Civilization & Tradition

Civilization & Tradition

by Allen C. Guelzo & James Hankins

The New Criterion

Features September 2021

 

On the fruits of Western culture.

 

We can never cut ourselves off from antiquity unless we intend to revert to barbarism. The barbarian and the creature of exclusively modern civilization both live without history.

—Jacob Burckhardt

 

A civilization is a complex system of customs, practices, and beliefs that binds a society or a family of societies together over long periods of time. To survive, a civilization needs to have the means to defend itself, usually military and diplomatic, from external threats. It needs systems of internal order, usually defined by customs, laws, and magistrates. Above all it needs moral and spiritual resources that generate loyalty to recognized authorities and allow individuals to actualize their full potential as human beings. The spiritual resources of a civilization provide those who share them with an identity that transcends the identity belonging to individual peoples united merely by common descent (the premodern meaning of  “nation,” natio in Latin). They produce a common culture that may last many centuries and even outlive the collapse of civilizational order.

 

All this is rather abstract. We can better understand what a civilization is by grasping what it does. Consider, then, what it means when we say that someone is civilized. To be civilized, in essence, is to act in ways that make us and those around us better and happier. This is not as straightforward as it may sound. Civilized behavior is more than a matter of having good intentions. It has to be learned, and learning to be civilized requires conscientious effort and practiced judgment. Individuals cannot learn how to be civilized by themselves. They acquire the arts of civilization only by participation in the life of a civilized people. The arts of civilization can be nurtured under the protection of one dominant state, like imperial China or the Roman Empire, or they can be nurtured by a family of states that share a common tradition, like the classical Greek city-states or early modern Europe.

 

To be civilized, in essence, is to act in ways that make us and those around us better and happier.

 

Most of us begin to learn what civilized behavior is from our families. If you have been fortunate enough to be raised in a good family, you will have been taught that there are things you do and things you don’t do. Your parents taught you not to be selfish, but to share what you have with your brothers and sisters. They taught you it was right to respect your elders and to be grateful for all they have done for you. You should not get angry and fight with your siblings but settle your differences calmly and consider what is best for everyone. You were taught to do your share of the family’s work, to be loyal to family members, and not to criticize them in front of outsiders. You were taught that mistreating people outside your family was wrong. You learned courtesy, good manners, to say “please” and “thank you,” and to apologize for bad behavior.

 

Learning to be civilized starts in the family but continues as you enter more fully into larger communities: those of your school, your religion, your town, and your country. As a representative of your country, you may one day be called upon to act in civilized ways when dealing with other countries. To be civilized you need to know how to treat equals with the respect due to them, to defer to rightful superiors, and to treat those under your authority with fairness and goodwill. You must learn to be a good friend. You must develop a proper sense of who you are—your roots—and what is expected of you as a member of a neighborhood, an institution, or a political community. You should acquire a discriminating enjoyment of literature and the arts that nurtures a deep and sympathetic understanding of your world. You should learn to respect the wisdom of religion. All this will help you to understand people who are different from you and to discover a higher purpose for your life. You should also learn to honor those who have built and defended your civilization, and to preserve the ways of civilized life for later generations.

 

 

Loyalty to our own traditions should not blind us to our own weaknesses or to the achievements of others.

 

 

If we want to be civilized people, we must learn to be proud of the right things in the right way. Those of us who live in Western countries can rightfully be proud of the achievements of our ancestors. Societies belonging to the Western tradition can boast of unsurpassed achievements in music, poetry, imaginative literature, history, architecture, philosophy, and science. But pride in Western achievements should never lead us to despise non-Western societies. Loyalty to our own traditions should not blind us to our own weaknesses or to the achievements of others. A fair-minded student of world civilizations, for example, might easily conclude that imperial China was far more successful at the arts of peaceful government, and over a much longer period, than any society in the Western tradition before modern times. He might judge that Hindu and Buddhist societies produced far richer traditions of moral self-cultivation than any found in the West, or that the rulers of Islamic countries had a more serious public commitment to charity than existed anywhere in premodern Europe. The institution of chattel slavery—treating human beings as private property, subhuman tools of their masters’ will—was far more central to the economies of ancient Greece and Rome (and for over two hundred years in parts of the early modern West) than it was in some other historical civilizations. Not all civilizations glorify war to the extent that some Western societies have done.

