How Fares Western Civ?
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How Fares Western Civ? Daniel Pipes
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Eliminating courses on Western civilization ranks as one of the many radical changes in the American university over the last few decades. Symbolically, the shift began in January 1987, when Jesse Jackson led Stanford University students who, in a farcical demonstration with deep implications, shouted “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western culture’s got to go.” And go it did. Those students, writes Stanley Kurtz in The Lost History of Western Civilization, not only succeeded “to dismantle Stanford's required course on the history and great works of Western Civilization . . . but [they] helped set off a ‘multiculturalist’ movement that swept away Western Civilization courses at most American colleges and set the terms of our cultural battles for decades to come.” Western civ courses matter because they help the intelligent citizen and voter understand three topics: how things came to be; what works and what does not; and where one fits into the world. Their abandonment leaves tomorrow’s leaders less capable. In the late 1970s, well before Jesse Jackson marched through Palo Alto, I taught this course using the History of Western Civilization: A Handbook (1969) by William H. McNeill, my mentor, as the basic text. Only in retrospect, having watched the spread of multiculturalism, do I now recognize McNeill’s spirit of cultural confidence. He calmly surveyed the highlights, spontaneously assumed the importance of Europe and its offshoots, unthinkingly asserted their accomplishments, and uncontroversially presumed these to be positive.
Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, taught European and world history at the University of Chicago; [email protected].
D. Pipes
In the post-ho-ho era, though, I got to thinking that a non-multicultural history of Western civ surely must deal differently with its subject matter; it cannot maintain McNeill’s aloofness but has to jump into the fray and fight that new enemy. How might that work out? Searching for an example of such a book, I found Rodney Stark’s remarkable 2014 study, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (2014). Its title signals an ambitious, audacious, boisterous, and pugnacious reply to multiculturalism. Whereas McNeill devotes dozens of pages to Russia, Stark mentions it just twice in passing; it has no role in How the West Won. The Renaissance rates seventeen pages in McNeill’s history but Stark does not mention it once, finding it unimportant to his story. Same for Napoleon, with twelve pages and not a mention, respectively. Contrarily, McNeill breezes over the Spanish Empire’s gold and silver, whereas Stark devotes six pages to it. Less obviously, Stark promotes a pro-Christian message foreign to McNeill but exactly fitting this era of civilizational clash. Also in contrast to McNeill, who serenely ignores other historians and their interpretations, Stark often takes outspoken issue with some element of conventional but misguid
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