A new concern emerged during the twentieth century that was more common among ‘conservatives’ (of a certain sort), and there has been something of a countercurrent from those more critical of present affairs: I am referring to the defense or attack of what many have called “Western Civilization” (or, more simply, the “West”). To point to just a few examples, defenders include figures such as Leo Strauss, Francis Fukuyama, and Samuel Huntington and detractors include writers such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Herbert Marcuse (though the detractors tend to be more specific and, therefore, less clearly aligned on this point). Of course, the various interests and concerns of each of these figures differs greatly, but they all have in common that they are addressing (to a greater or lesser degree) a designated moral and intellectual tradition that we tend to understand today as being “Western.” Moreover, there has been a recent uptick in more voices trying to defend “Western” values; one needs only look to several popular figures like Jordan B. Peterson, Douglas Murray, and Niall Ferguson (among many others). I, however, have little time for such endeavours. I think that the “West” and “Western Civilization” are misleading labels that either express nothing concrete or hide a more substantive claim for reasons that range from ignorance to active duplicitousness. In my view, the “West” is either an abstract conception that glosses over a much more complex and incoherent reality, or it is merely the remnants of Christendom which had a unified identity in Christianity – and it may very well be that both these options are, in a peculiar way, simultaneously the case. Nevertheless, if so much ink has and is being spilled upon this notion of the “West,” it strikes me as necessary to clarify what might be meant by it before we reject it.
As far as I can tell, the “West” that is both being defended and critiqued by many is, most simply, the moral and intellectual tradition(s) of central and western European countries (hence the name). This is naturally complicated by the successive heirs of these countries not necessarily being geographically proximate to Europe – Canada and the United States certainly fit this description, but it is even more salient for the rather eastward New Zealand and Australia. Despite the confusion of the geographic moniker given their global separation, we can still lean into the possibility that this designation points to an origin for a certain manner of thinking and doing; we might say that there is a tradition (with, perhaps, a variety of sub-traditions within) that emerged from central and western Europe but is now spread somewhat haphazardly throughout the globe. We can then inquire about this tradition, both in its principles and its details.
When people today think about the “West,” I get the impression that there are a number of (mainly political) notions that come to mind: states, human rights, freedom, individualism, democracy, representation, equality, etc. These are usually understood to be goods that are widely held; they need to be defended and maintained. Conversely, there are a number of less flattering notions that are also affiliated with the “West”: this same tradition has upheld imperial motivations, inequality of various sorts, capitalist exploitation, etc. Especially throughout the last few centuries, these claims have often been associated with radical or revolutionary movements. Now, notwithstanding the obvious contradictions that emerge based on the comparison of those positive and negative views of the “West,” there are frequently concepts that do not neatly fit together despite being on the same side of this divide. On the ‘positive’ side, it is a well-known trope that equality and freedom often conflict depending on the interpretations of both those terms that one takes. On the ‘negative’ side, though somewhat more complex, something like the supposed sexism of the “West” and the exploitations of capitalism do not necessarily cohere: a genuinely exploitative capitalist might actually favour extracting wealth from all people equally (more to gain) and therefore resist sexist workplace policies, whereas a sexist employer might forego greater labour exploitation to keep women out of the workplace altogether. Thus, both the supposed virtues and vices of the “West” do not fit neatly together in any clear way.
I articulate these various claims to point out something about the manner in which the “West” is described – given its internally fragmentary state, it seems to me that only two options are available to explain this condition: either 1) the “West” has never been a homogenous whole and this label is merely a term thrown upon a wide array of disparate notions, or 2) the “West” denotes a reality that is a disintegration of some unified identity of which we have since lost sight. Before unpacking each option, I should note that I recognize how this might be read as a false dichotomy. Someone could argue that these two realities (which are the only options if ideally conceived) could overlap; there could have been some core that fractured and then competing, disparate notions become entangled with aspects of that fragmented identity. This could very well be the case (I am actually inclined to think it is), but this ultimately – in my view – reduces to being the latter option of a singular, broken identity that can nonetheless be recognized. Moreover, per what I argue below, there would be no effective difference – what matters is whether there was a common identity that once existed despite the present disorderly rubble.
(1) If we accept that the “West” is merely a piecemeal reality upon which we have glommed a singular term for reasons approximating something like geohistorical convenience, then to either defend or critique it is a non-starter. If all that links together the various ideas and theories of the “West” is something like geographic proximity and historical interconnectedness, then to either praise or denounce the moral or intellectual pronouncements of this reality is a rather bizarre notion that I would argue is meaningless. This is like claiming that I think that the positions and policies advocated by the present federal Conservative Party of Canada are either good or bad because they are in Canada and it is 2024 – this is a meaningless utterance without broader contextual factors and a sense of morality. Of course, context – both temporal and locational – can be relevant in considering a moral claim, but to reduce such a claim to only those two factors is ridiculous. To claim that the Residential Schools of Canada were an immoral affair because they operated in the Northern portion of North America between 1831-1996 is simply a non-sequitur; what must be invoked are notions of good and evil, cultural intercourse, proper governance, etc. – and none of that is reducible to time or place. Thus, if someone were interested in mounting a genuine apology for or attack against the “West,” such a person would need to provide a clear identity (likely of a moral nature) that unifies its parts.
