Is 'Western civilization' a real thing or a brand?: Category critics

The relay race that wasn’t

Columbia needed a reason. Twenty million dead. Veterans coming home. The faculty designed a course that explained why — a narrative from Athenian democracy through Roman law to the American republic, as if the whole thing were a relay race and the baton had never been fumbled or carried by someone the syllabus forgot to mention.

We traced the intellectual genealogy. What we found is a concept younger than jazz. Herodotus did not think he belonged to Western civilization. He thought he was Greek. The Romans did not share a civilization with the Germanic tribes they fought for centuries. The medieval Europeans who received Aristotle through Arabic translation understood themselves as Christians reading a pagan philosopher mediated by Muslim scholars. The category that organized their world was Christendom, not the West.

The civilizational defenders say the tradition invented self-criticism. The Mohist school in China critiqued Confucian orthodoxy in the fifth century BCE. Buddhist philosophy subjected received categories to radical questioning two millennia before Descartes. The Mu’tazila in Baghdad championed rational inquiry against scriptural literalism in the ninth century. Self-criticism is not a Western invention. It is a human capacity the syllabus claims as proprietary by not assigning the competition.

The selective inheritors want to keep the texts and ditch the property line. But the property line is not incidental. The texts were assembled to create the impression of continuous civilization.

Where we concede ground: We have been better at dismantling the old syllabus than building a coherent alternative.

What would change our mind: Students in a Western Civ curriculum developing stronger critical thinking than those in a deconstructed alternative.

Read the full synthesis: Is Western civilization a real thing or a brand?