We can tell much about the state of a national debate by the words that can, and more importantly cannot, be articulated. Oscar Wilde famously described homosexuality as ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. (That was in the 1890s, some decades before the advent of ‘Pride’.) I have recently found myself on the defensive in a broadcast and in a spat on Twitter/X for having the audacity to use the term ‘White British’, despite this being the term designated by the British state to cover what remains the majority ethnic group. In similar vein, the very term ‘Western Civilisation’ raises hackles unless it is being incanted as a prelude to denunciation. ‘Hey ho, hey ho, Western Civ has got to go’ cried students at Stanford in the late 1980s. The chorus has grown a lot louder since. Back then they were merely referring to a course. Today they are referring to the subject matter itself.
Western Civilisation certainly has its enemies and a varied bunch they turn out to be. Iran’s Supreme Leader has denounced it as ‘deceitful, hypocritical, and filled with lies’. A Cambridge-and-Vienna-based academic has called it a ‘morally bankrupt fiction’. But more important than such breezy and sweeping disparagements of Western Civilisation have been the creeping attempts to undermine it, especially in universities and schools. Attempts to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ at leading institutions have included everything from claims that ‘mathematics operates as whiteness’ to an insistence that musical notation is a form of colonisation.
An article – indeed a book, indeed many books – could be written on defining what we mean by the term ‘Western Civilisation’, and many more could be penned on the genealogy both of the term and of the thing. This is not my purpose here. What I want to do is simply describe the benefits that derive from the tradition in which we all live, from which we all benefit, and which all too often we simply take for granted, so familiar are we with its blessings. Those blessings are essentially, I believe, threefold, and can in the simplest terms be captured by the words ‘Knowledge’, ‘Freedom’ and ‘Beauty’. The argument is obvious, and it should not need making, but just as Hegel’s owl of Minerva flies at dusk (we best understand eras as they come to their end), so it may be that only when what is most valuable comes under threat are we best positioned to appreciate it – and motivated to defend it.
First, then, to ‘knowledge’. It hardly needs saying that knowledge is a human project that has accumulated its treasures across millennia with contributions from many different peoples at many different times. It started, perhaps, with working out how to make fire and has not ended by working out how to build a supercomputer. But the exponential increase in our understanding of what the universe is and how it works achieved over the past few centuries represents, from the perspective of the sweep of human history, a step change. It is essentially the product of the societies, institutions and individuals of the West. Newtonian physics and Darwinian biology emerged respectively in seventeenth and nineteenth-century England, quantum mechanics largely in twentieth-century Germany and Mitteleuropa. The first flames of what we consider ‘scientific’ may have been kindled among the Greeks. The torch may at some stage have passed through the Arabs. And the prize for the greatest contribution may be about to pass to the Chinese and possibly the Indians. But the West has played an overwhelming role in advancing science for at least three hundred and fifty years. Claims of the equal validity of Aztec cosmology with astrophysics or of Aboriginal healing with Western medicine are just silly. Anyone advocating such nonsense still catches a plane built in line with aerodynamics, crosses a bridge constructed according to the principles of engineering and takes a headache tablet formulated within the parameters of pharmacology. At any moment of any day, such people rely on the artefacts of Western science to meet their needs. Or, to put it another way, if while denouncing or relativising or relegating the achievement of the Western science its critics nevertheless avail themselves of it, they are insincere. And if they do not avail themselves of it, they are of questionable sanity.
Western science is not just an objectively true set of propositions for understanding the universe (or, perhaps, a methodology for arriving at such truths – this is not the place for such philosophical niceties); it is the basis for the standards of living we enjoy. As a demographer, I tend to characterise these in the most starkly quantitative terms. In the UK, life expectancy has roughly doubled over two hundred years and infant mortality today is less than one fifth of what it was when I was born sixty years ago. But the UK was an early-adopter: progress among late-adopters has been much more rapid. In China, life expectancy has lengthened by nearly 80% since the middle of the twentieth century while infant mortality has not fallen by four-fifths since the 1960s, as in the UK, but by more than nine-tenths. Those countries with the shortest life expectancy and highest infant mortality rates have been the fastest improvers. These striking figures are manifested in countless lives improved and extended, countless children cherished rather than mourned. And all of this is the result of (overwhelmingly Western) science and technology, whether antibiotics or malaria avoidance techniques or bigger crop yields. For all the impressiveness of seventh-century Indian mathematics or eighth-century Chinese printing, no civilisation before the West was able to apply its ever-widening understanding of the workings of the world to extending and improving the lives of ordinary people to anything like this extent. And it has been a gift which the West, far from greedily keeping to itself, has generously spread to the four corners of the world. It is reckoned that half the world’s population alive today only exists thanks to the Harber Bosch process, invented in Germany in the early twentieth century.
