Is Western civilization a myth?

Naoíse Mac Sweeney, The West: a new history of an old idea

Naoíse Mac Sweeney has written a history book to dispel a persistent myth of Western civilization. Her argument seeks to save what she sees as the best of the West from the dying conservative myth of Western civilization.

“Western Civilization is therefore not just a myth in the sense that it is a fiction that we tell ourselves, despite knowing that it is factually false. It is a myth that was invented to justify slavery, imperialism, and oppression…. If we want to strengthen Western identity around our modern Western values, we therefore need to tear down the myth of Western Civilization.”

Why the Idea of Western Civilization is More Myth Than History, Naoíse Mac Sweeney, (May 2023)

Defenders of the Myth of Western Civilization

There is a certain kind of conservative, cultural warrior who insists modern culture is conducting a “War on the West”. Douglas Murray and Jordan Petersen are among the most prominent of these Defenders of the Faith. Murray indeed wrote a battle-cry for this point of view in his book, The War on the West: how to prevail in an age of reason (2022), which urged the defenders of the Western Civilization onto war: “The anti-Western revisionists have been out in force in recent years. It is high time that we revise them in turn.”

These writers seek to safeguard the honour of Western Civilization, and its grand achievements. There is an admirable grandeur in this effort to lovest well what is dear to thee. But the celebration of Western civilization relies upon an unsteady grand old narrative. Its high priests assume a coherence and continuity of the civilization of this odd entity that is named after a direction on a map; the essence and grandeur of Western civilization is evoked in a familiar story line. The genius of Athens. The majesty of Rome. The spirit of Christ, sheltered against barbarians and Eastern schismatics in the monasteries of Western Europe for centuries. The recovery of the classical tradition in the Renaissance, and its flowering in reason, freedom and beauty in the Enlightenment. The rebirth of a new Pax Romana under first Britain and then the United States of America. And then the ultimate apotheosis of Western civilization in post-1945 North America and Western Europe.

This sacralization of the story of the West found its most devoted preachers in the American and British cultural institutions (universities, magazines, broadcasters, think tanks and so on) of the new geo-political entity, the West, that took shape after 1945. It was defined in contrast to the Red East of Eurasia, and the poor, if decolonising, Third World. It defined its greatest enemy as the authoritarianism that glowered from behind the Iron Curtain that divided Eastern Europe. It coopted tainted Europe, after four decades of violent civil war, into a nobler, purer cause, the better angels of Western civilization.

Of course, there were ideas of Western civilization before 1945. After all, Oswald Spengler wrote The Decline of the West in 1918. But the American reinterpretation of Western civilization after 1945 had little in common with Spengler’s dislike for the decadence of Western Europe. It drew on long-established Anglo-American imperial traditions that reanimated Rome on the Thames and the Potomac. Any visitor to Washington DC can observe the reverberation of the Classical past in the American Mind: Roman columns, neo-classical architecture, Latin inscriptions, and the recreation of the patrician nobility of the Senate on the Capitol Hill itself. The Founding Fathers of the American Republic saw themselves as the inheritors of the Roman Republic, and turned Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire into a sacred text of history itself. But after 1945 this long-held tradition of the classical past was adopted in new form by a confident, indeed Supremacist, belief in American Greatness, which fused British liberalism, European culture, and both Jewish and Western Christian traditions into a new entity of Judaeo-Christian, Western civilization. One of its most popular forms was The Story of Civilization by Ariel and Will Durant, an eleven-volume statement of the grand old narrative, which is still widely recommended on YouTube today.

It is this sacred story that the Defenders of the Western Faith, like Murray, Petersen and dozens of alt-hist YouTubers (such as the notoriously unreliable Whatifalthist), have come out to fight for in recent years.

