Western Culture is Not a Dirty Word
Classical schools are expressions of Western culture. That much should be obvious. The “classical” in the title, after all, invokes a certain tradition, and it is the tradition of humanistic learning and pedagogy which can be traced back to the world of Greece and Rome, and which has ushered into the world such an extraordinary proliferation of reflection, beauty, and admirable character over the centuries. There is nothing remotely controversial in the desire to reclaim that tradition, and make it vital once again for modern students.
Of course, given the day and age we live in, it is controversial. There is a pervasive prejudice among many of our contemporaries that a commitment to teaching western culture is chauvinistic, a manifestation of racism or Eurocentrism or colonialism or what have you. There are recurrent, and increasingly more aggressive, attempts to push the last vestiges of Western culture from the curriculum, to be replaced by material deemed more “inclusive.” As classical educators, we need to confront these attitudes, and the policies they shape, with an unapologetic boldness, galvanized by a reverence for the heritage that has been handed down to us, and which we hope to transmit to our children.
To begin then, it is necessary to say that if we are simply discussing the expansion of the canon and curriculum to include non-Western sources and material, then we should all agree that this is desirable. The explosion in knowledge about world cultures that has occurred over the last two centuries or so, the modern access to texts and artworks from around the globe, obviously necessitates a corresponding adjustment in the subject matter we incorporate into the curriculum. Eric Adler made a strong case for such an adjustment in his recent book The Battle of the Classics, along with a sketch of how the wealth of texts available to modern educators might be drawn together coherently. No one could argue with his thesis, I think, that the abundant access we now have to non-western artefacts and traditions of thought means that the content of our curriculum cannot but differ from the content of curricula in place two centuries ago.
As one instance, I happen to think that as time goes on, classical educators are going to discover, with greater and greater enthusiasm, the riches of the Confucian tradition. I think they will increasingly recognize how profound an affinity there is between their own efforts and the educational program prescribed by that tradition, and draw with ever more explicit deference upon its practices and ideals. After all, Confucianism effectively embodies the tradition of humanistic education in the Eastern world, which, in its focus on cultivating the moral and aesthetic potential of the human soul, resembles the central and most valuable aims of the corresponding Western tradition.
There are other examples as well. The teaching of American history in most schools still shamefully ignores the extraordinary personalities that fill the records of the Native Americans, figures like Osceola, Tecumseh, and Sitting Bull, whose biographies would especially appeal to young men, and who demonstrate that the proper grounds of our interest in such figures is not to catalogue their victimhood, but to stand in awe of their manliness and indomitable courage. We might almost say that the entire continent of South America does not exist, as far as American schools are concerned, though there are a wealth of captivating personalities to encounter in its history – including Manco Inca and Simon Bolivar - and fascinating works of art, like the Gaucho poetry of Argentina (of which “Martin Fierro” is the preeminent example) or the School of Cuzco painters. And a study of the culture and history of Japan would introduce students to one of the most accomplished and fascinating civilizations that ever existed, and allow them to encounter an almost inexhaustible store of beauty, of a sort quite distinct from what they are used to.
There is no doubt, then, that classical educators would gain much from an appropriation of these materials. But to make such an appropriation effectively we must have a sense of how to approach them, how to present them effectively to the students, what sorts of ends to have in mind in their study. This comprehensive vision we derive from our own tradition, the humanistic tradition of the West. That tradition has trained us to search for the acculturative purport in texts, to teach those texts in ways that enhance the linguistic and rational faculties of our students, and to do all this in a manner that reflects back to students their own intrinsic dignity. It is one thing to graft onto this tradition, another to cast it aside altogether. And after all, if the discovery of disparate traditions has opened our eyes to cultural marvels from around the globe, this does nothing to diminish the marvels passed down to us from the West. If the Gita is a highly interesting religious text, well, so is First Corinthians. If the Song dynasty makes for fascinating study, so do the Plantagenets.
So if we are only talking about incorporating the “best that has been thought and said in the world” outside the West, then there is likely little cause for contention. But that’s not what we are talking about, is it? That’s never what these debates are about. The “reforms” of these activists are never about improving the intellectual and moral development of young minds. One never hears them demanding that English Teachers spend more time on Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior, or that History Teachers take a deeper dive into the development and influence of the Mughal Dynasty. The texts they agitate for are always representations of contemporary resentment, expressing the purported angst felt by this or that minority group in the modern world. The curricular design they promote is always an auxiliary to advancing a certain political agenda, an agenda that – ironically enough – has its roots in a subversive style of politics that is entirely Western in its origins.
So it is perhaps sufficient to dismiss the assault on Western culture in the curriculum by declaring that since we do not share the political ends towards which this assault is directed, we do not wish to be party to its implementation in our schools. But I do not want to dismiss these arguments quite so quickly. I think there is an opportunity here for classical educators to reflect with greater depth and clarity on their own approach by forcing ourselves to articulate a rationale for rooting our pedagogy in the Western tradition.
