By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
In the intellectual
tradition now designated as "Western," there is no literature before the
late nineteenth century analyzing a civilization, culture, society, or
political alliance, called the West. As we found out, there are no books
describing the relation of the West to the rest of the world, nor prophesying
its decline, nor narrating its historical development, nor constructing a
university curriculum or a course of reading based on its books. The West as a
theoretical tool is thus a phenomenon little over a century old within
"Western thought" itself (although it had emerged elsewhere somewhat
earlier as we shall see.)
What is surprising as
well, the West as a category has received little attention, despite its being a
fundamental term of useage and despite the range of
its meanings. Thus Jan Ifversen wrote in his 2004 "Who are the
Westerners?": Compared to the impressive amount of studies on the concept
of Europe, the concept of Africa or that of the Orient, very little is written
on the concept of the West. We can find many works on the idea of the West. But
they typically deal with the core values of the West and do not question the
chosen term or venture into more semantic reflections. (4-5)
Assumed as given, the
West has remain almost unnoticed in dictionaries of social and political ideas,
rarely appears in indices of books, and typically is not featured in series
examining critical vocabulary. 1
Yet there are some
recent signs that this situation is changing. For example, while Raymond
Williams does not have an entry on the West in the original 1976 version of his
Keywords, it appears in the revised edition of 1985; the author claims that
"now" it has interesting uses (333).2 A new awareness of the West as
a theoretical object is signaled more strongly by the 2005 New Keywords: A
Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, where it is the object of a
substantial entry by Naoki Sakai and Meagan Morris, who call it "a fairly
recent mythical construct," and observe that "the unity that [the
term] affirms has increasingly been challenged in recent decades" (38).
Likewise Luisa Passerini argues in her 2002 discussion of the idea of Europe,
"From the Ironies of Identity to the Identities ofIrony,"
that "the concept of 'The West,' which includes Europe and North America
and particularly the United States, is ambiguous and conflictual. For this
reason it deserves further investigation in order to clarify the aporiae and contradictions that historically have been at
the base of the European identity" (202).
But these are still
exceptions. Because there is little awareness that the West is a recent mode of
conceptualization, scholars use the term in ways that very often produce
anachronistic readings, for they impute it to older texts without being
conscious of the need for semantic or conceptual translation.
Perhaps now is the
time to ask about the West. In the last decade or so, there have been
increasing indications that the usefulness of the idea of the West is being questioned."What is the 'West'?" is now being
asked with greater frequency, within and without the academy that is. Still,
most who pose it, such as Jeffrey Hart in an article of that title, lack
awareness of the problematic nature of the term. When he asks "What is the
'West'?", he means: what is the essence of the West, what is the best way
of describing it "that would reach deeply into the unique essence of the
Western mind, explaining, at least in part, the astounding success and
transforming energy that have made the West supreme among the various powers of
the earth" (1)? Hart's project therefore is continuous with the voluminous
literature on the West that intends to explain its unique characteristics, its
dominant role in world history, and its pre-eminent position among world
cultures. The question of the West's superiority is inseparable from the
concept of the West itself it seems(and something we woll
discover further below). To ask the question, however, is not to be conscious
of the West as a conception; indeed, to ask the question seems precisely to
foreclose such self-consciousness. How Hart poses the question must be
distinguished, therefore, from the approach of a growing number of commentators
who are examining the usefulness or validity of essentializing ideas about the
West, such as Hart's own notion of "the unique essence of the Western
mind."
A critical
examination of the category, therefore, must be distinguished from a critical
analysis of the West's nature. The real counterpart to Hart's project of
identifying the inner meaning of the West's unique success would be the project
of identifying the inner meaning of the West's unique evil, which poses such
questions as according to Hitchens: "What is it in the Western soul that
thrills to violence and authority and fanaticism?" (Hitchens D7). Serge
Latouche's 1996 The Westernization of the World: The Significance, Scope, and
Limits of the Drive Towards Global Uniformity is a good example of such
anti-Westernism (or, sometimes, "Occidentalism"). Latouche argues
that, while any analysis of Westernization requires "at least a hypothetical
sketch of the essence of the West" (25), this essence cannot be found
within its geography, religion, philosophy, race, economy, or culture.
