Western Civilization: Rooted in Dignity & Love

And both its roots are under attack by the Left with their "cancel culture" and their hatred for any opinion that doesn't fit their narrative.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Bradley J. Birzer, PhD

We can trace the desire to understand the universal quality and dignity of the human person as far back as our very origin as a Western people.

As I get older, I’m terribly troubled by the move—going on since rise of the New Left and, especially, the Maoists who introduced us to Political Correctness in the late 1950s—to paint Western civilization with the racist brush, arguing that such sins as racism are systemic and systematic, rooted in the very structure of society. Indeed, as the relatively recent 1619 Project, sponsored by the New York Times, tried to argue, it is deeply rooted in Western and American DNA to be racist, sexist, colonialist, imperialist, and exploitative. For many critics, and for many young people, especially, such accusations have become a mantra. Several of these people go by the moniker, “Anti-Racist,” as if they have some kind of objective and divine authority. Not only is it incredibly dangerous to poison rising and future generations with such claims, it’s downright false—a conceit and a lie.

After having taught the Western heritage core course at Hillsdale for more than 27 years now (to every incoming class of freshmen), I can state with some certainty that if there’s anything rooted in our DNA as citizens of the West and as citizens of America, it is actually the desire to discover and promote human dignity and individuality—and always within the context of community.

We can trace the desire to understand the universal quality and dignity of the human person as far back as our very origin as a Western people. While someone might justly quibble with me on the exact moment of Western genesis, I happily and confidently turn to the development of philosophy and ethics in the Greek-Persian town of Miletus. There, a number of men gathered and debated the origins of humanity.

They asked two fundamental questions, each trying to get at the nature of our diversity within our universality. First, they asked: Are we and our essence earth, water, wind, or fire? That is, is there an “Urstoff—that is a primary substance that holds us all together? Second, though, and equally important: Are we trapped in the cycles of the world: life, middle age, and death; or spring, summer, fall, winter? And, if a God exists, does he share in the Urstoff with us, and can He help us escape the cycles of the world? While the Greeks didn’t find answers to any of these profound questions, Heraclitus’ definition of our Urstoff—”fire”—became a universal way of understanding the human person. The word Heraclitus employed was LOGOS, a Greek word that meant fire, spirit, Word, reason, and imagination. Throughout the Hellenic and, especially, the Hellenistic periods, many of the Greeks—Zeno, Cleanthnes, and the Stoics especially—adopted the LOGOS as their own. To them, it bridged the world between the God and all men. Each person, it seems, was a singular manifestation of the universal principle. As such, each person was connected to every other person through the God.

Virgil, Cicero, and the Romans took this to its logical conclusion. Virgil, in Eclogue 4, written roughly a half-century before the birth of Christ, predicted that the God would marry a Virgin, and she would conceive a child who would usher in golden age and, through the merits of the father, erase sin from the world. Just as seriously, Cicero, in On the Laws, proclaimed Reason as the link between all men and the God. What is there, he asked, more divine than Reason? As such, all good men and the God live in the cosmopolis, the city of the universal.

Let’s take this argument even farther. We can immerse ourselves in the ancient texts of Western civilization—the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid—and look for proof of racism (that is, judging another person by the color of his skin), and our search will be totally in vain. Judging a person by the color of one’s skin—a grave sin, to be sure—simply did not exist in the ancient West. It is a modern phenomenon, an accident of history, not something rooted in the Western tradition. As horrific as it is, it came with modernity, not with the West.

We don’t have to stick with the ancient pagans, though. We can turn to Christianity, definitively the one philosophy and institution that dramatically promoted the dignity of the individual. That is, what the Stoic dreamt about, the Christians fulfilled. Are we trapped in the cycles of the world? Absolutely not. Christ’s grace has freed us for eternity.

Not only did Sts. John and Paul in their various New Testament writings answer all the Greek philosophical questions—Christ is the LOGOS and, through his sacrifice on the Cross, brought all things in the universe to and through Himself—but from the Council of Jerusalem (as described in Acts 15, roughly 50AD), the Christian Church ruled, in the words of St. Paul, that one was neither male nor female, neither Greek nor Jew, neither slave nor free, but all one in Christ. Again, one must note, this was a proclamation of the dignity of the individual, but always within the context of community. The community not only promotes our excellences, it tempers our faults.

Let’s turn to America and its origins. Again, one a few might quibble, I would turn to our great founding document, the Declaration of Independence. More than a century-and-a-half after the Puritans signed the Mayflower Compact, an expression of human dignity, colonists again met and passed the Declaration of Independence, one of the most audacious and aspirational in world history. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” Thomas Jefferson’s document thundered, “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The audacity and the aspiration are off the scale. Though a somewhat secular shadow of the Abrahamic and Mosiac covenants and a strong reflection of the celebrated Magna Carta and Mayflower Compact, the Declaration asserted timeless and universal truths in a particular moment. The Declaration, as such, is nothing less than the eternal irruption of time. There is no asterisk for “all men.” Black, white, male, female, gentile, Jew—Jefferson and Congress meant ALL MEN, past, present, and future, here and abroad. Though American society was still deeply racially flawed at the time of the Founding, the Declaration proved—as Martin Luther King, Jr. would one day put it—a promissory note.  The modern historian can go so far as to claim with only the slightest exaggeration that all American history has been an attempt to make the Declaration true. With its invocation of God several times, and with the final line—added by Congress to Jefferson’s original draft—the Declaration most certainly becomes a covenant: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

It turns out, the so-called “anti-Racists” are the true bigots, falsely wallowing and drowning in their ideas of power relations (not love) and victimhood. To be sure, racism remains a grievous sin and a serious problem, but it is not rooted in our civilizations, Western or American, or in our nature. It is, rather, a corruption and perversion of reality. And, like such evils, it can be defeated only when we remember what is true, good, and beautiful—something the citizens of Miletus, the Greek and Roman Stoics, the Christians, and the members of the Continental Congress understood. Every person, regardless of the accidents of birth, is made in the Image of the Creator; each is an unrepeatable center of dignity and liberty, each a unique face of the Divine.

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The featured image is “Hellelil and Hildebrand, the Meeting on the Turret Stairs” (1864), by Frederic William Burton and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.