Is Western Civilization Dead?

'The reports of the death of Western Civilization are neither premature nor exaggerated; they are flat-out wrong.' Amen! It may be under attack, but is nowhere near defeated!

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Patrick M. Garry, JD, PhD

The reports of the death of Western Civilization are neither premature nor exaggerated; they are flat-out wrong.

The same people who boycotted a business because they wrongly thought the Norwegian flag hanging outside that business was the Confederate flag claim that Western Civilization is the cause of all the world’s injustices. To the contrary, every great injustice remedied over the course of American history has been addressed by some belief or principle of Western Civilization.

In recent decades, critics have argued that Western Civilization is racist and oppressive because it was shaped by white men who are long dead. That argument resembles the claim made by the man who said Volkswagens were defective cars because they had been driven in the past by a lot of Germans.

Western Civilization is very much alive, even though at the present time the courage of its defenders seems to be faltering. It is like a stately oak tree, with roots that run deep and a canopy of leaves that provide cool shade. Even if a branch breaks or is cut off, the tree does not die. Western Civilization sunk its roots in human history thousands of years ago and has guided nations and societies through the tumult of time. Critics who think they have banished the legacy of Western Civilization just because a few statues have been torn down or a few professors have been censored or a few college history courses eliminated exhibit an astonishing degree of and hubris and ignorance of history. They must think a couple of branches broken off the tree will immediately cause the roots to wither and die.

Contrary to the many claims bantered about in contemporary media, political and academic circles, the legacy of Western Civilization will live on. It will persevere, and it will experience a needed revival when all the flickering flames of its dissenters prove to be inadequate for the fueling of future civilization. Despite all the prognoses of doom, Western Civilization will continue to guide human life in the future just as it has in the past. This essay will try to demonstrate why Western Civilization has neither failed nor been the oppressive force its critics claim. Contrary to contemporary criticisms, Western Civilization has never been discredited as an unjust, oppressive, or racist force in history. Western Civilization has never been convicted in the courtroom of truth. But as it has been prevailing inside the courtroom, it has nonetheless been subject to a volley of accusations and slanders lobbed about on the courthouse steps outside.

The essential story of Western Civilization in modern times is not how it has been discovered to be somehow racist; rather, the essential story is how public confidence in Western Civilization has been so weakened over the past century that it is now vulnerable to such false attacks. The real story is one of how Western Civilization became so punctured by false associations over the past century that it could now, in the present age, be so stabbed by the equally false association with racism. Indeed, the case for the continued viability and power of Western Civilization will be made in part by revealing the fallacies of the case against it.

The current state of Western Civilization can be likened to a furnace trying to heat a house as more and more windows and doors get opened. When the pipes finally freeze, people say it must have been a faulty furnace.

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Western Civilization, which can be a complicated-sounding term in today’s bite-size media discussions, often gives way to the term culture. But any analysis of the state of American culture depends on which meaning of the term culture is being used. Most frequently, the term culture refers to the wide spectrum of popular entertainment products distributed through electronic media. The culture sections of newspapers and online news sites focus on the lives and new releases of popular musicians and actors. Cultural events comprise heavily promoted concerts of mega-star musicians, media interviews of Hollywood celebrities, or occasionally the release of an anticipated blockbuster novel or memoir.

Using this notion of culture, the state of American culture can be described as robust and pervasive. The lives and events and passing thoughts of cultural celebrities command the attention of hundreds of millions of online followers. Even during the darkest days of the Covid-19 lockdown, Netflix drew record audiences for its media entertainment offerings. A majority of Americans may not be able to identify the first president of the United States or even the century in which World War II occurred, but they can identify the hosts of television talk shows and the performers of hit songs.

Contrary to the media entertainment definition, another meaning of the term culture has nothing to do with the media or entertainment. In this second definition, culture refers to the intellectual and ideological foundations of a society, or culture. Most societies or cultures predate the governments of those societies. A society must usually exist before it creates a political or legal system to govern itself. Consequently, legal and political systems reflect and reinforce the cultures that give rise to those systems. Egalitarian cultures, for instance, tend to create and sustain democratic governments. Hierarchical cultures foster more authoritarian forms of government. Cultures that value justice enshrine the rule of law into their governance systems, while cultures that value order and stability tend to elevate authority and obedience as governing principles.

In this ideological and intellectual usage, the term culture can only be understood in a historical context. It does not change constantly, like a concert schedule of a popular musician or the roster of new-release movies. Instead, it spans centuries of time, giving birth to the intellectual life of a society and the foundational principles of its social governance. Culture provides a bridge across the chasm of time and civilizations. It is what modern life has inherited from the ancient philosophers, Renaissance thinkers, and Enlightenment writers.

This broader use of the term culture falls under the umbrella of Western Civilization, which has come to be criticized as a dead white man’s culture. Western Civilization does not rate highly within contemporary “woke culture,” or “cancel culture” as it is often called. Advocates of “woke culture” decry Western Civilization as the seedbed of exploitive colonialism, unapologetic racism, deep-seated sexism, environmental degradation and warmongering nationalism. These advocates seek to overthrow Western Civilization and everything attached to it. They argue that only by escaping from the suffocating oppression of the past, as represented by the norms of Western Civilization, can human society finally reach true peace, social harmony, and unrestrained individual fulfillment.

The advocates of “woke culture” argue that Western Civilization has been thoroughly discredited and exposed as the oppressive yoke that it is.

This argument is wrong.

