What Do Conservatives Mean by “Western Civilization”?

Culture is changing. Culture [has] always changed. Culture for the entire history of human civilization has been a fluid, evolving thing that is a response to the conditions that we live in. And so they want to take this mantle of culture. At the end of the day though, you know, it is very thin. And so the response that we have to have is again—it’s material. It’s class-based.” When it comes to AOC’s assertion that Western civilization is an unhelpful myth which must be put aside in favor of her materialist vision of politics, there are two seemingly contradictory truths to be held in tension: The concept of “Western civilization” really does lack a firm definition. I’m not pedantically referring here to the way that designers of Western civ curricula will inevitably quibble around the margins. Instead, I mean that there is no political program or set of moral beliefs that obviously follow any such curricula. Even as Western civilization defies precise definition, it is still immensely useful as an aesthetic signifier and rallying cry for people with very different philosophical precepts to nevertheless be united by their shared devotion to a set of practical policy goals. To be blunt, when conservatives appeal to “Western civilization,” they are referring to everything they like to ever come out of Europe and nothing they don’t like, with the line drawn by working backwards from predetermined ideological conclusions. To prove this point, we can observe the difficulty of selecting a representative group of Western thinkers and delineating between those we value for the sake of intellectual growth and those whose ideas we actually want to inform the moral and political conscience of our nation. This is to say, whom do we read for pedagogical purposes versus whom do we read but also lionize as integral to our civilizational self-understanding? Over the last several hundred years we might take Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Gramsci, Sartre, and MacIntyre as a representative set of intellectuals without which the Western canon could not be complete. And yet, for some of these thinkers their ideas have an ambivalent relationship at best to Rubio’s description of the West (Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Sartre) while others (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Gramsci) would be actively opposed to it. In MacIntyre’s case, he was a Catholic steeped in Thomism, yet also an avowed Marxist who wanted nothing to do with “the West”—MacIntyre may be on the syllabus, but does he get a building named after him? To take another edge case, we might ask: Is Russia part of Western civilization? On one hand, it’s impossible to imagine the canon without Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Andrei Rublev. Yet, Russia has always had an oppressive, autocratic government inimical to the freedom and equality integral to the West. Do thinkers who have upheld Russian authoritarianism such as Ivan Ilyin, Vladimir Lenin, and Alexander Dugin count as legitimate representatives of Western civilization? How can we be consistent in claiming all the Russians we like as part of the West while excluding all those we don’t? There are yet more yawning chasms of disagreement over the rightful heirs to the West (integralists, postliberals, neo-reactionaries), but suffice to say that, from a purely analytical perspective, this phrase is so capacious as to verge on meaningless. Does Western civilization lend itself to democracy and liberalism or authoritarianism and theocracy? All of the above, and then some. F.A. Hayek, noted libertarian economist, once described conservatives (Western civilization appreciators), in contrast to classical liberals, as being forced to resort “so frequently” to “mysticism” to defend their positions, a critique conservatives would do well to consider. Defenders of the West face a double bind. One option entails acknowledging that, by “Western civilization,” what’s really meant is Anglo-American classical liberalism, an admission which significantly truncates the horizon of acceptable discourse. The other is to embrace an understanding of Western civilization that is, to use a Chestertonian phrase, so open-minded that our brains fall out. While the former necessarily comes with certain self-imposed epistemic limitations, the latter creates an ouroboros situation where it’s not even clear why the West is worth preserving. One solution to this problem is to take Christianity specifically as the essence of Western civilization—preferring terms like Christendom, Christian civilization, and Judeo-Christian civilization which strike nearly the same tone but with greater clarity. Morally, at the heart of these various phrases is a Christian humanism that can be summarized by two contentions. First, that persons cannot be reduced to their material circumstances or biological functioning and therefore cannot be absolved of moral responsibility. Whether God worked through Darwinian evolution or some other means, we are not merely animals as such but beings imprinted with the image of divinity (imago dei) and thus possess free will and moral responsibility. The second follows from the first: that collectivism, whether communist or fascist, is categorically wrong because it treats persons as means to the end of a better world instead of ends in themselves. This all having been said, there is a sense in which the capaciousness of Western civilization is actually a strength rather than a weakness. While terms like Christian humanism or Christian civilization may be preferable, the truth is that these terms are not broad enough to sustain the ecumenism necessary for a broad political movement. This is evident by the fact that donors are not rushing to empty their wallets in defense of “Christian humanism,” and if someone wants to support “Christian civilization” they will probably just donate to their church. “Western civilization,” in contrast, functions as a Rorschach test to many different groups: to libertarians, anti-collectivism and small government; to foreign policy hawks (like Rubio), a means of uniting disparate nations against a common foe; to Christians, a positive reference to their spiritual heritage; and to Jews, a way to relate to European civilization that respects their contributions without asking them to convert. Each of these groups is attracted to the idea of Western civilization from different philosophical precepts, yet in practice arrive at many of the same conclusions. There are others in the conservative movement who, without necessarily being religious, still ascribe to something close to the imago dei—a perspective which leads them to be good coalition partners, if not coreligionists. C.S. Lewis once analogized Christianity to a house with a hallway connecting to many rooms, the hallway representing “mere Christianity” and the rooms particular denominations. A similar analogy could be drawn for Western civilization, where one should not be a Western civilizationist as such, but rather acknowledge their particular beliefs under the roof of Western civ. There’s something to be said about this conception of Western civilization as mirroring the notion of “fusionism” known to many on the center-right. The more one studies the history of National Review and its founder, Bill Buckley, along with Frank Meyer, Brent Bozell, Russell Kirk, and others, the more one realizes how stark the disagreements among these people were over the meaning of Western conservatism. Nevertheless, they persisted in their coalition because it was apparent that, whatever their differences, there was more to unite than to divide them. The same could be said of the American founding, whose laborers included orthodox Christians, heterodox Christians, and deists—and yet, even from significantly different starting points, they still designed a form of government currently in operation longer than any other. Whether we’re discussing the idea of Western civilization or the essence of America, it works better in practice than in theory. In conclusion, Western civilization deserves two cheers, not for its clarity of meaning but for its usefulness. Even so, Christians must bear in mind the ways in which their religion is and is not synonymous with Western civilization—recalling how in St. Augustine’s own time he witnessed the demise of Rome, and yet did not despair owing to his faith in God. Amen.