Why we study Western Civ

Public Interest, Wntr, 2005 by Steven Ozment

The modern inclination to read German history backwards from the 1930s, or to read premodern history generally in the light of the civil rights movements of the 1960s, is a highly prejudicial perspective on the past that can only find fault. Being German, or being free, has not meant the same thing in every time and place. For most of their long history, Germans successfully embraced authority and order without totalitarianism and pursued freedom and equality without liberal democracy. Totalitarianism and democracy have been twentieth-century experiments for Germans, not their mainstream historical polity. Only the historian's carefully cultivated contemporaneity with the past, his ability to "be there" in imagination and the language of an age, makes clear both the great difference and continuity between the past and the present.

In the postmodern world, many can imagine nothing worse than the infringement of individual liberties. Yet throughout most of history, when a choice had to be made, every age and culture has recognized that physical security is more basic to life than the freedom to come and go as one pleases. Before free and vibrant societies can exist, there must first be safety in the streets, productive work, and food on the table. Freedom is not everything; it is only the icing on a very large cake, which is the essential thing. That cake is a mix of stable political institutions, effective educational systems, and fluid social organizations. Freedom is the easy part; the discipline to build and maintain the pillars that support it is what is hard. Liberty and democracy are utterly meaningless concepts if all one is doing is trying to feed oneself and stay alive.

For this reason, we find few homilies in the past extolling egalitarian ideals of freedom. Most societies in the past believed a perverse egalitarianism to be their major problem: too many self-absorbed people and groups doing as they pleased, fragmenting and provoking society, making it impossible for strong cultural bonds to unite rival groups. What has been missing, according to history's contemporary critics, is the citizen's or subject's sense of obligation to a larger world beyond the individual, the family, and the clan. Even the Athenians, who created democracy and arguably loved it most, did not hesitate to suspend their constitution and allow despots to rule over them when aristocratic factions and peasant revolts threatened to destroy civilization. In the rural societies of the Middle Ages, the great problem of life was not to overthrow a tyrant, but to find an effective one. Resort to such rule in time of crisis became an honored political tradition in Europe down through the Renaissance. And therein lies a vital lesson of history for a Western world puzzled by other cultures' rejection of liberal democracy.

Western Civ meets Global Civ

As an academic dean in the 1980s, I recall the student who protested having to take courses outside of her major. When I asked why, she explained that she had to tutor the alien classes in Michel Foucault's philosophy before there could be any fruitful discussion or proper conclusion! Having grown up with the Internet, the present student generation, to its credit, likes to gather its own information. Unfortunately, it also wants that information delivered in bottom-line fashion without difficult labor and circuitous argument. Yet the same students recognize that their professors' theories and models, while capable of sparking cool, consensual discussions, lack legs and, in the end, indoctrinate.