Western civilization already was under attack long before Sept. 11, not with weapons but with words.
For years, critics abroad and at home have laid the world’s ills at our feet. Stanford University dropped its undergraduate humanities course, long titled there and on other campuses, “Western Civilization.” Younger faculty refused to teach anything with Western in the title. To them it was a dirty word. After the suicide strikes on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, pundits of this persuasion informed us it was a case of the West’s chickens coming home to roost, payback time for our cultural sins.
The literary critic and novelist Susan Sontag assured the New Yorker’s readers, “this was not a `cowardly’ attack on `civilization’ or `liberty’ or `humanity’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions.”
It is high time to let the gas out of that rhetorical balloon.
Two-and-one-half cheers for Western civilization!
Not three, mind you; nobody’s perfect.
Think about that last sentence: It is a hallmark of our civilization. It sets us apart from other cultures. In the West, we think of ourselves as a work in progress. We don’t assume our way of life is a finished product, a thing beyond criticism.
We are virtually alone in that assumption. Sontag and her intellectual allies ought to make the experiment of moving their base of operations to, say, Islamic civilization and put it through their cultural wringer.
They likely would find what Salman Rushdie knows from painful experience: Throughout much of the non-Western world, “cultural critic” can be a very dangerous job title.
In Rushdie’s case, it came with a death sentence. His crime? Writing a novel judged offensive to the Muslim religion.
In the much-maligned West, the same literary trick lands you, not on a hit list, but a best-seller list.
Freedom to express
Sinclair Lewis probably received some “drop dead you atheist” hate mail for his novel “Elmer Gantry,” a scathing account of a Christian fundamentalist preacher. But the American novelist didn’t have to go into hiding. Neither did the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, even though some thought his novel “The Last Temptation of Christ” was blasphemous.
The truth is that freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression–the very lifeblood of any intellectual, our critics included–are in short supply, verging on non-existent, once you get beyond Western Europe and America. So are the ethical standards our critics have been using to give us failing grades.
For instance, we’ve been told that those horrible scenes of Sept. 11 somehow were the consequence of America’s failure to support forces of democracy in an Arab world dominated by dictatorial regimes.
Yet look up “democracy” in an English-Arabic dictionary. You’ll find essentially the same word on both sides of the entry. The Arabic word for democracy is dimuqrati. It is much the same in a Chinese dictionary, and for a simple reason.
The concept of people governing themselves is a strictly Western one. The term didn’t exist in the lexicon of other civilizations–until they saw the West saying and practicing it.
We know where and when democracy was born. We used to have young people memorize the date, back before our universities became embarrassed to teach Western civilization.
In 508 B.C., a Greek statesman, Cleisthenes, decided there had to be a better way to make political decisions than waiting around for some king or priest to give orders. So he established a new system under which Athenians simply voted for what they wanted their government to do.
Of course, a simple straight line doesn’t connect Cleisthenes’ brainstorm with present-day Western-style democracy.
There were a lot of bumps in the road from there to here. Some of the worst were right at the beginning. Women couldn’t vote in ancient Athens. As a matter of fact, they couldn’t vote anyplace, including the U.S., much before the 20th Century.
Virtually all societies start out as male preserves, which is a very inefficient way of handling human affairs. If you keep women segregated and subservient, you’ve cut your pool of brain power by half. A lot of non-Western societies still make that sacrifice for the sake of keeping women under wraps. But the West started getting over that bump more than a century ago.
Path to equality
This still is not a society where men and women are fully equal. But in 1903, Western women had achieved such a sufficient degree of emancipation that Marie Curie, a French woman born in Poland, could win the Nobel Prize for physics.
Among the literati, East and West, it is fashionable to blame us for the failure of non-Western societies to invent a vaccine for polio, to discover that germs are the cause of disease or to define the concept of democracy. We are told that Western imperialism stunted the development of other civilizations.
To be sure, Western colonialism, like all imperialisms, was morally indefensible. Yet there is something too facile, not quite accurate, about using colonialism to explain how the big bad West could invent modern, life-saving medicine while the supposedly good non-Western civilizations didn’t. To begin with, there is a simple matter of chronology.
Why didn’t the non-Western world develop science and technology before the 19th Century, when Europeans became colonialists?
As a matter of fact, for much of history the West didn’t dish out imperialism. It was on the receiving end. It took the Spanish from the 8th to the 15th Centuries to free themselves from the bonds of Muslim invaders. From the 15th to the 19th Centuries, the Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian and Yugoslav peoples were subject to Turkish imperialists. Through part of that period, Mongols were imperialist masters of southern Russia.
Starting small
During the middle ages, the high point of non-Western aggression on Western peoples, the West was a puny thing. The Muslim world was far advanced over Europe. So was China. But once freed, Westerners began to tip that cultural balance.
They did so by seeing, say, a sick child and thinking: There has to be a better way. It is not that the peoples of the West had a monopoly on empathy. The impulse is universal.
What differentiated the civilization of Europe and America was a willingness to say: When stumped by a problem, try something new. If we don’t have the answer, find out who does.
It seems an obvious approach. But it is not very common. Most cultures are extremely reluctant to give up on the way their ancestors have done things, or to grant that other peoples sometimes have a better answer.
When it seemed that the Chinese Empire was about to fall prey to Western colonialists, advisers to the royal court urged that China establish diplomatic relations with the West. That way, there would be a window on the Europeans through which to keep an eye on their colonial schemes. The suggestion was turned down cold. The emperor has no equal, the Chinese explained, therefore he cannot exchange ambassadors with other so-called governments.
It wasn’t easy for the West to get over the inertia of long-established tradition, either.
When a pioneering generation of Italian doctors began to study human anatomy, they had to keep quiet about it. As late as the Renaissance, there were strong religious scruples against dissecting corpses. But they persevered, animated by a peculiar brand of intellectual curiosity that has marked the West since ancient times.
Romans collected laws
For example, the Romans collected the laws of all their people and made them into a great compendium, the lex gentium. It was based on the assumption that nobody has a lock on truth.
Roman jurists reasoned that law isn’t something that falls out of the heavens, a gift of the gods, something immutable. Instead, they reasoned that law is a product of human experience and needs to evolve as the conditions of life change.
Compare that approach with the attitude of the Taliban leaders when they were trying to haggle their way out of the mess they had gotten themselves into by giving Osama bin Laden sanctuary. The mullahs said they would turn him over, but on the condition that he be tried only according to Islamic law.
In other words: We know what is right and wrong. Your ideas don’t count.
And yet, the Susan Sontags accuse the West of being chauvinistic. By some intellectual sleight of hand, the West is made out to be insensitive to other cultures.
So let’s make such carping a prime objective of the counteroffensive forced on us by September’s tragedies. We need a war on cultural terrorists no less than the bomb-throwing types. Instead of flinching at their criticisms, we need to pump ourselves up.
Let’s hear a few cheers for Western civilization.
Not three; that’s not our style. Two and a half will do nicely.
