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摘要
摘要
Analyzing European civilization's legacy from its inception, the text assesses historical accounts of the West and argues that while often attacked as a cover for exploitation, its legitimacy/unity appears to contain both the rationality of the enlightenment and the mythological visions of fascism.
评论 (4)
出版社周刊评论
Conventional historians, asserts Gress in this original, sweeping study, see Western civilization as a progressive, linear sequence "from Plato to NATO," meaning that our modern ideals of freedom and democracy flowed directly from classical Greece. To the contrary, argues Gress, the notion of modern political libertya set of practices and institutionstook shape between the fifth and eighth centuries in a synthesis of classical, Christian and Germanic cultures. Gress's thesis that the Germanic tribes who invaded the former Roman Empire infused new energy and an ethos of heroic, aristocratic freedom was popular in the U.S. until the early 20th century, but, as he notes, it fell out of favor after two world wars and the experience of Nazism. The real strength of his scholarly inquiry lies in its fertile dialogue with Gibbon, Tocqueville, Goethe, Nietzsche, Marx, Montesquieu, T.S. Eliot, Joseph Campbell and numerous others as he wrestles with Western survival and the concept of Western identity. Arguing that the U.S. remains the bulwark and heartland of democratic liberal Western values, Gress mounts a withering attack on those he considers motley critics of modern capitalism and the West, including Sartre's slavish Stalinism, Toynbee's anti-Americanism, postmodernist nihilists (Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard), multiculturalists who assume that no single culture is preferable to any other and "Singapore school" economists who divorce economic development from political liberty. Gress, a historian, is a fellow at the Danish Institute of International Affairs. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
An erudite examination of the history of the West and what this history has meant to both its proponents and opponents. ``The West'' is not, for Gress, a fellow at the Danish Institute of International Affairs, simply an idea. Presented as an unblemished history of progress from ancient Greece to the present, this idealized ``Grand Narrative'' in its perfection was easy prey for those who would oppose the West; it couldnt possibly live up to its billing. This ``Grand Narrative'' was bad history, and Gress attempts to present a better history. He finds that the modern West evolved not as an idea but as a series of practices and institutions, some quite accidental and fortuitous, some tragic. Specifically, he finds the West to be an amalgam of ancient Roman, Christian, and Germanic cultures (the ``Old West'') mixed with the Enlightenment creations of liberty, reason, and economic freedom (the ``New West''). The scholarly detail with which the author presents this history is truly impressive. In the end, he concludes that the West of today, while not universal, not a destination at which all nations will or must arrive, is beyond question worth preserving and defending. He has, however, no patience whatsoever for those who would disparage the West. While his history is an intellectual marvel, his depiction of critics of the West consists of caricature and intellectual chicanery. Any criticism of the West is, for Gress, an attack on the whole tradition, so that the anti-Americanism of the Vietnam era simply became reformulated as anti-Westernism, so that ``environmentalism'' is nothing more than something invented by people to serve an authoritarian agenda. Thus does scholarship become reduced to polemic. Still, despite its flaws, this is a thought-provoking work, whether one is ``for or ``against the West.
《书目》(Booklist)书评
Just what is Western civilization? Gress, a historian of Germany, urges that defenders and attackers of "the West" share an ahistorical base: a "Grand Narrative" that "mistakenly defined liberty as an abstract, philosophical principle, which it then traced through a series of great books and great ideas divorced from passions and politics back to classical Greece." Gress maintains that "liberty, and Western identity in general . . . evolved, not from Greece, but from the synthesis of classical, Christian, and Germanic culture that took shape from the fifth to the eighth centuries A.D." The Grand Narrative of "the West" developed after World War II served propaganda as well as pedagogical needs in a cold-war world, Gress suggests, but was incomplete, selective, and "deaf to religion and theology as forces in their own right." In fact, he argues, "the West was not a single story, but several stories, most of which neither began with Plato nor ended with NATO." A challenging alternative reading of Western intellectual history. --Mary Carroll
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
Gress, a fellow at the Danish Institute of International Affairs, examines what he terms the "Grand Narrative"the story of the essential nature of the Western world. He challenges the assumption that the West began with the Greeks and posits the idea that it evolved from Christian, Germanic, and other influences that merged about 1500 years ago. Gress also argues that when the concepts of democracy, science, and capitalism were added to these earlier factors, the West as we know it now was created. He also discusses those who have opposed the "idea" of the West. But even his defense of the conception of the West does not ignore the uglier contributions of European fascism. Comparable to William McNeil's classic The Rise of The West, this sweeping, probing, scholarly work is suitable for academic collections and larger public libraries.Norman Malwitz, Queens Borough P.L., Great Neck, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
摘录
摘录
INTRODUCTION Liberty grew because it served the interests of power. This apparent paradox was the core of Western identity. It was obscured by the conventional account of that identity, the account that I have dubbed the "Grand Narrative." This account rightly saw liberty as fundamental to the West, but mistakenly defined liberty as an abstract, philosophical principle, which it then traced through a series of great books and great ideas divorced from passions and politics back to classical Greece. In that account, liberty existed from Plato to NATO as an ideal that was only ever partially realized and that had always to be asserted against an unruly reality. The key historical insight underlying this book is that liberty, and Western identity in general, are not primarily to be understood in the abstract, but as a set of practices and institutions that evolved, not from Greece, but from the synthesis of classical, Christian, and Germanic culture that took shape from the fifth to the eighth centuries A.D. These practices and institutions, which made up the Western forms of the market, the state, the church, and what I call Christian ethnicity, were not possible before the synthesis, which is therefore the true origin of Western identity. That the Greeks invented political liberty remains true; but to define the West exclusively as its legacy is misleading. The Grand Narrative was misleading for other reasons. First, because it was moralistic. It established a false dichotomy between some high principles, which existed outside history, and a flawed reality, characterized by inequality, prejudice, exploitation, and war. This dichotomy placed a burden of justification on the West and its most important political form, democracy, whose defenders were compelled always to explain how the reality differed from the ideal, and to see that difference as a problem to be addressed by political will--the will of the enlightened few. But the fact that political institutions did not satisfy all ideals was neither surprising nor unique to the West. What was unique to the West was how the prejudices, passions, and cruelties that we correctly see as the stuff of history engendered the niches of liberty that founded both prosperity and democracy. Western liberty was not something marvelously distinct from historical reality, but the initially unintended side effect of the drive for power. Rulers competing for power found that the niches of liberty of local communities made their societies stronger and more prosperous, hence more fit to compete. The passion for God, gold, and glory that launched the Christian holy wars of the crusades and sent the conquistador Hernan Cortes to Mexico yielded cruelty and war, but also spawned Western liberty out of the womb of ambition. In that perspective, what needs explaining is not liberty as a great idea sailing alongside history from the Greeks to modernity, but liberty as the tool and by-product of power in the geopolitical conditions of Europe, a by-product that ultimately overshadowed its source, establishing the local and partial rights to property, security, and influence on government that enabled economic development and led to popular sovereignty and modern liberal democracy. The Grand Narrative's second error was its universalism. It saw liberty and democracy, conceived by the Greeks and revived by modernity, not only as results of Western history and thus part of Western identity, but as universally valid. This universalism went with a third error, which I call the illusion of newness. The Grand Narrative imagined modern democracy as an invention of the Enlightenment and of the American and French Revolutions, an invention that owed less to Western history than to its own ambitions to shape the future. No one expressed that ambition better than Jean-Jacques Rousseau when he said, "it makes no sense for the will to put bonds on its own future actions." True democracy lay ahead, not here and now. It thus became a future-oriented search for justice, whereas democracy