Why we study Western Civ

Public Interest, Wntr, 2005 by Steven Ozment

The battle between the ancients and the moderns has accordingly become far more difficult for the ancients. In this hermeneutical turn, a waxing present without much of a track record holds greater authority than a well-documented but waning past. Skeptical of history's inescapability and utility, not a few modern historians believe their calling is to sever the dead hand of the past rather than pore over its vital remains. For the reading public, the study of the past often seems a search for forerunners and blockers of modernity, a parade of people, ideas, and crises either lauded for having prepared the way to truths we hold to be self-evident, or excoriated for having opposed them--history as self-confirmation.

In the best historical science, one becomes an expert on a particular age by gaining mastery of preceding ones. That is because human life in individual cultures is inter-connected from generation to generation and century to century. Subsequent events and developments root themselves in and incorporate previous ones, not unlike the way the early years in an individual's life continue to inform and shape the later ones. The most crucial and reliable information new generations need to seize their future effectively does not lie before them, but behind them. The past is more powerful and controlling than any future we can contemplate. This side of eternity, we are more the residues of history than the stuff the stars are made of.

Western Civ and its discontents

For new generations of high school and college students, rescue from present-day historical escapism and its great informational loss may begin in the mighty European or Western Civilization survey, which leaps over and through 25 centuries, from Mesopotamia onward, in a single academic year. Conceptually born in nineteenth-century European efforts to distinguish the culture and values of a presumedly superior West over those of a presumedly inferior East, Western Civ has been both a beloved and a hated introduction to the study of history in post-World War I America.

Three universities--Harvard, Columbia, and Chicago--played essential roles in creating this American original, appropriately born as an academic course of study in a nation that has believed itself to be a beacon to the world. Of the three universities, Columbia's required general education course ("Contemporary Civilization"), introduced in 1919 and expanded in 1929, and the teaching and writings of Columbia professor James Harvey Robinson, were key. In 1912, Robinson defended a long social, scientific, narrative history focused not on "fortuitous prominence" but on "the normal conduct and serious achievements of mankind in the past," peaking in modern Europe and America. Although he never taught an undergraduate course in Western Civ, the model he developed in his graduate courses and books between 1903 and 1919, which surveyed European history from the Middle Ages to the present, sowed the seeds. Between 1925 and 1930, a unified history of these centuries became the textbook we know today as Western Civ.