Did Western Civilization Survive the 20th Century?

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

The current barbarians within also remind us that the West is, again and again, the author of its own worst follies and abuses, compared to most of which the postmodernists pale into virtual insignificance. We are the authors of our own religious wars and persecutions, our own enthusiastic superstitions, our own conquests of lands and peoples over which and over whom we had no rights, our own ultimate nightmares of National or Leninist Socialism, which drowned our world in blood unimaginable in any century but the twentieth, and which truly threatened to bring this civilization to an awful end. We have had the will, however, to learn from depravity and from reality, and to bear ultimate witness to the higher sides of our being. What civilization ever has engaged in more searing analysis and soul-searching of its own sins?

The American Accomplishment

HAVING DEFEATED the National Socialists and the Communists within, the bearers of the best of this civilization have reason for a moment of optimistic pride. What often denies us both optimism and pride, however, is the very stringency of our self-judgment untempered by historical realism. It is a dangerous intellectual error to imagine that goodness, wisdom, order, justice, peace, freedom, legal equality, mutual forbearance and kindness are the normal state of things in human affairs, and that it is malice, folly, disorder, injustice, war, coercion, legal inequality, murderous intolerance and cruelty that stand in need of historical explanation. The West, in theory, always has understood that man has a lower side to which he is drawn, that man is a wolf to man, and that we are governed more by prejudice and passion than by the rational capacity of our minds. The West, in theory, has always understood that knowledge, including moral knowledge, is a hard-won acquisition, and that its application is even harder.

If that is so then we err grievously in our assumptions of what it is that requires particular explanation in the world. We understand the defaults; what should astonish us is the ability to change them. Rousseau and the postmodernists have it all wrong in this domain. It is not aversion to difference, for example, that requires historical explanation; aversion to difference is the human condition. Rather, it is the West's partial but breathtaking ability to overcome tribalism and exclusion that demands explanation, above all in the singular American accomplishment. It is not the injustice of difference in America that requires historical explanation, as if this were the odd phenomenon of human affairs. That injustice indeed requires reflection, so that we never lose sight of human moral weakness in general or of our own malice in particular. But historically, it is the existence and agency of Western values by which that injustice has been and is being progressively overcome that truly should excite our cur iosity and awe. Anti-Semitism is not surprising; the opening of Christian America to Jews is what should amaze. Racial aversion and injustice are not the source of wonderment; the Fourteenth Amendment and its gradual implementation are what should astonish. It is not the abuse of power that requires explanation, but the Western rule of law.