Instead: there
emerges a face unlike any known to us and which must infallibly astonish or
even frighten us: a very monster, half-mechanic, half-organic, which fits none
of our categories for the definition of species. The West appears to us a
living machine whose components are human beings, who give it its life and
strength but from whom it is autonomous: it moves through time and space at the
dictates of its own fancy. (26)
Other endeavors to
uncover the malign nature of the West include: Jalal Al Ahmad's Occidentosis: The Plague from the West, written in the
early 1960s, which, as the title suggests, treats Western culture as a
disease infecting Iran and Islam generally; Couze Venn's 2000 Occidentalism:
Modernity and Subjectivity, which considers the West as driven by the
imperialism of the Same; and David Rurst's
Westernism: an Ideology's Bidfor World Dominion,
which argues that "Westernism" is an ideology of secular humanism
competing for domination against other ideologies but carrying within itself
the seeds of cultural corruption (3).
Whether celebrating
or lambasting the West, these works seek to identify its essential spirit
without assessing its value as a category. I will argue that what I call
"critical accidentalism" departs from this style of cultural
criticism by its refusal to accept suchshort-circuiting
of critique, and by its demand that the West instead be analyzed as a theoretical
construct. The rest of the part assesses those works which either lay the
groundwork for, or demonstrate a critical Occidentalist
approach to, the meaning of theWest. They belong to a
diversity of fields, and, rather than constituting a coherent literature of
scholarship, they are united mainly by their individual authors' common
endeavor to bring the West into question.
The Political West
The most common
criticism of the West as a term questions its use to designate a single and
unified power or geopolitical entity. For example, Owen Harries argues in his
1993 Foreign Affairs article "The Collapse of 'The West'," that the
''political West" was synonymous with those countries belonging to NATO
(even though NATO identifies itself as ''North Atlantic" rather than
Western), and it has now lost its usefulness:
Over the last half
century or so, most of us have come to think. of "the West" as a
given, a natural presence and one that is here to stay. It is a way of thinking
that is not only wrong in itself, but is virtually certain to lead to mistaken
policies. The sooner we discard it the better. The political "West"
is not a natural construct but a highly artificial one. It took the presence of
a life-threatening, overtly hostile "East" to bring it into existence
and to maintain its unity. It is extremely doubtful whether it can now survive
the disappearance of that enemy. (41-2)
Harries believes that
the West still can name a common civilization, but not a geopolitical entity.
During the twentieth century, it had been employed as a description of
political alliances in the contexts ofWWI, WWII, and
the Cold War. Some of these alliances excluded nations Harries considers
culturally Western, such as Germany, and they glossed over important
differences and animosities, including those felt by European nations towards
each other and those felt by Europe towards the United States (48). Now, at the
end of the Cold War, America has found its interests diverging from those of
Europe, and it has embraced unilateralism as its foreign policy. Harries
concludes that the West is "a concept of the last resort," and that
it will not be needed until there is another common enemy. This echoes Agnes
Heller's claim already in 1991 that "the most superficial investigation
shows that the conceptual and geopolitical myth of the West has lost its
validity now that communism has collapsed" (qtd. in Gress 485).
More recent
commentators on foreign policy have likewise argued that shifting international
relations, especially in the context of September 11, have undermined the usefulness
of the term. Examples include: Alexander Rise, in his "What is this thing
we call the West?," written in the immediate aftermath of September 11,
2001; Gwynne Dyer, in his 2004 "'The West' an Idea Whose Time is
Gone"; and Niall Ferguson, in his 2005 "The Widening Atlantic."
All of them question the future possibility, and thus the enduring nature, of a
"political West" that is a geopolitical alliance consonant with
Western civilization or culture. More evidence that the unity of the West is no
longer being taken for granted can be discerned in the founding, in 1997, of a
Center for the Study of America and the West by the American Foreign Policy
Research Institute. The purpose of the Center is "to relate the teaching
of history to issues of American and Western identity," and it issues a
bulletin called "Watch on the West" to comment on "the meaning
of the West; the role of religion in shaping Western values and American
international attitudes; the West as a political entity; and the West as an influence
on American foreign policy." Its main concerns are with the future of what
began as an anti-totalitarian alliance between the United States and Western
European powers, and with defining enduring Western values.
