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Western Civilization

Western civilization is an historical concept with a recent origin and quite uncertain future. In many ways, the term became a secular equivalent to Latin Christendom in the United States, but the term never took firm hold in Europe itself, where national differences loomed too large.

The word civilization entered English from the French in the late eighteenth century, and initially meant polite behavior, just as it did in French. Manners that permitted a person to find his or her proper place in polite society was what civilization referred to. That meant using words and gestures to defer to superiors, snub inferiors, and climb as high as one could by peaceable means. Bearing, conversation, and clothing all mattered; so did wealth; and familiarity with art, literature, and music also helped to improve a person’s claim to be civilized. It differed from older courtly ideals inasmuch as no monarch set the tone or conferred formal rank. Civilization instead was an urban upper class phenomenon whose exact definition evolved in accordance with prevailing opinions among those who participated in polite society.

To begin with, such behavior was conceived as potentially universal.To be sure, civilization was most perfectly expressed in Parisian drawing rooms, theaters, and other public places, with London a close rival. But privileged urban circles in Germany, Russia, and other European countries did their best to imitate French manners, often going so far as to read and speak French and import the latest fashions from Paris. This sort of “civilization,” however contagious it proved to be, was limited to narrow elites, even within France itself. Even before the eighteenth century ended, a reaction set in among Germans, some of whom preferred to believe that their language and culture embodied a unique spirit that was incompatible with French “civilized” ways of thinking and acting.

Early in the eighteenth century, patriotic Germans persuaded themselves that German Kultur was intrinsically superior to French civilization, and Russian Slavophils soon argued for the superiority of the Slavic soul over more westerly versions of Kultur and civilization. Meanwhile in France and England, easy and rapid imperial expansion in Africa and Asia seemed evidence of their superiority to other peoples; and the term civilization was broadened to describe the achievements of British, French and European society as a whole. French and British empires were the most extensive and both countries were situated in western Europe; but no one made much of that geographical detail. Before World War Ⅰ, by and large, civilization was conceived as unitary, centered in Europe and destined to illuminate and eventually improve the lives of other peoples in colonial (and excolonial lands like the United States) as they learned the skills and style of civilized behavior from contacts with civilized Europeans.

This intellectual landscape altered abruptly during World War Ⅰ. In particular, the concept of Western civilization came to the fore in the English-speaking world when defense of “Western civilization” against the attacking Germans became a theme of British propaganda. In an incautious moment, Kaiser Wilhelm actually told his troops to mimic the fury of the Huns; and by calling German soldiers “Huns,” British propagandists were able to confuse the obvious fact that Germans shared western European civilization and made them out to be barbarians from the east. To be sure, concepts of west-east polarity had antecedents going all the way back to Herodotus who had contrasted free Greeks on the western side of the Aegean Sea with enslaved Persians coming from the east. And British war propaganda rejuvenated that motif by celebrating British and French “liberty” as against Germany’s imperial, aristocraticand wickedly aggressive-government.When the United States entered the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson chimed in by claiming his government’s purpose was to make the world safe for democracy.

Western and Chinese Civilization

This extract of text is from an essay from the eminent British philosopher in the Dial, an influential intellectual and literary magazine of the early twentieth century. It is an example of the point of view that Western civilization is superior to others and the world would benefit from its spread.

The traditional civilization of China had become unprogressive, and had ceased to produce much of value in the way of art and literature. This was not due, I think, to any decadence in the race, but merely to lack of new material. The influx of Western knowledge provides just the stimulus that was needed. Chinese students are able and extraordinarily keen. Higher education suffers from lack of funds and absence of libraries, but does not suffer from any lack of the finest human material. Although Chinese civilization has hitherto been deficient in science, it never contained anything hostile to science, and therefore the spread of scientific knowledge encounters no such obstacles as the Church put in its way in Europe. I have no doubt that if the Chinese could get a stable government and sufficient funds, they would, within the next thirty years, begin to produce remarkable work in science. It is quite likely that they might outstrip us, because they come with fresh zest and with all the ardour of a renaissance. In fact the enthusiasm for learning in Young China reminds one constantly of the renaissance spirit in fifteenth century Italy.

Source: Russell, B. (1922). Chinese civilization and the West. The Dial, 72, 361.

After 1918, these wartime follies were soon abandoned in Britain and France; not without some sense of shame. Throughout Europe, separate nationalistic histories, elaborated during the nineteenth century, continued to dominate classrooms in schools and universities. Accordingly, differences among the countries and peoples of Europe seemed more significant than western or any other sort of shared civilization. Instead, each nation treasured its own grievances against neighbors and cherished its own claims to greatness. Conviction of European superiority to Asians and Africans persisted, but that was based more directly on skin color than on such an intangible as western civilization.

