RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is now over 30 years since the Reverend Jesse Jackson led a crowd of protesters at Stanford University with the chant “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” Back then, Jackson and his followers were protesting against Stanford University’s introductory humanities program “Western Culture.” They proposed that there was something wrong with teaching the Western canon and the Western tradition. But it was what happened next that was so striking. The university swiftly gave in, replacing the study of Western culture with the study of many cultures. What happened at Stanford in 1987 was a sign of everything to come.

In the decades that followed, nearly all of academia in the Western world followed Stanford’s lead. The history of Western thought, art, philosophy, and culture became an ever less communicable subject. Indeed, it became something of an embarrassment: the product of a bunch of “dead white males,” to use just one of the charming monikers that entered the language.

Since then, every effort to keep alive, let alone revive, the teaching of Western civilization has met with sustained hostility, ridicule, and even violence. Academics who have sought to study Western nations in a neutral light have been prevented from doing their work and subjected to intimidation and defamation, including from colleagues. In Australia, the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, whose board is chaired by former prime minister John Howard, has had great trouble finding any universities to partner with. And that tells us something about the speed of this great shift. Just a couple of decades ago, a course in the history of Western civilization was commonplace. Today it is so disreputable that you can’t pay universities to do it.

In 1969, the BBC ran Sir Kenneth Clark’s extraordinary 13-part documentary series Civilisation. It aimed to give a unified history of Western civilization, and it did so, informing the understanding of millions of viewers around the world. Almost 50 years later, in 2018, the BBC tried to follow this up. Civilisations (plural) was a hodgepodge creation of three historians, trying desperately not to sound as if they were saying the West was better than anywhere else.

In a few short decades, the Western tradition has moved from being celebrated to being seen as embarrassing, anachronistic, and, finally, shameful. It turned from a story meant to inspire people and nurture them in their lives into a story meant to shame them. And it wasn’t just the term “Western” that critics objected to. It was everything connected with it. As Ibram X. Kendi, the guru of modern racist “anti-racism,” put it, “‘Civilization’ itself is often a polite euphemism for cultural racism.”

Of course, some swing of the pendulum is inevitable and may even be desirable. There certainly have been times in the past when the history of the West has been taught as though it is a story of unabashed good. Historical criticism and rethinking are never a bad idea — except when carried out by dishonest people with the most extreme interpretations. If we allow malicious critics to misrepresent and hijack our past, then the future they plan off the back of this will not be harmonious. It will be hell.

Critics of Western civilization venerate every culture so long as it is not Western. This leads to two major problems. The first is that non-Western countries are able to get away with contemporary crimes as monstrous as anything that has happened in the Western past. The second is a form of parochial internationalism, whereby Westerners mistakenly presume that aspects of the Western inheritance are common features across the rest of the globe. From Australia to Canada and America and throughout Europe, a new generation has imbibed the idea that aspects of the Western tradition (such as “human rights”) are historical norms that have been rolled out everywhere. In time, it has come to seem that the Western tradition that evolved these norms has uniquely failed to live up to them and that non-Western “Indigenous” cultures are purer and more enlightened than Western culture could ever be.

These are not fringe views. Nor are they new; they stretch back to the 18th century, at least. Today these views are taught in universities and schools across the Western world. And their results can be seen in almost every major cultural and political institution. They crop up in the most surprising places. For instance, the National Trust in Britain exists to keep open many of the country’s most beautiful and expensive country houses. The Trust’s 5.6 million members tend to enjoy wandering around a stately mansion and then having a spot of afternoon tea. But in recent years, the Trust has decided it has another job: to educate its visitors about the horrors of the past. And not just connections to empire and the slave trade, homophobia, and the crimes of primogeniture. It has recently chosen to push the idea that the English countryside itself is racist and is (as an academic who serves as a project director for the Trust calls it) a “green unpleasant land.”

Everything from art, mathematics, and music to gardening, sport, and food has been put through the same spin cycle. There are many curiosities in all this. Not the least of them is that while the West is assaulted for everything it has done wrong, it now gets no credit for having got anything right. In fact, these things — including the development of individual rights, religious liberty, and pluralism — are held against it.

This leads us to a second, deeper puzzle. Why open everything in the West to assault? The culture that gave the world lifesaving advances in science and medicine, a free market that has raised billions of people around the world out of poverty, and the greatest flowering of thought anywhere in the world is interrogated from a perspective of deepest hostility and utter simplicity. The culture that produced Michelangelo, Leonardo, Bernini, Shakespeare, and Bach is portrayed as if it has nothing relevant to say. New generations are taught this ignorant view of history. They are offered a story of the West’s failings without spending anything like a corresponding time on its glories.