Others, however, go
farther, raising more profound questions concerning the status of the idea of
Western civilization. Such contemporary critiques of the images, ideas, and
myths about the West have often been inspired by a prior and more substantial
critical literature examining received categories of culture and space as
Eurocentric. Stuart Hall and other cultural theorists argue that the
conventional terms of Western culture necessarily generate "Others"
and thus depend upon the construction of a "constitutive outside"
("Who Needs Identity?" 4-5).
And ofcourse then there is Edward Said's Orientalism: Western
Representations of the Orient, first published in 1978.
But while Orientalism
questions the category of the Orient as an Other through which the West has
apparently defined itself, it does not equally question the category of the
West. Said writes of the West as if it were a real entity, an intentional agent
that for its entire history objectified Others in order to strengthen its
identity and self-regard. In his calling for the deconstruction of the
construct of the Orient, he assumes that the West has acted as a constructor,
creating a false world in order to suppress or oppress what is outside of
itself.
But this leads Said
into an obvious contradiction. While accusing the West of essentializing the
East, he equally essentializes the West. He argues, for example, that the West
has made the Orient its "great complementary opposite since antiquity"
(58), and that there is a "Western style for dominating" (3). As
Dennis Porter observes in his "Orienta/ism and Its Problems," Said is
thereby claiming the "continuity of representation between the Greece of
Alexander the Great and the United States of President Jimmy Carter, a claim
that seems to make nonsense of history at the same time as it invokes it with
reference to imperial power/knowledge" (153). Said's essentialism leads
him to ignore "in both Western scholarly and creative writing all manifestations
of counter-hegemonic thought." 3
Orientalism 's
failure to employ the same critical apparatus to stereotypes of the West as it
does to stereotypes of the East is replicated by many of Said's followers in
postcolonial theory. For example, Ziauddin Sardar, in his 1999 Orientalism - a
study that is part of the Open University's Concepts in the Social Sciences
series - acknowledges the charge that Said has relied upon the kind of
essentialism he ostensibly opposes. Sardar dutifully observes that
"neither the West nor the Orient are monolithic entities: both are
complex, ambiguous and heterogeneous," and that ''the West itself was not
always 'The West'" (2).
Yet, in his own
analysis, he does not treat the West as something that is actually
"complex, ambiguous and heterogeneous," but instead as a singular
entity whose character has been stable through time. He confidently identifies
the motivations of all the Westerners who have written about the East as being
desires for superiority and for appropriation (15). Sardar writes, for example,
of ''the pathology of Oriental ism in the Western psyche" (1), based on
the longing of the "Western male" for the temptations of the
mysterious Oriental female, and of the will of the West as a whole towards the
denigration and domination of the East (2). Because it is merely the expression
of such pathological desires, "Orientalism then is the great lie at the centre of the Western civilization: a lie about the nature
of the West and about the nature of the great cultures and civilization to the
East of the West, a lie about Us and Them" (11). Although acknowledging
that his history of Western representations of the East is only a partial and
simplified one, then, Sardar asserts its essential truth: "But the detail
would add little to the concluding point: underlying the complexity of the
history of the West there is a continuity of stance to a necessary construct
that is called the Orient" (52). While his theoretical commitments appear
to necessitate a bow to heterogeneity, in practice Sardar presupposes a West
that is homogenous in nature.
This contradictory
treatment of the West is not untypical of postcolonial theory. Another example
can be found in the work of Balachandra Rajan, who in his Under Western Eyes: Indiafrom Milton to Macaulay warns that "India and the
West are enormous simplifications" (210), and yet who throughout the book
writes of the West as if it were a unified agent (Hegel ''traces a
psychological route that the West finds it difficult not to follow" [26]),
and as if it were motivated by malign intentions ("An ambivalent construction
of the Orient becomes necessary, in which Western morality can denounce what
Western cupidity continues to desire"[43]).
