Reviving the Study of Western Civilization – James Hankins

It has been about four decades now since courses on Western Civilization began to disappear from American high schools and colleges. In retrospect, the golden age of the Western Civ textbook fell in the decades from the 1950s to the early 1980s. Courses on the subject were a standard curricular offering, often required, for most of the Cold War period. The typical survey course covered Western history from the ancient Greeks and Romans through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ending with the Enlightenment and the contemporary West. In our parents’ and grandparents’ time, the Western Civ survey was commonly the linchpin for other humanities courses, providing a framework for deeper study of Western literature, philosophy, and the arts.

Starting in the mid-1980s, however, the requirement began to disappear. A 2011 report by the National Association of Scholars noted a sharp decline in mandatory courses in Western history since 1989. By 2010, none of the top 50 US universities required Western Civ, and only 16 of them even offered it as an option. Only 2 percent of all US colleges at that time required a Western history survey, even for history majors. By then, the subject had also been abolished as a required social studies course for public high schools by most Departments of Education throughout the 50 states.

Why did this happen? At the time, four decades ago, getting rid of Western civ courses looked like a no-brainer to many academics and administrators. After the turbulence of 1968, elite universities had set themselves the goal of becoming more international, and the ethnic and national origins of the student body were changing rapidly. The percentages of college students of European origin and of those having English as their first language grew smaller. Businesses were globalizing, and international NGOs were multiplying. Professors were becoming ever more specialized in their research and resented the burden of teaching general surveys. The cost of college was rising dramatically, which made students less biddable about required courses. They were paying top dollar, and they were going to study whatever they wanted to study.

Moreover, the generation of academics that grew to adulthood during the Vietnam War had been radicalized politically. Younger profs tended to see the whole subject of Western civilization as hopelessly tainted by American imperialism. Many radicals, their zeal outrunning their knowledge, denounced the West as uniquely racist, sexist, colonialist, or homophobic. Even the term “civilization” itself was problematic, as it implied that some societies might be more civilized than others. The new generation of “tenured radicals” preferred the term “culture” in its anthropological sense. Radical democrats themselves promulgated the dubious doctrine that all cultures were created equal.

Suddenly, outside a few bastions like Columbia and the University of Chicago, no college faculties were willing to identify specific texts or periods of history that students needed to know in order to qualify as educated people. Core courses were replaced with less controversial distribution requirements. Western civ courses were replaced with world history courses, where the naive assumption was often made that the West was the principal aggressor in a world filled with innocent victims of Western greed and violence. The Western past for Americans had always been, to some extent, a foreign country. Now it has become an enemy country.

About the same time, the false narrative was being spread that courses on Western civilization, or even the whole idea of Western civilization itself, were a recent artifact, an invented tradition put about by war-mongering propagandists. During the First World War, it was said, militarists were eager to seduce young men into joining the armed forces. The Western civ course was originally designed to manufacture loyalty to foreign countries that most Americans cared little about. Western Civ, it was claimed, had been revived again during the Cold War for the same insidious purpose—to justify the American empire.

To those who bothered to inform themselves about the history of education, of course, all this was perfect nonsense. The term “Western civilization” became current, not during the First World War, but in the mid-nineteenth century. Its emergence as a concept was originally in the service of an anti-imperial program and had nothing to do with the racist discourse of the time. The same subject matter covered in twentieth-century Western civ courses—Greek and Roman history, medieval and modern European history—had been the backbone of historical study in schools and colleges since the Renaissance. Early America read about ancient, medieval, and modern European history in the pages of William Robertson’s A View of the Progress of Society in Europe from the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century (1769). These same fields of study were required of Harvard gentlemen after Jared Sparks’s reform of the history curriculum in the 1820s. They formed the subject matter of François Guizot’s brilliant History of Civilization in Europe (1828, translated by William Hazlitt in 1846). In 1887, the historian of education Charles Baxter Adams, basing himself on extensive surveys, declared Guizot’s book to be the most widely used history text in American colleges.

Thus, the revolt against Western Civ of the last forty years blithely swept away a tradition that was in fact centuries older than most people at the time recognized. As usual with sudden preference cascades, nobody in the academic herd stopped to ask what might be the result of joining the stampede away from the study of the Western tradition. Now, however, forty years later, the downside of our willful plunge into ignorance of the Western past has become all too visible.

Most obviously, students today have next to nothing between their ears to block the negative stories being told them about the Western past. Yes, the Western past is marred by racist and sexist beliefs, by the practice of chattel slavery, and by exploitative forms of colonialism. But no, it’s not true that these civilizational failures are unique to the West. In fact, the West is more enlightened (by modern standards) when compared to other world civilizations. It was in the West, after all, that modern efforts to remove these ugly blemishes began, spreading from Britain, America, and Europe to the rest of the world.

Students today also know next to nothing about the positive achievements of the West. The learning loss is not trivial. Without understanding the struggle in the West over millennia to preserve liberty; without understanding the uniquely rich development of the Roman law tradition; without appreciating the roles that argument, hypothesis, mathematical modeling, and replicable experiment have had in Western science since the Greeks, the young are more likely to acquire the frivolous state of mind, now common, that thinks great civilizational achievements can be jettisoned without loss, once found guilty of “white supremacy.” Without a grasp of the frightful history of religious warfare and the tyrannical abuses of lordly power; without understanding how unproductive and even harmful science can be when it becomes dogmatic; without understanding the centuries of violence and oppression that led to the Western embrace of religious freedom, freedom of expression, and economic freedom—without understanding all that, the young will never comprehend the reasons why it is so vital to preserve the Western tradition. It should come as no surprise that the recent generations of Westerners who believe that the West is uniquely evil have been taught nothing at all about it.

We who live now in Western countries, from whatever part of the world our parents and grandparents came, have received an extraordinary—and yes, unique—inheritance from the Western tradition. If we want our children and grandchildren to understand and enrich themselves by reading Western literature and philosophy, if we want them to understand the architectural languages of the buildings that surround them, if we want them to love the great art and music on offer in our museums and concert halls, built at great cost by past generations, we must lift the pall of negativity that now hangs over Western civilization in the minds of the young. And the best way we can do that is by actually studying it.