What is the West?

VFR’s American-English, formerly leftist, counter-culturalist (and a big Dylan fan) reader writes (and please note that many further comments have been posted below his initial comment):

Reading your blogs and readers’ views about the West and the threats to it, I think what we now need is a more detailed and clarified definition of the West, past, present, and future. Many Muslims might argue they are upholding many of the West’s traditional views on morality, free speech, religious (in)tolerance, etc. And should we be invoking past Western moral values and political views on our “defense” of the West and how far back do we go? And how do the Left and Countercultural movements (and they are not the same thing though they can overlap) fit in both historically and in your future rejuvenated West. Or Neo-Nazi and Religious Right movements for that matter? I am currently watching a TV series on the Romantic Poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, Byron, Keats) who were in part drug users, sexual rebels, anti-Christians, anti-Democrats etc. These are our greatest modern Western poets. How do they fit in? What is this thing we are talking about, the West? Can non-white majorities produce a Western society? And so on and so forth. I can think of many other points I would like to be clarified. I think an article from you on this would be helpful for all of us.

Another reader (who is also VFR’s occasional French translator) replies:

Your American-English, formerly leftist, counter-culturalist Dylan fan raises an interesting question. I’m looking forward to your response. Two quick thoughts come to mind. First, these gifted artists were products of the intellectual foment of our great Western cultures—English, Italian, French, German, American, etc. Yes, of course they were flawed men, but they were free to flourish and to enrich the general populations of these cultures. Reading such men permitted standards in our schools to be constantly raised (until the counterculture brought them crashing down). They deepened our poetic sensibilities. Mozart had defects but I cannot imagine the world without Mozart. He would not have flourished under Sharia Law which would have forbade operas such as Così Fan Tutte (about infidelity) or Don Giovanni (about an unrepentant seducer) or The Magic Flute (freemasonry!). Michelangelo spoke openly of homosexuality—would he have been allowed to do that under Islam? In the West we learned to accept the flaws of our creative geniuses because they gave us so much that was valuable. We must not judge the West by the personal defects of its artists, but by the seemingly endless outpouring of poetry, literature, music, art, science, architecture, ideas, philosophies and religious feelings that have until the last century given us so many reasons to live.

Secondly, I compare a nation to a family. A family protects its own. Family members may have their flaws, some of them fatal, that is true, but the family locks the front door at all times. The family does not allow outsiders to march in, rob and take over. So a nation must prevent aliens from walking in and taking over.

He asks, “Can non-white majorities produce a Western society?” Geographically, yes, spiritually, no. When the Turks took over Anatolia, did they produce a Greek society? Of course not.

I’m surprised that a counter-culturalist (former or otherwise) is concerned that our poets took opium. He sounds almost prudish!

Many comments have been sent about this thread. I haven’t had time to address the main question about what is the West:

One reader writes:

Of course this guy is watching a program that emphasizes the decadent aspects of these men. Modern pop culture idolizes and deifies drug addicts and sexual deviants. Magnifying these flaws in great artists of the past justifies what has now become an agenda of the counterculture.

Another:

A good question. And the follow-up of can non-white majorities create the West? another good question. But the second one brings another question—“what is ‘white’“? Did the barbarians of the German steppes or the British Isles create the “west” or was the “west” brought to them? [LA answer: Neither. The West was the merging of the barbarian cultures with the Christian and classical traditions.]

Paraphrasing Belloc, the West is Christianity (and specifically, Catholicism). And as Christianity/Catholicism goes, so goes the West. Much like Byzantium was the Orthodox. And as the Orthodox declined (while Islam rose) so went the middle east.

Another:

Since you put it out there I think a good idea would be to have a sort of “What is the West?” essay contest. I’m sure you can think of an appropriate prize. Here’s my entry, gua- ranteed not to win. Your reader asks:”Can non-white majorites produce a Western society?” The answer is no, absolutely not. Experience tells me that, and I’ll leave the wrestling to the “I.Q. and the Wealth of Nations” crowd vs. Jared Diamond and his minions.

Another:

In response to your leftist correspondent from England, and his questions and comments about the preservation of the West, he is a bit confused isn’t he?