Every schoolchild now knows about slavery. How many can describe without irony, cringing, or caveat the great gifts that the Western tradition has given to the world? The Judeo-Christian tradition that formed a cornerstone of the Western tradition finds itself under particular assault and denigration. But so does the tradition of secularism and the Enlightenment, which produced a flourishing in politics, the sciences, and the arts. And this has consequences. A new generation does not appear to understand even the most basic principles of free thought and free expression. Indeed, these are themselves portrayed as products of the European Enlightenment and attacked by people who don’t understand how or why the West came to the settlements that it did over religion. Nor how the prioritizing of the scientific method allowed people around the world untold improvements in their lives. Instead, these inheritances are criticized as examples of Western arrogance, elitism, and undeserved superiority. At education colleges in America, training seminars tell aspiring teachers that even the term “diversity of opinion” is “white supremacist bullsh**.”

We have, it seems to me, only a couple of options. One is to fight and defend our own history along clear but exclusionary lines. The steam building for this backlash is already becoming visible. It would consist of a brutal but logical calibration: If people decide that they have contempt for our ancestors, then we will have contempt for theirs. More likely is that a growing number of people will come to reject the whole game. They might reply with the following calibration: If you do not respect my past and my forebears, then why should I respect yours? If you do not respect my culture, then why should I respect yours? And if you do not like what my society has produced, then why should I agree to your having a place in it? This way lies an awful amount of pain. It also concludes inevitably in conflict, solvable only by force. It is an option much to be avoided.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of people of all colors and political sides who seem intent on pushing us into that place. British academic and race-baiter Kehinde Andrews recently claimed that the whole system in the West needs to be overturned. What does he mean by this? In his own words: “I mean simply revolution. . . . You can’t separate racism from capitalism, so we need to do something else. There is no other solution than revolution.”

Fortunately, there are also wiser voices around. One of them is the American writer Thomas Chatterton Williams. In his recent memoir, Self-Portrait in Black and White, he writes: “One of the great intellectual projects facing us — in America and abroad — will be to develop a vision of ourselves strong and supple enough both to acknowledge the lingering importance of inherited group identities while also attenuating, rather than reinforcing, the extent to which such identities are able to define us.”

Where Kendi and others of the identity mindset look out at the world and seem intent on ensuring that no one is ever given any benefit of the doubt, Williams is rightly startled by this “inflexibility and lack of generosity.” And where these people hold themselves out as anti-racists, Williams acknowledges what so many people can see but too few have said: The most shocking aspect of today’s mainstream anti-racist discourse is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white-supremacist thinkers cherish. “Woke” anti-racism proceeds from the premise that race is real — if not biological, then socially constructed and therefore equally if not still more significant — putting it in sync with toxic presumptions of white supremacism that would also like to insist on the fundamentality of racial difference. Working toward opposing conclusions, racists and many anti-racists alike eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while any of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice.

It may seem today that there are more people on the side of Kendi than there are on the side of Williams. But history is on Williams’s side. And not just in the presumptuous, too often heard claim that the future will bear him out, but in the sense that the recent and distant past already does so. Glenn Loury, Adrian Piper, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and many others understand that the best of human knowledge and culture must be transferable and understandable across racial and social lines. To do otherwise — to decide that some things must be cordoned off, that they can be appreciated by only certain racial or ethnic groups — is to replay all the worst things of the past. Replayed in the guise of opposition to just such a replay.

People growing up in the West today remain among the luckiest people in human history. But as Branch Rickey famously said, “luck is the residue of design.” We in the West are lucky because men and women before us worked hard to make it so and performed feats extraordinary and mundane to see that luck was what we got. A luck that much of the world still wants to take part in. Of course, there are divisions. But as Gates said, we transcend division by recognizing that “any human being sufficiently curious and motivated can fully possess another culture, no matter how ‘alien’ it may appear to be.”

Much of the world can see this. Too few in the West today can, but they can learn to see it and be encouraged at the same time to realize that the culture, history, and people they have been taught to disdain and deplore have handed them a lifetime of riches. Today, when people ask where meaning can be found, they should be encouraged to look at what is all around them. They might recognize, with some forgotten humility, that what they have is more than luck. It is all that they will ever need.

Editor’s note: This essay is adapted from Mr. Murray’s new book The War on the West.