was in fact an old practice in the niches of liberty, and one impossible to explain apart from the Christian ethnicity of the Old Western synthesis. Democracy and its political philosophy of liberalism were not creations of the eighteenth century, but practices constantly being invented, oppressed, and revived throughout Western history, and impossible to understand or appreciate apart from that history. The modern (or postmodern) West therefore was no abstract universalism based on some imaginary set of multiculturally applicable political ethics, but no more and no less than the institutional and cultural result of over a thousand years of the joint practice of power and liberty. This book is not a history of liberty or of economic development in the West, for good histories exist, from which I have drawn or extrapolated the insights summarized above. It explains, rather, why the conventional Grand Narrative and its ideology of centrist liberalism were always inadequate as accounts of Western identity and its history. For some decades in the mid-twentieth century, they served a political purpose as a lowest common denominator in American--and to a lesser extent European--higher education and public opinion of an idea of the West as progressive, secular, democratic, and moderately capitalist. Centrist liberalism rested on a humanitarian belief in social, moral, and economic progress growing out of the use of reason to define and solve problems, and assumed further that no problems, whether political, personal, or ethical, were ultimately insoluble. The canon of great books was selected to ground and confirm this bland but pleasant teaching. The high point of centrist liberalism in America was the first two decades after World War II. In 1960, a well-known sociologist announced that the West had reached the "end of ideology." Yet in this era of consensus and prosperity began the attack on centrist liberalism. This attack came in two waves. In the 1960s, radicals promoted and supported by the very affluence they condemned charged the so-called Establishment with cynicism, exploitation, and immorality. The economically more difficult circumstances of the 1970s muted this attack but did not end it; rather, the radicals consolidated their hold on intellectual life while adapting to the competitive and capitalist values of American society and political culture. The second wave of attack came out of the atmosphere of crisis and limits of the 1970s, and took a harsher and gloomier view of the world and of its target, the liberal West. In particular, the attacks of the second wave discarded the one central feature of the West that all sides had shared in the 1960s, namely, the faith in reason. In the 1960s, the radicals accused their opponents of not using their reason correctly. In the 1980s, in the era of postmodernism and relativism, they accused rationalism itself of being at the source of the crimes of the West: racism, sexism, environmental degradation, and inhumanity. Beginning in the later 1980s, a series of books and events brought into focus this second wave of attacks on the idea of the West. These attacks presented no new arguments. They, and the reactions to them, did, however, reveal a fundamental confusion about what was being attacked or defended. To explain and resolve that confusion is one of the aims of this book. In 1986, students at Stanford University demonstrated against the core curriculum in Western civilization under the slogan "Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture's gotta go!" Because this episode took place on the occasion of a visit to the campus by the well-known black politician and presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, it received global attention and was alternately praised or vilified either as an overdue demand for revision of a curriculum that supposedly justified white male privilege or as a barbarous onslaught on cultural literacy. The demonstrators objected not only to the core curriculum, but to having to learn about a civilization they considered racist, sexist, and monocultural. A year after this opening salvo in the 1980s curriculum wars--themselves a pale rerun of the 1960s--anti-Western activists everywhere were hugely cheered by the first volume of a work that promised to subvert the traditional idea of the West. This was Black Athena by Martin Bernal, subtitled The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization . Bernal was a left-wing China scholar, a veteran of campus protests against the Vietnam War, who had devoted a number of years to studying the Bronze Age of Greece, Egypt, and the Near East, so that he could rewrite its history to serve the agenda of contemporary black activism. Bernal argued that white scholars had constructed a self-congratulatory image of the ancient Greeks as white Europeans, as a uniquely creative people whose originality proved that Westerners were innately creative and who, thanks to this construct, could be appropriated as models and ancestors of a superior, racist West. In fact, Bernal maintained, Greek civilization was indeed unique, but its uniqueness was not due to any native excellence, nor were the Greeks white Europeans. Rather, Greek civilization was borrowed from, and owed its essence to, nonwhite people: Egyptians and Near Easterners. If the West continued to look to Greece for its origins, he implied, it would find that these origins were African and Asiatic. The quincentenary of Christopher Columbus's first voyage to the West Indies in 1992 evoked a small torrent of revisionist works striving to prove that Columbus was a mercenary imperialist, that he brought the greed, colonialism, and violence of Europe to the peaceful and ecologically balanced societies of the New World. Kirkpatrick Sale, who like Bernal was a veteran of 1960s leftism, denounced the effects of Columbus as a blasphemy against the moral and ecological order of innocent native cultures and of mother earth, as the "conquest of Paradise." Official America, and particularly American schools, which had unself-consciously celebrated earlier anniversaries of Columbus as landmarks in the history of human achievement, turned agonized somersaults to avoid any appearance of residual triumphalism. and spent considerable effort teaching the schoolchildren and the public of 1992 that Columbus was no hero, that the Europeans were the least acceptable of the three equal cultures of early America--the others being the Indian and the African--and that the lesson of Columbus for today was diversity and multiculturalism. These subversions of what their authors clearly still considered a hegemonic idea of the West took place in a broader context of cultural criticism and self-doubt in American society. In 1987, the same year as Bernal, the political philosopher Allan Bloom published "a meditation on the state of our souls," which he called The Closing of the American Mind . Starting in the 1960s, Bloom said, "the culture leeches, professional and amateur, began their great spiritual bleeding" of a hitherto vigorous and self-confident democratic political culture. By the 1980s, American universities, where the elite went for its education, were dominated by relativism and cynicism--a relativism that, in the name of openness and diversity, refused to grant value to American history or society, and a cynicism that saw America and the West as cultures of greed and exploitation. Bloom proposed to restore more than the lowest common denominator of centrist liberalism. He suggested that Western civilization was deeper, more ambiguous, and more tragic than the optimists of the "end of ideology" had acknowledged. In a paradoxical sense, Bloom accepted the radical point that the centrist liberal idea of the West was hopelessly inadequate. But where the radicals saw themselves as brave opponents of a hegemonic capitalist liberalism, he saw them as merely the final stage, the degenerate product, of that same capitalist liberalism. To him, the centrist liberal West and its radical opponents were allies under the skin, engaged in the same trivialization of a great tradition. From his perspective, left and right both saw the liberal consensus as hegemonic, differing only in whether that hegemony was good or bad. Also in 1987, from a radically different angle, came the historian Paul Kennedy's warning, in Rise and Decline of the Great Powers , that the United States, like imperial Spain, France, Germany, and Britain before it, was doomed to decline. A sign of a great power on the verge of decline was its government's taking on international commitments beyond its means or maintaining a large military establishment, or its leadership demonstrating arrogance or insensitivity. Although Kennedy devoted only a few pages to contemporary affairs, many liberal and left-wing readers seized on those pages as indictments of what they saw as Ronald Reagan's needlessly provocative foreign policy, his high-handed interventions against left-wing regimes, his neglect of social problems at home, and his unapologetic American triumphalism. Such readers were delighted to learn from a distinguished historian that regimes indulging in such "imperial overstretch" inevitably would bankrupt themselves. Pointing to the large budget deficits of the Reagan administration, they waited eagerly for the inevitable collapse. Two years after Bernal, Bloom, and Kennedy, the declinists met what at first sight seemed a decisive refutation in Francis Fukuyama's essay on "The End of History," later expanded into a book-length analysis of the modern Western personality and its universal fate. Fukuyama did not even stop to consider Bloom's warning that relativism was sapping the foundations of American democracy and literacy. Rather, he argued that democratic liberalism, exemplified above all in the United States, was the political philosophy and practice most in accord with the needs and feelings