I think any such rationale has to begin with a basic distinction. Most of the hullabaloo against Western culture is actually a complaint about Western history. Columbus, Churchhill, Robert E. Lee are the bete noirs of the progressive reformers; Beethoven, Michelangelo, Baudelaire, not so much. The evils of “colonialism” and “white supremacy,” that are regularly alluded to in order to buoy the case of the activists, are assertions about a period of history, not about the quality of a culture. When the activists do take aim at unmistakable representatives of Western culture, as the recent campaigns against Homer and Shakespeare reveal, their cases always suggest these figures embody the evils of Western history.
Again, there is an easy response here, which is simply that the history of the Western world does not remotely resemble the caricature drawn up by the activists. There is an immense amount one could say here – I will just say this: the most basic reading of Western history does not reveal anything like an unvaried course of imperial expansion. To the contrary, from the heroic resistance at Salamis to the defense of Malta to the Guelf resistance to the Empire to the campaign against Napoleon, one as often discovers in the history of the West a defiance of great power – often great power originating outside the West - as much as its augmentation. Only an ignoramus would suggest that Western history reveals a straightforward record of subjection.
But let us leave this caricature undisputed. Let us grant as much force to the activists’ case against Western history as they like, and suppose that there was something uniquely pernicious or oppressive about the exercise of power in the West (though there definitely was not). The fact remains that history is not culture. They are not the same thing at all, though they are bound together inextricably. The manifest injustice of the Spanish encomienda system is an item of history; so too are the objections of Las Casas and the qualms of Charles V and the condemnation of the University of Salamanca. But these latter items reveal a moral striving – one that was admittedly futile in the end – that sheds light on the mental universe shaped by the culture of the era. It is that mental universe that the classical educator wants to extract from the historical record, and present as a vital acculturating force to the modern student.
A culture never matches up with the history out of which it emerges because a culture is, among other things, a series of representations of the ideals and highest standards prevalent among a given people, and people always fall short of their ideals. A failure to grasp this very basic distinction gives rise to all those tedious screeds – which the people making typically think quite astute – about how America never quite lived up to its professed conviction that “all men are created equal.” But this is also why our schools have always placed the emphasis on the ideal, because a school is a place where young minds are acculturated, and that process entails a constant insistence on the standards such minds are expected to uphold over the course of their lives.
As soon as we appreciate this distinction between culture and history, and recognize that classical education is an expression specifically of Western culture, all the current protests against the teaching of Western culture that stem from the supposedly oppressive nature of Western history fall to the side and become null. The only question that remains is this: what is to be gained from a course of study rooted in this cultural tradition that cannot be encountered elsewhere?
One really cannot answer this question without bringing in Christianity, and its influence over that cultural tradition. To a Christian classical schooler, the question concerning the unique value of studying Western culture always comes back to a desire to present the faith to young people in the most intellectually robust and appealing manner possible. As a Christian classical schooler myself, I certainly feel the power of this argument, but I am trying to eschew all easy answers here, and I want to see if I can make a case universal enough to appeal to those outside the Christian tradition.
There are three distinctive aspects to the cast of mind formed through the study of Western culture I would want to emphasize here. The first is what I would call an openness to life and human nature, or a predilection for the good inhering in these things over and above their demerits. The influence of a religion which professes the incarnation of God – his consecration of the human person by the adoption of that form – obviously plays a decisive role here. But as far back as the Greeks – and this is, to my mind, the crucial legacy left to us by them – a relish for the beauty and dignity of human nature is apparent. Other traditions, it seems to me, reveal a far more regular predilection for the grotesque (I am thinking of things like certain Noh masks or much of the sculpture that survives from Mesoamerican culture). But in the West, that penchant is fairly marginal; the much more preponderant taste runs towards proportion and decorum. What this reflects to me is a contentment with the form of human life, and a willingness to make the best of it. To make an irresponsibly sweeping claim, subject to a thousand qualifications, I would say that Western culture committed itself very early to a via positiva, whereby the right way to live is not to be discovered in a rejection or renunciation of human nature, but through its proper cultivation.
Closely related to this dynamic is the centrality of literary art to the dominant Western program of formation. This affection for literature is not unique to the West – in the East, poetry was arguably given even greater weight as a social attainment – but its systematic incorporation into the curriculum, and the variety and philosophical scope it achieved as a result, are extraordinary accomplishments of the Western world. This is an underappreciated fact about Western culture, but the fact is that, for two millennia, one of the earliest and most extensive influences upon educated young minds was to be found in poetry and narrative, and this could not but shape the character of the West in decisive ways. The spirit of play and elan which is such an evident quality of the most flourishing eras of Western culture (see Johan Huizenga’s Waning of the Middle Ages for many examples of what I am referring to) can ultimately be traced to this practice of bending the earliest utterances towards harmony, and the earliest actions towards heroic lore. So too can the uniquely rich and complex modes of public discourse that prevailed in the West up until very recently.