Hu Shih:The Difference Between Eastern and Western Civilizations

A onetime cultural critic who became a leading figure in the emergence of modern China, Hu Shih rose to prominence by promoting the use of the vernacular in literature—a practice that earned him the title “father of the Chinese literary renaissance.” The excerpt below describes his views on the difference between eastern and western civilizations.

The Oriental civilization is built primarily on human labor as the source of power whereas the modern civilization of the West is built on the basis of the power of machinery. As one of my American friends has put it, “each man, woman and child in America possesses from twenty-five to thirty mechanical slaves, while it is estimated that each man, woman and child in China has at his command but three quarters of one mechanical slave.” An American engineer has stated the case in almost the same language: “Every person in the United States has thirty-five invisible slaves working for him . . . The American workman is not a wage slave, but a boss of a considerable force, whether he realizes it or not.” Herein lies the real explanation of the difference between the two civilizations. It is a difference in degree which in the course of time has almost amounted to a difference in kind.

Source: Hu Shih (1931). The civilizations of the East and West. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Western “Civ ” Enters the College Curriculum

In the United States, however, the concept of Western civilization had a far more significant career. Courses in Western civilization were invented during World War Ⅰ to explain to draftees what they were fighting for. These survived the war in a few American colleges, and spread widely in the 1930s, supplementing American national history and becoming required introductory courses for a great many students. Western “civ” courses retained that privileged status until the 1960s or later so that a whole generation of college students acquired a modest familiarity with ancient, medieval and modern European history, and the belief that they were heirs of that past. This was accompanied by almost total ignorance of the history of the four-fifths of humankind excluded from Western civ courses.

Reasons for this curricular development are not far to seek. American national history was too brief to connect directly with ancient Greece and Rome, the staple of humanistic higher education as transmitted to the country’s Founding Fathers. Filling the gap with British history was acceptable to many Americans of English and Scottish descent, but Americans whose ancestors had come from other parts of Europe wanted a broaderbased past and found it in “Western civilization” courses. And by annexing Western civilization to their own national history, Americans achieved a grander, more inclusive cultural ancestry than any single European country could boast.

There was a second and in many ways more powerful intellectual impetus behind western civilization courses as they came on stream in the 1930s. Most collegebound Americans had learned a smattering of Biblical history in Sunday school, and the Christian (and Jewish) view that God governed the course of events was firmly implanted in their minds. But ever since the eighteenth century a contrary liberal, Enlightenment view of history had taken root in a limited intellectual circle, according to which the progress of liberty was what mattered most, and liberation from religious error by recognizing historical causes with which God had nothing to do was part of the story.

Western civ courses offered a splendid opportunity to juxtapose these rival worldviews. By pitting Reason against Faith, St. Socrates against St. Paul, such courses spoke to central concerns of generations of students. Choosing to focus on a few great books, works of art and big ideas, and showing how they changed from age to age, introduced college students to aspects of the western cultural heritage and invited them to pick and choose what to accept and what to reject from it. As such Western civ courses came alive for innumerable college students and helped them to shape a meaningful world from which the majority of humankind was tacitly excluded.

The Iroquois View of Western Civilization

The Iroquois are an indigenous nation of the northeast in the United States and southeastern Canada. As part of their expression of their political, cultural, and economic rights over the last several decades, some Iroquois have set forth a revisionist view of their own history and the history of the world. The following text sets forth the views on Western Civilization of Mohawk Iroquois traditionalists in the community of Akwesasne (St. Regis Reserve/Reservation) on the U.S.-Canadian border.

The third and most important element in the narrative is its construction of history—worldwide in scope, from beginning to end—as a struggle between destructive colonial powers and oppressed indigenous, or “natural” peoples. This colonialindigenous dichotomy not only structures the historical world process but also serves as an explicit indigenous critique of the West. The position papers are a message . . . which identifies the process of that abuse of the planet as Western Civilization ...What is presented here is nothing less audacious than a cosmogony of the Industrialized World presented by the most politically powerful and independent non-Western political body surviving in North America [the Iroquois League] (Akwesasne Notes 1978, 69). The position papers undertake an analysis of Western Civilization from the perspective of a natural and ancient culture. They see this task as imperative “in the age of the Neutron bomb, Watergate, and nuclear energy plant proliferation ...” Iroquois tradition, unlike Christianity, Mohammedanism, or Judaism, reaches back to at least the end of the Pleistocene.... People who are familiar with the Hau de no sau nee beliefs will recognize that modern scientific evidence shows that the Native customs of today are not markedly different from those practiced by ancient people at least 70,000 years ago (Akwesasne Notes 1978, 69-70). The Iroquois have a “geological kind of perspective,” which sees modern whites as young children “committing incredible destructive folly” (Akwesasne Notes 1978, 70).

