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Humility as the key to the West’s success
The Realist, writing at The Inverted World, discusses a unique and formative characteristic of the West: humility. It is humility, he says, that enables Westerners, far more than members of other civilizations, to criticize themselves and admit that they are wrong, and so improve both themselves and their knowledge. Of course this self-critical tendency can be carried to destructive and suicidal extremes, as is the case with liberal guilt; as George Washington once wrote (see next entry), there is no guarantee against even the best idea or value being turned to bad purposes, and so it is with humility. But the humility and self-criticism are also the source of the West’s uniquely innovative and progressive spirit. The Realist, who is not a religious believer, relates these Western characteristics to Christianity and its faith in reason, and I think this is correct. What is unique about the Western people, starting with the parent cultures of the West, the ancient Hebrews and the ancient Greeks, is their orientation toward a transcendent truth. For all previous cultures, the divine was bound up with the visible cosmos, and society was organized to replicate, on the social level, the order of the cosmos. Reason as an independent faculty for the study of nature had not yet come into existence, and there was little room for independent self-criticism or innovation. The Hebrews first decisively broke free from this age-old cosmic orientation of the human race through the revelation of the Creator God:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep…. And God said, let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: And God divided the light from the darkness.Through his word God articulates the primal chaos into order, into a cosmos. Yet God himself remains outside the cosmos. The universe is made by God and partakes of God’s truth and goodness, and so is intelligible, but the universe is not itself God. The Hebrew revelation of the nature of reality thus accomplished two things: it said that the truth is above us, above the universe, which makes man humble, but it also made the universe meaningful as a revelation of God’s order and truth, and thus a legitimate area for study and cultivation. In a discovery parallel to that of the Hebrews, the Greek pre-Socratic philosophers broke with the primordial cosmic consciousness of the human race through the discovery of nature, physis, the ordering structure of existence, which can be apprehended through reason, nous, and communicated through logos, the principle of intelligibility and discourse. Thus began the first speculations about nature seen as an arrangement of impersonal and objective principles which could be known by reason, in place of the cosmos mythically apprehended as, say, the expression of a god killing his father and chopping up his body. Further elaborating the pre-Socratics’ discovery of nous as a human faculty that orients man toward a truth beyond man, Plato said that man lives in a tension toward the truth, coming closer to it or falling away from it, but cannot possess the truth. Plato’s insight is key both to Western man’s humility and his creativity.
James W. writes:
That Western Civilization contains the keys to moving beyond the limitations that all other civilizations have experienced is obvious through both the simplest comparisons or the most detailed. These are some distinctions: Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 21, 2007 10:16 AM | Send Email entry |