What is Western Civilization
Over at the Belmont Club, http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/2006/06/liberal-internationalism.html
they were discussing Liberal Internationalism.
One poster there linked to an article on the psychopathology of liberalism, describing it as a suicidal envy-avoidence behavior.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/1/20/231252.shtml
(Myself I am chary of attributing a psychopathology to a behavior that can more charitably be ascribed to charity. Liberals have Christian faith without Christianity: they think the last should be first, and so they root for the underdog; they think Divine Providence will protect them, and so they turn the other cheek and do not hate their enemies.)
One question in the resulting comments was, “What is Western Civilization?”
Specifically, “What specifically about the West is so disdained and what is it about the left that produces this apparent self-loathing? “Western Civilization” is a really big idea, one which includes Marxism and multi-culturalism itself.”
My answer: Western civilization is Christendom.
It is the civilization that grew out of the fall of the Roman Empire, and inherited its verities. The two major threads that run threw the various European nations include the heritage of Athens and the heritage of Jerusalem. The Athenian heritage includes the rational, the scientific, the enlightened, but also the skeptical, questioning, unsettling intellect which is the source both of Western strength and Western shame. The Jerusalem heritage includes an unique respect for human life, individualism, an insistence on monogamy, but also includes a dark passion for religious conformity that overleaps tribal and national boundaries. Both threads contain a love of liberty and a belief that history unfolds towards an end goal.
The contrast with the great ancient civilizations of the East, with India and China, or with the terrifying civilizations of South America, Aztec and Toltec, could not be more pronounced. The world-view of the Hindu, the Buddhist, and the Taoist are profoundly passive, seeking salvation neither through works nor faith, but through detachment and mysticism; and the Western mind grows faint contemplating the endless cycles of Buddhist eternities, where eon follows eon, changelessly. There is no native word for liberty in these parts of the globe; polygamy is the norm; infanticide is as common as among the ancient Romans.
The God of Christendom is the subject of speculation and deduction in an Athenian fashion: theology is a science in the West, and from this grows our political traditions, the belief that men, through the use of his god-given reason, can produce a government rationally based to protect our god-given rights. It is commonplace today to depict religion as the enemy of science and freedom, but this is not historically sound. The contrast between the Empire before and after the rise of Christianity makes plain that the status of women and underlings was markedly improved by the canon law, and this consistently across the centuries. Christianity, and nothing else, abolished the slave trade, first in Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries, and then across the globe. In places where Western Civilization, i.e. Christendom, is weak, the vile trade is making a reappearance.
The civilizations of the Near East are our dark reflection. The Muslims share with us the Jerusalem thread, but not the Athenian. They have a Christian belief in a universal and egalitarian religion, to be spread to all peoples, but they have rejected skeptical inquiry into the truths of the universe as impious. There is no Muslim St. Thomas Aquinas which ties ancient pagan culture into modern faith. They have no universal Church, and hence no intellectual superstructure.
Marxism and multiculturalism spring from the skeptical tradition of Athens. The first is merely Plato’s REPUBLIC updated with various fallacies of economics. The very terms used to criticize capitalism are all taken from the Enlightenment tradition: charity for the poor, and insistence that the law be no respecter of persons, fraternity, equality, and so on. Marxism is Western skepticism without the ballast of Western theology, and, like Islam, becomes a destructive, bloody force in history.
Multiculturalism is promoted by people who have no interest or love of foreign cultures: it is Western skepticism pointed against Western exceptionalism, an insistence that history be no respecter of persons, and that all men are created equal. Naturally, no sultan in whose veins the blood of the Prophet runs, no Son of Heaven, no Brahmin born into his high caste, has this generous Western respect for the barbarians and infidels beyond the boundaries of his civilization.
Like all modern Western intellectual innovations, multiculturalism is merely an inferior and disproportionate copy of an idea first promoted, and placed in proper proportion, by Christian theology: first, the insistence that all men are equal springs from the Jewish tradition that God is no respecter of persons, and that salvation is individual; second, the insistence on universality springs from the Roman tradition that truth is catholic and ecumenical, that is, world-wide and universal, not the special possession of one race or nation.
Naturally, it is heresy in their eyes to remind Western intellectuals where they get their ideas.
That is what the Leftist intellectual is in rebellion against, and that is what he hates: reason and faith, hope for the future and respect for the past.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