 

None of this is to say than non-Western civilizations do not have faults as great or greater than those of the West. The point is not to declare winners and losers in some imaginary competition between world civilizations, but rather to alert us to the pitfalls of civilizational pride. The old moralists distinguished between “proper pride” and sinful pride. Pride in our civilization is a good and necessary thing. It is even, rightly understood, a virtue. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle said that human beings have the virtue of proper pride “when they both are and believe themselves to be worthy of great things.” They have great souls, megalopsychia. But if they believe themselves to be great beyond their actual merits, then they are fools and not virtuous. They suffer from what the Greeks called hubris, the delusion that human beings can compete with gods. In the Christian tradition, an exaggerated sense of our own merit is called vanity, and it is a sin. The display of vanity is vainglory, and it is not only sinful, but ridiculous.

 

As Westerners we learn proper pride when we study the history of our civilization and realize the extraordinary things that our forebears have accomplished. Their achievements can inspire us to admirable deeds in our own life and actions. They elevate our standards. It’s like being an athlete who joins a successful team: you have to raise your game. Or you might compare being a proud Westerner to someone who is brought up in an old and famous family. Pride in belonging to that family imposes a sense of duty to live up to its finest traditions.

 

Proper pride is kept healthy by gratitude, a sense of honor, and a proper humility. Through gratitude we become conscious that our own achievements are not entirely our own: we always stand on the shoulders of giants. Others have worked to make our achievements possible. A sense of honor makes us uphold the best in our traditions: if we want to take pride in them, we cannot bring disgrace on them by bad behavior. We want to be worthy of our inheritance, and we want to be honored by people and institutions that themselves deserve honor.

 

Through gratitude we become conscious that our own achievements are not entirely our own: we always stand on the shoulders of giants.

 

A proper humility keeps pride from becoming arrogance. Proper humility is the consciousness that we may be worthy of great things, but we are quite capable of doing disgraceful things when tempted or intimidated. If we criticize the greatest men and women of the past, as we sometimes must, our criticism should be tempered by recognition of their greatness and our own smallness. To find fault with extraordinary figures like Pericles, Queen Elizabeth I, or Abraham Lincoln is a bit like spectators at a sporting event or a concert disparaging great athletes or brilliantly talented musicians. Others may ask us—and rightly so!—who are we to be pointing out the faults of others? Have our own actions been so faultless, are our own skills so remarkable, that we can appoint ourselves as judges of the great? We should rather praise and blame our ancestors in a manner that befits our standing as beneficiaries of a great tradition. To do so is decens, the Latin word that stands behind the English word “decent.” It is seemly or becoming to persons like ourselves; it has a graceful fitness that is constructive and reflects well on us. A proper humility leaves us readier to admire and learn from men and women of great achievement, and slower to think that the present generation is called upon to be the censors of mankind, as many today seem to believe.

 

In recent times we have seen spread through our schools and institutions an improper and uncivilized humility, a malicious form of humility indistinguishable from self-hatred. This is a humility that humiliates, that seeks to blind Westerners to their magnificent traditions and to rub their noses, like misbehaving dogs, in their worst offenses. The effect if not the goal of this movement of self-humiliation is to make Westerners ashamed of their own civilization and to take away from us the very inheritance that our parents and ancestors worked and fought so hard to hand down to us. It makes us reluctant to add to that inheritance and pass it on to those who will come after us.

 

These attacks on Western civilization illustrate a sad truth about all civilizations at all times: their fragility. We know of some civilizations, like the gigantic Khmer Empire of medieval southeast Asia, almost as vast as the Roman Empire, which left no literary record at all of its history and culture. Fortunately, a total loss of memory has never happened in Western countries, though the threat of it happening at certain times was real enough. What we call “Western civilization” is actually a succession of civilizations: principally those of the Greeks and the Romans; the Latin and Greek civilizations of medieval Christendom; and the civilization of Europe from the Renaissance down to modern times. In recent centuries European civilization was spread around the world by European soldiers, colonists, merchants, missionaries, and educators. Today there are fully “Western” countries like Australia and New Zealand in the Pacific Ocean where the dominant population is ethnically European. There are other nations like Japan and India that are not ethnically European but have absorbed certain features of the modern West such as experimental science, parliamentary democracy, or capitalism. Modern Western civilization is a third- or fourth-order civilization that has inherited essential elements of its culture from earlier peoples who lived in no single part of the world.

