WHY STUDY WESTERN CIVILIZATION?

First, globalization is a genuine phenomenon fully worthy of study, but to study it effectively, students need to know about Western Civilization. That’s because to a very high degree the globalized world is one that has been shaped by Western Civilization. Without the West’s advances in communications and transportation, any form of global civilization would be impossible. Studying the history of the West brings a student to grips, as nothing else can, with the roots, the shaping events, the underlying causes of the process and substance of globalization, indeed, of the creation of modernity itself.

Second, Western Civilization has transformed the human condition. This remains invisible or at best gropingly understood by students who have had no chance to study systematically the rise of the West, which brings into focus better than anything else the origins and development of a sophisticated worldwide marketplace; an impersonal, rule-based bureaucracy; the scientific outlook; modern medicine, lengthened life-spans, democracy and constitutionalism, and the massive increase in material abundance.

Third, America is part of Western Civilization. We thus cannot understand ourselves except against the background of Western Civilization, and at this point in history, we cannot understand Western Civilization without grasping America’s particular additions to it. The United States is one of the great theaters in which the West’s recent history has unfolded. Most American university students are Americans and ought to have the chance to learn of the origins of their culture and country.

Globalization and world history rightly understood provide new reasons for restoring a focus on Western Civilization, but these aren’t the only reasons to bring back the subject. Western Civilization is worth studying in its own right for its unique pattern of creativity.

The academic disciplines that we work with, including the individual sciences, are almost all Western creations. Many of humanity’s highest achievements in philosophy, engineering, and the arts are Western. The study of Western history can hardly proceed without coming to terms with its catalog of disastrous decisions and great follies too, but the abiding reason to study the West is that the West continues to matter.

It has shaped and continues to shape the world politically, economically, intellectually, legally, and aesthetically. The worst tyrannies of our time, even in the non-Western world, are typically rooted in Western ideas. Think of Mao’s, Kim Il-Sung’s, and Pol Pot’s appropriation of Marxism, and the Arab

Baathist movement founded by Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Bitar in emulation of Robespierre and the Jacobin and Fascist conceptions of national unity. This is not to limit the case for studying the history of the West to the argument that it is a key to understanding “the Rest,” but to say that the West is a powerful and complex phenomenon that demands elucidation. Students who are left with scant knowledge of Western Civilization are ill-equipped to make sense of their own lives or the world around them.