Western Civilization has never been discredited. It has been smeared and weakened by unwarranted associations with injustices and crimes that have nothing to do with the tenets of Western Civilization. It has been the unjustified target of those who wish to place everything bad that has happened in the world in a direct line of causation with the ideals of Western Civilization. Indeed, the biting irony in all the attacks on Western Civilization is that nearly every wrong and injustice claimed to be the inevitable offshoot of Western Civilization has been remedied by the workings of Western Civilization’s principles.

Western Civilization refers to the civilizational ideals developed over centuries of human history. These ideals and principles include individual dignity, the existence of eternal truths, the power of reason and rationality, the rule of law, the elevated status of the individual within the social system, and the value of human freedom. Western Civilization is not measured by geographic borders or historical boundaries. It reflects a legacy of the wisdom of the past, living on in the loyalty of the present and through a committed vision for the future. This inheritance connects the best part of the past with the dreams of the present. For thousands of years, Western Civilization has provided the most enlightened and most successful guideposts throughout all the conflicts and turbulence of human history.

As the eminent philosopher Roger Scruton wrote,

Our Western Civilization is not some peculiar, narrow little obsession of people who happen to live in a certain geographical part of the world. It is an inheritance, constantly expanding, constantly including new things. It is something which has given us the knowledge of the human heart, which has enabled us to produce not just wonderful economies and the wonderful ways of living in the world that are ours, but also the great works of art, the religions, the systems of law and government, all the other things which make it actually possible for us to recognize that we live in this world, insofar as possible, successfully.

Civilization at its root entails a means of connection among people, a way for human beings to interact with each other in peaceful and productive ways. It represents a comprehensive social system constantly adapting to facilitate such peaceful and productive relationships. Western Civilization has incorporated the most proven and longest-lasting of human intellectual traditions: the Hebrew Bible, the great epics of Rome and Greece, the literature of the Middle Ages—all of which testify to the truths of the human existence. This collection of truths and experiences constitutes a civilizational bequest to the modern age of the lessons and insights of the past. For thousands of years, Western Civilization has been a repository of knowledge and understanding of the human condition in all its complexity.

However, history now finds itself in one of those periods of civilizational tumult. Like angry rioters burning down the businesses that provided a living to their community, the enemies of Western Civilization blindly fire their artillery on the one lighthouse that has steered humanity through centuries of conflict and uncertainty. It is like the crew of a ship throwing overboard the ship’s only compass just because it was owned by an unlikeable captain. But if history has shown anything, it is that the power of human reason eventually prevails over the irrationality of the mob. And because Western Civilization has never been rationally discredited, it retains its force and appeal, to be tapped once again when future generations rediscover their need for the only compass that has provided true guidance throughout history.

Given the thousands of years over which Western Civilization developed, it is nearly impossible to attribute its development and identity to one culture or time period. However, it is possible to identify two essential cultures or traditions that gave rise to Western Civilization. The ancient Greek philosophical tradition and the Judeo-Christian religious tradition together brought about a fundamental transformation in how humanity was viewed and treated. The Greek political ideas and the Jewish religious beliefs combined to advance the idea that humanity was more than just another material element in a physical world, more than all those items that were bartered about in the marketplace. From the Greeks came the idea of natural law, that a universal morality underlies the physical world and is knowable to the human mind. The Judeo-Christian tradition held that humanity was created in God’s image and that God’s moral law constituted the ultimate governance of human behavior. These two traditions produced a moral and political bedrock that elevated individuals beyond mere physical pawns to be used at the whim of despots.

Western Civilization conferred a moral purpose to both individuals and communities. It provided an overarching framework for both individual fulfillment and community cohesion. Revolutionary insights of Western Civilization were the recognition of the dual nature of humanity and the idea that human meaning could only be seen through the dual lens of individual and community. Individuals possessed liberty and dignity, but individual fulfillment also depended on a strong and vibrant community. Therefore, freedom was not the only goal for individuals; community health and stability were also necessary. But it was Western Civilization that provided the means to keep individualism from denigrating into libertarianism, and communitarianism from falling into statism. Concerned with the flourishing of both individual and community, Western Civilization saw the complete individual as living within a community that respected individual dignity yet demanded individual respect for the community.

The balancing of these sometimes competing concerns stood at the focal point of Western Civilization. However, in recent times, this careful balance between the individual and the community has given way to the growth of the state, which not only threatens voluntary community but individual liberty as well. Moreover, Western Civilization’s idea of objective truth and morality has given way to systems of thought that reduce truth and meaning to the distribution of political power. Abandoning the Western tradition has resulted in a demise of community and a regression to tribalism and hedonism, as well as a cultural and political worldview that sees persons not in terms of individual dignity but in terms of what social group they belong to and what political viewpoints they espouse.

During its long and steady march through history, Western Civilization has shaped the slow development of democratic government. It injected civic equality into rigid social caste systems. It created the conditions for the flourishing of the arts and sciences. It brought reason, scientific innovation and free inquiry into a world cloaked with superstition and unexamined ignorance. It eventually created public educational systems and the great universities. Western Civilization first recognized the individual liberty that its detractors now exercise in protesting it; and it crafted the rule of law that its detractors now use to protect mobs dedicated to rejecting it.

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Despite its thousands of years of development, however, Western Civilization has come under attack. But this most recent attack, virulent as it is, seeks to exploit a much longer and more subtle, and even subterranean, weakening in the image and public confidence in the Western tradition.