The historical critique is also a cultural critique. What the position papers call the “Iroquois Way of Life” is a spiritual consciousness which acknowledges the interdependence and equality of all living creatures, and recognizes the necessity for gratitude to the Creator (Akwesasne Notes 1978, 72). In contrast, other peoples in the world began with a spiritual consciousness, but have lost it. When humans domesticated animals they “assumed the functions which had for all time been the functions of the spirits of animals.” When Semitic peoples developed irrigation technology, they “reproduced a function of Nature” (Akwesasne Notes 1978, 73-74). Technology led to cities which led to stratification, imperialism, and laws. Christianity became the servant of the new technology and “imposed itself exclusively of all other beliefs.” All remaining tribal European peoples with pantheistic religions were “despiritualized” by becoming Christian (Akwesasne Notes 1978, 75). The the-oretical perspective at work in this analysis is cultural evolutionism with a devolutionary emphasis—the non-Indian cultures of the world have increasingly degenerated into destructive materialism.

Exploitation of the “Natural World” by Western cultures has meant the extinction of species of birds and animals, forests levelled, waters polluted, and Indians “subjected to genocide” (Akwesasne Notes 1978, 76-77). “Western technology and the people who have employed it have been the most amazingly destructive forces in all of human history.” Having exhausted all other sources of energy, Western Civilization has now “settled on atomic energy. . . which has by products which are the most poisonous substances ever known to Man.” The Indian “Way of Life,” which is the only hope of the planet, is also “fast disappearing, a victim of the destructive processes” (Akwesasne Notes 1978, 77).

The destruction of the Native cultures and peoples is the same process which has destroyed and is destroying life on this planet....And that process is Western Civilization....The process of colonialism and imperialism which has affected the Hau de no sau nee are but a microcosm of the processes affecting the world (Akwesasne Notes 1978, 78). The position papers argue throughout that Western Civilization is responsible for genocide, extractive technology, pollution, and will ultimately destroy the world. They argue throughout that each separate institution within Western Civilization—the church, state and federal governments, schools—is colonialist; and that representatives of these institutions, from school teachers to government officials, serve as oppressors of the Iroquois people, and are agents of acculturation, a term meaning, in the lexicon of traditionalists, distortion or repression of authentic Iroquois cultural consciousness.

The position papers portray all the natural or indigenous peoples of the world as opposed to the forces of the West. They suggest that “indigenous peoples” are those who are connected by ancient roots to a piece of land, who live in harmony with nature without exploiting either resources or other peoples, and who, above all, have a spiritual understanding of and relationship with the earth. The difference between the two ways of life described in the text, between Western civilization and indigenous peoples, is essentially a difference in the relationship each has with nature. The one exploits, extracts, destroys; the other respects, conserves, and lives in harmony with nature.

Source: Ciborski, S. (1990). Culture and power: The emergence and politics of Akwesasne Mohawk traditionalism (pp. 100-102). Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International.

By the 1960s this constellation of circumstances altered and Western civ courses soon lost their preferred place in most American colleges. Their dismantlement arose mainly from the discontent of young instructors who objected to teaching hand-me-down Western civ instead of presenting their own up-to-date specialized fields of research, as tenured professors preferred to do. Since tenure depended on published research it was clear that teaching Western civ delayed professional advancement. Tenured professors could not deny that obvious fact, so such courses had few defenders and most of them were soon scrapped.

Changes on the religious scene also contributed to making them obsolete. Decaying Sunday school training deprived Western civ courses of their earlier intellectual bite for some students, and a contrary current of bornagain religious commitment made secular history unwelcome to others. Efforts to expand the scope of Western civ to embrace the rest of the world remained weak and sporadic and have not yet become really respectable in the eyes of most academic historians. Instead, industrious researchers multiplied specialties, making national history more and more incoherent, and calling the validity of every sort of statement about large-scale history into ever more serious question.

The collapse of European empires after World War Ⅱ and widespread rejection of claims to any sort of ethnic, racial or cultural superiority was a third factor that undermined the legitimacy of Western civ courses. And as students of non-European descent began to show up in college classrooms, efforts to accommodate them by teaching Amerindian, Asian, Latin American, and African history multiplied. Multiple civilizations, all conceived as equal and separate, became fashionable; and when outsiders intruded, as Europeans had done so obviously in the nineteenth century, they were often blamed for it. Western civ thus became something of a bogey man—the exact opposite of what American undergraduates had been brought up to believe between 1930 and l960.

Further transformations of American historical teaching no doubt lie ahead. Western civ is likely to continue to play a conspicuous part as it has since the 1930s, because how to fit Europe as a whole and western Europe in particular into the recent history of the world remains so problematic. Yet the whole concept of Western civilization as an entity acting in world affairs is uncertain. Structuring world history around separate civilizations, became commonplace after Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918-1922) and Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History (1934-1961) did so. But as globalization advances, the separateness of local civilizations blurs, and historians, reflecting their times, have begun to emphasize larger, trans-civilizational connections, while simultaneously questioning the coherence of Western or any other regional civilization.

William H. McNeill