 

What binds all these civilizations together, from the Greeks to the modern West, is tradition. Tradition is a word taken from Latin, traditio, which literally means “a handing down.” There have been moments in the history of the West when the greatest achievements of its predecessor civilizations were in danger of being lost and forgotten. Some of the most famous works of literature and philosophy from ancient Greece and Rome that we still read today barely survived the Middle Ages. For example, in the fourteenth century the complete works of Plato were preserved only in three or four manuscripts; the poetry of Catullus, a number of works by Cicero, and numerous books of Livy, at certain points in their transmission, survived in single manuscripts. Without Cicero or Livy we would know far less about the Roman Republic; without Plato the heights of ancient philosophy would be hidden from our view. These writings and many others were preserved by a handful of devoted scholars, many of them monks, who cared about preserving the literary record of Greco-Roman civilization at times when few others did.

 

 

Instead of wiping out all memory of their enemies, some conquerors were wise enough to recognize and preserve the achievements of the peoples they had defeated in battle.

 

 

More commonly, however, the arts and sciences of earlier civilizations were preserved by the nations that conquered them. Instead of wiping out all memory of their enemies, as too often happens in human history, some conquerors were wise enough to recognize and preserve the achievements of the peoples they had defeated in battle. This is what happened when the Romans conquered the eastern Mediterranean in the second century B.C., home to the civilization of the Greeks. Enlightened Romans admired the extraordinary achievements of Greek culture and realized how much they could profit from preserving and adapting them to the needs of Roman society. They began a project lasting many generations to integrate the refined culture of Greece—its arts, literature, science, and philosophy—with Roman military power and statecraft. Rome later created its own great literature, following Greek models. Thus, in the famous words of the Roman poet Horace, “captive Greece took her savage captor captive.”

 

Seventeen centuries later, the few remaining fragments of Hellenic civilization in the eastern Mediterranean were again threatened with extinction, when the last empire of the Greeks, the Byzantine Empire, was crushed by the Ottoman Turks. But the scholars and merchant-princes of the Italian Renaissance, realizing the potential loss to civilization, sent agents to the eastern Mediterranean to collect Greek manuscripts and invite Greek scholars to teach in the West. Over the next century western European scholars printed in Greek and translated into Latin most of the surviving monuments of Greek literature, philosophy, and science. The language of ancient Greece and its literature began to be taught in European schools, alongside Latin literature. Simultaneously, the Roman Church led the effort to preserve the heritage of Greek Christianity in the West. Thanks to these heroic deeds of scholarship, the European Renaissance created a new civilization in which the Greco-Roman inheritance was fused with the legal, scientific, and theological traditions of medieval Christendom. The search for a harmonious and mutually supportive relationship between the classical and Christian elements in the Western tradition, begun already in late antiquity, was to remain a characteristic feature of European civilization down to modern times. Their reconciliation was most nobly expressed in the art of the High Renaissance.

 

In recent decades, as the classical inheritance has gradually faded from the consciousness of educated people, we sometimes hear the ignorant or tendentious claim that Western civilization is an invented tradition, that “there is no such thing as Western civilization.” It is true, to be sure, that the term “Western civilization” was hardly used before the twentieth century. It became popular in the era of the two world wars as a way to draw North Americans and overseas Britons closer to Europe and to encourage them to take responsibility for their common heritage. But the thing denoted by the term “Western civilization” is, emphatically, no invention. Americans and other Western nations around the globe do in fact share a heritage with European nations that goes back to classical Greece. It permeates the modern West from top to bottom.

 

What is the Western tradition? One way to describe it is to visualize it as a great tree with a vast root system hidden beneath the surface of the earth. Through historical study we can develop a kind of X-ray vision that helps us to see that system, all but invisible to the uneducated. An educated person understands how the Western tradition draws its nourishment from roots sunk deep through layers of soil and subsoil, down into the bedrock of antiquity.

