Western Civilization Would Be a Good Idea

Embrace WEIRD Identity Politics

Judea, Greece, and Rome: the triumvirate of Western civilization as seen on the ceiling of the Thomas Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress. Source: Library of Congress

A journalist once asked Mohandas Gandhi what he thought of Western civilization. Famously, the Indian independence activist replied: “I think it would be a good idea.” Though he was being characteristically facetious, Gandhi was right. Reclaiming the notion of Western civilization would be a good idea. Against the worst tendencies of the left, it would mean taking pride in a history that gave birth to shared ideals, instead of discarding that history for failing to live up to them. Against the worst tendencies of the right, it would mean encompassing nationalism within a larger framework, one that suggests allies and ideals instead of just rivals and self-interest. The label “civilization” supplies a standard that any society should strive to meet. But the qualifier “Western” sets a limit on universalist pretensions that can justify wars to impose, or immigration policies that fail to impose, specifically Western values.

In his essay “The Clash of Civilizations?”, Samuel Huntington defines a civilization as “the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species.” Since it is definitionally broad, civilizational identity exists on a gradient. As Huntington writes, “a resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level of identification with which he intensely identifies.” Because it’s so broad, a Western identity will likely be felt less intensely than a local, national, or religious identity. But it gives all of those identities a richer context and history. For example, the United States of America was founded in 1776, but its founders looked to the Roman Republic and Athenian democracy for inspiration. The classical architecture of Washington, DC, is a visible reminder of America’s civilizational legacy.

The exact boundaries and definition of Western civilization are subject to debate, which is itself a Western virtue. Is Russia, an heir to both Byzantium and the Golden Horde, part of the West? Is Latin America, with its mixed Iberian and pre-Columbian heritage? A shorthand for the West’s foundation is “Athens and Jerusalem,” with Athens signifying its classical heritage and Jerusalem its Biblical heritage.¹ One could also add Rome, the originator of Western law and the historic mediator between Athens and Jerusalem, to the list. Via the expansion of Christianity and the Roman Empire, the center of Western civilization ultimately shifted north, but its origin was pan-Mediterranean. Thus the West cannot be equated with Europe, let alone with the white race (which was not a salient concept to the ancients). Nor is it synonymous with Christendom, since there are non-Western Christians and non-Christian Westerners. But while the definition of the West is malleable, it is not infinitely so. The West is heir to a distinct history and intellectual tradition, made manifest in contemporary values, institutions, and even psychology.

WEIRD Identity Politics

As Huntington writes, despite the superficial spread of Western culture globally, “Western concepts differ fundamentally from those prevalent in other civilizations.” Supposedly universal “ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance” in other cultures. Joseph Henrich encapsulates the uniqueness of the Western mindset with the acronym WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic). He characterizes WEIRD people as highly individualistic (eg, desiring control and choice), impersonally prosocial (eg, valuing impartial principles over in-group favoritism), and analytical (eg, focusing on categories over relationships) in contrast to “much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived.”²

Henrich is careful to note that psychological variation occurs within nations (eg, cities tend to be more WEIRD than rural areas) and that a strict WEIRD vs non-WEIRD dichotomy is too simplistic (since values exist on a continuum). Nevertheless, some nations are markedly WEIRD on average, largely corresponding to Western civilization's traditional core: Western Europe and the overseas Anglosphere. In Henrich’s analysis, WEIRD origins can be traced to the dissolution of kin-based institutions via the marriage and family policies of the Catholic church (eg, the prohibition of cousin marriage and polygyny) in the first millennium. Western civilization is thus deeply rooted in cultural evolution, as a “proto-WEIRD psychology first nurtured, and then coevolved with, new economic and political institutions, both formal and informal.” For example, one of Huntington’s above-listed Western ideals, the rule of law, presupposes a psychology that places impartial principles before loyalty to clan or tribe.

Thus Western values are not universal—though they can, of course, appeal to members (perhaps the most “WEIRD” members) of other societies. Huntington wrote his essay in 1993, when victory in the Cold War seemed to herald the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy across the globe. In his 1989 “The End of History?”, Francis Fukuyama postulates that “the end point of mankind's ideological evolution” could be “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” By contrast, for Huntington, “the very notion that there could be a ‘universal civilization’ is a Western idea, directly at odds with the particularism of most Asian societies and their emphasis on what distinguishes one people from another.” Huntington is wrong insofar as Islam also claims to be a “universal civilization,”³ but he is right to emphasize the West’s status as one civilization among many. As Henrich shows, to be WEIRD is not the global norm. Rather, Western values are the product of a unique psychology that, because of its own cognitive biases (eg, a tendency toward abstraction), imagines it is standard.

