The much-maligned Western Civilization
... and why we should push back against "anti-whiteness," "wokeness," and "diversity"---
One of the very first core courses I attended as a freshman at a NY state community college in the early 70s addressed the history of Western Civilization. One definition of the course “rationale” is as follows:
This survey course introduces students to political, economic, military, religious, and cultural developments of the ancient, medieval, and early modern periods that constitute the foundation for the modern West. It is a required prerequisite for upper-level courses in European history, and it may also fulfill a portion of the General Education requirement.
Being a product of the old conservative Greek high school curriculum (which is now dead and buried) I was ahead of the class of mainly American-born students. And by happy coincidence, our instructor was a Greek-American whose family originated in Sparta of Leonidas and his 300 fame, which prevailed over Athens during the catastrophic Peloponnesian War (431 to 405 B.C.) to rise as the most powerful city state in the Ancient Hellas of that period.
Western Civilization I and II I enjoyed greatly because, apart of the Ancient Greece component, it was the grand tour of cultural and political European history all the way to our modern times. Western Civ thus became the foundation of a ten-year-long university education with History as its core subject.
Beginning in the 1960s, however, the European-American academic landscape was being gradually usurped by the rising cult of looney Left “progressivism,” complete with a relentless assault on ancient, and more recent Western, wisdom, product of the massive civilizational contribution of “dead white men.”
Campus radicals, whose early ranks comprised overwhelmingly white “justice warriors,” engaged in serial outbursts of frightening self-flagellation and adopted a take-no-prisoners totalitarian strategy against anything and anyone
that would dare stand in their way.
In time, the 60s radical influences morphed into a war of mass destruction
upon anything and everything that is defined as “white privilege” and a product of the “criminal minds of the white aristocracy.”
To add fuel to this deranged onslaught, the last decade or so has further broadened the field of battle; “activists” have transformed sexual and “gender”
deviance
to the status of the guiding political imperative of “social progress” and must-have “equity” to be imposed upon Western societies via a multifaceted campaign of strongarm cultural subversion, relentless online propaganda, and “anti-racist” political/social blackmail.
This latest whirlwind has only intensified the ugly war against “dead white men” thinking and, as an offshoot, it is fuelling, among others, the current vast socio-political divisions that threaten specifically the United States with a second civil war.
In a previous post, I outlined the impact of “wokeness,” “equity,” etc. in the United States that has graduated into a raging epidemic
against
common sense,
the imperative of suppressing rampant criminal violence (disproportionally produced by ‘oppressed minorities’),
the urgent need to quash left-progressivism on campus,
the need to combat the type of all-round left “looney” liberalism that blights life in both America and Western Europe,
the critical imperative to combat illegal immigration and the “woke” attack on national protected borders,
and the elevation of all forms of sexual deviance masqueraded, as “normal” and “acceptable,” to the rank of “global human rights” protected by both international and state statutes.
Western Civilization bruises the maniacal “woke warriors,” who possess precious nothing to display beyond claiming (incorrectly) that deep black Africa was once a brimming civilizational hub that actually gave Europe the tools to become the world’s commanding intellectual/scientific/political center of gravity.
With the exception of Ancient Egypt, and the rest of the North African rim plus, to a certain extend, Ethiopia, black Africa has produced no persistent civilizations — a fact that should be obvious by, among others, its current, rather brittle, state of politics and society.
Mary Lefkowitz has already debunked the myth that European civilization “was born” in black Africa via her seminal Not Out of Africa, a book that should be required reading for all the black-white-and-in-between “woke” and their fellow travelers.
Further reading
Academics seeking promotion at UCL told to overhaul courses to limit the number of 'dead white men'
Academics seeking promotion at one of the country’s leading universities have been told they should overhaul courses to limit the number of “dead white men”.
Researchers applying for any teaching roles at University College London (UCL) should “engage” with the institution’s Liberating the Curriculum initiative and be prepared to "demonstrate the impact" of this.
According to an internal university guidance document, titled UCL Academic Careers Framework, this is listed as a core requirement for those applying for lecturer roles.
It says that all academic, research and teaching staff are expected to demonstrate “at least some core activities” when applying for a promotion.
The document explains that an "indicator of impact" could be either introducing new or making “substantial” revisions to old modules in response to student feedback.
SEE FULL REPORT [best accessed via Firefox browser]
Our New Year’s resolution should be to stop cancelling dead white men
It is mind-boggling that some of the most elite institutions of higher learning are now to minimise exposure to Western civilisation
Growing up Jewish and a girl, I was immersed in a cultural inheritance created almost entirely by people either unlike me, or opposed to me: Christian men, of which a fair number were anti-Semites and sexists. But does that mean I’d have been better off not reading or watching or engaging in the works of these white, Christian, patriarchal thinkers and writers, the architects of Western civilisation? Absolutely not.
Reading Dickens, Trollope, Shakespeare, Aristotle, Plato and the Bible (OK, I only ever managed a few pages of that) might not always have been rip-roaring fun, but the Western canon, a peerless body of work, was essential for helping me forge both a moral and intellectual universe. Obviously you can be a good person without ever picking up a book, or by ignoring Western civilisation entirely, but it is a shame to miss out on this incredible inheritance.
It is therefore mind-boggling that some of the most elite institutions of higher learning in the world are now trying to minimise exposure to it, citing their revulsion at work by the déclassé category known as “dead white men”. Last week, it emerged that academics seeking promotion at University College London are being told to demonstrate commitment to limit the number of “dead white able-bodied men”, as the internal document put it, on their reading lists, through engagement with the university’s Liberating the Curriculum initiative.