 

The taproot of this Western civilizational tree still draws nourishment from the language and literature of classical Greece and Rome. Over 60 percent of English words have Latin or Greek roots, and the percentage is much higher in Italian, Spanish, and French. The technical language of medicine is still based on Greek, and modern legal literature is filled with Latin terms and phrases. Most Western literary genres also have roots in antiquity. The Greeks invented the forms of epic and lyric poetry, elegy, and epigram. Comedy, tragedy, and the novel were also pioneered by the Greeks, satire by the Romans. Narrative history and biography in the West begins with Herodotus and Livy, Thucydides and Tacitus, Plutarch and Suetonius. Western oratory descends from Demosthenes and Cicero, though later times rarely if ever surpassed those great models of noble eloquence.

 

 

The technical language of medicine is still based on Greek, and modern legal literature is filled with Latin terms and phrases.

 

 

Western philosophy, particularly its emphasis on argument and proof, goes back to the Greeks of the classical period. Western metaphysics was founded by South Italian Greeks in the fifth century B.C. Socrates inspired many philosophical schools and provided the model for the philosophical life: a life devoted to seeking truth and goodness. Plato and the Stoic philosophers founded ways of thinking about the world and human behavior that gave rise to continuous traditions in the West through the Middle Ages and down to our own times. Aristotle’s philosophical works, especially his logical writings, formed the backbone of European university education from the twelfth to the seventeenth century. His moral philosophy is a part of the modern Western canon and is still studied by college students today.

 

Most of the conclusions of ancient Greek science and medicine were discarded in early modern Europe, but some Greek scientific principles, such as the need for the systematic collection of evidence, remain valid. The Greeks also invented mathematics, and the scientific achievement of the modern West is inconceivable without Plato’s intuition that the structure of nature was fundamentally mathematical. Modern technology found inspiration in Archimedes’ application of mathematics to problems of engineering and mechanics in the third century B.C.

 

In the realms of government and law, though modern representative democracy differs from the participatory democracy of ancient Greece, the principle that all citizens should play some part in their own government has inspired Western thinkers and statesmen since the High Middle Ages. The vocabulary and analysis of political stability and change remain heavily dependent on the Greeks, especially Plato and Aristotle, to this day. Republican governments since the Middle Ages have been inspired by Roman models. The most precious principle of modern government, the rule of law—the conviction that the legal system should provide equal justice to all persons, regardless of their power or status—was the creation of Roman jurists. There was a continuous tradition of commentary on Roman law in Western universities from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries, and Roman principles of public and private law still run in the bloodstream of all Western legal systems today.

 

In the plastic arts, the classical language of architecture was invented by the Greeks and enhanced and adapted creatively to new purposes by the Romans. It deeply influenced early Christian and Byzantine architecture and experienced several revivals in modern times, beginning with the Renaissance. A splendid revival of classical architecture is occurring once again in our own times. The Western tradition of sculpture also begins with the Greeks and inspired brilliant revivals in the plastic arts of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassical periods. The painting of the classical world, being physically more fragile, had less influence on later periods, but the few examples that survived, and literary descriptions in ancient authors like the elder Pliny, were foundational. For instance, the ancients’ commitment to the representation of nature and to stimulating appropriate emotions in the viewer were primary goals of the visual arts from the late Middle Ages down to modern times.

 

In the sphere of faith and spirituality, we still live in a world created by ancient religion, and the Roman Catholic Church is the only human institution that has survived continuously from the ancient world into the present. The Christian tradition was formed in the first century A.D., but it built on the much older traditions of Judaism, and it retained the Hebrew Bible as part of its sacred scriptures. Already in the first century it began to interpret its theology in terms drawn from Stoicism and Platonism, and Christianity’s dialogue with Greek philosophy continued through the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Christian theology to this day maintains its vitality by returning to the Jewish and Greek sources of its religious vision. The tradition of Biblical commentary has had a continuous history from antiquity to the present.

 

Many traditions which today are thought to define what it is to be Western in fact have shallower roots in the Western past. The institution of the university, in part indebted to the Islamic madrasa, was founded in the late twelfth century, and several great modern universities such as Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and Bologna have a continuous history back to that founding period. The gothic style, invented in twelfth-century France, is still being used today, particularly for university buildings. Popular romantic songs and stories of today have roots in the French chivalric literature of the Middle Ages. The legal principle of due process was the invention of thirteenth-century jurists, and the idea that rights inhere in privileged corporations and property-owning individuals was also first explored in medieval courts of law. The practices of consultation that led to representative government can be traced back to European parliaments of the thirteenth century. The establishment in the Middle Ages of a spiritual government independent of lay government, employing a separate legal code (canon law) to regulate the behavior of Christians in their religious life, was invented by the popes of the High Middle Ages. It did not survive the Reformation, but its rejection created a conceptual space (or vacuum) which liberal theorists of the early modern period would define as a space of freedom.

