It’s the annual meeting of the International Society for Dinosaur Research. Concerned by a fall-off in student recruitment, as young people increasingly look to more relevant, future-orientated degree programmes that offer a better chance of a job at the end, and shaken by its image as a hotbed of sexism and dodgy relationships with students (as seen on Friends), the Society has organised an open discussion of the future of the discipline. One delegate takes the microphone. “Our discipline was founded on the exploration of God’s miraculous creation, but we’ve increasingly abandoned those sacred values, and put off many students, through an emphasis on autonomous natural processes and time-spans of millions of years in a way that directly contradicts Scripture!” As members of the panel interject, and someone tries to take the microphone away: “You are betraying our heritage! We are the dinosaurs!”
Of course it wouldn’t happen. Yes, there are palaeontologists and other scientists who are also committed creationists – I was at university with some – but they keep their beliefs carefully separate from their work, for fear of discrediting the latter. Yes, there are plenty of people out there who reject the mainstream scientific perspective, and some of them have very deep pockets – but you keep them out of the profession, and resist attempts at getting you to skew your activities in return for funding, because their beliefs are incompatible with the basic assumptions of the modern discipline. Geologists don’t accept flat-earthers, however fervent and sincere their convictions. Archaeologists don’t rewrite their mission statements and teaching programmes to appeal to believers in ancient aliens.
In the humanities, however – and apparently especially in classical studies – old ways of thinking never completely die. The tradition of all the dead generations, especially the nineteenth-century ones, weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. The charge-sheet against ‘Western Civilization’ as a concept is lengthy, even before we get onto the crimes that have been committed in its name and the causes for which it’s been offered in justification. And yet it persists; not, admittedly, as something that any respectable scholar would actually deploy to support their analysis – it’s not a ‘theory’ like Marxism or post-structuralism – but as a wider discourse that is assumed to pervade and inspire all our professional activities, and certainly to justify them. “We are Western Civilization” – and the crisis of the discipline is, from this viewpoint, fully explained by its failure to acknowledge this basic truth, seeking to change with the times rather than stick to its traditions.
Why this persistence? It’s over-determined, of course. The obvious reason is that humanities subjects don’t have paradigms in the manner of the sciences (and that’s true whether you see scientific paradigms through the lens of Kuhn, Feyerabend, Latour or whoever); that is, intellectual frameworks within which all research takes place and all knowledge is constituted at a given point. Rather, we have a cornucopia of theories and methodologies, and fuzzy values and assumptions, which move in and out of fashion according to how far different scholars find them useful and can make them persuasive; some of these are in due course abandoned, or at least not mentioned in polite company – but they’re rarely if ever exploded or demolished, just neglected or forgotten. In some respects it’s great that we can still read scholarship produced two centuries or more ago and still find it accessible and even useful, that we can think of ourselves if we wish as part of a continuous tradition rather than a series of jerky paradigm shifts. In other respects it’s scary: why isn’t this stuff obsolete and/or incomprehensible? Is there really so little progress in our understanding?
‘Western Civilization’ can’t be destroyed (literally, maybe, but not conceptually) so long as some people continue to find it a useful idea; it will persist as a possible way of interpreting the world, ‘cos that’s how humanities disciplines work. But we then have to ask why so many people within classical studies continue to find it useful and persuasive, rather than pointing and sniggering at anyone who raises it in conversation. External factors: it’s a story that lots of people with power and money want to hear, and a means for classical studies to insist on its contemporary relevance and importance. Internal: it’s an expression of identity, a form of self-aggrandisement, a defence mechanism against accusations that studying long-dead cultures is pretty pointless when our world is burning.
Put another way: it’s a normative interpretation of the history of classical reception, slipping from the historical fact that readings of Greek and Latin classics played a role in the shaping of the modern world (with a definite tendency to exaggerate their importance in this) to the claim or assumption that this was a necessary development. ‘Western Civilization’ is taken to be good; this retrospectively justifies classical antiquity and its study as the fount of this goodness, and then circles back to explain the goodness of modernity as the natural product of its classical roots.
This is a very odd combination of nostalgia – within this pattern of thought, classical studies is conceived as already in decline compared with the good old days, and so too is modern culture because it has less regard for the classics – and the unqualified celebration of the present. The fact that classical antiquity can be seen as a source also of some of the darkest elements of modernity – racism, misogyny etc. – is disqualified as a theme; criticising aspects of either contemporary society or the traditional image and valuation of classical antiquity is a ‘politicisation’, whereas taking the status quo for granted is apparently not. Such discussions are deemed illegitimate because they question the sacred traditions of the discipline and also undermine its conventional claims to respect, attention and funding – which then leaves classics open to continuing mobilisation in defence of the status quo, as an apolitical – because past, and great – support for the claims of Western Civ more generally.
