What is the West, and can it survive?

Ed writes:

You describe Israel as a Western nation. I’m tangentially curious: do you mean “Western” primarily in the sense of being ancestrally and ethnographically derivative from Europe? Or are you thinking more in terms of Western “values,” i.e., moral restraint?

If the former, then it seems that Israel is no more Western an outpost of Europe than Estonia or Uruguay. After all, many Israelis are originally from Russia and eastern Europe. If it’s moral restraint and rule of law (things for which Russia is not known) that make Israel Western, then there’s the question of how much of that is forced upon them exogenously by realpolitik necessity. By any objective standard, is Israel really any less of a banana republic (e.g., it’s had its fair share of turnover in prime ministers) than other non-Anglo quadrants of the Big West?

Ceuta and Melilla drew far less attention and wrath than Israel does. Would you say that that’s in part because Spain is perceived as less “Western” (or, at least, less in-your-facely Western) than Britain and the U.S. and therefore more acceptable to Muslims? If those two outposts were under real mortal attack the way Israel is, would you readily rally to their side in the name of defending the West?

LA replies:

It is a Western nation because it is a liberal (though statist) democracy constituted of free individuals, because it is Western in its mores and standards. The keynote of Western society is individuality and individual rights, along with a great emphasis on reason, science, etc. This began with the two parent civilizations of the West, ancient Israel and ancient Greece. In the Hebrew Bible, there is an emphasis on the individual soul encountering the divine (e.g. Abraham, Jacob), the individual soul in its psychological complexity (e.g. Jacob, David, Saul), that never existed before. In ancient Greece, you had the prototype of individualism in the hero (the ideal of the individual becoming, at least momentarily, “like a god”), in philosophy and science (the attempt by individual reason to understand nature), in democracy (society constituted of free individuals), and tragedy (the artistic expression of democracy, focused on the individual, his sufferings, and his choices between right and wrong). The Hebraic strand and the Greek strand came together in Christianity which then became the basis of the West.

To sum it up, what defines the West is the focus on the individual soul or psyche as (in Eric Voegelin’s terminology) the “sensorium of transcendence,” i.e., as the locus where transcendent truth is experienced and through which it is expressed, which in turn makes the individual person the representative of truth and therefore the focus of value and concern.

Ed then quoted me from a recent blog entry on Israel:

“One thing is clear, however: the United States, world opinion, and Israel’s own liberalism make it impossible for Israel to conduct a real war.”

It follows from this, in conjunction with your statement about transcendence, that the only way for Israel to conduct a real war is for it to cease to be a “Western” nation.

LA replies:

No, the answer is for the West including Israel to abjure and repent of its own liberalism, which is a decadent, suicidal form of Western transcendence.

- end of initial entry -

Ed writes:

In reply to my comments from the other week, you explained Israel’s Westernness chiefly by appealing to its ancient Biblical-era significance. This strikes me as a rather tangential—and surely ineffectual—defense, for it implies that only historically- and religiously-minded people (here we go again!) can see any compelling reason to support Israel in its present predicament.

I take the more mundane view is that Israel is a run-of-the-mill semi-western country; it’s only due to its highly abnormal situation that its relative Westernness is so noticeable.

Furthermore, appealing to Israel’s specific historic significance makes it harder to rally to the defense of Ceuta and Melilla against Muslim encroachment.

LA replies:

You’re making a valid point. Yes. Apart from the fact that Israel shares in the philosophical/spiritual experience of individuality in relation to the transcendent that I was defining as the essence of Westernness, Israel is also pragmatically and civilizationally a part of the concretely existing West.

I agree with you that the latter matters and should not be ignored. However, the latter would not be true unless the former were also true. You see my point? The West is not just a “thing,” it is not just a geographical area, and it is not just a collection of shared political, economic, and military interests. What makes the West the West is a shared spiritual experience.

Singapore and Japan are modern, but they are not Western, because they don’t share that Western spiritual basis.

Now I know you don’t like anything labeled spiritual or religious. So for you we could define the quality that defines Westernness as the experience of the individual person as a rational knower of truth. The political result is the same: the articulation of society in terms of the individual.

As for defending Spain’s enclaves in Africa, Centa and Melilla, why is that a problem? Pragmatically the West consists of the Western countries plus the areas under Western cultural control and influence.

Mark P. writes:

You responded to Ed’s question about whether Israel can only defend itself if it ceased to be Western with the following:

No, the answer is for the West including Israel to abjure and repent of its own liberalism, which is a decadent, suicidal form of Western transcendence.

But isn’t this “decadent, suicidal form of Western transcendence” a direct outgrowth of the things you listed in the first paragraph that defined Western civilization? If so, then how did we end up with the suicidal form of liberalism?

I bring this up only because it seems we’ve moved away from treating liberalism as a natural outgrowth of Western Civilization to doing what Ann Coulter does…treat liberalism as some malignant force imposed upon us from the outside.

Of course, I could be wrong.

LA replies:

There is no escape from the problem of existence. Read the Nichomachian Ethics. All good things have their excessive and decadent forms which are to be avoided. I don’t think I’ve ever treated liberalism as a malignant force imposed from the outside. Modern liberalism is a decadent or hypertrophied form of Westernness that has taken over the West. It’s a flaw within the West that the West must heal.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 07, 2006 07:23 PM | Send