First, he is hopelessly provincial. He associates “the West” with his own proclivities, prejudices, desires, and experience. He cannot get outside of himself to grasp how his own experience is part of, and a reflection of, something greater and more transcendent than his own particular parochial concerns.

His misunderstanding of the West—and all civilizations and cultures—is exemplified in this comment:

“Many Muslims might argue they are upholding many of the West’s traditional views on morality, free speech, religious (in)tolerance, etc. And should we be invoking past Western moral values and political views on our “defense” of the West and how far back do we go?”

Your correspondent associates the West with certain epiphenomena (which he gets wrong), with which he is obsessed, and misses the point of a culture’s organic growth through history, the central experiences that contributed to that growth, and the ideas and values that coalesced around those experiences. He therefore views the West as a set of propositions to be set against other sets of propositions (for example, those of Muslims).

Cultures and civilizations are not based on propositions. Perhaps the belief that they are is a reflection of our ideological age. Rather, cultures and civilizations are organic, and the laws, religions, and cultural expressions of a civilization grow naturally out of the shared experience of the people. If that doesn’t happen, a civilization either doesn’t take root, or it disintegrates in confusion. The very existence of a civilization is proof that it did happen, at least at one time.

The re-invigoration of a civilization can’t be based on the imposition of a set of propositions or beliefs. It is, rather, the re-affirmation of a shared history and experience, the proclamation that we are “a people.” Any propositions associated with a civilization come out of that proclamation, they do not produce it in the first instance.

This is why the West had the confidence and breadth and energy to encompass the Romantic poets mentioned by your correspondent, as well as Mozart, Whitman, Van Gogh, Da Vinci, Raphael, Goya, Flaubert, etc. The list could go on forever.

The best way to define the West is by its experience and the various expressions—political, artistic, commercial, religious, communal—of that experience. If society becomes detached from that experience, or alienated from it, then the civilization becomes confused and begins to disintegrate. It is hardly helpful to the preservation and conservation of that experience, and its associated consciousness, to import millions of aliens who do not share the experience, have no interest or stake in it, and in fact are hostile to it.

A follow up from the same reader:

One small point that occurred to me regarding your correspondent’s questions about the West, and our earlier discussions about positivism and the fact/value distinction.

Your correspondent asks:

“And how do the Left and Countercultural movements (and they are not the same thing though they can overlap) fit in both historically and in your future rejuvenated West.”

He is correct, they are not the same thing. The “left” is usually associated with a particular political bias and consciousness, arising during the French Revolution, and expressing itself in various ways, either as liberalism, socialism, or communism. More generally, these movements are associated with an historical consciousness and “Progress.”

The so-called “countercultural movements,” however, may be considered as a reaction of a particular generation against an educational bias toward positivism, rationalism, objectivity, and detachment (of which the fact/value distinction is a part). It could be read as a reaction against Scientism, a consciousness that had crept into the culture over a period of a 100 years.

The counter-culture’s remedy to this positivism was: “All we need is love.”

Both rationalism and spirituality are part of the Western experience. It is a subject in itself to consider how the West has accommodated both. Not all cultures have achieved this mix, and the tensions between these forces in the West continue to this day.

But, one could not delete either element—either rationalism or spirituality—and still have the West.

I do not intend to intimate that the West can be reduced to the mere categories of rationalism or spirituality. It is much bigger than that. But, these categories help, I think, to clarify the place of the so-called “counter-culture.”

LA replies:

One way of stating this would be that the left has two sides, the Rationalist, as represented by Voltaire, and the Romantic, as represented by Rousseau, the second partly a reaction to the first.

Another way of stating it is Seraphim Rose’s second stage of Nihilism, Realism (materialist reductionism), versus his third stage of Nihilism, Vitalism (Nietzsche is one example, Fascism another, hipsters another, hippies another, the contemporary cult of movement and excitement another), which arises in reaction against Realism without challenging its underlying denial of transcendent truth.

The same reader writes back:

I like your analysis better than mine.

“Vitalism” is better than “spirituality,” and you tie it all together within a larger schema of Nihilism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 31, 2006 10:12 PM | Send