 

It was only to the early modern period, indeed, that we can trace much of what today is considered characteristically Western. The Western scientific tradition goes back to antiquity, but the modern scientific method—“the discovery of how to discover,” the approach to science that has given human beings such power over nature in the last two centuries—first emerged in the seventeenth century. The Western doctrines of natural equality and natural rights, though inspired by Christian theology, also acquired their modern form in the later seventeenth century. The theoretical underpinnings of limited government, toleration, and religious pluralism were a product of the early Enlightenment. The later Enlightenment, in the person of Adam Smith, produced the first powerful arguments in favor of free markets and free trade.

 

Our march through all these Western traditions since antiquity, rapid though it has been, should expose the naiveté of recent activists who want to uproot Western civilization and replace it with utopias of their own devising. In fact, Western countries can no more cease being Western than an individual can discard his own dna and choose a new set of genes. Someone who destroys his own dna would cease to exist; trees that are uprooted die. We are what we are and can only choose to cultivate our sound traditions, to prune away the mistakes of the past, and to repudiate our crimes. We cannot pretend that history did not happen. To condemn the whole Western tradition as “fundamentally flawed,” as some do today, is a sign either of colossal ignorance or malicious fanaticism—or both. Some modern critics of the great tree of Western civilization are less radical and would like merely to hack off a few branches here, kill parts of its root system there, replacing these as necessary with artificial roots and branches engineered to modern standards. But these critics are, as a rule, poor political gardeners; they have no deep understanding of how civilizations have been improved in the past, and they are heedless of the ways that civilizations have fallen into ruin. Only the study of history can teach us the best ways to cultivate the garden of civilization, protect it from internal diseases and parasites, and fence it off from external threats.

 

 

Historically and etymologically, civilization has been associated with cities.

 

 

The greatest threats to Western civilizations before the modern era came from hostile empires—such as the Persian and Parthian Empires of antiquity and the Ottoman Empire of early modern times—as well as from semi-nomadic groups that both Greeks and Romans referred to as barbarians. Barbarism, in fact, is considered the lexical and conceptual opposite of civilization. Historically and etymologically, civilization has been associated with cities. The first were built around six thousand years ago in Mesopotamia and flourished in symbiosis with an agricultural economy. Outside these settled regions with urban centers dwelt nomadic peoples who had no fixed habitation and lived by hunting, foraging wild plants, and finding pasture for livestock. Cities had social hierarchies; nomads were organized more loosely into tribes and clans led by chieftains. Since nomadic life was economically less secure than settled agriculture, nomadic peoples tended to live in a hostile, parasitic relationship with civilized peoples, who clustered in temperate zones and fertile regions able to support large-scale agriculture. Sometimes nomadic peoples organized themselves into powerful armies and were able to overrun civilized parts of the globe, controlling them for their own benefit. Sometimes, as in China, the Mughal Empire of India, and early medieval Europe, barbarian kingships absorbed the cultural heritage of the peoples they defeated and formed hybrid civilizations. In Western lands, barbarian armies were a serious menace to the Roman order from the third century A.D. to the fall of Rome (476 A.D.) and remained threats to the sub-Roman kingdoms of the early medieval West down through the eleventh century.

 

The Roman Empire, for its part, recognized a duty to civilize the barbarians who came under its rule. In the typical Roman view, the barbarians were impoverished, semi-nomadic peoples living in villages rather than towns. They engaged in incessant warfare as a way of life and had little or no commerce. They spoke myriad ethnic languages that inhibited their participation in the Roman order and kept them from accessing the resources of civilization, its arts and sciences and philosophy. They worshipped strange, bloodthirsty gods and sometimes engaged in human sacrifice. Their way of life, in other words, prevented them from being not just Roman, but fully human. The Romans believed that their state had a duty to bring peace, order, commerce, education, and settled agriculture to barbarian lands. These were the preconditions of civilized life, thanks to which the barbarians would be able to achieve what the civilized world had already achieved: economic security, political integration, and personal moral and spiritual development. Barbarians would thus acquire full humanitas, a Latin word that can also be translated as “civilization.” Pliny the Elder wrote that through Roman power Italy had become

 

the parent of all lands, chosen by the power of the gods to make even heaven more splendid, to gather together the scattered realms and to soften their customs and unite the discordant wild tongues of so many peoples into a common speech, so they might understand each other, and give civilization (humanitas) to mankind; in short to become the homeland of every people in the entire world.