Since the publication
of Said's Orientalism, a whole literature has developed devoted to uncovering
the operation of other imaginary geographies dependent upon the logic of binary
oppositions. Larry WoUT's 1994 Inventing Eastern
Europe: the Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment argues that
the idea of Eastern Europe was invented in the eighteenth century in order to
construct the identity of Western Europe as being the true Europe. Maria Todorova
analyzes the idea of the Balkans in the same light, arguing that the region has
never been considered to be truly part of Europe and has always been subject to
the same sets of Orientalizing stereotypes as other areas named Eastern or
Asiatic; she calls this set of stereotypes "Balkanism." Similar
arguments are made concerning "Byzantinism," which Dimiter Angelov
defines as the "simplistic and negative assessment of Byzantine
civilization and of the Byzantine legacy in southeastern Europe by historians,
political scientists and publicists" (1). This style of critiquing. The
meaning of European conceptions of space has in turn been criticized by the
historian J.G.A. Pocock for its assumption that "constructed" or
"invented" categories are necessarily the expressions of a hegemonic
ideology. All geographical and political concepts are by definition
constructions, Pocock argues, yet they also might be related to lived
experiences that historians should attempt to understand and not merely judge
("Some Europes" 55-6). And, to extend
Pocock's observation into a question, doesn’t the equating of contruction with oppression seems to have blinded those who
have discerned the West's constructions of Others to the possibility that the
West might equally be constructed or invented?
In fact there is a
habit of writing about the West as if it were an agent of oppression, imposing
itself upon others by thinking of them as Others. Thus the Oriental, the
Eastern, the Balkan, and the Byzantine are identities that are done by the
West. But if the West is also constructed, who then would be the constructor?
This one-sidedness reveals
itself even in a work that includes what appears to be the first systematic
consideration of the West as a category. Stuart Hall's "The West and the
Rest: Discourse and Power," a chapter in the Open University 1992 text
Formations of Modernity, holds that there is a direct relation between economic
power and representation. Hall considers the West to be an "idea,"
one fundamentally synonymous with modernity, which has the special function of
classifying, representing, comparing and evaluating other societies in order to
rank them lower than the European (278). He argues that the production of the
West occurred during the early modem period, and that it produced in turn an
idea of "the modem" as Western domination. Unfortunately, Hall is not
exact about what terms were used in the historical texts he cites, and thus he
treats the West, modernity, and Europe as close synonyms. For example, when he
discovers textual evidence for a growing sense of European identity in the
early modem period, he takes this as evidence for a growing sense of Western
identity (289).
Following the
approach of Foucault, Hall identifies "the West and the Rest" as a
"discursive formation" that produces meaning and social practices
rather than an "ideology" that masks the true conditions of economic
production (291). Hall claims, accordingly, that the discourse of the West
cannot be reduced to mere economic interests.
Yet neither can it be
treated as "innocent," for it acts as a form of domination over
others (295). While complaining that the idea of the West employs stereotypes
that split the world into the more and less valuable, Hall himself employs
stereotypes that split the world into the dominating and the dominated.
Occidentalism
There is a recent
literature on "Occidentalism," or on negative representations of the
West, that brings into question discourse about the West, and not merely the
discourse of the West. While Hall treats the West as a discursive formation
that stereotypes others, this different approach examines how the West itself
is stereotyped in contemporary political and social analysis. The 1995
collection, Occidentalism: Images of the West, edited by James Carrier, is the
pioneering work of this literature. The contributors identify a number of ways
in which essentialized images of the West operate in contemporary discourse
both in Asia and the West. They argue that Western social scientists,
particularly anthropologists, have denigrated Western culture in their attempts
to engage with non-Western cultures, and that non-Western intellectuals have
employed simplistic representations of the West in order to valorize local
identities (viii-ix). In the 1997 New Literary History article
"Orientalism versus Occidentalism?", Wang Ning argues that;
while Occidentalism is still an "indeterminate and problematic 'quasi
theoretical' concept" and yet the object of specialized study, "its
ghost has already been haunting" various "Oriental countries."