of contemporary humanity across the globe. Therefore, democratic liberalism would inevitably become the worldwide standard of society and government. So far from being an age that had abandoned Western rationalism and meritocracy in favor of relativism and cynicism, Fukuyama said, our age was one of growing consensus about the objective validity of the Western ideals and methods of science, democracy, and capitalism. The attacks on the Western canon, the fight over relativism, and the opposed diagnoses of decline or triumph indicated that something was at stake below the surface of debate on short-term policies in education, international affairs, or race relations. Clearly there was a battle over the West and its identity. And although Sale, Bernal, and the Stanford students liked to believe that they were facing a powerful opponent in the shape of the traditional, liberal idea of the West, their attacks were so popular and met with such wide understanding in public opinion that it was evident that the Grand Narrative, the story many readers of this book may recollect, had collapsed or become a shell of itself. The attacks also demonstrated, however, that nothing had been put in its place. By the 1980s, academics and politicians had largely dismissed its canon of great books and ideas as apologies for privilege and assimilationism. In response to Bernal, Sale, and the other radicals, the liberals did not look to Bloom for moral rearmament and for renewed faith in their idea of the West. Rather, they vilified Bloom as an elitist enemy of justice and of the essential new pedagogy of diversity. In short, they became more liberal, assuring their critics that they, too, deplored the sins of the West. In the 1990s, a revised version of the liberal idea of the West came into circulation that repudiated its canon of great books and its scientific rationalism in favor of a global, democratic humanism, antiseptically purged of its historical baggage and presented as the only morally adequate political philosophy for a diverse, open, multiculturalist society. Proponents of this revised, superficially optimistic version combined a revised liberalism with a Fukuyama-like belief in its universalist virtues, but without Fukuyama's robust and unapologetic faith that liberal democracy was deservedly superior. The result was an idea of the West from which all the incorrect, hard edges--of science, meritocracy, sexism, and racism--had been filed away. The result was a West fit for the new universalism, a West without the West, as it were. This book argues that the chanting students, the Bernals, and the Sales were right to attack the liberal idea of the West, but for the wrong reasons. The Grand Narrative's idea of the West fell to history because it forgot history. It was, as the critics maintained, inadequate, but not because it was exclusive, chauvinistic, or politically incorrect. It was inadequate because it defined the West as modernity and its core, liberty, as an abstract principle derived from the Greeks and transported, outside time, to its modern resurrection in the Enlightenment and in twentieth-century liberal American democracy. By contrast, this book presents an idea of the West as the institutional and political fruit of various critical conflicts and interactions: of Greece with Rome, of both with Christianity, and of all three with the ideal of heroic freedom imported by the Germanic settlers of the former Roman Empire. These interactions did not take place in the elevated atmosphere of great books and great ideas. They were full of destructive as well as creative passion and, often, of cruelty. The marriage of Germanic and Christian ideas of liberty with the Roman idea of imperial order yielded democracy and capitalism, but they also yielded holy wars, black slavery in the New World, religious inquisitions, and economic exploitation. The most persistent opponents of the idea of the West were therefore not the radical critics of the 1960s to the 1990s, but the authors of the Grand Narrative who, for the best of motives, constructed the ahistorical West of progress and morality that, torn from its moorings in religion and in the actual practice of imperfect liberties, proved defenseless when called on its faults. By presenting the West as a moral enterprise, the Grand Narrative made itself fatally vulnerable to moralist assault. This is not to say that the critics will welcome an idea of the West that roots its manifestations--emphatically including democracy and capitalism--in what I call the Old West or the medieval synthesis, the blend of Christianity with Germanic and classical culture. Returning the New West to its historic identity is to defy both the multiculturalists and the centrist liberals in their 1990s incarnation as global universalists. But then that is the point, implicit in the beginning and explicit toward the end of this book, that the West is not the world. It is the West; and whatever its contribution to the future interplay of civilizations that may emerge in the third millennium from the worldwide sweep of modernization, that contribution will be made, if at all, from within its historically conditioned identity, and not from some illusory vantage point of universal humanism. The method adopted is to move through the stages of Western evolution, as conventionally defined, from Greece to the twentieth century, taking the Grand Narrative as the starting point and showing its shortcomings. By contrasting this catalog of opinions with the actual cultural characteristics of the regions of the West at various times, we obtain what I take to be a fuller and more accurate delineation of Western identity. What also emerges, I hope, is an account of the central belief system of the New West, democratic liberalism, which refutes its three weaknesses: the illusion of newness, economism, and its ambivalence about whether liberty is absence of coercion or empowerment. These three weaknesses appear the moment that liberalism is defined as a purely secular and individualistic doctrine. Such a definition opens the door to those in the 1960s and after who argued, repeating older arguments, that economic liberty was a fraud, because its reality was the bourgeois pathology of greed and wealth maximization and that the natural and inevitable end of liberalism was therefore nihilism. Does the West, appropriately redefined, have a future? And if it does, what sort of future? One of the most significant political and philosophical distinctions at the end of the twentieth century was between those who thought such questions silly and those who took them seriously. Those who thought it silly to doubt the future of the West were the optimists, the new universalists. According to them, the West not only had a future, it was the future. They pointed out that, in the 1980s and 1990s, the vast majority of the world's people had demonstrated by their actions and their stated desires that they wanted market capitalism, liberal democracy, and human rights. The most dramatic illustration of this was the fall of communism in central and Eastern Europe, including the former Soviet Union. But the Western optimists could easily adduce other illustrations. In many Latin American countries, for example, new or reinvigorated political movements for democracy, human rights, and economic freedom had transformed the political landscape since the 1980s. Likewise, the most numerous people on Earth, the Chinese, while still laboring, for the most part, under a bureaucratic, corrupt, and mafialike communist regime, were discovering and unleashing economic and productive energies that, so the optimists claimed, would in a space of twenty years or so lead inevitably to a democratic regime respectful of human rights. Since democratic capitalism, human rights, and personal freedom were Western in origin, the optimists held, their worldwide spread would yield a Westernized world, or at the very least, one favorable to Western survival and Western interests. The optimists differed on how long this would take. Some saw a Westernized, democratic world as a likely reality in the space of a few decades; others predicted a longer transition, of perhaps a century or two. But the final outcome was, they thought, certain, and it was also certain that it was an outcome that the overwhelming majority of people, of whatever race, creed, or country, eagerly desired. One last question remained for the optimists: once the people of the world had achieved a world broadly democratic, capitalist, and libertarian, would history--meaning large-scale conflict over fundamental questions of ideology, geopolitics, and control, leading to revolutions, changes of regime, and political upheaval--come to an end, or would the many communities of the human race discover new reasons for conflict? Some optimists justified their vision by anthropology and biology. Human beings, they said, were naturally disposed to want, and whenever possible, to establish democracy and capitalism. Another way of putting this was to say that human beings achieved their true and full potential only in democratic and capitalist regimes. Since, in the optimist vision, men must naturally want to live as full and free a life as possible, it was inevitable that, once democracy and capitalism became possible, they therefore also became desirable and their ultimate and universal victory inevitable. Others were content to note that certain people had, in a particular time and place, namely, early modern Europe, discovered or invented the principles of democratic order and economic growth. Whether a preference for these principles was hardwired into the human biochemical behavior system or whether they were simply fortunate accidents was not the point. The point was that once they were discovered, the results they produced proved effective and popular among many people and groups, including those who had not themselves