Two recent reviews in the British press of a new book by an Oxford historian.
The Economist (unsigned), “The history of the West is not quite what you learned in school.”
Asked what he thought of Western civilisation, Mahatma Gandhi is said to have quipped that such a thing “would be a good idea”. (The West, he suggested, was not so enlightened.) But as Josephine Quinn makes clear in her new book, Western civilisation has always been a bad idea, or at any rate a wrong-headed one. To compartmentalise history into a set of distinct and essentially self-contained civilisations is a misguided quest that has dangerously distorted our understanding of the world, Ms Quinn asserts: “It is not peoples that make history, but people, and the connections that they create with one another.”
Ms Quinn, a historian and archaeologist who teaches at Oxford, does not spend 500-odd pages trashing what generations of schoolchildren have been taught to take pride in as European achievements. Instead, she demolishes the underlying concept of what she calls “civilisational thinking”. Her argument is simple, persuasive and deserving of attention.
The idea of civilisation, Ms Quinn points out, is relatively recent. The word was first used only in the mid-18th century and did not take hold of Western imaginations until the late 19th century. In that imperialist age, historians found that Greek, Roman and Christian civilisations made nice building blocks that could be stacked into a grand-looking construct, which they labelled “Western” or “European” civilisation. To this they attributed a host of inherited “classical” virtues: vigour, rationality, justice, democracy and courage to experiment and explore. Other civilisations, by contrast, were regarded as inferior.
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Ms Quinn’s brisk, scholarly romp across the arc of European history shows that, far from being rare, contact across and between cultures, often over surprisingly long distances, has been the main motor of human advancement in every age. Rather than being prickly and inward-looking, most societies have proved receptive to ideas, fashions and technologies from their neighbours.
Ancient Greece, for example, was less a place of origins than of transmission from Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian and Phoenician cultures, which themselves had mixed and exchanged ideas. And rather than being the wellspring of democracy, Athens was “something of a latecomer” to a form of governance that appears to have been first tried in Libya and on the islands of Samos and Chios. Persians, eternally cast as Greeks’ polar opposites, actually imposed democracy on Greek cities that they ruled, suggesting “considerable Persian faith in popular support for their own hegemony”, Ms Quinn notes.
Tristram Hunt, director of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, Financial Times, “How the World Made the West — a scuttling of civilisational myths.”
It is the Oxford professor of ancient history Josephine Quinn’s contention that we continue to remain ideologically hidebound by such misplaced historicism. This “civilisational thinking”, as she puts it, provided the cultural rationale for western European supremacy during the 19th century, enabling colonial expansion and racial hierarchies. And in the 21st century it is still the norm, Quinn suggests, misguidedly to distinguish “the west”, a Christian culture with Greco-Roman or even earlier “Indo-European” roots, from “the east”, whether centred on Russia, China or Islam.
Tracing 4,000 years of predominantly European history, Quinn unpicks this paradigm to emphasise the west’s permeability. Her purpose is to dethrone the “privileged connection” between ancient Greeks and Romans and the modern west, and focus instead on the millennia of interaction with other cultures. So-called western values — freedom, rationality, justice and tolerance — are not only or originally western, she suggests, but “the West itself is in large part a product of long-standing links with a much larger network of societies.” As any brief study of museum antiquities in Athens, Rome or Berlin will testify, an appreciation of the reflexive relationship between cultures of the eastern and western Mediterranean, or human settlement across the Levant and north Africa, or trade flows between northern Europe and the Iberian peninsula, is not the most startling revelation. Few public accounts of the past today subscribe to mid-Victorian ideals of an unblemished classical inheritance. Nevertheless, Quinn pursues this claim with an impressive display of rigorous scholarship lightly worn, successfully covering a huge amount of material.
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At the end of this supremely professional history, I was left with the question of who is it for? Approaching the 50th anniversary of Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism, our undergraduates certainly don’t lack for cultural relativism or calls for decolonisation. In the UK, Generation Z already has precious little appetite for defending “western civilisation”, with a recent YouGov poll showing 38 per cent of under-40s say they would refuse to serve in the armed forces in the event of a new world war, and 30 per cent say they would not serve even if Britain was facing imminent invasion. If, on the other hand, this weekend I was sheltering in a bombed-out apartment block in Kyiv, fearing another wave of barbaric Russian bombardment, I think I might be hoping that “the west” did retain some sense of a historic identity and purpose in the world.
I have yet to read the book, so my comments here are simply a reaction to the above-cited reviews, not a 592-page scholarly tome with over a hundred pages of footnotes. I have no doubt that it makes important contributions to the literature. But the topline findings described in the reviews are not the least bit surprising from the standpoint of social science.
Of course the notion of “Western civilization” and, indeed, the notion of distinct civilizations aren’t real. They’re social constructs. As Benedict Anderson famously said of nations and nationalism in a 1983 classic of the same name, they are “Imagined Communities.” And even my schoolboy understanding of European history was that it was constantly engaged in exchanges with the outside world, readily borrowing ideas from them. Indeed, I decided early on that this was precisely what made the West the West: a cosmopolitan willingness to learn from new ideas in a constant quest for progress.
Still, while the notion of “the West” as something distinctive from “the Rest” can be and has been destructive, that doesn’t render it completely without value. While Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations was rightly criticized for its cartoonishness, its core idea that the experiences of Western societies (including especially the Enlightenment and Reformation) made it distinct in important ways from that of Russia. And I don’t think many in East Asia, the Arab Middle East, or Sub-Saharan Africa would disagree that there are rather significant cultural differences between us.
