Europe: A History (9 page)

The really vicious quality shared by almost all accounts of‘Western civilization’ lies in the fact that they present idealized, and hence essentially false, pictures of past reality. They extract everything that might be judged genial or impressive; and they filter out anything that might appear mundane or repulsive. It is bad
enough that they attribute all the positive things to the ‘West’, and denigrate the ‘East’. But they do not even give an honest account of the West: judging from some of the textbooks, one gets the distinct impression that everyone in the ‘West’ was a genius, a philosopher, a pioneer, a democrat, or a saint, that it was a world inhabited exclusively by Platos and Marie Curies. Such hagiography is no longer credible. The established canon of European Culture is desperately in need of revision. Overblown talk about ‘Western civilization’ threatens to render the European legacy, which has much to be said in its favour, disreputable.

In the United States the debate about Western civilization has centred on the changing requirements of American education. In recent years, it seems to have been driven by the needs of a multiethnic and multicultural society, and by concern for Americans whose origins lie neither in Europe nor in Europe’s Christian-based culture. Generally speaking, it has not re-examined the picture of the European heritage as marketed by the likes of the ‘Great Books Scheme’; and it has not been disturbed by demands from Americans of European descent for a fairer introduction to Europe. Where courses on Western civilization have been abandoned, they have been rejected for their alleged Eurocentrism, not for their limited vision of Europe. In very many cases, they have been replaced by courses on world history, which is judged better suited to America’s contemporary understanding of the ‘West’.

One well-publicized reaction against the shortcomings of‘Western civilization’ was to abolish it. Stanford University in California took the lead in 1989, instituting a ‘Culture, Ideas and Values’ course in place of the former foundation course in ‘Western Culture’ that had hitherto been compulsory for all freshpersons. According to reports, the university authorities surrendered to chants of‘Hey-ho, Hey-ho, Western Culture has to go!’ Readings in Virgil, Cicero, Tacitus, Dante, Luther, Aquinas, More, Galileo, Locke, and Mill were replaced by excerpts from Rigoberta Manchu, Frantz Fanon, Juan Rulfo, Sandra Cisneros, and Zora Neale Hurston (none of whom suffered the stigma of being ‘Dead White European Males’).
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This event was excessively satirized. Stanford can take some pride from seeing a problem and trying to tackle it. The trouble is that the cure may prove worse than the malady. In theory, there is much to be said for introducing ‘mul-ticulturalism’ and ‘ethnic diversity’ into American academe. It is unfortunate that there is no known Tibetan Tacitus, no African Aquinas, no Mexican Mill for students to study. Indeed, there is nothing very much in any of the recorded non-European cultures that might illustrate the roots of America’s supposedly liberal traditions.
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At the time of the furore over Stanford’s program on Western Culture, its parallel courses on European History escaped the spotlight. But they were cast in the same mould. The choice of 39 set readings for the program in ‘Europe I, II, and III’, for example, revealed a brand of selectivity with far-reaching implications. Apart from Joseph Conrad (Korzeniowski), there was no single author from Eastern Europe. (Conrad was included for his novels about Africa, such as
Heart
of Darkness
, not for his writings on Eastern Europe.) Apart from Matthew Arnold, there was no single author with any sort of connection with the Celtic world. (Arnold was included as English critic and poet, not as Professor of Celtic Literature.) There was no single Italian author more modern than Baldassare Castiglione, who died in 1528. There was one novelist from South Africa, but no one from Ireland, no one from Scandinavia, no one but Germans from central Europe, no one from the Balkan countries, no one from Russia. Most curiously, from a history department, there was no historical text more modern than one from Herodotus.
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To be fair, selection is always necessary, always difficult, and always unsatisfactory: Stanford’s quandary is not unique. But the particular form of selection practised by one of the world’s most expensive seats of learning is indicative of wider concerns. It purports to introduce ‘Europe’, but introduces only a small corner of the European continent. It purports to introduce ‘the Western Heritage’—the title of its textbook—but it leaves much of the West untouched. It purports to give emphasis to Europe’s ‘literary and philosophical aspects’, but emphasises only a partial slice of European culture. It mentions neither Joyce nor Yeats, neither Andersen, Ibsen, nor Kirkegaard, neither Kafka, Koestler, nor Kundera, neither Solzhenitzyn nor even Dostoevsky. No Trades Description Act could ever sanction a product whose list of ingredients lacked so many of the basic items.

No zoo can contain all the animals. But, equally, no self-respecting collection can confine itself to monkeys, vultures, or snakes. No impartial zoologist could possibly approve of a reptile house which masquerades as a safari park and which contains only twelve crocodiles (of both sexes), eleven lizards, one dodo, and fifteen sloths. In any case, Stanford was hardly alone. By 1991, the National Endowment for the Humanities was quoted with an assessment that students could graduate from 78 per cent of US colleges and universities without ever taking a course in Western civilization.
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One suspects, in fact, that the problem lies less in the subject-matter of European studies than in the outlook of those who present them. Many American courses, like the Great Books Scheme, were directed at a particular generation of young Americans, who were desperately eager to learn a simplified version of the lost heritage of their immigrant forebears. Nowadays, they obviously need to be modified to match a new generation, with different perceptions. Readings about Europe might arouse less resentment if they were laced with some of its less savoury aspects. Intelligent students can always sense when something is concealed, when they are not expected to understand, but to admire.

Some of America’s minorities may indeed have a case for contesting Eurocentrism. If so, America’s majority, who are overwhelmingly European in their origins, may choose to challenge ‘Western civilization’ on other grounds. Many of America’s most numerous communities—Irish, Spanish, Polish, Ukrainian, Italian, Greek, Jewish—came from regions of Europe which find little place in existing surveys of ‘Western civilization’; and they have every reason to expect an improvement.