made the discovery. The power of example, of liberty and prosperity, was enough to explain why democracy and capitalism must expand and flourish whenever and wherever possible. It was also enough to explain why contrary systems of order and production, such as communism, must fail. In the long run, such contrary systems could neither mobilize support nor deploy resources efficiently enough to stop the people they controlled from open or secret revolt in favor of democracy and capitalism. Whether democracy and capitalism were natural or merely fortuitous, therefore, their success, once they had appeared, was certain. And since both were the core of the West, it was an easy leap to argue that the worldwide spread of democracy and capitalism also meant the worldwide spread of the West. Did the West have a future? Silly question! Much in this optimistic and universalist account of the late twentieth century and its extrapolation into the future was attractive and flattering, not least to Western vanity. Some of it was perhaps even true. Certainly, democratic and capitalist societies were, on average, richer and freer than others, by any reasonable measure. Late-twentieth-century scholars were also confirming what Immanuel Kant had argued during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, namely, that free and prosperous societies--Kant spoke of "republics"--were likely to prefer peace to war in international relations, that therefore a world consisting largely of democratic and capitalist societies would be a more peaceful world. Governments in free societies, moreover, were also less likely, and less able, than others to use force or fraud against their citizens. The best method to minimize domestic oppression and interstate war was therefore the same method prescribed if you wanted to reduce overall poverty--to expand the zones of democracy and capitalism. The optimists held that democracy, capitalism, and Westernization were three aspects of the same trend, which was irresistible. On the other side of the divide were those who did not find the question of the future of the West silly at all. This other camp contained various groups, some of whose agendas were radically incompatible. Unlike the optimists, they did not present a coherent story, but rather made political, historical, philosophical, or cultural arguments that undermined the optimists' position that the West not only had a future, it was the future. Four groups, or types, of argument seemed especially pertinent. The first group, represented by the former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, made two points. First, that economic growth did not require democracy. Western liberal democracy, these people said, had become an obstacle to rational economic policies because of its many competing interest groups, its licentiousness, its pandering to opinion and prejudice, its false populism. Second, that economic growth, though it began in the West, was no longer, at the end of the twentieth century, a Western prerogative. Lee and his followers went further. The West, they said, had lost its productive, competitive, and intellectual edge. It was no longer as inventive or as fast-growing as before. The sources of economic growth and therefore of stability and prosperity in the future were to be found in China and Southeast Asia. The future of the world might be capitalist, but it would not be Western. The West, in the long term, was more likely to become an economic and cultural backwater, its shrinking numbers of semiliterate hedonists dependent on the skills, productivity, and competence of others. At bottom, Lee's argument was that the West had no future as a world-dominating culture because it had become incompetent. Lee and his followers claimed that "Asian values" of family cohesion, thrift, and foresight were better suited to achieve prosperity and social stability in the coming century than the individualism of the West, which had indeed achieved prosperity, but at the cost of social stability. The economic crisis that struck Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia in 1997 seemed at first blush to question that claim. The Asian crisis was not in the least mysterious; it was the inevitable consequence of financial mismanagement and of people thinking they could disobey the fundamental laws of economics. "The cosy relationship between governments, banks and firms insulated business from market forces, encouraging excessive borrowing and a wasteful use of resources," a leading analyst accurately observed. The crisis, therefore, did not discredit Lee's Asian values. Rather, it revealed "cronyism and corruption," thanks to which East Asian savings were "invested often for political or personal favour rather than maximum rates of return." It was the denial of market forces and of accountability, not "Asian values," that provoked the meltdown. The idea of Asian values was in any case vacuous. Those values, as Lee expressed them, were no different from the basic values of early Western capitalism and boiled down, in essence, to the economic commonplace that there is no free lunch, to St. Paul's dictum from the New Testament that he who does not work shall not eat, and to the basic rule of capitalism which said that accountability was the foundation of a market economy and a guarantee that distortions would be self-correcting. What remained of Lee's argument was therefore the point that prosperity and social stability were not, as some Western analysts held, opposites, but rather complementary, and that behavior that sought one at the expense of the other was self-defeating. According to the Asians, the West since the 1960s had forgotten economic fundamentals in the search for self-realization and autonomy; conversely, one could say that Asian leaders and managers in the 1990s had sought social stability, and affluence for themselves, at the expense of autonomy--of the kind of autonomy expressed, for example, in Western pluralism, where both politics and the economy were subject to the checks and balances that curbed the sort of secretive, insider dealing that caused the Asian crisis. If the Asian crisis did nothing else, it at least disposed of the fallacious Asian values argument and refocused attention on how prosperity, social stability, and liberty were not contradictory, but flourished only in symbiosis--a point which is one of the basic claims of this book. The second type of argument was what one could call the realist case made by two quite different sets of people: Western social scientists and Third World intellectuals. Among the Western social scientists making this case were the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, the British anthropologist Ernest Gellner, amd the Syrian-born German political scientist Bassam Tibi; among the Third World intellectuals, the sociologist Ali Mazroi. They agreed that democracy and capitalism were Western inventions but did not agree that their global spread implied global Westernization. The opposite would occur, they predicted. As non-Western societies adapted market institutions and practices, they would become less, not more, patient with Western cultural and economic hegemony. Even democracy was not by any means a guarantee of Westernization, rather the opposite. As the broad masses in non-Western cultures achieved political influence they would want their leaders to use that influence not to Westernize but to combat Westernization and to assert their own cultural, political, religious and social identities. This argument contested the core of the optimist case, which was that democracy and capitalism were inherently and inescapably Western, so that societies that admitted them were necessarily choosing to become more like the West. Democracy and capitalism, according to the optimists, were not simply procedures of decision and efficient production. they carried within them the code of Western civilization, and no society could adopt them without also importing that code and permitting it to transcribe itself into the receiving society. This portion of the optimist case had an impressive history in western scholarship since an early version of it had been formulated by Max Weber, one of the founders of modern social science itself. The case rested on a prior assumption about human social behaviour, namely, that you could not separate institutions and procedures from characters, values and ideals. A society in which certain institutions, such as those of democracy and capitalism, predominated would also be a society that encouraged and rewarded a certain kind of person. So influential was this argument that many scholars and thinkers had come to assume it to be intuitively obvious. Therefore the realist countercase of the 1990s appeared to many shocking and implausible. The realists made two arguments, of which only one cut to the core of the basic thesis. this more powerful argument said that you could and should distinguish between procedures and institutions on the one hand, and political culture, social norms, and ideals on the other. Capitalist methods and democratic voting procedures did not automatically reprogram the psyche or change a society so that its influential leaders, thinkers, and shapers became like Westerners. But in the 1990s, most realists merely questioned that democracy and capitalism meant inevitable Westernization. This lesser case simply said that, yes, democracy and capitalism were spreading, but that this was leading to less, not more Western influence. This was not something the West could do anything about. The realists did not claim that the West had become incompetent. What the West would or could do was beside the point. The realist case was rather that fundamental laws of social and cultural change, confirmed time and again in human history, indicated that the best future of the West was not as the single culture, but as one among several, and