Asian scholars indulge in Occidentalist stereotyping
when they seek to characterize the Western as alien (62). But, given the
interconnectedness of non- Western and Western academic life, treating the West
as the East's Other imposes a false distinction between the two, Ning claims
(66). But neither this author, nor the contributors to Occidentalism, question
the legitimacy of the West as a category of analysis. Their critique is
directed rather towards the set of negative representations or "stylized
images" of the West that obtain in a number of discourses (Occidentalism
1).
In a more polemical
style, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, in their 2004
Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, argue that Occidentalism
expresses a powerful ideology of hatred towards the West, one that dehumanizes
its object as much as Orientalism dehumanizes the East. The two authors trace
Occidentalism' s intellectual origins principally to the German reaction
against the French Enlightenment, but in addition to older European traditions
of hostility towards the city. The views of various groups opposed to the West,
including Russian Slavophiles, Nazis, Japanese nationalists, and radical
Islamicists, have a common source in anti-modernism within the West itself.
Present conflicts between the West and Islamicist groups such as Al-Qaeda do not
therefore represent so much a "clash of civilizations" as a
"cross-contamination, the spread of bad ideas" (149).
Buruma
and Margalit intentionally simplify history in order to highlight the dangers
of historical over-simplification. They attribute the anti-Westerism
they describe to feelings of hatred and humiliation, and therefore as lacking
any intellectual justification. Despite their reluctance to acknowledge that
criticisms of the West might be grounded in more than psychological states, the
authors successfully demonstrate the interconnectedness between seemingly
disparate national discourses, on the one hand, and fundamental differences
within seemingly unified national discourses, on the other. While they
correctly identify how the West has been used as a slogan for suspect political
purposes, they themselves often come close to sloganeering by overstating the
extent to which critics of Western (such as Dostoyevsky) would consider
themselves, or should be considered by us, to be the West's "enemies"
(98).
Robin D. Gill offers
a more reflective and nuanced assessment of Occidentalism in his 2004
Orientalism and Occidentalism: Is the Mistranslation of Culture Inevitable?
Gill shows the extent to which both those in the East and those in the West
employ both Orientalist and Occidentalist
stereotypes. He notes Said's binary opposition between the oppressive West and
the oppressed East, for example, and criticizes it for serving to reinforce the
notion of Oriental passivity. Gill's primary concern is the influence of what
he calls a "negative Occidentalist" outlook
in Japan, where, he argues, stereotypes about the West playa far more essential
role in the formation of national identity than do Orientalist views in Western
countries. As do the others who analyze Occidentalism, Gill wants to correct the
ways in which the West has been misrepresented, but unlike them he includes
both positive and negative ideas about the West as they are held by both
Westerners and non-Westerners (54-56).
The West and History
Because historians
should, and do, note the historicity of political vocabulary, it is not
surprising that a number of professional historians have had a critical
awareness of the West as an idea or term whose meaning has shifted over time.
For some, the history of the term allows for a more precise definition; for
some, it provides a neutral description of changing usage; and for others it
demonstrates the West's status as a mere invention or myth. Among the fiercest
critics of the West are a number of historians of Europe, who argue that the
category has mainly exclusionary purposes. Professional historians have another
motivation for their skepticism, for the West's meaning has been the central
concern of well-known speculative philosophers of history in the twentieth
century, such as Spengler and Toynbee.
Loren Baritz, in his 1960-61 American Historical Review article
"The Idea of the West," traces the history of the poetic and
religious meanings of the west as a direction, and how these influenced English
and American perceptions of national identity. In the early modern period, the
English took up the Roman theme of the westward "course of Empire" to
affirm their own right to rule the New World. For the Puritans, America was the
New Jerusalem in which God's light would now shine on humanity from the west (636),
fulfilling His purpose for humanity and signaling the end of times. In the
nineteenth century, the "opening" and settling of the West was the
Manifest Destiny of the United States; Thoreau, for example, wrote that
"only in America did the West exist," because only in America could
humanity be born anew (639). Baritz's history treats
the cultural meaning of the direction of the west up through the nineteenth
century rather than in the discourse of his contemporaries in the mid twentieth
century. Even so, his article uncovers some of the mythological and religious
dimensions that still surround the West, especially in the United States.
