From Plato to NATO: the Idea of the West and Its Opponents

National Review, Sept 28, 1998 by Roger Kimball

SEVERAL years ago, I lectured at Williams College about some recent trends in American higher education. The movement that has come to be known as multiculturalism was just then picking up steam, and colleges and universities across the country were falling over themselves to dismantle their ''Eurocentric'' humanities curricula. Only a year or two earlier, Jesse Jackson, protesting a required course in Western civilization at Stanford University, had led students on his famous march chanting: ''Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture's got to go.'' My talk was partly an attack on such manifestations of radical multiculturalism, partly a defense of making the study of Western civilization the center of a liberal-arts education. Alas, my remarks were not well received. I remember in particular an exasperated young woman who, during the question period, informed me that undergraduates should not focus their attention on Western culture because, after all, ''Western civilization is responsible for most of the world's ills.''

At the time, I wondered what her parents would have thought about that declaration, especially when the tuition bills at Williams came due. And I thought about that young woman again when reading David Gress's masterly new book, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents. I hope that she has an opportunity to read it. She would doubtless be pleased to discover that Mr. Gress, a Danish-born classicist and historian, agrees with her that the West has been responsible for much cruelty, oppression, injustice, and general nastiness. She would perhaps be less pleased that Mr. Gress nevertheless mounts a vigorous defense of the West -- not least because it has done more than any other tradition to acknowledge and remedy those evils.

Such tensions -- between the ideal and the real, between rhetoric espousing noble causes and the often less palatable realities that assure the success of those causes -- are at the heart of Mr. Gress's patient historical inquiry in this book. He has two main enemies in his sights: the multiculturalists, who attack the idea of the West, and well-meaning boosters who misunderstand and prettify it. Like other thoughtful commentators on our cultural prospects --Alasdair MacIntyre and Allan Bloom come to mind -- Mr. Gress understands that superficiality is as dangerous to the future of the Western tradition as outright hostility. Hence the irony of his title. ''From Plato to NATO'' is the mildly contemptuous epithet students use to describe those ''Great Books'' college courses that purvey a simple Whiggish tale about the origins and development of Western civilization. According to this cheery story, it all began with the Greeks, who invented democracy; things then got a push in the Renaissance, which invented individuality; and then, three ninety-minute class periods later, the West really comes into its own with the Enlightenment, which abolished religious superstition, instituted human rights, and formed the perfect prelude to absolute perfection: the liberal, secular, relativistic society of present-day America and Western Europe.

In other words, prizes for everyone. Mr. Gress refers to this scenario -- a staple of so many college survey courses -- as ''the Grand Narrative,'' and a large part of his book is devoted to correcting the ''chronological myopia'' that it presupposes. ''One of the basic flaws of the narrative,'' he notes, ''was precisely its moralism, the fact that it presented the story of the West as a pedagogical adventure with a happy ending.'' Not that Mr. Gress is against happy endings. Rather, he is against the sentimentalization of history for ideological purposes -- which means in part that he is against the habit of rescripting the past to suit present definitions of virtue. ''The Greeks, Romans, and early Christians,'' he observes drily, ''were not protoliberals.''

Moralism is not the only problem with the Grand Narrative. There is also the issue of simplification. One of Mr. Gress's chief aims in this book is to show that, throughout history, ''various Wests coexisted, defined in terms of different principles, regions, beliefs, and ambitions. The West is not a single story, but several stories, most of which neither began with Plato nor ended with NATO.'' And then there is the problem of hubris. Part of what drives moralistic theories of history is the sense of their own unlimited scope and applicability. Anyone who has dipped into Hegel's writings on history knows the scenario. History for Hegel is the unfolding of the absolute idea -- ''God's walk through the world,'' he called it -- that just happens to find full flower in Prussia in the early nineteenth century in the person of G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel's faith in this idea, he tells us, ''is not a presupposition of study; it is a result which happens to be known to myself because I already know the whole.'' Nice work if you can get it, of course, but rather hard on anyone who doesn't happen to be Hegel.