There is a certain value in their arguments. No culture is all bad. No history is without moments of cruelty and beauty. Moreover, trite criticisms of Western civilization can over-reach, and not engage genuinely and empathetically with the voices of the past. In recent years, some resentment, political advocacy and denigration of the past has crept into the discussions of the ‘dead white males’ of Western civilization. People have acted as prosecutors of the dead and gone; they have not acted as retrievers of fragile meanings at risk in a burning archive. Such arguments betray my understanding of history’s essential tasks: empathy, and dialogue between the cultures of now and then.

New History of an Old Idea

But there is a bigger problem in these writers’ battle-cry that the West is the true salvation of humanity. The sacred story of Western civilization, alas, is terrible history. Felipe Fernández-Armesto has written the most insightful book on civilizations, in the plural, including the West or the Atlantic civilization of the 20th century. He provides a brilliant, nuanced account of the formation, limits, limitations of Western civilization, and its critics, that I highly recommend. But he also wrote a scathing judgement of the works of the Durants and American ‘Western Civ’ courses, which are being revived by Murray, his allies, and institutions, such as the Ramsay Centres for Western Civilization.

Numerous American textbooks on ‘western civilization’ appeared during the Cold War: I have only glanced at a few of them but I think it is fair to say that their authors were under an obligation to say nothing new.

Fernández-Armesto, Civilizations, p. 13)

So, one might say, the Defenders of the West, Douglas Murray and his Atlanticist crew, are merely repeating old orthodoxies, and again saying nothing new. They are merely redressing an old idea in politically convenient clothing.

If they wanted to say something new they would read the works of Felipe Fernández-Armesto, and dozens of quality historians, whose works over the last few decades have rewired the story of the West, and of the many flourishing civilizations of the past and present multipolar world. They might begin with the entertaining, vivid and accessible, The West: a new history of an old idea (2023) by Naoíse Mac Sweeney.

Naoíse Mac Sweeney is a professor of classical archaeology and ancient history at the University of Vienna. Her book takes apart the origin myth of Western Civilization that I have sketched satirically above. In her words

“The origin myth of the West imagines Western history as unfurling back unbroken in time through Atlantic modernity and the European Enlightenment; back through the brightness of the Renaissance and the darkness of the Middle Ages; back ultimately, to its origin in the classical worlds of Rome and Greece. This has become the standard version of Western history, both canonical and clichéd. But it is wrong.”

Sadly for Murray and the other Defenders of the Faith, they are defending an error. Mac Sweeney goes onto suggest a motive for why this war to defend Western civilization has broken out with such ferocity in the last few years, despite decades of historical writing that has dismantled the grand old narrative.

“It is a version of Western history that is both factually incorrect and ideologically driven - a grand narrative that constructs Western history as a thread running singular and unbroken from Plato to NATO.”

The grand old narrative of Western civilization is factually wrong because its origins do not lie simply in classical antiquity, and there is no unbroken blood line of thought from ancient, medieval and modern history. In fact the cross-fertilisation of the supposed societies of the West and all the others of the ever multipolar world have been amply demonstrated by many scholars. It is an old, tired fairy tale, not a battle standard for Douglas Murray’s new crusade.

This myth is ideologically motivated because, in Mac Sweeney’s words, “it has provided a justification for Western expansion and imperialism, as well as ongoing systems of White racial dominance.” Of course, Mac Sweeney does not mean that is all there is to the cultural achievements of the many civilizations that have found their way to the garden of the West. But we should surely agree with Mac Sweeney when we hear tired old tropes of the moral superiority and missionary purpose of Western civilization wheeled out to justify the latest war in defence of the liberal rules-based international supremacy, also known more precisely as American supremacy.

Mac Sweeney presents these two fundamental arguments about the myth of Western civilization simply, clearly and briefly at the start of her book. The real magic of her book, however, is the way in which she demonstrates those arguments through 14 brief lives that show how intertwined the West and the Rest always were. These lives tell a new history of the multipolar world, and the West’s reliance on distorting the truth of those lives to restore an origin myth for the sacred purpose of dominion.

