Did Western Civilization Survive the 20th Century?

National Interest, The, Winter, 1999 by Alan Charles Kors

The West always has been concerned with the limits of reason and knowledge, the role of received prejudice and custom, the appropriateness or arrogance of its metaphysical conclusions, and with the phenomenon of paradox. Indeed, the West authored the formal exposition and mental pyrotechnics of such concerns. The heirs of the least subtle forms of that tradition do not even know their parentage, but their inheritance attests to the dynamism, for better or worse, of the Western intellectual dialogue itself.

It was the Greeks and their heirs--not any Third World critics of post-colonialism--who obsessed so creatively about the role of King Nomos, of received opinion, of education and prejudgment, of the seeming relativity of values, beliefs, and taste to time, place, and accident of birth. Montesquieu, in the eighteenth century, was profoundly struck by the malleability of the human condition, and by the relativity of what might seem the most foundational aspects of human existence to geography, time and historical vicissitudes. He also saw, however, what our current social constructionists do not: as undeniable as that malleability may be, there is a natural reality that underlies, conditions and sets limits to it, and the relationship between human malleability and natural reality is the appropriate subject of deep objective study. For Montesquieu, civilizations may flourish ephemerally without solving real problems of reciprocity, justice and virtue, but they cannot survive. Further, he believed that while certa in forms of social arrangements may persist for as long as terror and despotism sustain them, there is a real human nature and a set of real human needs, and these will out toward their true ends when coercion is lessened by chance or struggle. Montesquieu, and indeed Enlightenment thinkers in general, often are equally loathed by conservatives who believe them excessively relativistic, and by postmodernists who see them as excessively dogmatic. In fact, few in the Enlightenment would have disagreed with the observation that Adam Smith made, in 1759, about "the necessity of justice to the existence of society."

The failure of the postmodernists' canon and politics fully to grasp the irony of their proclaimed alienation from Western thought and values signifies a profound failure of self-knowledge. Their ideologies derive not from non-Western culture, but from the internal debates of the West and the products of its educational vitality: from Marcuse, Gramsci, Marx, Hegel and Rousseau--from, in short, the debates that the West has always had with itself. Their kaleidoscopic values eventually return to the West. They sought sanctuary in Christian churches, that most medieval of protections, for the Leninists of Latin America. They campaign against, and seek asylum in America for the victims of, involuntary female circumcision, citing our notions of legal equality and universal human dignity, not their alleged commitments to the relativity of all human values and cultures. They seek tenure at universities with medieval traditions of what the West called "philosophical liberty." They wear ribbons for greater funding of Western medical research into the causes and cures of AIDS and breast cancer. Hypocrites without self-knowledge will not bring down this civilization, unless we join them in its demolition and work even harder than they do.