 

It might require coercion to subdue the barbarous, but the belief of the more principled Romans was that subduing the barbarians by force in the short run would enhance their potential for full humanity in the long run. This was the mission civilisatrice of imperial Rome, imitated in later times by the Spanish, English, and French Empires—though all too often that mission turned into something hypocritical and corrupt, and was invoked merely to justify outright conquest and exploitative forms of colonialism.

 

The Romans and later Western imperialists, however, also nurtured certain principles and attitudes that helped them resist the temptation to oppress the barbarian peoples they had conquered, embracing them instead as equally human and even as fellow citizens. One of the virtues of societies belonging to the Western tradition is that they have ordinarily been willing to learn from non-Western societies—not only from advanced societies like the Persians and Chinese but even from peoples they judged to be less civilized. No other world civilization has devoted as much effort to studying other peoples and civilizations, learning their languages and understanding their arts, literature, religion, governments, and culture. Familiarity may sometimes breed contempt, but in general learning about other societies is more likely to lead to respect, even in the case of so-called barbarians. Thus we find the Roman historian Tacitus praising the rustic virtue and courage of Germanic barbarians, inveterate enemies of the Romans, comparing them favorably with the effete, over-civilized Romans of his time. In the Middle Ages, while Christian knights were fighting Islamic armies in the Levant, their brothers back home in French and English universities were reading Muslim philosophical treatises and commentators on Aristotle. Through war and disease the conquering Spaniards of the sixteenth century eliminated large portions of the native populations of the New World, often treating them with sickening cruelty, but they also collected records which they and later scholars have used to reconstruct pre-Columbian civilizations. The same British merchants and administrators who used military force to establish their rule in India during the nineteenth century also collected Indian art, preserved ancient ruins, and studied the written sources of earlier Indian history, founding traditions of scholarship that endure today. Though some modern critics see these studies as just another form of oppression—another way for conquerors to control their subjects—it would be fairer to admit that Western studies of colonized peoples also led to the preservation and learned study of many native cultures that would otherwise have been lost to memory. Today those erudite traditions can provide a basis for mutual understanding between Western countries and their former colonies.

 

 

All individuals, civilized or barbarian, belonged to a greater human community: a cosmopolis, a world-state visible to the eye of the philosopher.

 

 

Western ethical traditions also softened the hard edge of imperial dominance. War and conquest often lead combatants to dehumanize their enemy, but Stoic philosophy, which had a quasi-official position in the Roman world, taught that even enemies had to be treated with respect as rational and moral beings. All individuals, civilized or barbarian, belonged to a greater human community: a cosmopolis, a world-state visible to the eye of the philosopher. For Cicero, the greatest of Roman orators, all humanity was regulated by the same law of nature, was permeated by the same divine spirit, and therefore constituted, in some larger sense, a community. Though the Stoic doctrine of oikeosis (or “appropriation,” “endearment”) meant that our duties to those closest to us are more primary and generate more direct claims on our benevolence, in principle we have a duty of benevolence to all human beings. The word humanitas is also the name of a virtue. A person with the virtue of humanitas—a humane warrior or a humane ruler, for example—is one who does not take advantage of his superior power over another person but respects the weaker person’s claim on him as a fellow human being.

 

Christian faith also supported a humane cosmopolitanism. In the New Testament book of Acts (17:26–29) the Apostle Paul, preaching to a pagan audience in Athens—an audience that included Stoic philosophers—asserted a common humanity based on common descent from a single man, Adam, and on a future state of perfect justice that will be brought into the world by the divine man, Jesus Christ. In Paul’s vision of the Church, all human beings are equal in the sight of God and all human distinctions of ethnicity or class must disappear. All peoples, whether Jews, Greeks, barbarians, or anyone else, are “fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household” (Ephesians 2:19). In later periods of Western history Paul’s words were regularly taken as prohibiting the enslavement of Christians by Christians. Hence when the Spanish conquered Central and South America in the sixteenth century they were told by religious authorities that they would have to choose between converting the native peoples to Christianity or enslaving them. Of course the behavior of Western peoples all too frequently fell below Paul’s high standard of inclusion and humane feeling, but it is a ruinous error of judgment to condemn high principles because the practice of those principles has been flawed.