(2) Now, determining what is the unified core that undergirds all we refer to as “Western” is itself a precarious affair. We can simply return to both the positive and negative attributions I outlined above to get some of the conjectured possibilities, though I think none of them holds up to scrutiny. ‘Individualism,’ ‘Equality,’ ‘Racism,’ ‘Patriarchy,’ or the many other terms we might conjecture tend to be quickly dismissible. None of these explanations does a good job of revealing the vast variety and complexity of the empires, nations, and countries that have ostensibly made up the “West” at one point or another; I, however, hardly have the time to address each suggestion here. Nevertheless, I believe that there is a clear unifying identity that sits behind what we now call the “West,” and it is made clear by referring to the notion that is arguably a precursor to what the “West” signifies: Christendom.
Christendom is itself a problematic historical phenomenon. It is hardly a linear or unified trajectory, and there is much debate about how stable of an identity it can offer. Of course, Christendom’s very name comes from its root in the Faith of Christianity. Many could reasonably debate about just how Christian Christendom ever was, but this itself presents the core identity: Christendom is best characterized as a wrestling with Christian truth. It has its ups and downs; it frequently accentuated some aspects of Christianity while downplaying others; and it often fell into deeply sinful ways based on the principles of Christianity itself. Nevertheless, I would argue that this does help elucidate the core of European history for the last two thousand years; to be unaware of Christianity’s role in European history is simply to misunderstand that continent’s past. This suggestion does, however, present a view that is too clean – Christendom itself has not survived well (if at all). As anyone familiar with the history of Christianity – especially in Western Europe – will recognize, Christendom began to fracture in the late Renaissance and early Modern period due to the advent of different states developing throughout Europe and the internal strife of the Catholic Church resulting in the fragmentation of various ‘reformations’ (I think that “The Reformation” never happened – Anglicanism and Lutheranism have very different origins). Nevertheless, even these early fractures were evidently grounded in debates about Christianity and who had the authority to maintain what it means to be a Christian; one cannot understand, for example, the centuries-long strife of English politics if one does not understand the history of Christianity in that country.
Ultimately, ‘wars of religion’ emerged between these competing Christian sects which then resulted in what we might today call ‘the rise of secularism.’ It was thought that religious fighting was merely due to theological dispute (a questionable claim), and several European states soon began ejecting any notion of metaphysics and ushering in a much more material, humanistic (in a reductive sense) ethic. (There is a question about even this impulse – was that not a Christian impulse? Did the desire to preserve humanity not have an Incarnate logic to it?) Subsequently, there emerged something of a positivist view for each country’s laws because Christianity could no longer play a grounding role for morality as it once had; no longer could the people of these states refer to Christian belief (for it had fractured and been tainted), so they went on to refer to their laws and constitutions as grounding their morals. In some cases, there was something of a return to “philosophy,” though that ultimately ended up devolving into even worse conflict than the religious wars – yes, I am referring to the French Revolution. A glaring issue, of course, is that all of these cultures, their beliefs, and their laws had been initially formed in a Christian context; the three pillars of ‘Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality’ are quite difficult to understand without a Christian inheritance. Such political principles were certainly not those that had been determined by Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, or Marcus Aurelius.
Nevertheless, in the aftermath of these civilizational convulsions away from Christendom, we arrive at that list that I provided above: positively, we recognized states, human rights, freedom, individualism, democracy, representation, equality, etc.; and, negatively, we recognized imperial motivations, inequality of various sorts, capitalist exploitation, etc. As far as I can tell, and as has become clear in recent decades, these notions (both defending and critiquing the “West”) are groundless without an underlying moral framework from which one can draw – and I believe that only a Christian ethos is able to make sense of them all, even if they seemingly run afoul of many aspects of Christianity when shorn from their root. They all rely on the Christian notions of love, self-sacrifice, human dignity, and humility that are only made sense of within that tradition, and the historical record seemingly vindicates this view. Thus, I would contend that the “West,” insofar as it does have a unifying identity, is a fragmentary collection of ideas and theories that are the mere residue of a deeper Christian understanding of the world (though some foreign accretions may have latched on in the ensuing centuries). If this is the case, then the term “West” or “Western Civilization” simply fails to acknowledge or indicate the true core of what we are talking about, and I would therefore contend that it ought to be done away with.
Of course, given my overview, the term “West” does have a coherent meaning in a limited, historical sense: it is the residual fragments of a linguistically and culturally plural civilization loosely unified in a bygone concern to wrestle with Christianity. It may even be taken as a description of the present, but it is hardly a sustainable identity. If this is the case, then the detractors against the “West” must go to the depths of Christianity and investigate its meaning, otherwise they are complaining about various illnesses without ever knowing what proper health looks like. Perhaps they could draw on some other civilizational self-understanding to then critique Christianity, but this hardly seems to be their tact; as far as I can tell, they often rely on select precepts only made available through Christianity while neglecting the whole. As for those who defend the “West,” I take their project to be simply foppish. Apologizing for “Western Civilization” is merely defending a variety of disparate and unstable claims that have become incoherent due to being cut off from their common foundation; moreover many of the figures who do so (whether consciously or not) defend certain principles at the expense of others and wind up corrupting any semblance of a coherent ethic. In brief, to defend the “West” is the attempt to maintain and remain within a fundamentally moribund condition.
Hoping for Clarity 