For the past century, the ideals and legacy of Western Civilization have experienced an increasing erosion in public confidence. This erosion has not occurred because of some direct and triumphant assault on Western Civilization. Rather, the erosion has resulted from a steady stream of indirect attacks, not on the core of Western Civilization but on various traumas in modern life that in fact have no connection with the fundamental tenets of Western Civilization. The erosion in the image of Western Civilization has occurred primarily because of guilt by association. A world war, an international economic depression, the Holocaust, nuclear proliferation, racial discrimination, poverty and inequality have all been used to attack Western Civilization, as if the ideals and principles built up over thousands of years were all designed to cause widespread hardship and suffering among large and diverse groups of people.

But the story of the attacks on Western Civilization is not a story of failures or injustices on the part of Western tradition. The story instead is one of continual misrepresentation of the true tenets of Western Civilization. Quite possibly, the opponents of Western Civilization have no real opposition to the core identity of that cultural legacy. Very likely, they have no real opposition to reason, rational thought, the rule of law, and individual liberty as a foundation of democratic society. Yet they persist in tearing down the foundations of Western Civilization and demonizing it as a creed of oppression and injustice. The explanation for this apparent paradox of action and belief lies in the ultimate goal of the critics.

Ever since the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s, the progeny of those revolutionaries has wanted to remake American society. But to remake culture and society, the old foundations first have to be wiped away. And so Western Civilization has suffered not because of what it is, but because it stands in the way of what cultural revolutionaries want to create in the future.

This is why Western Civilization will ultimately see a revival: because it has always worked, and because it is being abandoned not because of any failure on its part, but because social revolutionaries wish to create a new society that lacks any substantive or proven foundation.

To better view the current attacks on Western Civilization, it may be instructive to look back to the beginning of the twentieth century, when Western Civilization stood at the apex of its public embrace, and to compare the early twentieth century with the early twenty-first century. This comparison may then later lead to insights into how Western Civilization eventually came under the attacks that have recently besieged it. Ironically, Western Civilization has come under its most intense attacks just when its beneficiaries have come to enjoy the most healthy, prosperous and protective society in history.

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The high point of Western Civilization, in terms of its public image and the power of its influence, occurred around the turn of the twentieth century. Democracy was on the rise across the globe; educational systems were based on studying the great works of Western Civilization and on fostering allegiance to that tradition; scientific progress was rapidly escalating; universities and centers of higher learning grounded their great accomplishments and influence on the Western tradition; legal systems solidified the rule of law; peace and prosperity thrived as never before. That part of the world basing its cultures and societies on the norms of Western Civilization were flourishing. The tradition of Western Civilization claimed near universal support. Every school and university touted the value and need for that tradition. Serious problems existed in American society as the twentieth century arrived, but there was no doubt as to the future course of America’s allegiance to the legacy of Western Civilization.

Crime and drug use plagued American cities at the end of the nineteenth century. Massive immigration heightened social tensions that had already been fueled by racial and gender conflicts. The economy in the 1890s sank into yet another recession. All in all, at the turn of the century, much anxiety and nervousness pervaded American attitudes about the future. Notwithstanding this pervasive anxiety, the 1890s served as a prelude to “the American Century,” as Henry Luce famously named it: a century when automobiles replaced horses, when women went from seeking the vote to seeking public office, when the Internet replaced the telegraph, and when America became the unquestioned world leader.

The residents of the twentieth century experienced more change in their daily lives than had the whole world over the entire span of recorded history. And yet, in the beginning decades of the twenty-first century, Americans by huge margins expressed pessimism about the future and a belief that their country was in a long-term economic, moral and spiritual decline. Unlike attitudes of a century earlier, feelings of doom and decay filled the early twenty-first century mindset.

The social divisions of a century ago were just as alarming then as the present divisions are to present-day Americans. With the phenomenal growth of its cities during the 1890s, America had ceased being the agrarian society often envisioned by its founding generation. For the first time, the value of industrial products surpassed those of agriculture. Urban growth and industrialization transformed the United States from an agricultural nation to a manufacturing power. As the urban areas grew and prospered, rural America went into decline. Destitute farmers flocked to the cities, while those that stayed on the farm remained at the mercy of the railroads and banks. A great rural-urban divide threatened social harmony.

Rapid immigration fueled urban growth. The 1890s were a decade of unprecedented immigration, a decade in which Ellis Island first began processing immigrants into the United States. During the 1890s, for instance, eighty percent of Chicago’s population was either foreign-born or had foreign-born parents.

Just as in present-day America, the media at the turn of the twentieth century was in great flux. In 1893, Alexander Graham Bell opened the first New York-Chicago telephone circuit. The 1890s gave birth to America’s mass media. William Randolph Hearst bought the New York Journal in 1895 and proceeded to build an empire of mass-circulation newspapers. This new mass media was rooted in sensationalism and propaganda, exemplified by how the Hearst and Joseph Pullitzer newspapers, in their competition for readers, published lurid and sensational accounts of Cuba that created an almost hysterical public demand for America’s entry into the Spanish-American War in 1898.

Labor strife was rampant in the 1890s. Between 1893 and 1898, more than 7000 strikes occurred, many of them violent. This labor unrest gave rise to a socialism movement and the rapid growth of the Socialist Party. Cultural tensions in the 1890s involved the growing Mormon, Catholic and Jewish populations; and these tensions were just as intense as the racial tensions a century later. Anti-Catholic secret societies stockpiled arms in anticipation of a Catholic war on Protestants.

Inner-city problems may have been even more severe than they are today. As Lord Bryce observed about urban America in the 1890s: “The government of cities is the one conspicuous failure of the United States.” In addition to adult and teenage gangs, even child gangs roamed large cities. Crime escalated during the 1890s. The number of murders per year in Chicago increased from 1266 in 1881 to 7840 in 1898. In 1894, the homeless in New York City numbered 200,000.