SEE FULL REPORT [best accessed via Firefox browser]
He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?
Dan-el Padilla Peralta thinks classicists should knock ancient Greece and Rome off their pedestal — even if that means destroying their discipline.
In the world of classics, the exchange between Dan-el Padilla Peralta and Mary Frances Williams has become known simply as “the incident.” Their back-and-forth took place at a Society of Classical Studies conference in January 2019 — the sort of academic gathering at which nothing tends to happen that would seem controversial or even interesting to those outside the discipline. But that year, the conference featured a panel on “The Future of Classics,” which, the participants agreed, was far from secure. On top of the problems facing the humanities as a whole — vanishing class sizes caused by disinvestment, declining prominence and student debt — classics was also experiencing a crisis of identity. Long revered as the foundation of “Western civilization,” the field was trying to shed its self-imposed reputation as an elitist subject overwhelmingly taught and studied by white men. Recently the effort had gained a new sense of urgency: Classics had been embraced by the far right, whose members held up the ancient Greeks and Romans as the originators of so-called white culture. Marchers in Charlottesville, Va., carried flags bearing a symbol of the Roman state; online reactionaries adopted classical pseudonyms; the white-supremacist website Stormfront displayed an image of the Parthenon alongside the tagline “Every month is white history month.”
Padilla, a leading historian of Rome who teaches at Princeton and was born in the Dominican Republic, was one of the panelists that day. For several years, he has been speaking openly about the harm caused by practitioners of classics in the two millenniums since antiquity: the classical justifications of slavery, race science, colonialism, Nazism and other 20th-century fascisms. Classics was a discipline around which the modern Western university grew, and Padilla believes that it has sown racism through the entirety of higher education. Last summer, after Princeton decided to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from its School of Public and International Affairs, Padilla was a co-author of an open letter that pushed the university to do more. “We call upon the university to amplify its commitment to Black people,” it read, “and to become, for the first time in its history, an anti-racist institution.” Surveying the damage done by people who lay claim to the classical tradition, Padilla argues, one can only conclude that classics has been instrumental to the invention of “whiteness” and its continued domination.
Classics Can Stay in its Cozy Cave of Whiteness While the Rest of Us Move On
Note: This is a superb specimen of virulent “woke” attack on the Classics as “An antiquated, elitist, domain that belongs to and serves White people.”
It is a VLR (Very Long Read) but you should persist to the very end to get a full sense of how deeply and virulently hateful the white “woke” and “equity warriors” are toward their own kind.
And, unsurprisingly, this brilliant culture warrior is Canadian!!
Two weeks ago at an outdoor event organised by Toronto’s X-University’s Pow Wow, a volunteer asked my husband and I what we were teaching. My husband answered for himself and then said I taught Classics. “Well no”, I said. “I teach History”. The truth is, Classics is not a tag I like to wear.
I often say I was not meant to land where I am right now. I am Québécoise and a first generation university graduate. I grew up in the suburb of Québec city and was raised by a kickass stay-at-home mom and a wonderful dad who was the manager of a supermarket. My grandparents belong to families of farmers and train drivers. All of them are French settlers whose ancestors migrated to Québec in the mid-1600s. My whole family still resides in Québec city. To this day, no one else in my entire family tree has a graduate degree. I paid for my studies by getting a small loan, working several jobs and getting merit-based scholarships. If I am sharing these details, it is because my positioning had a direct impact not only on the type of work I do, but also on my relationship to Classics. The same can be said of my academic trajectory, which mostly took place between Québec and France.
Québec’s higher education system is very different from what exists elsewhere in Canada and in the USA. It is a bit more aligned with the French system, especially when it comes to disciplinary compartmentalization, international networks and, crucially, affordability: I used to pay 2,000$/year in school fees in Québec; it used to cost 50 Euros a year (yes, only 50 Euros!) to audit classes at the EPHE in Paris, and I don’t even remember paying any fees at the Sorbonne nor at the EHESS.
… and a counterpunch
In praise of dead white males
Freud, Marx and Nietzsche continue to shape our world.
In an age when ‘white’ and ‘male’ have sometimes become terms of abuse in political discourse, especially at its most base level – on campus and online – it would take a brave soul to claim that three dead, white men from the 19th century remain some of the most significant figures in the Western world today. Yet that is what Bettany Hughes has been doing in her current BBC Four series Forward Thinkers: How, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud Shaped the Lives of Millions.
‘Their ideas shaped the lives of millions in the 20th century, and in the 21st they still have exponential influence’, explains Hughes. ‘From pop songs to global economics to our attitudes to sex, the theories and aphorisms of these three dead white males underpin everyday experiences.’ Sigmund Freud’s concepts of ‘the pleasure principle’ and ‘wish-fulfilment’ live on in US advertising culture, while his affirmation of the normalcy of the abnormal has facilitated progressive gender politics. Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw moral relativism and the crisis of authority after the ‘death of God’, while his exhortation that ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ resonates in boardroom and self-help culture, encouraging us to accept failure as intrinsic to success.
Then there is Karl Marx, who was pronounced finished after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet, in the age of austerity politics, Marx’s appeal has undergone a resurgence, as epitomised in Europe by Yanis Varoufakis. In Britain, Paul Mason’s book PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future has clearly touched a nerve, and, in the first part of Hughes’ series, Mason explains how ‘exploitation’ within ‘the capitalist system’ occurs through the expropriation of surplus value. Mason’s book, like Thomas Piketty’s Capital, has seemingly made orthodox Marxist criticism of capitalism respectable again.