not necessarily the most powerful. And there was nothing anyone in the West could or ought to do about this. The scholars and polemicists in these two groups shared a coherent and mostly positive view of the West as the civilization that invented modern democracy and economic growth and that had therefore on balance, made substantial net contributions to human happiness and freedom. Their main gripe against the optimists was that they were to simpleminded in extrapolating from past western success to a Western-dominated future for the whole world. The third and fourth groups of anti-optimists argued less from the outside then from the inside. They were not so much concerned with what Westerners could or should achieve, with whether their global power was getting stronger or weaker. They were participants, rather, in the internal Western debates on identity, survival, justification, and legitimacy. The third group believed the West was declining for internal reasons and would therefore not become the universal civilization foreseen by the optimists, whereas the fourth group believed the West was not worthy to become universal and should not have a future. The third group, the straightforward pessimists, saw Western decline as inevitable and rooted in the West's own institutions and culture. The pessimists represented a long and respectable tradition in Western cultural debate. In fact, all civilizations on occasion produced philosophers who described or foresaw inevitable decline. The West was not unique in that respect. Western cultural pessimism was unusual in its prevalence and in its reappearance in virtually all periods of Westen history. In the later twentieth century, prophets or, as they themselves believed, analysts of decline blamed a number of features, some of them opposites of each other. Thus, some, on the liberal side of the spectrum, saw the West as doomed by creeping superstition, whereas some conservatives saw radical scepticism and free thought as threats to the culture. Some accused individualism, others mass society, and some both at the same time. Some thought the West was wasting resources on defense, others that it was neglecting its own defense. While they found many reasons for pessimism, the members of this third group all shared a sense that the decline of the West was a tragedy--for some, an inevitable tragedy, for others, one that could have been avoided. But, in either case, a tragedy. The fourth group, found mainly on the left of the political spectrum, was different in this respect. These people did not want the West to have a future, or at least not until it had radically transformed itself according to a particular agenda. Never before the twentieth century had any civilization produced within itself as powerful, as varied, or as wide-ranging a tradition of radical self-criticism as that of the West. Some of these critics were what many of them claimed to be: critics pointing out hypocrisy, inconsistency, and injustice, and appealing from present practice to ideals and promises, to what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." In other words, they expected the West to live up to their standards and were willing to grant that it could do so. But others were more or less overtly hoping for the end, in some cases the violent end, of their own civilization. The West, according to the more outspoken members of this fourth group, was, of all civilizations, uniquely rapacious, racist, sexist, exploitative, environmentally destructive, and hostile to all human dignity. It was unredeemable. Only if the West went down to destruction could the rest of the human race hope to survive. The historian Arthur Herman referred to the "sadistically redemptive" outlook of those who, in this tradition, denied the West a right to a future. The optimist case that the West both had a future and was the future was contradicted by the mere fact that many people, some of them influential scholars, politicians, and thinkers, disagreed. One found more obvious evidence that the future of the West was in doubt in the political and cultural history of the 1990s. At the beginning of that decade, most influential thinkers, including many of the doubters, agreed that the West, the civilization of democracy and capitalism, had won an overwhelming victory and that the political and economic future of the human race promised more peace and prosperity for more people than had been the case before the fall of the Soviet Union. But as the 1990s progressed, the pessimists returned in force. During the Cold War, the pessimist case, classically put by James Burnham in Suicide of the West , written in 1963, was essentially a simple one: the West could not outcompete the Soviet Union because it was too fragmented, too decadent, too soft, and not willing to assume the long burden of struggle against a determined and radically hostile enemy. The reason for this weakness, Burnham argued, was liberalism itself, which he presented as a reaching that believed in progress and universal common purposes, and that therefore had no answer to those who refused to accept those premises. Liberalism, he claimed, was the ideology of Western suicide, for it taught the West to accept its own destruction as reasonable and even desirable. All the older and deeper traditions of pessimism were temporarily overshadowed by this more urgent variant. In 1991, this case became moot. The Soviet Union unilaterally ended the contest; the West won by default. The result was not that the optimists gained sole control, but that older varieties of pessimism reemerged. As for the anti-Western Westerners, those who thought the West did not deserve to survive, they had been active all along, but also found themselves, perhaps to their own surprise, with new freedom and new arguments after the Cold War. One paradox of the 1990s in the West was, then, that the wind went out of the sails of Western self-confidence just as that self-confidence had received its possibly greatest boost ever. Some people, the optimists, were unaffected. But the paradox, as it affected those many other people who found themselves assailed by new or revived doubts about the legitimacy, viability, or justification of the West, was not impossible to understand. One reason for it was that many people were not sure whether the victorious forces of democracy and capitalism were really as solid or as full of promise as they seemed. Another was that some people thought they were solid enough, but wondered if they were as beneficial as the optimists claimed. A third reason for the paradox, and the main reason for this book, was that the confusion about the West's future rested on a prior confusion about the West itself. This confusion explains why both those who believed in and those who doubted the West's future came in so many guises. It was not that they were unusually imaginative or creative; rather, the West they were praising, deploring, criticizing, attacking, or merely investigating was ambiguous and protean. A feature identified by one analyst as the core of the West, say, capitalism, might seem to another as the mere by-product of its real core, say, Christianity. Likewise, two people might agree on the definition but disagree about its implications; what one considered a great good might seem to another to have produced disaster. For example, some identified the West with the impulse to discovery, which led to science and to Christopher Columbus. The optimists might consider both results beneficial: science uncovered the laws of nature and revealed the universe; Columbus connected the New World to the Old and thereby made possible the modern world economy and the United States of America, the most powerful liberal democracy. On the other hand, people like Kirkpatrick Sale considered both science and Columbus as nearly unmitigated disasters of human history. Science, they held, was not about truth but about power; it gave immense power to greedy, sinister people who used it to oppress others. As for Columbus, many people in the 1990s thought he belonged with the worst archvillains of human history, not only because he came from an evil, corrupt, and rapacious European culture, but because he and the other European explorers unwittingly introduced Old World microbes to the New World that killed nine-tenths of its indigenous population. The purpose of this book is not to attack or defend either the proposition that the West is the future of the world of any one of the declinist, pessimist, or radically hostile propositions. It is rather to step back from that debate to ask what the participants were arguing about. It is to explain how and why different people defined the West differently, and to argue that the standard history of Western civilization from Plato to NATO was inadequate. My title, therefore, is ironic. The standard history began with the Greeks and ended with the political West as organized for mutual security in the Atlantic Alliance, in NATO. This history, described in chapter 1, was not so much wrong as superficial. The West was never a single entity that one could define neatly as beginning in Greece, slowly growing during the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, and reaching its fruition in the later centuries of the second millennium A.D., all the while maintaining an essential identity. Rather, throughout this history, various Wests coexisted, defined in terms of different principles, regions, beliefs, and ambitions. The West was not a single story, but several stories, most of which neither began with Plato nor ended with NATO. The two most important versions of the West were the Old West, identified as the synthesis of classical, Christian, and Germanic cultures, and the New West, the synthesis of reason, liberty, and progress; or science, democracy, and capitalism; or technology, human rights, and the pursuit of happiness. As indicated above, I believe that the opposition between these two that is at the basis of the liberal Grand Narrative of the West as the march to freedom is mistaken: the New West goes off its rails if it divorces itself from its Old origins. The optimist vision of the West as triumphant democracy and capitalism utterly ignored the Old West and was therefore superficial and therefore unable to bear the weight of universal significance that the optimists gave it. Above all, my pedagogical purpose is to add chronological and philosophical depth to both the optimist and the nonoptimist visions. Those who followed the arguments for or against the future of the West in the 1990s might easily be misled into believing that history had become irrelevant to the question. The end of the Cold War, like it or not, demonstrated that democracy and capitalism were successful. The only remaining questions, some said, were whether they would continue to be successful, whether they would bring the benefits their proponents promised, and whether the result would be a Westernized world or something else. On the contrary, I believe that the history of the West, or better, the history of the various ideas of the West and their interaction, became relevant again in the 1990s after having been less relevant during the course of what people, misleadingly, called the Cold War of 1947-91. Misleadingly, because the actual Cold War of U.S.