Also in the American
Historical Review in the early 1960s, Gerhard Masur's "Distinctive Traits
of Western Civilization: Through the Eyes of Western Historians," presents
an excellent overview of the history and nature of "universal history."
The conception of universal history, in his view, has been inseparable trom the rise of historical consciousness, the latter being
a distinctive trait of Occidental culture (591).
Historical
consciousness arose directly from the Christianity of Western Europe, which
thought of both humanity and time itself as purposeful wholes: the possibility
of a philosophy of history depends upon the assumption that "the meaning
of history is one, that it cannot be manifold, but must be single and
unique" (593).4 Masur observes that, even though the philosophy of history
has universal aims, it is actually "Europocentric," for it treats the
West as the agent and locus of world-historical meaning. Even Herder, who
wanted to give each world culture its due, "once more identified the
history of the West with that of the world" (596).
Masur argues that
"one can hardly speak of a history of Western civilization" prior to
the eighteenth century, because the conceptualization of history that it
involves was unavailable before that period; but he does not locate precisely
when it did become available (592). One problem is that he fails to distinguish
between the universal histories that were implicitly centered on European
history and comparative histories of civilizations that explicitly treated
the history of Western civilization in distinction from all others. As a
result, Mazur often attributes to various eighteenth- and nineteenth century
figures conceptions that they did not have. For example, he makes the following
claim: "Hence, in German thought we will not be surprised to find world
history once more identified with Western civilization. 'The most eminent place
of human culture and of national history is the Asiatic-European hemisphere,'
says Friedrich Schlegel" (597).
But, given that the
West depends upon a distinction the East, and that Europe depends upon a
distinction from Asia, Schlegel's "Asiatic-European hemisphere" can
hardly be considered to be equivalent to the West; it would be closer to what
is currently meant by the Northern hemisphere. And, as I will see later, the
use of "civilization" to signify a particular culture rather than a
universal condition only began in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and
there is no evidence in the quotation from Schlegel that he is employing it in
that way. 5
David Gress, in his
1998 From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents, is seemingly
more critical about the assumptions involved in the idea of the West than the
previous two authors, and more interested in uncovering its specific history. The
idea of the West most commonly found in higher education, Gress argues,
involves a "Grand Narrative" connecting ancient Greek origins to
modem science and liberal democracy through the progress of Great Books. This
Grand Narrative of the West, as relayed by the traditional curriculum of
American general education, is recent in origin, beginning with the cult of
Greece in German Romanticism. It was only institutionalized in the American
university during WW I, in order to forge a commitment of American soldiers to
the European cause. Gress does not dispute that there is an entity called the
West, but instead that the Grand Narrative gives a correct account of its
history. He wants to replace its incorrect emphasis on Hellenic sources with a
true narrative of the West, one centered on European political conflicts during
the Middle Ages. The West was forged out of the history of power struggles
rather than any tradition of high culture. Thus: "The West was never a
single entity that one could define neatly. . . various Wests coexisted,
defined in terms of different principles, regions, beliefs, and ambitions. The
West was not a single story, but several stories, most of which neither began
with Plato nor ended with NATO"(16).
Even while
acknowledging that "the West was never a single entity," Gress holds
that there is a true West, and that this is now threatened by cultural
corruption, engineered particularly by contemporary theorists. The attacks on
the Western tradition by exponents of postmodernism and deconstruction,
according to Gress, are derived from their "nihilism." Critical
theory is merely destructive, the successor of the "radical
Enlightenment's" triad of "rationalism, license, and
self-gratification" (as manifested by the French Revolution's Terror). The
authentic West, in contrast, finds expression in the "skeptical
Enlightenment's" triad of "reason, liberty, and prosperity"
(559).