The tenor of that public discourse commonly received its peculiar cast from the fact that its interlocutors were often free persons, actively engaged in the counsel and management of a commonwealth. In this stress upon the desirability of political freedom, we hear another distinctive note of the Western composition. In the face of Xerxes’ onslaught, the Greeks roused one another with injunctions to “remember freedom first and foremost,” and from that moment in history a conviction that freedom is the “first and foremost” quality of a just political order has been a steady, if often ineffective, ideal in the West. When we study Cato the Younger’s campaign against Caesar, or the Florentine resistance to Visconti expansionism, or of course, our own Founding generation, we are studying the efforts of men who believed that politics was to be grounded in something more than brute power, that some provision for debate and dissention was a necessary adjunct to any satisfactory disposition of power. Similarly, when we read Aristotle’s Politics or Burke’s speeches upon the impeachment of Warren Hastings, or the Federalist Papers, we encounter that same commitment towards rendering the exercise of power answerable to reason.
This is only the poorest sketch of the cast of mind forged through a study of Western culture, but enough to make clear all that stands to be lost by throwing that study aside. What should be apparent to any person attuned to the desperate condition of our society at the present moment are the abundant resources provided to us by the Western tradition to meliorate that condition. Among a generation that has lost sight of human dignity, that wallows in depression and in endless representations of human degradation, that tradition of beauty and proportion provides young minds an inestimable refuge. In an age haunted by a sense of meaninglessness and ennui, that tradition of teaching that each life is an adventure, and a masterpiece awaiting conclusion, can shine like a saving light. At a time when the powers that be are becoming increasingly comfortable stifling dissent and exercising power on the strength of mere assertion, that tradition of free government, and the open discourse it relies on, cannot be cherished too ardently. Those who wish to deprive our children of the study of Western culture truly wish to steal from them the means of equipping their souls to rectify the outrageous injustices of our day and age. They are seeking to disarm them against the malignant designs that they themselves are perpetrating.
This would be enough to condemn outright the schemes of the activists, and reject their rejection of Western culture. But even here I do not rest my case, nor do I think the strongest reasons for preserving that tradition have been stated. Because in everything I’ve written to this point, I have insinuated that there is some sort of choice over whether or not our schools should be imparting the distinctive cast of mind emerging from the Western tradition, and the fact of the matter is that there is absolutely no choice involved in the matter anymore. We are all Westerners now, whether we like it or not. I have already noted the delicious irony of the activists employing a political vocabulary that is unmistakably Western in its origins. But in a much broader sense, we are all descendants of a spiritual history that unfolded in the Western world, and our modern outlook is inexorably shaped by that history, for all the good and ill this entails.
Our vastly augmented knowledge of the natural world and the way this knowledge has transformed the potentialities of human life; the dizzying momentum of self-consciousness and interiority and the varied modes of skepticism they have engendered; the erosion of ancient grounds of authority and the political volatility this has caused – all of these undeniable facets of modern life resulted from a tale of intellectual development that had its setting in Western Europe, and no ideologies, however belligerent or abrasive, can cancel out this truth. If we would have our students understand the contours of the period they inhabit – to “know themselves” in all their historical dimensions – we must invite them to make a study of that tale by examining the texts and the events in which its plot has been inscribed. Only by studying the essays of Montaigne and the French Revolution and Frankenstein and the Descent of Man and World War One and Machiavelli and Crime and Punishment can our students acquire a sufficient command of the mental forces that brought their present world into being, and only by acquiring that command can they go to work upon their world in any fruitful way. The precondition for transcending the limitations of one’s age is a capacity to comprehend the sources of those limitations. If we harbor any hope of endowing our students with the ability to remedy the disrepair into which our society has fallen, then there simply is no question about whether a study of Western culture is required of them.
The task of appropriating the tradition of Western culture in such a way that we can present it to young minds as a vehicle of their age’s reclamation is one of immense complexity. It requires a systematic distinction between what belongs to that tradition’s vigor and flourishing, and what belongs to its decay. It requires a sensitivity to the spirit of that tradition, and a competence to transmit that spirit to young people in a way they feel to be vital. As we saw, it requires some ability to incorporate materials originating outside that tradition. These are the tasks of the classical educator, and as should be apparent, they involve not simply a rote transmission of the tradition of Western culture, but a participation in and recreation of that tradition. Classical education, at its best, represents not merely an examination of Western culture, but a true, vital, and original instantiation of that culture. That is why its advent provides us with such profound cause for hope, because it offer us not merely the latest educational trend, but one of the few viable sources of cultural and spiritual renewal in our time.