-Soviet confrontation, when the two sides were barely talking, and a Soviet attack on the United States and NATO was genuinely possible, covered only a small part of that period, certainly 1947-55, possibly 1958-63, and, somewhat less plausibly, 1981-86. The simplistic and misleading usage, however, became dominant as soon as the Soviet Union dissolved and will therefore, unavoidably, be followed here. History became relevant again because, during that period known as the Cold War, the Western democracies shared a dominant common interest in deterring Soviet military attack. This interest was neither false nor exaggerated. But it did create an artificial and ahistorical community of danger that emphasized strategy, defense, and the immediate political balance of power between East and West. Within that community, politicians, citizens, and analysts naturally focused on the structure of institutions and events that bound "the NATO West" together and on how that structure was faring in its strategic, diplomatic, and political struggle with the Soviet Union. Some of these politicians, citizens, and analysts were dissenters; they did not believe in a Soviet threat, and some thought the United States a greater danger to peace than the communists. But even these critics developed their arguments and established their beliefs within the framework of the Cold War, within that structure of institutions and events that came together in 1945-48 and that could, or so people thought, be adequately explained and understood in terms of a simple Grand Narrative of Western civilization culminating in the Atlantic Alliance. When the Soviet Union ended in 1991, the logic of this structure of institutions and events also ended. Two new, or hitherto overshadowed, factors brought long-term history, including the history of Western institutions, ideas, and realities, back to the agenda. The first was the new landscape of world politics, no longer dominated by a single major conflict, but by a variety of relationships and dynamics, some tense, others loose. The second was the self-doubt within the West and in particular within the United States. Unfortunately, many people in the 1990s continued to discuss both world politics and domestic American problems with little or no reference to any history going back more than a few years. Indeed, at times it seemed that the close time horizon of Cold War debate had been replaced by an even closer horizon. At least, during the Cold War, those who discussed politics, survival, and the future agreed to look back to the 1940s. After the Cold War, many people seemed to think that the world began anew in 1989-91 and that no earlier history, even that of the Cold War, was relevant to understanding the present or predicting the future. This was the opposite of the truth. No discussion of the West, whether in an optimistic, a pessimistic, or a radically hostile vein, could properly take place after 1991 without a longterm perspective. Thus, one of the sources of confusion in the discussions of the West after 1991 was that many people continued to talk as though the historical perspective was unnecessary. The optimists looked forward to democracy and capitalism spreading worldwide without much thought about how these two principles related to the history of Western civilization and how this complex relationship might fare in the post-Soviet world. The various pessimists and enemies of the West continued, often, to talk as though the West was adequately defined as a political system consisting of the United States, NATO, and very little else. It is to combat this chronological myopia that I offer these reflections. Although this book does not defend optimists, pessimists, realists, or anti-Westerners, its author does have an opinion about the prospects of the West. Democracy and capitalism were indeed in harmony with human nature, as late-twentieth-century evolutionary psychology and sociology were describing it. But that did not mean either that they would easily spread across the world, or that their spread meant universal Westernization. Three points will illustrate these uncertainties. The first is that human nature is flawed. Just because the natural and social sciences of the late twentieth century gradually gave us a better fix on what arrangements were good for people, what made them flourish, this did not mean that people or institutions would quickly, or ever, conform to this knowledge. For one thing, many people disagreed that science was discovering the truth about human nature. No government, certainly no Western government, would find it easy to transform this new knowledge of human nature into laws and prescriptions for behavior, even assuming that politicians wanted to do so. Second, most people remained happily ignorant of these supposed discoveries. Third, even if they were familiar with them or intuited their truth, people did not always do what they knew to be right or in their interests properly understood. The "human nature" of the late-twentieth-century evolutionary psychologists, anthropologists, and neurologists was somewhat like the economists' "rational actor." If people had perfect and complete information, and if their reason was not subject to their desires, they would act in perfect conformity to their best interests, which would also be the best interests of their community. But, to repeat, people were not perfect. Finally, laws, procedures, institutions, practices--all the arrangements that made up a society or a culture--were inevitably a mix of prejudice, interests, and occasionally a smattering of insight into what was good for people. Such arrangements, however seemingly irrational, had tremendous inertia. Societies did not change overnight. Just because democracy and capitalism, in some form or other, corresponded to some ideal and scientifically established human nature was no evidence that these practices would, in the short or medium term, spread or become universal. Even if they did, the result would not be a Western world. This second point about the future of the West is that democracy and capitalism, by the end of the twentieth century, no longer implied Westernization. So far, the realists were right. Singapore, China, and Southeast Asia provided cases of capitalist or protocapitalist societies that showed little if any inclination to Westernize their cultures. In Iran in 1979 and elsewhere in the Islamic world, popular movements claiming power on the democratic principle of majority rule also did not wish, when in power, to Westernize their cultures, economies, or social structures. On the contrary, capitalist development and popular political movements made it more, not less, possible for the elites of non-Western societies to emphasize, rejuvenate, and reassert their own identities using all the means of late-twentieth-century technology, from cassette tapes to the Internet. This point had a broader implication. Democracy and capitalism grew slowly in the West from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, transforming the West out of all recognition. One could argue that democracy and capitalism, along with other aspects of modernity such as science and individualism, were likely to transform the non-Western world in the third millennium A.D., just as they had transformed the West in the second half of the second millennium. But the end result of this transformation would not be a Western world but a world in which all peoples would be shaping their societies and cultures using the tools of modernity without thereby being Western. The West was simply the first of several cultures to have undergone the revolutions of modernity; this leading position should not be taken to imply that those revolutions would produce identical outcomes in other cultures. That modernity began in the West was no accident. The West created the conditions of global modernization. It did not and would not determine its results. Moreover, and this is my third point about the future of the West, what was this West whose future we are discussing, this West that would either become global or not? Was it even possible for the optimists to define a simple West whose habits, institutions, culture, and social arrangements were becoming global? Such a definition was possible only by ignoring history and in particular by ignoring those who defined the West in ways incompatible with the short-term narrative of Western identity prevalent both during and after the Cold War. In the broader perspective of the