The editor of the reliably awful Quillette tweeted this morning, in the context of publishing a piece by Mary Frances Williams about her perspective on the now-notorious ‘Future of Classics’ session at the meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in January*: “Classicists who hate Western civilisation are almost as painful to watch as venture capitalists who hate capitalism.” If this was a claim about “classicists who hate classical culture”, it would make a degree of sense – though the obvious response, as various people on the Twitter have noted, is that historians of slavery aren’t expected to love slavery. But the casual assumption that classics implies Western Civ and Western Civ implies classics, in perfect harmony and mutual affection, both makes no sense on the surface and completely gives the game away in ideological terms.**
But this leaves us with a problem: given that the idea of Western Civ and its intimate connection to classical antiquity won’t go away, and is indeed being boosted by some very noisy reactionary forces out in the wider world, what do we do when someone – a ‘colleague’ in the broadest sense – starts talking about it? It isn’t just that the concept persists; mention of it always comes equipped with plausible deniability – the fact that white supremacists talk of Western Civ the whole time doesn’t mean that’s what I mean when I use the term – and so objections can always be framed as polemical, ideological and indeed discourteous and unprofessional.
My fictitious dinosaur scientists can afford to laugh at a creationist colleague, which is also the most effective means of undermining such claims within scientific discourse. Claims about Classics And Western Civilization seem to demand a more serious response, given the importance of the issues and given that such views are still relatively mainstream within the discipline – but a serious response immediately loses legitimacy in the eyes of those who see or claim to see disciplinary tradition as apolitical, and it immediately runs up against the norms of professional courtesy according to which we should pretend that everyone is acting with equal good faith and reasonableness.
But even if we assume good faith – that the person talking of the classical roots of Western Civilization is quite innocent of the problematic associations of the term – we’re still allowing that discourse to be normalised if we don’t counter it. Colleagues don’t let colleagues inadvertently bolster the narratives of white supremacy? Even if that means having to interrupt their exposition of the classical equivalent of young earth creationism…
*I haven’t previously written about this, simply because I wasn’t there (and now feel even less inclination ever to attend than I did before). But the news that Sarah Bond might be censured*** by the SCS Ethics Committee for acting in a way not becoming to a scholar – a magnificently pompous phrase, that implies a rather limited knowledge of how scholars tended to engage with one another in the past – presumably for interrupting Williams’ ‘We Are Western Civilization’ intervention, demands a response.
**There is of course a reading of this tweet to the effect that, just as venture capitalists who hate capitalism should stop exploiting the system and instead work towards the revolution, so classicists who hate Western Civ should likewise stop drawing on the authority and prestige of the classical and start burning the whole thing down. Except that we get criticised for that too. Clearly the intended message is that the capitalists should accept that it’s the only game in town and abandon their silly moral objections, and likewise classicists should accept their destiny as fanatical initiates of the cult of Western Values.
***The latest news is that is not intended as a formal censure, just a note that the matter had been discussed. Which raises further questions… See https://classicalstudies.org/scs-news/committee-professional-ethics
Update: not terribly important, but I should note that this piece wasn’t in fact written as a response to the Quillette piece, which I didn’t come across until very late on, but rather as a general reflection on this issue (which has been rather prominent over the past few months, and was also something I thought about in my Why On Earth Are We Still Putting Up With Classics? book), with a particular influence from Rebecca Futo Kennedy’s paper at the Newcastle conference last week.
I gave a shorter version of something like this to my World History students last week when I said that we consider the Greeks and Romans to be important because we consider the Greeks and Romans to be important. It’s tautological: we overemphasize them in our historical study because someone decided they should be overemphasized, and now we can’t understand our own discourses without reference to these sources.
Though the increasing frequency with which I find students don’t know the common definitions of terms like “epicurean” suggests that maybe we could dispense with some of it….
So those of us who study Greece and Rome are actually Taoists now?
I’m not quite sure what the central theme is here: is it (a) that there is no such thing, in any meaningful sense, as Western Civilisation, (b) that WC as a thing exists, but is not, to a significant degree, rooted in Greece and Rome, (c) that even if it is so rooted, that is a bad thing (or at least a mixed blessing), or (d) something else?
Predominantly (a), with some (d). ‘Western Civilization’ is an intellectual construct, a way of viewing the world, rather than something with a physical existence. That does not mean that it doesn’t exist or have an effect in the world – concepts and ideas can be enormously powerful – but it means that we have a choice about whether or not we use it, and that choice is based on utility and persuasiveness rather than on the fact that it’s an unavoidable part of the world. ‘Western Civilization’ is not actually a useful concept for any sort of historical analysis, partly because it’s so nebulous and excessively general and partly because of its copious ideological baggage. Historians don’t deploy it as an analytical concept (they might discuss the historical phenomenon of people’s belief in it, but that’s clearly different) – so it is surprising (and this is the main point of my post) that the concept nevertheless persists in some of the discourse around history.