Although Gress offers
an apt description of the Grand Narrative, and a useful account of the origins
of many of its assumptions, his own history is flawed. For one thing, he is
anachronistic in his use of the West, to the point of mistranslating nineteenth-century
texts, because he does not really consider the possibility that all our ideas
concerning the West might be recent in origin. While he correctly observes that
Spengler began writing just at the point where "Western elites were
starting to recognize themselves as Western and not just as 'civilization' tout
court, and were beginning to devise the Grand Narrative to explain and justify
being Western" (74), he does not consider the implications of his own
statement, namely that the West cannot be read farther back in time. While he
helpfully analyzes the Grand Narrative of the West as the product of a certain
moment in history (57), he does not consider that his own narrative has an
historical provenance in the nineteenth-century ideology of Teutonism,
which posited the centrality of the Germanic contribution to Europe. While he
wants contemporaries to use the West in a more conscious fashion by
understanding its history, he says that he disagrees with the historian Norman
Davies's criticism of the idea of the West without answering any of his points.
Gress's approach shows the weakness of thinking of the West as an
"idea": the issue for him is only whether or not the idea is
understood correctly. Gress even charges certain of those who have an
"incorrect" idea of the West with malicious intentions and with
promoting cultural corruption and nihilism.
Gress, therefore, is
not a reliable historian of the concept of the West. On the other hand, his
characterization of the standard history of the Western tradition as the Grand
Narrative is a helpful one, and it will be used in this study. His critique of
the Grand Narrative's claim that the ancient Greeks were the first Westerners,
is also effective; Gress observes that, while the Hellenic culture is part of
the legacy of Western civilization, so are a number of other cultures,
including those of medieval Islam and China. He argues that "the West was
more than the sum of these legacies, nor were the legacies necessarily
representative of the civilizations that spawned them" (75).
Historians of world
history, are also critical of received ideas about the West. The best known of
these is William H. McNeill, who has attempted through his work to supplant the
Eurocentric writing of history. In a later reflection on his 1963 The Rise of
the West; a History of the Human Community, McNeill writes that in it he had
intended "to turn Spengler and Toynbee on their heads": they both had
treated civilizations as separate entities, and he had wanted to demonstrate
that they were closely inter-related (Mythistory 57).
On the other hand, McNeill still seems to couple world history with the
progress of West em civilization, as the title of his
famous book suggests. But he claims that he had not meant by this to celebrate
the West's uniqueness as a source of cultural innovation. And, since then, he
has become even more convinced of the historical prevalence of "ecumenical
cosmopolitanism" rather than cultural autonomy (64).
In a 1997 article,
"What We Mean by the West," McNeill explores the separate question of
terminology. He notes that, as a direction, the west has had a number of quite
different valuations attached to it (as described by Baritz,
above), and that present uses have an enormous range of meanings: "What
the West means in a given context, therefore, depends entirely upon who is
invoking the term and for what purpose" (1). Nevertheless, the term always
serves to make a demarcation for the sake of cultural self-definition.
Again, as does Gress,
McNeill ends up claiming that there is an essential West despite its many
possible meanings, and it is characterized by liberty. He argues that the
political distinction of West from East originated in the Persian Wars, when
the Greeks distinguished their freedom from the slavishness of the Persians.
This ideal of freedom,''the republican spirit"
(2), was then passed down to Rome, and then to Renaissance Italy.
The Italians, who
employed ancient republican principles to counter current assertions of
imperial and papal power, became the cultural leaders of their time, having as
their project "nothing less than to organize the western promontory of the
Eurasian landmass into a single, integrated market economy through commerce,
specialized production ..." (3). While this ambition provoked the
religious backlash of the Reformation, the technological accomplishments of the
early modem period soon persuaded Europeans that they might be superior to both
the ancients and hostile powers in the East. Finally, the torch of Western
freedom was passed to the Anglo-French nations of the nineteenth century.
Republican virtue made England and France so successful that others, both in
Europe and outside, felt compelled to copy them: "And that, of course, was
the essence of the West - the Anglo-French West - that imposed itself on the
rest of the world between 1750 and 1914" (5). America during this period
gradually advanced to the level of ''the core European West," but still
felt itself to be separate culturally. It was WW I that caused the United
States to identify with Anglo-French traditions, and the "Western
Civ" course was born in American colleges. Its curriculum was later
challenged by legitimate demands for a more inclusive world history, but
McNeill argues that these were often "contaminated" by the
multiculturalist doctrine that all cultures are equally important (6).