If knowledge and all that flows from it is the first reason to cheer for Western Civilisation, freedom is the second. The West has incubated some pretty unpleasant ideologies. It took its time in rejecting the institution of slavery which had been part of just about every society in history. Communism and Fascism most certainly have Western origins. But so has the democracy, and dare one say it, the liberalism which has marked the freest societies humanity has known. We can debate whether the roots lie in Athens, Jerusalem or Rome, but the kind of political settlements we have achieved in the West, allowing for freedom within the rule of law and a measure of popular determination of how politics proceeds and what character the law takes, have undoubtedly been the most successful kind of way of organising societies in history. For all of the faults of any individual instance of this kind of settlement, it invariably makes for a more attractive and successful society than the alternatives.
It may be that this era is ending and that the most effective societies in the future might model themselves on something closer to the People’s Republic of China or the United Arab Emirates. Some would vehemently argue against such a view. But whatever the future holds, it remains the case for now that it is Western-style democracies which act as poles of attraction to the global masses. Whatever the pros and cons of immigration, it speaks volumes that the world’s masses want to come to the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. Few, other than those from the ‘near abroad’, seek to live in Russia, while working in the wealthy sheikhdoms of the Middle East is for most expats there, whether from the West or from the developing world, a short-term financial arrangement rather than any kind of intention to stay and become part of the society of the host nation. Many of those who are most vocal in their criticism of the West’s democracy and freedoms as sham, particularly in the elite Universities of the US, have left their own political systems to live in the West and take advantage precisely of those privileges that they claim to hold in contempt. In many ways they are as hypocritical as those who damn the supremacy of Western science but who would without any hesitation rush a sick child to a hospital rather than to a witch doctor. They are reminiscent of the communist critics of the West who preferred their tenured positions at Cambridge or Berkeley to any of the fifty-seven varieties of Actually Existing Socialism on offer in the era of the Cold War.
The third cheer is for Western music, literature and art. Here the competition from other civilisations is indeed formidable and the judgment inevitably subjective. Someone not brought up to appreciate Chinese opera or the intricacies of Tamil dance is perhaps hardly in a position to compare or rank their charms compared with what the West has on offer. But in a way, that makes the point. Just as Western knowledge of the universe truly is objective and not just one of many alternative systems, the worth of Western art forms is attested to by the universality of their appeal. Millions of Chinese school children are encouraged to play the piano and violin and to master the works of Bach or Mozart. Shakespeare’s popularity in Japan is legendary. Some of the finest practitioners of that quintessentially western literary form, the novel, are to be found in contemporary Africa.
There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. Korean pop stars have developed a fan base beyond the peninsula, although the extent to which their output is really in any authentic sense truly Korean rather than of Western origin can be debated. The sculpture of Africa and the art of East Asia are widely revered, although the music of these continents continues to have a more narrowly local appeal. No really objective measure can be brought to bear when comparing the art forms of one civilisation against another, and in any case, with the intensification of globalisation, cultures that were once more or less distinct and water-tight are increasingly prone to worldwide influences. Popular music in the West is unimaginable without the influence of African Americans. Nevertheless, the glories of the painting of the Renaissance, the music of the Baroque, Classical and Romantic eras, and the literary gems of Dante, Shakespeare, Molière and Goethe deserve a resounding cheer, even if their equivalents from beyond the West are deserving of accolades too.
Perhaps there was a time when the West was hubristic, and its hubris was thoroughly unattractive, but such a time has long passed. The pendulum has swung far too far in the other direction. We live in an era of cultural cringe and apology, decolonisation and, chillingly, calls for the globalisation of the Intifada. And yet we continue to rely on and benefit from – day by day, minute by minute – the physical, epistemological, political and cultural capital that the West has created. If we fail to be aware and appreciative of that, if we become too embarrassed to celebrate and renew that capital, then we will resemble a collection of half-witted teenagers sitting comfortably on a branch high up in a tree, cheering wildly while the branch is sawn off.
Dr Paul Morland is an author, broadcaster, and demographer. His most recent book is No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children (Forum).
