Music: Beauty, for One Thing

But it’s worse than a gimmick: It’s actually a tool to support the author’s cultural relativism. “In a departure from the way civilization is usually understood, I try not to judge societies against a checklist of supposedly civilized characteristics,” he writes, adding that “because civilization is seen here as a kind of relationship between human society and the natural world, the degree to which a particular society is civilized is measurable on a scale of its own making.” In other words, nobody can make comparative judgments about different civilizations because they are merely functions of their environments, and each environment is a wholly distinct universe that cannot be understood in terms of other ones. No one can suggest that desert civilization is culturally richer than tropical lowland civilization because, among other things, there’s very little about desert life that overlaps with tropical lowland life.

All of which seems a very convenient way to circumvent an uncomfortable two-pronged truth facing left-wing academics today—namely, that civilized peoples have rejected socialist totalitarianism, and that the West in general, and the U.S. in particular, seems to be on the “right side of history.” To put it more squarely, there is a civilization—Western civilization—that billions of human beings today are scrambling to join by way of internal reform or immigration. For Fernández-Armesto to suggest that all civilizations must be viewed on their own terms is to ignore this phenomenal migration.

About the Author

Jay Nordlinger

Jay Nordlinger was a senior editor of National Review and a book fellow at National Review Institute.

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But it’s worse than a gimmick: It’s actually a tool to support the author’s cultural relativism. “In a departure from the way civilization is usually understood, I try not to judge societies against a checklist of supposedly civilized characteristics,” he writes, adding that “because civilization is seen here as a kind of relationship between human society and the natural world, the degree to which a particular society is civilized is measurable on a scale of its own making.” In other words, nobody can make comparative judgments about different civilizations because they are merely functions of their environments, and each environment is a wholly distinct universe that cannot be understood in terms of other ones. No one can suggest that desert civilization is culturally richer than tropical lowland civilization because, among other things, there’s very little about desert life that overlaps with tropical lowland life.

All of which seems a very convenient way to circumvent an uncomfortable two-pronged truth facing left-wing academics today—namely, that civilized peoples have rejected socialist totalitarianism, and that the West in general, and the U.S. in particular, seems to be on the “right side of history.” To put it more squarely, there is a civilization—Western civilization—that billions of human beings today are scrambling to join by way of internal reform or immigration. For Fernández-Armesto to suggest that all civilizations must be viewed on their own terms is to ignore this phenomenal migration.