W orId
history should concern itself with those unique "seats of innovation"
that are dominant in anyone period; the most recent has been the West, but
before that it was China, and now it looks as if innovation is moving outside
the Western sphere. Yet conservatives who defend the West's superiority are as
mistaken as multiculturalist liberals who denigrate its accomplishments (7):
"So insofar as a concept of the West excludes the rest of humanity it is a
false and dangerous model. Situating the West within the totality of humankind
is the way to go" (8).
A more fundamental,
yet less familiar, questioning of the assumptions behind the concept of the
West is that of Marshall G.S. Hodgson, who was a contemporary of McNeill's at
the University of Chicago, but who, unlike McNeill, published little in his own
lifetime.
In essays collected
in a posthumous collection of his writings entitled Rethinking World History,
published in 1993, Hodgson criticizes the conceptualizations of culture that
have caused civilizations closely connected with each other by the common "zone"
of the Mediterranean to be treated as if they were isolated historically:
Western scholars, at
least since the nineteenth century, have tried to find ways of seeing this
Afro-Eurasian zone of civilization as composed of distinct historical worlds,
which can be fully understood in themselves, apart from all others. Their
motives for this have been complex, but one convenient result of such a
division would be to leave Europe, or even Western Europe, an independent
division of the whole world, with a history that need not be integrated with
that of the rest of mankind save on the terms posed by European history itself.
(9)
Yet all our modem
serious attempts at understanding world history are based on all the
assumptions of a series of distinct societies, distinct culture worlds, each
with its own inner unity and with only external relations to the others.Universalizing efforts, such as that of Ranke, are
only seeming exceptions, based on optical illusions which made Europe seem the
world, and all other regions isolated and parochial. (10-11)
For Hodgson, the very
terminology of the West is problematic. As early as 1944, he called for scholars
to use East and West only with great care, because while the West or the
Occident possibly does refer to a distinguishable civilization or society, the
Orient does not (41). Over time the Orient has expanded from its original
meaning - what was the east of Rome - to encompass many separate societies
which are only unified by their not being Occidental (40). Thus, the problem
with the usual way of writing about the West is not merely that it tends to
disparage the Asiatic or Oriental, but even more that it accepts "the idea
that the 'East' is one cultural entity complementary to that of Europe at
all" (41). "Westernism" is the outlook informing the prevailing
understanding of history, by which humanity is divided into the ahistorical
Primitives, the static or regressive Orientals, and the dynamic and creative
Occidentals (92). Everything historically dynamic therefore becomes typed as
Western, and the Eastern is always typed as static (6-7).
In her contribution
to a collection of papers first presented at a conference in 1985 devoted to
the question "What Americans should know: Western civilization of world
history?", Lynn Hunt questions the legitimacy of Western civilization as
it is understood by American general education. Her "What is Western About
Western Civilization?" proposes that the time is ripe for questioning the
category of the West itself - but her call to re-think the West as an
organizing principle of education would be little heeded in the "canon
wars" that followed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hunt observes that
teaching "the Western tradition" in order to solidify cultural
identity is oddly more of an American than a European endeavor (155), and she
argues that the time has come to think about why this is so, and .'to try
to recapture the process by which we invented the Western tradition in the
first place" (156). In the end, Hunt's project seems not so much to treat
the West as a category that came into use at a certain time, but rather to be
concerned with recovering the richness of its earlier content, especially to be
found in the comparative study of civilizations undertaken in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century. That is, she would like .to give the West
more meaning by comparing it directly with other cultures, and not merely to
assume that it is unique while paying no real attention to them. Like Gres‘s,
McNeill, and Hodgson, therefore, Hunt calls for an understanding of the West
that is more adequate to history.
The three previous
historians think that the problem with the West is that it needs to be placed
in a larger context. According to Hodgson, for example, that larger context is
the Afro-Eurasian civilizational complex, within which Islam played an
important role. But there are two historians of Europe who have identified the
West as a problematical category altogether, and have disputed its legitimacy.
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