With all the problems of the cities, and with the rising influx of non-English speaking immigrants, public education presented many challenges. By 1890, for instance, a public high school education reached only a small minority of American children, with less than seven percent of all eligible children enrolled in the nation’s public high schools.

As with education, home ownership likewise possessed a strongly unequal characteristic. In 1899, only one-quarter of Boston suburban dwellers owned their own homes. A century later, more than eighty percent of all homes in Boston’s suburbs would be owner-occupied.

Interwoven with all these problems and uncertainties of the 1890s ran one of the most important and far-reaching political movements in history—the movement for women’s suffrage. Amidst the rapid growth of feminism as a social and political force, the so-called “Woman Question” pervaded public debate. Suffrage constituted a primary goal of the women’s movement in the 1890s. This new feminist activism, particularly evident in Margaret Sanger’s birth control movement, reflected the newly emerging social roles for women, which in turn caused much anxiety about the future of family and society.

America during the 1890s seemed caught in the grip of sharp social divisions. The divisions were different from the ones a century later, but just as tormenting and vexing. The country appeared to be dramatically partitioned into two separate and antagonistic societies. One was the industrial north and east; the other was the rural south and west. The disparities and unrest between the regions were sharp and turbulent. Farmers were alarmed at the increasing concentration of wealth in eastern cities and were convinced that the city was their enemy. A political revolt of southern and Western farmers against the eastern banks and industrial monopolies reflected those entrenched suspicions.

In addition to this urban-rural division were other social divisions that fragmented life within the city itself. Immigrant neighborhoods of Poles, Italians, Slavs and Russian Jews created a multitude of tensions. Religious conflicts erupted between Catholics, Protestants and Mormons. And the frequent labor strife threw urban neighborhoods into continuing violence.

In many ways, life at the turn of the twentieth century was just as divisive and problematic as it is two decades into the twenty-first century. In many other ways, life was harsher and more difficult. And yet, Americans a century ago maintained their optimism about the future and their faith in the foundations of their social and political institutions. This optimism and faith enabled early twentieth century Americans to bridge many of the divisions that plagued them. Farmers no longer see the city as their enemy; protestants no longer prepare for war against Catholics; employers no longer take up arms against their workers. The faith and confidence of Americans in the 1890s was articulated by the immensely popular novels of Horatio Alger, whose characters epitomized the promise of opportunity.

Another symbol of social optimism was the opening of Ellis Island, the starting point for millions of immigrants seeking a fresh start in a new land. In the 1890s, America was very much an immigrant nation—a nation attracting millions of people who had spent their life’s savings just to journey to America. An 1890s popular guidebook for immigrant Jews stated: “Select a goal and pursue it with all your might. No matter what happens to you, hold on. Sooner or later you will achieve your goal.”

Unquestionably, from a material perspective, life is better in the 2020s than it was in the 1890s. People are healthier, safer, more comfortable, and they enjoy more physical pleasures. But what is lacking is the kind of faith and confidence in basic social institutions and values that existed at the turn of the twentieth century. And yet, in contrast to the pessimism and anxiety felt by modern-day citizens of the United States, the immigrant optimism continues to thrive. Across the world, people are staking their life savings on a chance to come to the United States. To the throngs of immigrants, both legal and illegal, America is still a beacon of hope. These immigrants seek to assimilate into American culture, rather than to live in the isolated cocoons of their separate cultures.

The 1890s, a decade standing at the zenith of the belief in the Western tradition, was indeed a nervous decade. But society and culture did not succumb to this nervousness; instead, it went on to build the “American century.” Perhaps what empowered this optimistic and faithful pursuit was the confidence in a society and culture built upon the norms of thousands of years of civilization. The anchor that kept America upright amidst all the storms of fear and anxiety was the continued belief in America’s root identity. The anchor of Western Civilization gave to people a solid foundation from which they could address the challenges and uncertainties of their time. To the inhabitants of early-twentieth-century America, tradition was not some oppressive yoke around their necks. Instead, a tradition that had prospered over centuries made them feel less lonely or isolated; they could feel a part of something that had been going on for a long time.

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The absence of this time-tested anchor of social and cultural life sets the current age apart from the beginning of the twentieth century. Instead of relying on the civilizational norms that guided human history for thousands of years, modern society finds itself in a panic for new standards and guideposts. Never before, except perhaps with the French Revolution of 1789 and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, has humanity attempted to completely discard the past. (Indeed, the last time there was such a widescale attempt to tear down statues and rename places and institutions was the Soviet Revolution, which left in its wake a legacy of brutality and oppression.) But to discard the past is to remove the foundation for the present and the guidepost for the future. And indeed, that is what present-day America is seeing – a present that is rootless and without direction.

The attack on the past and on everything associated with Western Civilization certainly escalated after the May 25, 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Higher education became oppressively intolerant of any faculty member who deviated from the official academic position on race, gender, and lifestyle. For instance, the Michigan State University pressured a professor to resign his position as vice president of research because he touted research finding that police were not more likely to shoot black Americans. Indicative of the general state of affairs in higher education, the California State University system like many other universities mandated ethnic and social justice studies, all focusing on the evils of America and the grievances against it; at the same time, however, many of those same universities also ceased requiring or even offering courses in Western Civilization.

