for people to read both Greek and Hebrew writings (as in the case of Philo of Alexandria), and they tried to make sense of the ideas and arguments present in both traditions. With the rise of Christianity as a breakoff of Judaism, Christian writers in the Roman Empire tried to explain how their God could be both the savior of the New Testament and the god that Plato and Aristotle described in their own works. Eventually, figures like Descartes and Hobbes consciously rejected some of the concepts and ideas in the Greek and older Christian tradition and developed their own political, moral, and metaphysical outlooks on the world.
This of course is the briefest of treatments that covers a sliver of Western thought. However, it is enough to illustrate that there has been a conversation that has spanned thousands of years. Conversations in everyday life can be remarkably organic. Two people can start discussing a subject and then change their minds over time. Other people can join the conversation and move it in a particular direction that covers new topics that nonetheless still relate to what came before in some way. This is exactly how discourse has taken place over the course of the history of writing. What started in Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia inspired later figures and intellectuals to respond to it and take things in a new direction. Some people tried to build on what came before; others rejected what had been said and developed their own ideas, though they nonetheless had to explain why their new moves were superior to what had come before. Of course, given the nature of written text, it was always possible for later generations to look further back than their own direct forebearers and take from older portions of the conversation. Thus, there could be revivals and attempted restorations that broke with immediate tradition by recovering older ways of thought. This is acutely illustrated in the case of the Italian Renaissance or the American founding.
This account of Western Civilization can thus account for the diversity of ideas it contains. Conversations often involve participants that don’t agree with each other; they just have to listen to what the other person says and respond to it. So it is with the history of the West. Kant and Aristotle don’t have to agree with one another to be part of the same discussion. Furthermore, the idea of Western Civilization as conversation can accommodate and explain the rich and winding turns that the conversation took. Islam, for instance, is clearly aware of and incorporates elements of Judaism and Christianity, but also in certain places bumps into Hinduism and Buddhism in Asia. This can lead to an intertwining of the Western Conversation with another one in India and China. Indeed, there is on this account no need to insist that the Western Civilization must be entirely distinct from Eastern Civilization, in the same way that a conversation between multiple interlocutors can break off and continue with some new additional members. What matters is the genealogy of the dialogue.
With that said, it may be possible to suggest that some places have continued the conversation in ways that more closely adhere to what came before, or at least had continued more of the same conversation topics for longer periods of time. In this way, we might be able to distinguish between countries like Spain and Indonesia. Spanish society, politics, and culture has clearly been influenced by many threads of the Western Conversation. Indonesia, one the other hand, has a Muslim majority and a sizeable Christian minority but nonetheless did not have the same access to all of the authors from the Western tradition for most of its history that Spain has had while also having more exposure to Eastern tradition and influences. Thus, this account of Western Civilization can accommodate the intuition that some countries are part of the Western tradition while others are not, even if this is inexact and constantly in flux.
This account of Western Civilization is also empowering and invigorating in certain ways. We can all be part of Western Civilization on this account: just start reading and respond to it. You can either agree with some parts of the discourse and live your life accordingly, or you can argue against it and/or take things in a new direction. Conversation in this way connects us to the past without binding us to what came before as a kind of destiny. It allows us to view Western Civilization as a family tree that can help us feel joined to our ancestors in some way while still leaving space for new marriages and additions. The possibilities are not entirely unlimited but nonetheless infinite. Think of the fractions in between the numbers one and two, or the number of possible combinations of words in any particular language.
If you have questions or comments about what I’ve said, let me know. That’s how you continue a conversation, after all.