Western civilisation: The virtuous and calamitous reality – Simon Wilson
A drawing thought to be of Christopher Columbus.
THE FACTS
- Western civilisation has produced a wide range of virtues and vices.
- Slavery contributed to the wealth and power of Europe in the age of empire.
- Capitalism, the economic engine that made European empires so dominant, has also created a threat to planetary ecosystems.
“We must remember the virtues of Western civilisation”! This was the headline on a recent column in the Herald and I’m here for it. Great art, democratic traditions, scientific achievements that uplift humanity: who doesn’t think they should be remembered and celebrated?
But there are a few other things we might remember at the same time. For one, Western civilisation has not been all virtuous. For another, the West is not the only source of civilising virtue.
And there’s a third thing, which I’ll pose as a question: why are we being exhorted to remember the virtues of the West?
The column was by Jonathan Ayling, formerly the chief executive of the Free Speech Union (FSU), who was promoting his new business venture: a charter school in a “classical” tradition.
The FSU, as we all know, is dedicated to the virtues of debate; in that spirit, I offer this column in response.
“True education seeks clarity,” Ayling wrote. This is not always true. Education often explores doubt and reveals the complexity of things. It reminds us that it’s precisely when we have “clarity” that we are most at risk of closing our minds.
Ayling tells us his curriculum will celebrate “Homer and Shakespeare, Plato and Augustine, Newton and Austen”.
Good. All of them explore a human condition for which the search for clarity is often futile and sometimes devastating. King Lear had clarity when he banished Cordelia. Pride and Prejudice is, among other things, a meditation on the folly of jumping to conclusions about other people. “God is best known in not knowing him,” said St Augustine.
Ayling also produces a radically distinct definition of Western civilisation: “What if it simply means gratitude for the best ideas we’ve inherited?”
Agree, we should be grateful. And while we’re at it, let’s remember the best ideas come from everywhere. As do the worst.
That’s the thing about “civilisation”, wherever you find it: it contains the best of what we can be, and the worst. None is exempt on either count.
This is not a difficult idea to grasp. Yet celebrating, exclusively, the virtues of just one civilisation closes our minds both to the goodness in the others and to the badness in our own.
Ayling credits Western civilisation with giving us “the rule of law”, “the conviction that power must answer to justice”, “the idea that truth can be discovered through reason and inquiry rather than decree or superstition”, and with “universities and parliaments, literature and law, cathedrals and symphonies”.
He calls this a “fair reckoning”. But it’s really not.
The rule of law was established in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi in 1750 BCE (before the common era).
When Columbus visited the Americas in 1492, European kings were answerable only to God. But the chiefs of many First Nations at that time were answerable to people’s assemblies.
Galileo’s reason and inquiry triumphed over superstition: hooray for the West? But the Church triumphed over him: boo to the West.
Our number system came to us from Arab mathematicians, who learned it from India. The Japanese novel The Tale of Genji dates from the 11th century CE. The Great Pyramid of Giza predates Europe’s first cathedral by nearly 3000 years.
And universities, those peak bodies of superior knowledge? Europe’s first was the University of Bologna, founded in 1088 CE, by which time there were four Arab universities in North Africa. India had Nalanda and Taxila universities from around 500 BCE.
One-eyed boosterism isn’t the worst of it. A “fair reckoning” shouldn’t be just a list of goodies; it has to put them in context.
From the 15th to the 19th centuries, European empires conquered much of the world, creating extraordinary wealth for those who owned the mines, the fields, the factories and the ships.
This wealth funded astonishing technological progress. It supercharged the Renaissance and a great flowering of the arts and sciences. It paid for sanitation in the cities, created a commercial class and allowed the spread of education. It made Western civilisation what it is today.
And it all happened because of two things. The first was the supply of cheap, endlessly dispensable labour for the plantations and mines of the Americas and the Caribbean.
The “supremacy” of the West was built on slavery.
The second was conquest. The “civilising” influence of the Europeans who followed Columbus, into most parts of the world, was not based on reason and inquiry, but on gunpowder (invented in China).
Ayling acknowledges the West had slaves “on an industrial scale”. But he puts that aside and says, “To defend Western civilisation ... is not a haughty claim of superiority. It is the thankful deference to what we have been given, often bought at great price.”
This, to me, is too close to saying there was slavery and colonial oppression but let’s forget about it now. I think we have to be better than that.
Ayling’s new school will “revive classical education, combining intellectual rigour with moral formation”. A school that sounds to me like Britain’s elite, although presumably without their bullying, class snobbery and moral sanctimony.
And he says, “The story of human history is one of great suffering. All things considered, our society suffers little. This is not by chance but by design.”
Actually, it’s neither by chance nor design. The human rights and economic opportunities we enjoy today were fought for, in the civil rights movement, by suffragists and later waves of feminists, by unionists, by gay-rights activists, by peasant rebellions, by the colonised and the enslaved.
Today, the most salient truth for me about Western civilisation is that capitalism, the economic machinery of its wealth and power, is responsible for climate change and the potential collapse of ecosystems that support most life on the planet.
China has become the biggest emitter, but the Global North has contributed over 90% of the greenhouse gases built up in the atmosphere over the past 250 years. We did it.
We can listen to Bach or Beyoncé and enjoy their civilised virtues, but we can’t shy away from the environmental challenges we now face.
The fossil-fuel industry wants us to believe change is not possible. It wants us complicit in its determination to keep on drilling.
Ultimately, civilisation is not measured in cathedrals and aeroplanes. It’s about being fit for purpose.
There’s a civilisation from this part of the world that didn’t have gunpowder or teeming hordes of people, so it was subjugated by those that did.
But hundreds of years earlier, it had the skills to make the greatest sea voyages in the history of the world.
As Ayling says, a good education celebrates the achievements of its own society. Romeo and Juliet? Bring it on. As he doesn’t say, it should also allow students to understand values that might not be their own, and people who are not like them. So, bring on marae visits too.
And a good education will teach students about the virtue of living within planetary boundaries. Because they’re going to need that, even if the rest of us pretend we don’t.
And yes, teach Homer! The Iliad is the story of two societies whose moral clarity and traditional virtues (“honour”, “manliness”, “revenge”) bring ruin to everyone and everything. The old ways that made them great have become no longer fit for purpose.
This column originally described Jonathan Ayling as the founding director of the Free Speech Union.