But this intolerance was not confined to academe. A New York Times editor resigned in protest over the newspaper’s enforced internal orthodoxy. A company, Goya Foods, was boycotted simply because the CEO stood with President Trump at a White House ceremony and offered words of praise for the President. Statues were toppled or defaced across the nation; and besides the expected Confederate statues, a host of other and even unexpected statues came under attack.

Statues that were toppled, defaced or removed during the summer of 2020 included: Edward Carmack, a nineteenth-century newspaper editor who criticized an African-American journalist writing about racial justice; Frank Rizzo, a Democratic mayor of Philadelphia, accused of having allowed violence against African-Americans during his mayoralty; Matthias Baldwin, a Philadelphia inventor, manufacturer, and abolitionist who was charged with “colonizing;” dozens of statues of Christopher Columbus; several statues of George Washington; a statue of Francis Scott Key, the composer of the national anthem; John Greenleaf Whittier, a nineteenth-century Quaker poet and abolitionist who was a delegate to the first meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Convention; a San Francisco statue of Ulysses S. Grant; the Abraham Lincoln Emancipation Statue in Boston; an elk statue in Portland; a statue of Mary, the mother of Jesus, in Massachusetts; the statue of President Andrew Jackson in Washington, D.C.; a statue honoring Mexican-American soldiers in Sacramento; and a statue of the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who delivered a speech in Rochester, New York about what the Fourth of July should mean to southern slaves.

When Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, was asked about protestors who tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus and then tossed it into the harbor of her native city of Baltimore, she simply said “people will do what they do.” In a statement reflective of the modern rejection of the past, Ms. Pelosi said she was more concerned with looking forward to the future and was not wedded to monuments of the past. But not only was Ms. Pelosi indifferent to the past, she was also indifferent to a fundamental tenet of Western Civilization—the rule of law. Moreover, while she has called for the removal of statues of members of the Confederacy, she has not made a similar demand regarding other people who committed treason against the United States.

A striking rejection of Western Civilization was made by the Smithsonian Institution. An online exhibit by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History depicted values like hard work, self-reliance, delayed gratification, politeness, timeliness, and a commitment to the nuclear family as being products of the “white dominant culture.” Christianity, conventional grammar, and the scientific method’s emphasis on “objective, rational linear thinking” were labelled as proprietary to “white culture;” thus, any attempt to instill such beliefs or standards in African Americans would be racist. Although the exhibit was later removed, it obviously reflected yet another attack on Western Civilization by equating long-held beliefs and standards as simply a part of white oppression.

Protests at courthouses across the country resulted in fires set and property damaged. And the mayors of those cities not only refused to condemn that violence and destruction, they actually participated in the protests that led to the fires.

Although attacks on the legacy of Western Civilization greatly increased in 2020, such attacks have existed for years. In 2016, for instance, students at Yale University protested a course on poets like Shakespeare, Milton and Woodsworth, saying that the course “actively harms students” and creates a “hostile” academic culture. Elsewhere, students at Stanford University overwhelmingly voted down a proposal to restore a Western Civilization course requirement. In 2019, the University of Notre Dame covered up historic Christopher Columbus murals in its main administration building. Later in the year, Los Angeles removed a statue of Christopher Columbus, as did many cities across the county. The San Francisco Board of Education painted over an 83-year-old mural of George Washington, and the town of Arcata, California took down a statue of President William McKinley, based on the argument that he advocated policies detrimental to Native Americans.

These rejections of history wrongly equate Western Civilization with an oppressive “whiteness.” They also focus only on instances in which followers of Western culture have fallen short or failed. To critics, only one attitude can exist toward Western Civilization: an endless apology for all its apparent past sins. It is as if there are absolutely no positive or redeeming traits whatsoever about Western Civilization, even though an essential trait of the Western tradition is the ability to engage in the kind of self-criticism that few cultures are able to emulate.

Western Civilization is not some racist tract intended only for a Caucasian race. It is not aimed at the subjugation of one people and the elevation of another. But it is the foundation for modern American culture and society; consequently, those who wish to dramatically transform that culture and society must obviously find a way to discredit the foundation. Understanding the manner in which Western Civilization has been laid open to doubt and attack actually helps reinforce the enduring strength of Western Civilization.

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The slow erosion of public confidence in the power and integrity of Western Civilization began a century ago, with World War I and the carnage caused by that brutal conflict. After a generation of men was nearly wiped out in Europe and nations brought nearly to the brink of ruin, all for seemingly no constructive purpose, people began doubting the intellectual foundations of the societies that engaged in such destructive warfare. But while terrible mistakes and misjudgments were made by a host of political leaders, none of those mistakes or misjudgments had anything to do with any tenet of Western Civilization. Nonetheless, skeptics used the destructions of World War to cast doubt and criticism on Western Civilization, even though the Great War was itself not a natural product of the Western tradition.

When the Great Depression struck the world in 1929, and lasting throughout the 1930s, another wave of doubt was exploited by critics of Western Civilization. This wave focused on the tremendous economic calamity besetting the world and imposing unprecedented hardship on people. Cultural dissidents began calling for a great transformation of society and a rejection of all past beliefs and institutions. But to criticize Western Civilization for the Great Depression is like blaming the meteorologist for the hurricane. Western Civilization does not promise that economic policymakers will never make mistakes that will then undermine the economy. Instead, Western Civilization offers a social and cultural blueprint for recovering from social traumas and triumphing over them, which is exactly what happened in the years and decades following the Great Depression.