 

In recent times the failure of Western nations to live up to their principles has been used to accuse Westerners of hypocrisy or even condemn the Western tradition as a whole. Premodern Westerners, however, were themselves well aware of the yawning gap that could sometimes open between the teachings of their civilization and the behavior of those who called themselves civilized. Already in their classical period the Greeks were asking the question: who are the real barbarians? We Greeks call the Persians barbarians and claim civilization for ourselves, but isn’t our own behavior toward each other sometimes far worse than anything the Persians ever did to us? Extreme events such as war, famine, and epidemics could at times remind the Greeks of the barbarism that lay just beneath the surface of their civilization. The greatest historian of antiquity, Thucydides, made it a major theme of his history how the Greeks had barbarized themselves over two decades of warfare, committing unspeakable atrocities against their fellow Greeks. “War is a teacher of violence,” he wrote, noting how the Greeks, for all their claims of civility and piety towards the gods, had not hesitated in their warlike rage to slaughter the entire male populations of cities they had conquered and to enslave their women and children. Another Greek writer, Xenophon, a student of Socrates, tried to show his fellow Greeks that the Persians, whom the Greeks labeled barbarians and considered their inferiors, were more wisely governed than they were themselves. In his fictionalized history of Cyrus II, the founder of the Persian Empire, he taught that civilization does not come from membership in a race, but from good customs and good character.

 

Twenty centuries later, the great French writer Michel de Montaigne in his Essays (1580–88) asked Europeans to ponder whether they, the nations of the all-conquering civilization of the West, who had brought a large part of the globe under their sway during the previous century, were in fact barbarians, morally inferior to the savage cannibals they had stumbled across in the jungles of Brazil. To most Europeans the question would have seemed utterly absurd on its face, but Montaigne, in explaining the warrior code that underpinned the rituals of cannibalism, showed Europeans how their own cruel customs of torture, their monstrously inhuman punishments meted out to heretics and criminals, made them far more barbarous than the naked savages of Brazil.

 

I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horror of such acts [cannibalism], but I am heartily sorry that, judging their faults rightly, we should be so blind to our own. I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling, in roasting a man bit by bit, in having him bitten and mangled by dogs and swine (as we have not only read but seen within fresh memory, not among ancient enemies, but among neighbors and fellow citizens, and what is worse, on the pretext of piety and religion), than in roasting and eating him after he is dead.

 

 

Civilizations could improve, but they could also go bad; they could normalize evil customs and practices that blind us to our own wickedness.

 

 

Montaigne was as civilized a man as Europe could produce in that era: well traveled, deeply learned in Greek and Latin literature, public-spirited, full of humane sympathy and understanding of others, kind, pious, and wise as Socrates. He owed much of this to the civilization that nurtured him, as he acknowledged, but unlike many he also recognized that civilization was a process and not a state. Civilizations could improve, but they could also go bad; they could normalize evil customs and practices that blind us to our own wickedness. From Montaigne we learn that to be civilized does not mean passive acceptance of all received authorities and practices. To remain civilized requires vigilant and lucid appraisal of what we have received, using our full humanity to judge what is truly good and to reject what is corrupt and destructive. Civilization is always threatened by barbarism, and the greater threat often comes more from within than from without. Every man and woman is potentially a person of high cultivation and goodness, but also, potentially, a barbarian.

 

By far the greatest achievement of the West, the achievement that has led to its most amazing successes and its most abject failures, was the creation of modernity. Modernity has dramatically changed the life experience of most human beings over the last two centuries. Many historians now believe that the two most fundamental transformations of human life on our planet occurred with the Agricultural Revolution, which began some ten thousand years ago, and the Industrial Revolution that began at the end of the eighteenth century.