The great paradox of contemporary American intellectual life, however, lies in
the fact that the virtues most prized by the American version of Western civilization—tolerance, freedom of thought, cultural pluralism—now seem to be under attack from the very people who have benefited from them most. Critics have observed ‘the Closing of the American Mind’.
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Self-styled ‘liberals’ have been shown to be pursuing an ‘Illiberal Education’.
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Sixty years on, the author of the Great Books Scheme, still proud of‘The Opening of the American Mind’, prefers to lambast his colleagues at the University of Chicago rather than to modify his prescription.
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The wrangles may be over-reported. But America’s historic drive towards a unified language and culture looks to be losing out to those lobbies and pressure groups who shout loudest.

It is an understatement to say that history did not quite work out as the devotees of‘Western civilization’ would have wished. All of them were believers in one or another form of European domination. Spengler was as right to record the West’s decline as he was wrong to believe in the future supremacy of Russia. But the ideas linger on, and their final defeat has not yet occurred. For most Europeans, they have lost their former vitality. They have been shattered by two World Wars and by the loss of overseas empires. They will obviously make their last stand in the USA.

For only in the USA do the true well-springs of‘Western civilization’ still flow. Since the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991, the USA is the sole heir of European imperialism, and has inherited many of its attitudes. It may not be an empire of the old sort; but it has been left with ‘the white man’s burden’. Like imperial Europe before it, the USA struggles to police the world, whilst battling the ethnic and racial conflicts within its own borders. Like Europe today, it is in urgent need of a unifying mystique to outreach the dwindling attractions of mere democracy and consumerism. Unlike Europe, it has not known the lash of war on its own face within living memory.

An absolute majority of Americans have European roots. They have adopted and adapted the English language and the European culture of the founding fathers, often in creative ways. Yet those Euro-Americans will never draw their main inspiration from Asia or Africa, or from studying the world in general. In order to cope with themselves, they have a profound need to come to terms with Europe’s heritage. In order to do so successfully, they must liberate their view of Europe’s past from its former limitations. If the European example shows anything at all, it shows that belief in the divisive propositions of ‘Western civilization’ is a sure road to disaster.

The greatest minds in Europe’s past have had no truck with the artificial divorce of East and West:

Gottes ist der Orient!
Gottes ist der Okzident!
Nord- und südliches Gelande
Ruht im Frieden seiner Hünde.

(God’s is the East; God’s is the West. Northern and southern lands rest in the peace of His hands.)
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National Histories

In modern times, almost every European country has devoted greater energy and resources to the study of its own national history than to the study of Europe as a whole. For reasons that are very understandable, the parts have been made to seem more significant than the whole. Linguistic barriers, political interests, and the line of least resistance have helped to perpetuate the reigning citadels of national historiography, and the attitudes which accompany them.

The problem is particularly acute in Great Britain, where the old routines have never been overturned by political collapse or national defeat. Until recently, British history has generally been taken to be a separate subject from European history—requiring a separate sort of expertise, separate courses, separate teachers, and separate textbooks. Traditional insularity is a fitting partner to the other widespread convention that equates British History with English History. (Only the most mischievous of historians would bother to point out that his
English History
referred only to England.)
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Politicians have accepted the misplaced equation without a thought. In 1962, when opposing British entry to the European Economic Community, the leader of HM Opposition felt able to declare quite wrongly that such a step would spell ‘the end of a thousand years of British history’.
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The English are not only insular; most of them have never been taught the basic history of their own islands.

Similar attitudes prevail in universities. Honourable exceptions no doubt exist; but Britain’s largest history faculty did not start teaching ‘British history’ until 1974; and even then the content remained almost entirely English. The students rarely learn anything about Ireland, Scotland, or Wales. When they take examinations in ‘European history’, they are faced with a few optional questions about Eastern Europe and none about Britain. The net result can only be a view of the world where everything beyond England is alien.
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The basic, and fallacious, assumption, writes one dissenter, ‘is that everything important in British History can be explained in terms of British causes’. Or again: ‘The deeply ingrained and undiminished segregation of “British”—in reality English—history from European history … creates a narrowness of vision that has become a powerfully constricting cultural factor.’
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According to another harsh critic, a combination of traditional structures, arcane research, and excessive professionalization has reduced British history to ‘incoherence’. ‘At the universities as in the schools,’ he wrote before sensibly emigrating, ‘the belief that history provides an education … has all but vanished.’
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Cultural history as taught at Britain’s universities often clings to a narrow, national focus. There is a marked preference for the old-style study of national roots, over broad international comparisons. At the University of Oxford, for example, the one and only compulsory subject for all students of the English Faculty remains the Anglo-Saxon text of
Beowulf.
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Until very recently in Oxford’s Faculty of Modern History (51c), the one and only compulsory reading was the Latin text of the seventh century, ‘History of the English Church and People’ by the Venerable Bede.
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Curiosities of the same order no doubt exist in all countries. In Germany, for instance, universities suffer from the ramifications of the Humboldtian principle of ‘academic freedom’. German history professors are reputedly free to teach whatever they like. German history students are free to learn whatever they choose from the menu served up by their professors. In most universities, the only rule is that each student must choose at least one course from ancient history, one from medieval, and one from modern. At times of great pressure from the German state, therefore, professors sympathetic to official ideology were free to load the menu with a heavy dose of German national history. (Back to the Teutonic tribes, once again.) In more recent times, when the state has been loath to interfere, they have been free to devise a menu where German national history can be completely avoided by any student so inclined.

The problem of national bias is probably best observed in the realm of school textbooks and popular histories. The more that historians have to condense and to simplify their material, the harder it is to mask their prejudices. A few comments are called for.