On the issue of “Western civilization,” I would like to, in pursuit of fairness and truth, say something that offends everyone. As the American writer Walker Percy once joked, “What else can you do when some of your allies give you as big a pain as your opponents?”
I should have credence in this arena. I’ve been a student or professor of great books for more than two decades. I’ve taught in classical Christian schools. And I have investigated the history of ideas and the sources of a great tradition for just as long. With passion and conviction, I can say that the great books are among the best resources for virtue formation in education.
Yet as much as I support the great books, I do not support the partisan game between conservatives and liberals, elitists and popularizers, those who believe the Western canon should be lionized and those who believe it should be destroyed.
On one side, American defenders of “Western civilization” want to pass down the heritage that influenced the founders of the nation and that is part of a contemporary student’s cultural legacy. C.S. Lewis offers this analogy: “If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said.” Students who don’t learn the foundations of the Western world—from Homer to Herodotus—are liable to be unmoored from the ideals that form that world today.
On the other side, Western civilization is stoned by some academics as racist and sexist, and thus much of the best of our shared tradition is thrown out, to our very great detriment. The American academic Michael Poliakoff recalls how the Rev. Jesse Jackson led a protest at Stanford University—“Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go!”—because of a misunderstanding that Western civilization was nothing more than “Western supremacy, colonialism, and racism to its opponents, rather than the academic study of the nations, cultures, and peoples that contributed so heavily to the world we live in.”
When considering the founding of the country, it may be just as true to say that the Gospels and Socrates influenced Benjamin Franklin as it is to say he was influenced by the Iroquois Confederacy, as Ken Burns did in a recent documentary. The question is, which texts are we choosing to pass on to the next generation—and why?
To preserve our Western Civilization courses, we need to be aware of the authors that have been left out of most curriculum lists but deserve a seat at the table, while also being ready for the dynamic and global world of the 21st century.
In The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, the legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen, for example, emphasizes the classics and their notable influence on American ideas of liberty without erasing contributions of lesser-known or hidden figures. For those who think classics only mean books by “dead white males,” Rosen highlights the letters of Abigail Adams and the poems of Phillis Wheatley.
In 1980 my mentor Louise Cowan, co-editor of Invitation to the Classics (1998) and founder of the great tradition curriculum at the University of Dallas, argued for an expansion of the literary canon to include the best that has been thought and said across the globe: “The things worth preserving, the things we ought to be passing down, far transcend any single heritage.” Cowan quoted contemporary poet Robert Creeley and cited the 1980 Japanese film Kagemusha as voices that pick up the mantle of tradition and continue the conversation for a global audience.
The phrase “Western civilization” can be misleading; it sounds like it misses the confluence of great ideas and writers from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. To uphold a “Western civilization” canon with only Western writers, a person would have to strain a gnat from the sand. In other words, educators choosing to see only “the West” would have to ignore Christianity in Africa in the first 1,000 years of the church—including St. Augustine—or scrub out the influence of Islamic translators of Aristotle when they read Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, or dismiss the Arab al-Kindi’s influence on Roger Bacon.
However, dissolving Western civilization courses, which many institutions have done over the past five or so years, has helped no one. To fill the gaps left by these once-core courses in the classics, universities have proposed a smattering of disconnected and specialized classes in literature, politics, and history. These specialized classes pale in comparison to teaching the classics according to the history of ideas, in response to enduring human questions, and for the formation of virtue. An over-focus on British literature, for instance, may introduce a reader to Chaucer but neglect the influence of Dante, miss the connection to philosophy, and focus on scholarly understanding of Middle English rather than the big ideas of justice, love, or human flourishing.
If “Western civilization” has a value left in the name, it is because people associate the phrase with an interdisciplinary reading list that includes but is not limited to the great authors of the past who shaped our contemporary ideas about law, freedom, and so forth—Homer, Augustine, Dante, Julian of Norwich, Shakespeare, Milton, Wollstonecraft, Douglass, Kierkegaard, and the great authors continue.
Perhaps we could take a minute and listen to both sides of this argument. Those who cherish “Western civilization,” in my experience, have no desire to pass on a heritage for only a particular race, sex, or tribe—instead, these educators believe that these good, true, and beautiful books would be liberating for everyone who reads their pages. Yet educators wary of “Western civilization” struggle to trust the good intentions of those in favor of these seminars because the list of books often marginalizes the contributions of every continent apart from Europe, or the names of authors reflect a preference for white men.
Does it not seem that the most fruitful way forward is to come together as a society and admit that we have a shared tradition full of conflict and confluence? That education demands that we choose from the best that has been thought and said across the world and enter into a larger conversation, in which we see ourselves humbly as participants in carrying forth an old, old story? Inclusion does not mean watering down—nor should it mean tokenizing or head-counting. And compromise should not necessitate sidelining the Western writers of the past and their massive contribution.
Could we instead try a Great Tradition approach, one of inquiry and belonging, where the past is a necessary preamble, but where we admit the future is unfinished? In practice, this means that Western civilization educators examine their syllabi to ensure that they are telling a true story of the history of ideas. In a course on ancient classics, for instance, would it be worthwhile to add Sappho, focus on Antigone as a heroine, highlight the Ethiopians in The Histories, or consider a female translator of Homer’s epics? Does the list of medieval writers in your Western Civ class include any of the female mystics? In seminars focused on 1600 to 1800, have professors taught Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz’s “Respuesta a Sor Filotea” or Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography? Why not? Such small steps go a long way to bridge the gap between those who love and those who hesitate to accept Western civilization seminars. It’s been said that small steps for us mortals can mean big leaps for mankind.