 

The Industrial Revolution is an inadequate name for the comprehensive changes wrought in the way human beings think and live that were brought about chiefly (but not only) by extraordinary advances in science and technology. It is, nevertheless, in the economic life of the human race that the difference modernity makes is most evident to the eye of the historian. Before the Industrial Revolution took hold in the West, most of the human race, including most Westerners, lived at the subsistence level. Mere survival was difficult for the vast majority of people, and overall life expectancy was low. Scarce resources made premodern peoples readier to go to war, readier to rebel against their rulers, readier to persecute others, and readier to immigrate to new lands when life became precarious.

 

Around the end of the eighteenth century, a dramatic change began in the human condition that historians have dubbed “the Great Enrichment.” The average income of Europeans began to increase rapidly. It doubled, then doubled again. It continued to double every generation down through the twentieth century. The massive increase in the wealth of Western societies over two hundred years went together with other unprecedented changes. Life expectancy has more than doubled. Urbanization, which had been increasing gradually for thousands of years, exploded. Enormous concentrations of capital began to appear, which fed astonishing technological advances. In 1903, the first motor-powered aircraft was invented; in 1969, the first humans landed on the moon.

 

No reasonable person would think of rejecting the real benefits of modernity. But modernity has also given rise to a mentality or way of thinking, called “modernism” here, whose effects on our civilization have been far from benign. The enormous advances in material life experienced by Western and Westernized nations in the last two centuries have given the modernist mentality great power over the minds of intellectuals and revolutionaries. In its most militant forms that power has even been used intentionally to destroy civilizations. It has brought untold suffering and death to tens of millions across the globe, betraying the promise of modernity itself.

 

At the center of the modernist mentality is a model of historical development known as the “idea of progress.” Western literati going back to antiquity had always acknowledged that human beings could and in fact had improved their lot through science and technology, and that civilized life could and in fact had spread widely. They were also well aware that civilization was fragile, empires rose and fell, and that human advances could be abused or forgotten. But from the later eighteenth century onwards many thoughtful persons—as was natural for people living through the Great Enrichment—began to believe that human progress was inevitable so long as traditional authorities were dethroned and Science—with a capital “S”—raised up in their place. The civilized traditions of the past must be discarded, they believed, if the ideal futures men were beginning to imagine for themselves were to be fulfilled.

 

The creators of the idea of progress, who belonged to the movement known as the Enlightenment, also praised freedom as progress’s necessary condition. This did much to establish a presumption in favor of political liberty, freedom of religion, and human rights. Rightly understood and rightly ordered, these principles can and do contribute to the betterment of mankind. But the creators of the myth of progress also helped create a politics and a rhetoric of progress that defined progress as material abundance, as ever-increasing autonomy of the individual from society, and as a license to transcend the limits of human nature.

 

 

A culture that cannot balance the modern and the traditional, one that is all for the modern and all against the traditional, will end up destroying itself.

 

 

It was this modernist narrative that gave sanction to the worst excesses of totalitarian governments in modern times. The idea of progress as weaponized by modernists has crippled the ability of our Western traditions to perform their proper functions: to anchor us in the past, to engender noble aspirations, and to foster in us reverence for our forebears and for established authorities.

 

Some recent thinkers have argued that the only way to save modernity is to free it of militant modernism. A culture that cannot balance the modern and the traditional, one that is all for the modern and all against the traditional, will end up destroying itself. When the moral capital of Western civilization is finally exhausted, we will not have entered some brave new world. We will have compassed our own destruction. What the barbarian hordes of ancient and medieval times were unable to accomplish, we will have done to ourselves.

 

This, indeed, is the great test that Western civilization faces in our time. We need to find a new balance between tradition and innovation, to modernize with moderation, without losing that inheritance of immeasurable value that we call the Western tradition. The great British statesman Edmund Burke, in 1790, on the very brink of modernity, wrote: “People will not look forward to posterity who never look backwards to their ancestors.” We too, as people who aspire to civility—to the goodness, truth, and beauty that our tradition, like a river, bears down to us from the civilizations of the past—have a duty to study and cherish what we have been given by our ancestors, and to preserve it for our children.

 

 

 

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Allen C. Guelzo is Senior Research Scholar, Council of the Humanities, Princeton University.

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James Hankins is a Professor of History at Harvard University. His book, Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy, was published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University in November 2019.

 

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 40 Number 1, on page 4