various ideas of the West that coexisted before the Grand, or standard, Narrative took over, it was logically impossible to Westernize the world, because there was no single model of the West to impose. One model, that of liberal democracy and capitalism, would, for example, exclude another model, that of Christian theocracy. So even if democracy and capitalism spread quickly worldwide, and even if non-Westerners refrained from using democracy and capitalism to reassert their own identities, this would not mean that the world was Western. At most it would mean that much of the world had adopted a partial and fragmentary model of the West, one that excluded other and historically better grounded ones. No, the future of the West was not as the single culture of a homogeneous world of democratic capitalist societies. Rather, it was as one of several cultures reforged in the crucible of modernity, of democracy, capitalism, science, and individualism, expressed, for example, in the demand for human rights. The interesting question about the future of the West was not when or how it was going to achieve global hegemony, because that question was moot, but what the West would look like in the third millennium, in the new era of global coexistence of several distinct but modern civilizations. The fate of the West in that coexistence would depend in large part on how well Westerners, and others, understood their past and the history of their own identity. And the essential preliminary to gaining that understanding was to look at the versions of Western civilization that had crystallized in Western history itself over the preceding two millennia. Noting the variety of definitions of the West, some scholars denied that the phrase had any coherent meaning or connotation at all. Never mind whether the West was good, evil, in decline, or headed for a glorious future. These options were irrelevant, for their subject, the West, did not exist. The West, such critics argued, was whatever the person using the phrase wanted it to be at any given moment. The historian Norman Davies went further. He listed twelve variants of Western civilization, of which the most important were the Roman Empire, Christendom, the French West of the Enlightenment, the imperialist West, the German-controlled West based in central Europe, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant or WASP West, the American-led Cold War West that included Japan and Saudi Arabia, and finally a European West based on the European Union. The WASP West was particularly significant, because during and after World War II, this definition of the West was responsible for the Grand Narrative, which Davies called "the Allied scheme of history." This version permeated education, public opinion, and political doctrines in much of Western Europe and the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s. Proponents of this scheme, Davies claimed, asserted a "unique, secular brand of Western civilization" in which "the Atlantic community," or NATO, was "the pinnacle of human progress," having emerged from Anglo-Saxon democracy, liberal capitalism, and the Anglo-American alliance for democracy of World War II. The "Allied scheme" was based on denouncing Germany as an enemy, on an indulgent view of the Soviet Union, which had been a wartime ally of the democracies and therefore was never considered as morally deficient as Hitler's Germany, and, third, on accepting the division of Europe into East and West as the natural consequence of age-old cultural, geopolitical, and economic differences. The Allied scheme suffered a body blow when American universities eviscerated or abolished their Western civilization courses, but its ghost lived on into the 1990s. The American news media's obsession, more than fifty years after World War II, with the "Nazi gold" held by Swiss banks made little sense compared with other atrocities that one might investigate--except for the enduring force of the Allied scheme, whose proponents demonized Germany and downplayed other regimes of terror, whether closer or more remote in time and space. Because some politicians and ideologues had coined and used a range of ideas of the West, Davies concluded "that Western civilization is essentially an amalgam of intellectual constructs which were designed to further the interest of their authors." He condemned "the really vicious quality" of the idea of the West, because books based on that idea and its variants "present idealized, and hence essentially false, pictures of past reality ... judging from some of the textbooks, one gets the distinct impression that everyone in the `West' was a genius." Certainly, many of the older-style textbooks on Western civilization were selective. Whether they stated or implied that the West consisted only of geniuses and included no fools or knaves would require a full, and boring, textual analysis. Davies's real gravamen against the idea of the West was in any case not that it was selective, but that it was selective in a particular respect, namely, in positing an artificial and damaging dividing line in Europe and in excluding eastern Europe from something called the West. Davies was not wrong in making this charge, although he overstated his case by claiming that ideas of the West, named in his list of twelve variants, were purely ideological constructs without any value as genuine attempts to conceptualize and understand important features of history. He insisted that the Slavs and other eastern European peoples were as fully a part of European history as the British and the French, who played a greater role in the traditional Western civilization courses. Of course they were; but arguing for a more comprehensive view of European history was not the same thing as proving that there was no such thing as Western identity. The question of Western identity or identities and its relation to the Slavic peoples was important; it was, among other things, a question of where the West stopped, geographically, as well as a question about the status of such elements of Western identity as medieval scholastic philosophy, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. Davies wrote about the political, social, religious, economic, and cultural history of Europe, but that should not delegitimate accounts of the West, just as histories of the Arab peoples or of the Chinese should not delegitimate accounts of Islamic or of Chinese civilization. If one wanted to warn against distortions of history, there were in any case other, arguably more urgent perils facing Americans and Europeans of the late 1990s than the danger of an overvalued West. Citizens of that era were not likely to encounter simplistic narratives featuring only the great and the good and touting Western superiority. They were more likely to read statements confirming widespread prejudices against the West. In a review of a book about the slave trade to the New World, for example, a learned historian wrote that "no group has made such widespread use of enforced labour over such a long span of time and such a vast geographical area as the peoples of Europe." He offered no evidence for this statement, which was easily contradicted in a letter by a less-well-known and less learned but also less prejudiced historian. But the learned historian was by no means untypical; he was merely conforming to the opinions of his peers. He began his article with a disappointingly safe and false statement rather than one that would have been provocative but true. That the job of a historian was not to conform but to learn and to resist the prejudices of the age was a principle of intellectual hygiene that many leading Westerners decided to neglect in the second half of the twentieth century. Thus, in this case, the one civilization that voluntarily abolished both the slave trade and slavery--the West--was offhandedly denounced as uniquely evil. Such reflexive rhetoric served the cause not of enlightenment but of that particular and damaging kind of obscurantism favored by the literate classes. The purpose of this book is not to "present idealized, and hence essentially false, pictures of past reality." It is not a political and social history of Europe or of America, nor is it yet another history of Western civilization of the type that Davies castigated. It is an investigation of the most important meanings of the West counterposed to the Grand Narrative, which corresponds to what Davies called the "WASP West" and its "Allied scheme of history." The WASP West cut eastern Europe off from the West and ignored religion and any history that did not fit into the simple Plato-to-NATO scheme of constant improvement. These were its two cardinal sins. Proponents of other variants of the West similarly ignored those features that did not enter into their definition of the essence of the West, the true West. This book argues that all the Wests emphasize some part of a broad story, that no story can ever be truly complete, and that the history of civilization is only one kind of history; as Davies trenchantly argued, there is also the political, religious, economic, and social history of particular regions, nations, people, faiths, territories, groups, and individuals. Three themes run through the book. The first is that the standard story is partial and incomplete. It was created to serve the needs of mass higher education after the world wars and had, therefore, to be simple in outline but rich in content. Above all, the story had to be consistent, linear, progressive, with a start date in ancient Greece and an end date in 1950s America. But, midcentury American liberalism, for all its qualities as a political doctrine, was not the only legitimate or possible representation of the idea of the West. And to argue, as the story did, that the idea of the West found its fulfillment in that doctrine was dangerously wrong. Dangerous for two reasons. First, because