Western Civilization does not promise immunity from hardship, but it does offer a prescription for recovery. Nonetheless, the Great Depression created an opening for a Marxist assault on existing society and its Western foundations. This assault has been reenergized in recent years and uses various race, gender and sexual orientation weapons to try to weaken the social foundations and allow for a dramatic transformation of society. Thus, as with World War I, critics similar used the Great Depression to wage an assault on Western Civilization.

Ironically, Western Civilization has been blamed for the consequences of two opposite phenomena: economic trauma and economic prosperity. The tremendous prosperity occurring after the Second World War, and the materialism and individualism it fostered, has also been a source of criticism of Western Civilization, as if somehow Western Civilization led us, after all these centuries of philosophical inquiry, to a narcissistic existence obsessed with material gratification. But even the most rudimentary examination of the values and tenets of Western Civilization reveals that mindless materialism and individual gratification was never a valued goal or pursuit. Moreover, the rise in the type of individualism that has occurred over recent decades was facilitated by the opponents of the Western tradition, leading to a complete imbalance between the individual and community. Consequently, the rise of materialism and individualism, facilitated by a great boom in prosperity, has contributed to a weakening of the foundations of Western Civilization.

Another social factor that has eroded the public’s esteem of Western Civilization has been the uncivilizing impact of technology. While technology has not posed any direct attack on Western Civilization—and indeed, the rapid advance of technology is a result of the scientific process made possible by the influence of Western Civilization—it has nonetheless exerted a certain corrosive effect. By seemingly minimizing the influence of the past, the role of tradition and the bonds of community, technology contributes to the appearance that Western Civilization is no longer needed by society. But of course, this is one of the drawbacks of modern technology—it conveys the message that the past is irrelevant, and that the miracle of technology can solve all the deepest yearnings of humanity.

The world of social media, while perhaps greatly facilitating individual communication, nonetheless has a weakening effect on the common culture. With technology enabling each person to receive communications only from chosen sources, the common culture suffers a continual erosion as individuals increasingly retreat to their own self-constructed media cocoons. The Western Civilization model of a unified and cohesive culture gives way to an increasingly fragmented and tribalized culture. And indeed, increasing tribalization in America has coincided with an increasingly weakened and besieged Western Civilization. The media, which in past generations often provided an umbrella of commonality to society, now often acts as a supplier of ammunition for cultural conflict and fragmentation. By reinforcing individual differences, media technologies encourage people to drift into their own individual media world and away from a more common culture.

One of the most confusing and fragmenting effects of technology is the sheer speed with which cultural practices and institutions have been challenged and eroded. Take, for instance, the speed with which centuries-old orthodoxies have been discredited: the nature of marriage and the tight connection between gender and biology, as well as the preeminent role of free speech in a democratic society. Technology has also elevated, to the detriment of the common culture, the therapeutic individual whose identity and well-being derives solely from his own emotional needs.

The most potent and damaging recent attack on Western Civilization comes from the racism argument, which alleges that Western Civilization is a product of white males and hence denies the diversity of humanity. Therefore, because of its inherent racism, Western Civilization must be banished from the nation’s educational curriculum and cultural institutions. The problem with this argument is that the lessons and values of Western Civilization in no way advocate or condone racism. Simply because many of the great works of the Western canon were written by white males is no reason to condemn the whole legacy of Western Civilization. Such a position would by itself constitute a prime example of narrow-minded bigotry and prejudice. Simply because there might not have been book publishers operating in, say, Africa, does not constitute good reason for dismissing the works produced by book publishers in, say, Italy.

The racism and discrimination arguments against Western Civilization do not directly address the substance of Western Civilization; they primarily attack Western Civilization because of the identity of those individuals who produced lasting works articulating and defending the canons of that civilization. Critics deride as racist the great works of Western Civilization in music, philosophy, literature, and art simply because they were largely produced by “dead white males.” But the shallow and biased nature of these attacks on civilizational norms that have evolved over the millennia demonstrate that Western Civilization has neither failed nor proved inadequate. Instead, Western Civilization has come under assault primarily because the attackers wish to overthrow current cultural norms and institutions and replace them with some new civilizational model completely cut off from the past. Essentially, Western Civilization is condemned because it became so prominent and successful, leading modern critics to denounce it as “dominant,” as if dominance alone were sufficient to discredit it.

The racism attack on Western Civilization remains profoundly misleading. Critics think that by merely categorizing Western Civilization as white culture they can brand every component of the Western tradition as racist. In fact, the protection of individual rights, and particularly minority rights, lies at the heart of the Western jurisprudential tradition, which discovered and disseminated such principles as due process and equal rights under the law. These are not racist concepts. To the contrary, racial minorities have benefited when those principles, though unjustly denied them earlier, were later extended to them. Thus, to depict all of Western Civilization as a mere mask for the pursuit of racial supremacy simply because countries in the West followed certain racist policies during periods in their history, in direct violation of the principles of Western Civilization, is as intellectually dishonest an endeavor as one could make.

The racism case against Western Civilization not only fails to find any substantive flaw but also fails to propose any substantive alternative. Essentially, the alternative proposed by critics amounts to cultural paralysis, imposed by constantly competing victim groups, and leading to greater social authoritarianism from an ever more expansive central government.

The anti-racism alternative to Western Civilization ultimately becomes a creed born of grievances. It is a creed fueled by a preoccupation with individual resentments. It does not articulate models for social peace and progress, but simply looks for new and more hateful enemies. It elevates the victim as the preeminent cultural hero, as if people are to be envied and adulated simply for their victim status. Centuries of moral thinking on individual and social virtue boil down simply to assigning all virtue to the victim.

