Did Western Civilization Survive the 20th Century?

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

Most dramatically, of course, it is not slavery that requires explanation--slavery is one of the most universal of all human institutions--but the values and agency by which the West identified slavery as an evil and abolished it. Finally, it is not relative pockets of poverty in the West that should occasion our wonder--the general state of poverty once went under the name of "the human condition"--but, rather, the values, institutions, knowledge, risk, ethics and liberties that created such prosperity that we even notice such poverty at all, let alone believe that it is eradicable. We are surprised, in a failure of intellectual analysis, by all of the wrong things, and we lose our wonder at the accomplishments and aspirations of our civilization as a tragic result.

That attempt to contain depravity, indeed, has been so successful in the West, relative to the human condition, that the other world fantasized by the multiculturalists seeks entrance, again and again, at our doors. One sees the alleged victims of Western civilization hopefully seeking entrance to it; one does not see the intellectual despisers and would-be despoilers of this civilization beating down the doors of the cultures they claim to celebrate. Leave Harvard for Sierra Leone, MIT for contemporary Vietnam? Gender feminists escaping the oppression of the West for Kenya, Guatemala, Cuba, Afghanistan, India or the territories of the Inuits? I think not.

Some might argue that it is merely the West's material wealth and prosperity that draws people to it. It would be bizarre to hear the multiculturalists argue that. Have so many been willing to die merely for the prosperity of their neighbors? Does the prosperity of the West not reflect the fruits of its values, its freedom, its notions of individuality, liberty and responsibility, its faiths, its institutions of law and legal equality, its commitment to reciprocity, and its intellectual realism?

Reality and Reason

IT IS WORTH reflecting on this latter trait of the West, its intellectual--its philosophical-realism. While various extreme epistemological and ontological skepticisms and various radical irrationalisms have flourished in our history, sometimes with brilliance and profundity, Western civilization always has had at its core a belief that there is a reality independent of our wishes and ideas; that natural knowledge of that reality is possible, and, indeed, indispensable to human dignity, and that such knowledge must be acquired through a discipline of the will and mind; and that central to that discipline is a compact with reason. The West has willed, in theory at least, to reduce the chaos of the world to natural coherence by the powers of the mind. When some Christian voices condemned such efforts as impious, the great doctors of the Church proclaimed them indispensable to a coherence on which human understanding of the faith depended. The Christian universities of the West began higher education in philosop hy, and to reason badly or against straw men was always deemed an error of grave import.