A Western civilization made aware of its particularity carries policy implications. For example, attempts to impose Western democratic norms on the clannish societies of Afghanistan and Iraq—both products of a radically different civilizational context—were doomed to failure. As Henrich notes, “The more dependent a population was, or remains, on kin-based and related institutions, the more painful and difficult is the process of integrating with the impersonal institutions of politics, economics, and society that developed in Europe over the second millennium.” A corollary is that emigrants from kin-based societies will have difficulty integrating into the impersonal institutions of the West. Mass inter-civilizational immigration does not automatically result in more WEIRD people capable of replenishing an aging Western society. Instead, without assimilation, it can result in the importation of the same clannish values the West evolved away from over the centuries.

The Civilization That Dare Not Speak Its Name

By pretending that civilizations don’t exist, we increase, rather than diminish, the chances that they clash. Huntington predicted that “The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.” He was wrong in some of the particulars, suggesting, for example, that conflict between Russians and Ukrainians was unlikely due to their shared civilizational identity.⁴ But Huntington also posited that nations could change their identity given widespread elite and public support, and that Latin American and Eastern European countries were most likely to join the West. The war in Ukraine is a consequence of Putin’s Russia turning away from the West toward a distinct Eurasian identity. The desire by Ukraine to move in the opposite direction, toward the European Union, caused an inter-civilizational fault line to shake. A battle-hardened Ukraine would be an asset to the West, but so would a Russia not drawn into China’s corner. The inevitable post-war negotiations must account for the civilizational stakes.

Huntington also famously noted that, from sub-Saharan Africa to the Indian subcontinent to the Caucasus to the Philippines, “Islam has bloody borders.” Today these borders extend into the heart of Europe, where jihadists target symbols of Western values like free speech (the Charlie Hebdo offices), artistic expression (concerts at the Bataclan theatre and Manchester Arena), and religious pluralism (a Catholic church in Normandy, the Jewish Museum of Belgium). Whether Israel is a founding member of the West (reborn into nationhood like Greece and Italy) or a related but unique Hebraic civilization can be debated.⁵ Either way, Israel is aligned with the West politically and has become a symbolic scapegoat for enemies of Western civilization. To be Western is compatible with—even calls for—criticizing Israel if it fails to live up to the civilized standards that Jews helped invent.⁶ But first and foremost, to be Western requires condemning Hamas for not having any civilized standards at all.⁷

To say the West is a distinct civilization is not to say it is unreservedly superior to others. There are downsides to being WEIRD, as untrammeled individualism can lead to social breakdown and analytical thinking can miss the forest for the trees. Western civilization, like any other, is guilty of imperialism and oppression. But it is telling that the West’s critics rely on an anti-imperialist tradition indigenous to the West. As Leszek Kolakowski writes, “a distinctive feature of European culture,” from Bishop de las Casas to Montaigne, is “its capacity to step outside its exclusivity, to question itself, to see itself through the eyes of others.”⁸ Even Gandhi, despite his “Western civilization would be a good idea” quip, was influenced by Western thinkers like Thoreau, Ruskin, and Tolstoy.⁹ The West’s capacity to criticize and transcend itself, a legacy of Greek philosophers and Hebrew prophets, is a source of self-corrective strength but also, when taken to extremes, of self-destructive weakness. Ironically, civilization denialism is a classically Western debility.

1. Victorian cultural critic Matthew Arnold writes that “by alternations of Hebraism and Hellenism, of man's intellectual and moral impulses, of the effort to see things as they really are, and the effort to win peace by self-conquest, the human spirit proceeds.”

2. Quotations here and below are from Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (2020).

3. As Bernard Lewis writes in 2002’s What Went Wrong?, from the medieval Muslim perspective, only China was comparable in achievement to Islamic civilization. “But Chinese civilization remained essentially local limited to one region, East Asia, and to one racial group. . . . Islam in contrast created a world civilization, polyethnic, multiracial, international, one might even say intercontinental.”

4.

Timothy Snyder

complicates this perceived civilizational unity by noting that present-day Ukraine was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (which was Western in orientation) for over 300 years.

5. For Huntington, “In terms of numbers of people Judaism clearly is not a major civilization.” However: “With the creation of Israel, Jews have all the objective accoutrements of a civilization: religion, language, customs, literature, institutions, and a territorial and political home.”

6. Israel’s critics are sometimes accused by its supporters of holding the Jewish state to an unfair standard. But this higher standard is also a tribute to the Jews’ foundational contributions to Western morality. Palestinians could rightly accuse their Western supporters, many of whom excuse mass murder and rape as “resistance,” of what George W. Bush called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

7.

Arnold Kling

has proposed that conservatives emphasize civilization against barbarism, whereas progressives see the world in terms of oppressor vs oppressed. October 7 and its aftermath have served as a Rorschach test for these contrary dichotomies.

8. From “Looking for the Barbarians” in Kolakowski’s Modernity on Endless Trial (1990). Rémi Brague credits the Romans, willing students of their Greek subjects, for providing “Europe with a practical version of a theoretical truth: what is mine is not necessarily better than what comes from elsewhere. We have to be ready to accept foreign goods and to prefer them to our own traditions.”

9. Tolstoy is Russian but appears in Howard Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994), so is Western enough for rhetorical purposes.