citizens whose notion of the West depended on the traditional story had little with which to resist those who challenged the story with the intention of destroying its influence. Thus, we saw American elites abandoning the liberal story in droves, starting in the 1960s, until by the 1990s the story, if it was told at all, was told mainly as a joke or as a butt of criticism and attack. And dangerous, second, because the narrow understanding of the West implicit in the traditional story made it difficult if not impossible to resist those critics who said that the West was not merely oppressive, white-male-chauvinist, and evil, but that it was morally empty and spiritually vacant. A second theme is that the standard story was deaf to religion and theology as cultural forces in their own right, and not merely as contributors of ideas to a Grand Narrative, Thus, the standard story could use parts of what came to be called the Judeo-Christian tradition: dignity of the individual, value of each life, and the hopes and struggles for human rights and moral equality that flowed from that tradition. But it could not so easily use others: the belief that the next life was as important as, if not more important than, this and that worldly success was therefore not to be sought; the value of contemplation over action; doctrinal orthodoxy; intolerance; religious wars; anti-Semitism. Because it was deaf to religion, the standard story presented both classical religion and Christianity as peripheral, derivative, and largely irrelevant, except as providers of ideas whose true role was to function as stepping-stones in the great secular drama of Western ascendancy from Plato to NATO. The third theme running through the book is that the standard story was flawed because it took only what it wanted from history and built a linear narrative from it: from the Greeks it took democracy and philosophy; from the Romans, law; from the Renaissance and Enlightenment, individual autonomy; from the revolutionary era, liberal democracy, from the modern era science and technology. But the Grand Liberal Narrative was possible only if you ignored great chunks of Greek, Roman, medieval, and early modern European civilization, The Greeks, Romans, and early Christians were not protoliberals. Inherent in the oldest recoverable meanings of the word West were the idea of movement toward or beyond the (western) horizon and the idea of sunset, evening, the fall of night. The English word west , unchanged since Saxon times, and its identical cognates in German and Scandinavian was an adverb of direction, as in "to go west." It derived from the Proto-Germanic * westra , and it, in turn, from an Indo-European word, * wes-tero , which was the comparative form of an adverb, * wes- , meaning "down, away." West thus originally meant "farther down, farther away," then, by extension, "something farther down and farther away; the direction of something farther down and farther away." From the Indo-European root * wes- also derived, or so linguists held, a word * wesperos , "evening," which became in classical Greek hesperos or hespera , which meant both "evening" and "west." This joint meaning provided rich echoes in classical mythology. For example, the Hesperides, the daughters of evening, lived on the western ocean, where they kept a tree of golden apples given by the goddess of Earth as a wedding present to Hera, the bride of Zeus, father of gods and men. One of the twelve labors of Hercules was to slay the dragon that guarded the tree and take the apples. The magical apple tree in the West appeared also in Celtic mythology, on the island of Emain Ablach, the home of the sea god Manannan mac Lir. To the ancient Egyptians, to go west was to die, for beyond the sunset lay the kingdom of the dead. The evening sun, Atum, entered that kingdom and moved through it beneath the earth, to be reborn as the morning sun, Chepre, in the east. The two categories, death and rebirth, belonged to different kinds of time. The death that brought all beings, including the sun, to the "beautiful West" led out of time as change into time as permanent result-- jet --a space in which the deceased continued their life without change, in eternal duration. The Celts also had stories about otherworldly realms beyond the West, such as the story of the journey of the hero Bran to Emain Ablach, or the Voyage of St. Brendan , one of the most popular tales throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. Tir na n-Og , the land of youth, was sometimes placed beyond the sunset and could be reached only at the end of a particular kind of voyage, an immram , which was both a voyage in space and a voyage within oneself. At its end, one saw Beanntaichean arda is aillidh leacainnean Sluagh ann an comhnuidh is coire cleachdainnean `S aotrom mo cheum a' leum g'am faicinn Is fanaidh mi tacan le deoin. [High mountains with lovely slopes Folk abiding there whose nature is to be kind Light is my step when I go leaping to see them And I will remain a while there willingly.] Early in European culture, certainly by Roman times, people began associating a different idea with the geographical direction west, and with the sunset, namely, the idea of youth and vigor, the idea that lands to the west were fresher, younger, and more vigorous than those to the east. This idea was related to such myths as those of the apples of the Hesperides or of Emain Ablach, to Tir na n-Og , and to the story of Bran's voyage to magical realms of pleasure and wonder, but in the classical world it became an idea about the immediate, not the magical, world. This notion was understandable because in the Mediterranean basin it happened to be the case, as it was also in China, that the lands at the eastern end had the older and more established culture, whereas those to the west were more recent, ruder, and less developed. The idea of the West as the direction of youth, innocence, and vigor contradicted the idea of the West as the country of sunset, which could be interpreted metaphorically as decline. The most famous of all stories associating the West with youth and rebirth was that of King Arthur in the isle of Avalon. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Welshman descended from Bretons, who in the twelfth century re-told many of the old Celtic tales about Arthur, the king was fatally wounded at the battle of Camlan, to which he had been treacherously lured by his evil son and dark counterpart, Mordred. His wound doomed him to death in the mundane world, but by divine grace he was transported to Avalon, "the island of apple-trees" in the West, where nine women with magical powers--counterparts of the Hesperides--healed the king and allowed him to remain alive in Avalon in a sort of half-state between heaven and earth, ready to return in the final battle of good and evil. This idea of the West as the region of vigor and youth came into its own in the age of exploration. The other two ideas--of the West as the region of sunset and decline, and as the goal of travel and yearning, whether mundane or supernatural--returned to feed the romantic imagination of the nineteenth century and the cultural pessimism of the twentieth. All these ideas suggested a richer heritage that was in some ways as alien to the technocratic, liberal West as any non-Western civilization. As a prolegomenon to recovering some of this heritage, and particularly its Old Western manifestation, this book offers a rediscovery of a different past than that of the simple story of great ideas from Plato to NATO. From the foregoing it will be clear that both the institutions and the resonances of myth that entered into Western identity were much deeper and broader than what was captured either in the Grand Narrative or in the critical antinarratives. For the same reason, the defense of the West mounted by some of the optimists and by neoconservatives in the 1980s--the defense, for example, of William Bennett in his Book of Virtues --was, however well meant, unable to restore the cultural balance. The problem with such defenses, and with the neo-optimist case that ignored the attacks, was that they took the liberal narrative for granted and neglected the multiple and alternative traditions of the West. Thus, they did not answer the critics on solid ground, but on the shifting ground of contemporary cultural debate. But if, as I argue, the Grand Narrative was itself flawed and was itself the basic obstacle to understanding Western identity, these defenses conceded both too much and too little--they conceded the value of much of the critics' case but did not abandon the Grand Narrative. The defenses were partial. I want to show a broader picture of Western identity to give both defenders and attackers a better target. Optimists, pessimists, realists, and enemies of the West all had their favorite moments in history, when the particular feature or features they considered as the essence of the West made their appearance. Those who admired or praised the West looked for what I call Magic Moments, those who despised it or foresaw its decline looked for Original Sins. All such groups were engaged in establishing or inventing some particular idea of the West to suit their interests. In the late twentieth century, the searches both for Magic Moments and Original Sins took place against the background of the Grand Narrative. What did this narrative look like? Copyright © 1998 David Gress. All rights reserved.目录
Preface |
Introduction |
1 The Grand Narrative and Its Fate |
2 The Battle over Hellas |
3 The Burden of Rome |
4 Christianity and the Fall of Rome |
5 Germanic Freedom and the Old Western Synthesis |
6 Faith, Passion, and Conquest |
7 From Christendom to Civilization |
8 The High Tide of Liberalism |
9 The Totalitarian Trap |
10 The Cold War West |
11 Battle in the Heartland |
12 The Failure of Universalism and the Future of Western Identity |
Notes |
Index |