14 Lives that Tell a New History of the West

The 14 lives examined by Naoíse Mac Sweeney are:

1. Herodotus - the ‘Father of History” who turns out not to be its father, but was a sharp observer of a fluid, changeable, multipolar world that did not all resemble the myth of ancient Athens, subsequent myth-makers of Western civilization assumed.

2. Livilla - the granddaughter of Emperor Augustus who was one of many figures who Mac Sweeney describes as the ‘Asian Europeans’.

3. Al-Kindī - the great Muslim scholar who in the 9th century, with many colleagues in the Islamic House of Wisdom, not the Christian monasteries of the West, curated, adapted and developed traditions from the distinct Greek and Roman worlds, not as a single blood line, but as multi-coloured mosaics.

4. Godfrey of Viterbo - the scholar and bureaucrat of the German Holy Roman Emperor in the 12th century who knew the conflicts of the classical world, and the many different strands of Christianity, including its Asian variants.

5. Theodore Laskaris - the 13th century Byzantine Emperor who denounced the Latins of the West as uncivilised and having no claim to the heritage of the ancient Hellenes.

6. Tullia D’Aragona - the female polymath, poet and philosopher who in 16th century Italy began to fuse together the concept of the Graeco-Roman world that would give birth in the Renaissance to the origin myth of the West.

7. Safiye Sultan - the great mother of the Sultan Mehmed who presided over the Ottoman court and impressed the world in the sixteenth century.

8. Francis Bacon - The Renaissance scholar, statesman and essayist who began to articular a more coherent idea of the Graeco-Roman world, but did not yet espouse its values as the taproot of Western civilization.

9. Njinga of Angola - The West African Queen who in the 1600s, despite the wealth and power of her society, converted to Christianity, and stimulated the movement of the European West to adopt a civilizing mission.

10. Joseph Warren - the forgotten Founding Father of the USA who in his political rhetoric began to assert the idea that the USA was the rightful heir of Eruopean culture, without its ancient regime encrustations, and that “the newly independent United States of America was to be the final and perfect culmination of Western civilization” (Mac Sweeney, p. 225).

11. Phillis Wheatley - the enslaved Afro-American who wrote a book of poetry and challenged the increasingly racialist ideas of Western civilization.

12. William Ewart Gladstone - the 19th century British Prime Minister in the era of steam globalisation, Christian missionaries, and the British world system, who articulated the ideas of Western Civilization in accord with the brute facts of the sudden Western domination of the rest of the world.

13. Edward Said - the 20th century Palestinian-American scholar who in his famous book Orientalism began to unthink the West.

14. Carrie Lam - the chief executive of Hong Kong in the 21st century whose rule embodied the challenges of seeking the best of East and West, and integrating within one story, two rival narratives of history and civilisations.

These portraits may entice you to read the most enjoyable, The West: a new history of an old idea. Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s book will help you understand that our cultures are always strange mongrel blends of tradition and imitation, and that there is no sacred cultural blood line that runs from Rome to Washington DC. There is rather always a splintering plurality of civilizations in the chameleon multipolar world.

Exploring History of Civilizations More Deeply

In her book Mac Sweeney foreshadows the publication of a more detailed history of the West, and how it was shaped in interaction with the multipolar world. This history has now been published, Josephine Quinn, How the World made the West: a 4,000 year history. I will review it here and on YouTube shortly, and I see it is already listed as a best-seller.

If you would like to explore the world history of civilizations, without Douglas Murray’s grand narrative, but with the benefit of quality world history, in all its diversity, ambition, achievements, devastation, tragedy and comedy, then why not check out my new online history course World History Explorers.

World History Explorers I: Civilizations we will read together Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Civilizations. You will go on a world tour of civilizations across the world, not just Western, and explore the shared heritage of the world. You can join any time, and enjoy one of the most wonderful world tours of world history.

You can enrol by going here.

This week I will be giving a lesson about the ideas of civilization that explores the themes of this post in more detail.

Until next time, take care and enjoy your histories.