Universities have been conducting an unprecedented experiment in historical amnesia on American students.
Universities have been conducting an unprecedented experiment in historical amnesia on American students.
I n January 1987, the battle cry of Jesse Jackson and student protesters at Stanford seemed outlandish to the point of absurdity: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go.”
But, lo and behold, the Jackson impulse ended up sweeping all before it.
At most colleges and universities, as documented by Stanley Kurtz in his excellent monograph, The Lost History of Western Civilization, Western Civ requirements are long gone, and the course may not even be offered anymore. (A free PDF of the monograph is here, by the way.)
Even art-history courses have come under fire for smuggling into the classroom, via the Parthenon frieze and Michelangelo, a traditional version of the hated Western canon.
This is why Ron DeSantis’s initiative to bring back Western Civ as part of Florida’s higher-education reforms is so important — it bucks a decades-long trend in academia that is radical, destructive, and a profound disservice to our culture.
The turn against Western Civ was driven by a hostility to the traditional version of the history of the West as antiquated and racist, along with a taste for academic specialization, a zeal for multiculturalism, and a heavy dollop of political cowardice.
The result has been perverse, as universities — themselves a crucial part of the Western story going back to the eleventh century — refuse to transmit to students benefiting from the glories of the West the basic building blocks of their own civilization.
This amounts to an unprecedented experiment in historical amnesia that is being conducted on American students. And it is why college education — at least public education — is too important to be left to the academics.
The DeSantis proposal is drawing the expected hysterical attacks. Whoopi Goldberg said that Western civilization might be the governor’s lens, but not hers — as if an irreverent New York City–born comedian who attended a Catholic school as a kid and makes a lavish living off freely speaking her mind is anything other than a thoroughgoing product of Western civilization.
Media Matters weighed in: “What DeSantis is doing by foregrounding ‘Western civilization’ is defining whose perceived history and identity is important and deserving of rights and protection. The not-so-subtle message is that white people who fit into a specific conservative identity should sit atop the social hierarchy.”
This is not how any rational person would read, say, Plato’s Apology, or Montaigne’s essays, or Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but is characteristic of how progressives associate the entirety of Western civilization with white supremacy.
An editor for Miami’s NPR affiliate huffed that mandating the teaching of Western civilization runs counter to the values of the West itself: “You can’t claim to be Pericles when you act like Putin. Or to be John Stuart Mill when you behave like Nicolás Maduro.”
This is all tripe, although influential tripe, since such attitudes are dominant on college campuses.
The fact is that it should be a requirement of an American liberal-arts education to study the West, since it is the ultimate source of who we are as a people and a country. The United States didn’t — if you’ll forgive the Western cultural reference — spring from nowhere like Athena from the head of Zeus. Our ideals, institutions, cultural predilections, architecture, and much else all have their sources in various aspects of the Western past.
There’s also no need to be parochial about it. The West is the source of the modern world.
It has touched nearly every place around the globe and driven the adoption of democratic practices, the rule of law, pluralism, and market economics in countries that aren’t part of the West and never will be.
It is impossible to understand modernity, wherever it exists, without understanding the West.
Of course, the Western tradition isn’t a monolith and includes ample self-criticism, beginning with the Greeks. Studying the Western tradition means engaging with the great debates — Plato or Aristotle, Burke or Paine, Smith or Marx.
It is often said that Western Civ isn’t relevant anymore because our population is changing; it is more diverse, with more immigrants. But being from someplace else doesn’t make Western Civ any less pertinent — immigrants who have come here from other cultures have chosen the West, and they, too, should know the outlines of its history.
The Western tradition is open to anyone. As W. E. B. Du Bois famously wrote:
I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil.
By the way, a Western Civ course would likely be only one class over two semesters, leaving plenty of room for students to take specialized classes on other civilizations and cultures and waste their time with more frivolous subjects as they please.
Finally, it’s important to realize that what DeSantis is proposing is a return to what was the norm in American education. Part of the case against Western Civ is the argument — first made by historian Gilbert Allardyce — that it was an innovation, an artificial construct devised for ideological reasons during World War I. Kurtz demolishes this notion in his monograph, showing that the history of the West has been central to American education from the beginning.
The exception has been the last couple of decades, and it should not stand. More than 35 years later, Jesse Jackson is finally getting the pushback he deserves.