Dinosaurs are a hoax and so is the spinning globe earth. Earth is young and flat and stationary.
Sorry, Neville, for the amazingly late comment, but I’ve just seen this! Obviously I’d have a lot to say in response. Obviously, this piece suggests I don’t think Quillette is reliably awful, and that ‘Western Civ’ can be sensibly used as a descriptive term: https://quillette.com/2019/01/11/is-western-civilization-a-thing/. But let me start with the analogy you start with. It’s very arresting, but I wonder if it’s quite right. I would suggest a close analogy would be someone standing up at an Islamic Studies or Sinology conference in Indonesia or Taiwan and saying ‘We are Islamic/Chinese civilization.’ I can imagine there might be scholars in the room who’d want to keep more distance from their field of study, and who might even consider themselves against Islamic or Chinese Civ – but I’d also imagine there’d be scholars who thought it made some sort of sense of speaking of themselves in the same cultural tradition. And I don’t think that’s an absolutely crazy position in Classics, either. Have I missed something? (Admittedly, I don’t know much about dinosaurs, or palaeontologists…)
Of course analogies are always inexact, and always polemical. Mine is clearly intended to question the continuing acceptance, at least in some quarters, of ‘Western Civilization’ as a meaningful analytical concept rather than just a convenient label for the study of a traditional bundle of European authors. Yours, I guess, is intended to shift the discussion in a “but everybody does it!” direction; what’s wrong with studying and taking pride in ‘our’ culture? Yes, there’s a debate to be had about the place of any form of chauvinism in any field of intellectual activity, and I don’t think the idea of evaluating different societies in terms of how Islamic or Chinese they are is any more attractive or persuasive than evaluating them in terms of how Western they are (but see also: power, imperialism). But I think I would see e.g. Islamic Studies as having more of a real, apolitical object than ‘Western Civilization’
Hi Neville, Did you read my piece? (Sorry again for the late reply but I just saw your response…) It doesn’t really argue ‘everybody does it!’ or ‘what’s wrong with taking pride in “our” culture’; my argument is more that the Western Civ label makes sense analytically and pedagogically. Having said that, if there are some students who identify with the Western tradition in a moderate way, I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that, just as I wouldn’t look askance at a Chinese Canadian taking a course on ancient China partly for reasons of cultural identity. When you use the word ‘chauvinism’ you use a term for a particularly extreme form of culture identification, but it strikes me that there’s quite a lot of room for more moderate types of cultural identification – and that treating the huge numbers of people who go in for the more moderate types as chauvinists probably won’t do any good. As for evaluating works on how Western they are, I’m not aware of any course that does that as part of its coursework. Usually there’s some pre-selection (e.g. it makes sense to put Aquinas on this course but not Confucius), then you tend to discuss what the texts are talking about, and how they might connect to other texts in the tradition (e.g. how Thomist theology receives Aristotelianism).
Hi James, yes, I read your piece, though that’s quite a while ago. I think our basic difference is that I don’t think Western Civ makes any analytical or pedagogical sense, except as a case study in ideological constructs and cultural values – so, something to be analysed and critiqued, certainly, but not an organising principle for research or teaching. And it’s an ideological construct that is at best chauvinism-adjacent, and one has to work pretty hard to decontaminate it from the numerous times it’s deployed for nakedly racist and imperialist ends – so why bother?
Thanks Neville. I do think constructs are sometimes useful (we use them all the time, after all), and though they’re necessarily ‘ideological’ in the sense ‘intellectual’ they don’t have to be so in the sense ‘tendentious.’
I do think it’s useful because it’s handy to be able to refer to the set of intellectual lineages which move through various European cultures and often carry on in North America – like liberalism, say, or Platonism – just as it’s handy to be able to talk about Confucianism, Legalism, or Chan as parts of ‘Chinese civilization.’
I do think the term Western Civ has been used in a chauvinistic way, by people who think it’s a comprehensively and inherently superior tradition. But I’ve also seen it used by thinkers who think it’s been a force for evil, and that suggests it’s more of a descriptive term that can be presented as good or bad depending on what you think of it.
I’d also say that though (again) I’ve seen it used by jingoists, it can also play a more cosmopolitan purpose. Bertrand Russell’s ‘History of Western Philosophy,’ I take it, isn’t called that because he thought there was only one sort of philosophy, but precisely because he realised there wasn’t. In other words, ‘Western’ is a word that can help us avoid cultural imperialism by allowing us to say, ‘I’m going to present this philosophical tradition – but I’m aware there are others out there too and don’t want to pretend there’s only one.’
To be honest most of the uses of the term ‘Western’ in my time as a student studying classics and philosophy were, I think, more in that vein. Series of books, collections of readings, etc. with the word ‘Western’ in them were, in my experience, more likely just to want to be clear on what they were talking about than to be trumpeting naked racism. (In any case, I don’t remember much of that sort of thing in Russell or Anthony Kenny and the like).