Diversity is no substitute for the complex historical and philosophical structure of Western Civilization. Diversity is simply a descriptor; it describes the type of society we have and the people living in it. It does carry any moral or intellectual guideposts for society. It does not represent a deeply philosophical blueprint for the structuring and operation of social institutions. Free speech, the rule of law, individual dignity, the dynamism of free markets, natural rights, and the political invention of constitutional government do not come from the word diversity. While Western Civilization bridges the gap between thousands of years of history with the needs of the present and the direction of the future, diversity entails only an immediate glance at the composition of the present.

As Shelby Steele writes, “today minorities suffer from underdevelopment, not racism.” In other words, they do not suffer because Western Civilization is inherently racist; they suffer because they have not fully enjoyed the benefits offered by Western Civilization. The critics of Western Civilization offer a single, one-dimensional claim to minorities: that they are victims of a racist Western tradition. This claim puts all minorities in a victim status, dependent on the majority for reparations. But imposing racial guilt does nothing to uplift the lives of racial minorities. What will uplift are the same tools that have uplifted other races throughout history, and these tools are the legacy of Western Civilization: individual virtue and responsibility, family cohesion, strong community bonds, free markets, vibrant education, natural rights and the rule of law. As Western Civilization has proven throughout history, these values when embraced fully and freely enable individuals and communities to develop their best energies and talents.

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Even though higher education is turning its back on Western Civilization, denouncing it as sexist and racist, and even though many prominent political and business leaders refrain from offering any defense of the Western tradition, it still retains its integrity and viability, for the primary reason that none of the attacks on it have ever gone to the substance of the tradition. Western Civilization may have been weakened, but it has never been discredited. To the contrary, the ideals and values of Western Civilization have proved to be the remedy for the precise social ills and wrongs for which the Western tradition has been most vehemently attacked.

It was not interest group or identity politics that eliminated slavery. It was a fundamental belief in the dignity and natural rights of the individual, a belief that had been fostered and strengthened for centuries under the growth of Western Civilization. Slavery had been an aberration from the Western tradition, and it was that tradition that finally eliminated slavery. To not recognize that is to completely misread the events of history.

The dissenters to McCarthyism in the 1950s resorted to the Western ideals of due process, the rule of law and individual liberty to stop the bullying intimidation of Joseph McCarthy, whose assault on free speech and academic freedom amounted to one the most serious such assaults in American history. And yet, a similar assault is occurring now, with the boycotts and firings and personal attacks aimed against anyone who publicly disagrees with the gender, racial and sexual agenda currently prevalent in the media and higher education. In July of 2020, for instance, two high-profile resignations among elite journalists highlighted the ideological intolerance of the media. Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss both resigned their positions at New York magazine and the New York Times respectively because their viewpoints had exposed them to ridicule, harassment and, retaliation within a profession seemingly dedicated to free speech. The New York Times editorial page editor was forced to resign because he published an op-ed piece by a United States Senator calling for the use of federal troops to quell the looting and violence occurring in American cities during the summer of 2020.

The same people who smear Western Civilization as being oppressive and intolerant are in turn oppressive and intolerant toward anyone who stands up for the values of that civilization. During the summer of 2020, weeks of violent protests sought to destroy government buildings in cities like Seattle and Portland, all in the name of fighting the racial injustice of Western Civilization. People were injured and killed, property was destroyed, businesses were ransacked, cities became unsafe zones of roving mobs. These were the means used to attack a society based on the ideals of Western Civilization. But these means alone demonstrate that Western Civilization is the only just and workable model for society. Once violence, intimidation and oppression are used as a means of achieving a new society, that new society will never be able to escape its violent and oppressive beginnings.

An examination of how the assault on Western Civilization is being waged further bolsters the conclusion that the attackers’ real aim is to engage in historical erasure: wiping away the past and all the institutions and values of the past. And once the past is destroyed, or so the theory goes, a new social model can step into the cultural void.

Reflecting the real focus of protests as a push for a complete transformation of society and a rejection of all institutions and values of the past, the 2020 racial justice protests and riots also led to attacks on religious houses of worship. A fire was set at a Catholic Church in California; a statue of Mary, the mother of Jesus, was burned in Massachusetts; a statue of Jesus was beheaded in Florida; satanic symbols were painted on a Catholic Church in Connecticut; a statue of Mary was desecrated in New York. And yet, these criminal acts received very little media attention.

The real aim of the racist objection to Western Civilization is a Marxist quest to overthrow society as racist. And the primary weapon in that overthrow is the culture of victimhood, which recasts Western Civilization as an oppressive system of victimization. Yet hiding behind its single-minded attack on the old as racist, the new society promises to be far more coercive—just look at the intolerant speech codes and the repressive use of “cancel culture.”

Much of the opposition to Western Civilization comes from identity politics, but this approach strives for nothing beautiful or prosperous. It focuses not on creating better education or economic opportunities, but rather on speech codes and diversity quotas and toppled statues. Its purpose is not to offer advancement to anyone, but to justify the vindication of grievances.

Identity politics is premised on a belief that society is starkly and inevitably divided between the oppressed and the oppressors. With grievances as the primary currency in the political marketplace, power comes from victimhood and from alleging the oppression your group has suffered. The more grievances you have, the more political power you have. Justice is not a high ideal; instead, injustice becomes the building block of political power. The whole social model of identity politics rests not on aspirations, but on grievances and victimhood. Whereas assimilation constitutes a key component of Western Civilization, identity politics seeks an adversarial culture.

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Even though the public may not knowingly oppose historical precedent and traditions, Western Civilization nonetheless remains vulnerable to attacks because of a growing indifference to or lack of public confidence in the nation’s heritage. This indifference or lack of confidence may contribute to the feeling that the general insecurity of the present could be remedied by simply erasing history, wiping clean the legacies of certain individuals, and supposedly starting over.

Although the insecurity of the present could be weakening the confidence in history, the general malaise in the modern age may also stem from the decline of confidence in the Western tradition. The fire at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in April of 2019 seemed to reflect this cultural malaise. A great sadness accompanied the videos of the burning cathedral, a sadness more profound than any regret toward the destruction of a public building or monument. Perhaps, deep down, people realized that the cathedral was more than just an architectural treasure and popular tourist attraction. It represented something much deeper. And indeed, there is perhaps no greater symbol of the heritage of Western Civilization than that magnificent cathedral. But as the images of the fire spread through the Internet, the pall of silence and shock reflected a fear that much of what the cathedral stood for may have already been abandoned or dismissed. It was, after all, a church—an institution in the Judeo-Christian heritage, which for centuries gave life and inspiration to the development of the ideals that built our civilization.

Perhaps the fire prompted people to think, even if very briefly, about all the good of the past—about a cultural tradition that prized freedom, dignity, a truth that transcended the individual, and a respect for humanity. Perhaps, even if for a moment, people wanted a break from the continual condemnation of the past; perhaps they wanted to remember a heritage that had brought so much progress and enlightenment to the world. Perhaps the fire served to teach a lesson: buildings do not define the past; human yearnings and accomplishments define the past. Perhaps the fire did prompt at least a momentary reflection of what had first produced that cathedral—a vibrant Western Civilization.

Public opinion polls demonstrate a great cultural and political malaise hanging over contemporary America. Commentators attribute this malaise to economic turbulence or the incompetence of political leaders or the persistence of poverty and injustice in the world. But all those factors have existed since the beginning of recorded history. Given the depth of the malaise, the cause is most likely deep-seated and foundational. It is most likely the feeling that the present age has lost the bearings that had guided it for centuries, that the present age has been cut off from its roots and left to wither in the sun.

Nothing else can explain the current malaise, coming as it does during a period in history that is the most peaceful, healthy, and prosperous time in history. And yet, people are angry, resentful, and suspicious of society and its institutions. Despite all our material comforts, good health and relatively safe homes, we sense that something is missing, that our culture has been ripped away from the religious and philosophical foundations upon which it was built.

The current malaise may reflect a longing to return to stable, life-giving roots. Throughout history, community and social institutions have been inexorably linked with individual happiness. But without that connection, both the individual and humanity in general lose touch with what gives meaning to life.

In Heretics, G.K. Chesterton depicts the danger of blindly discarding tradition. He presents the scene of a mob that, in the grip of emotional irrationality, has torn down a lamppost. Afterward, people in the crowd realize that now, in the darkness, they need to figure out what light is, just as a medieval monk in the crowd had predicted prior to the destruction of the lamp. The lesson, according to Chesterton, is that “what we might have discussed under the lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.” And that is what has happened to our culture. Without the traditions of our civilization to guide us, we are just flailing away in the dark. And this darkness is the cause of our cultural malaise.

The malaise may also result from the fact that the critics of Western Civilization offer no substantive alternative. They may secretly envision the kind of society they want to create out of the ruble of a society and culture they have worked so fervently to decimate, just as the French revolutionaries did in the late eighteenth century, but they have provided no concrete cultural roadmap or model. They certainly have offered nothing on the scale of what the Western tradition has developed over thousands of years, incorporating the philosophy, arts, and political thinking of history’s finest creators. Indeed, how could they create from scratch what it took several millennia of Greek philosophers, Jewish theologians, Middle Ages thinkers, seventeenth-century scientists, and eighteenth-century political theorists to create? Indeed, the critics of Western Civilization depend on a high degree of historical ignorance. And to a degree their strategy has worked, with the rise in political anger and insecurity coinciding with an equally high ignorance of the past.

The attempted discarding of Western Civilization has completely upended the delicate balance achieved over centuries of history between community and individualism. The individual possesses a dignity and natural rights that cannot be ignored by the community; but the individual also needs a strong community to provide the kind of fulfillment and satisfaction that only human interaction can provide. Without the framework of Western Civilization as a guide, individualism can often run amuck, as it does when the claim is made that individual feelings can trump the laws of nature—when the biological fact of gender is suddenly made subservient to whatever feelings on gender the individual may have. On the other hand, community can be taken too far, as when an increasingly prevalent and expansive central government nearly extinguishes individual freedom—when the push to expand the central government suffocates all the other smaller and more local forms of voluntary community. Indeed, the rush to globalization often sucks the air out of the most meaningful forms of community. As Western Civilization demonstrated over centuries, rootedness in community must begin at the local level.

To assess accurately the state of Western Civilization, one needs to understand how the Western tradition, standing at the peak of its influence and popularity at the turn of the twentieth century, ended up in such a state of siege a century later. The battering of Western Civilization, beginning with World War I and slowly building through the twentieth century, never hit upon the essential identity or nature of the Western tradition; however, the distractions of that battering did erode public confidence in ways that would later deplete the ranks of defenders of that tradition, weakening it for the more virulent attacks that would come in the early decades of the twenty-first century. To understand this historical dynamic is to understand that the current assault on Western Civilization possesses no substantive justification but simply tries to exploit the weakness inflicted on the Western tradition by decades of distorted and irrelevant claims.