Reflections on the History of Western Civilization

The possible demise of the Western Civiliza­tion course has been frequently discussed in the historical profession. As a teacher of Western Civ. I wonder if I am an endan­gered species on the way to extinction, having outlived my usefulness. Before being retrained, as a keypunch operator perhaps, I offer some reflections based on twenty years of teaching Western Civ.

I entered into the ranks of college Western Civ teachers at the University of Chicago, where I was a graduate student in the mid-1960s. A handful of us took a field rather rarely offered, I believe, in Western Civiliza­tion, taught by two masters of the art, Karl J. Weintraub and the late Christian W. Mackauer. We had to sit in on a section of the undergraduate Western Civ course and also take a seminar of our own choosing, reading such works as the Nichomachean Ethics, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the historical philosophy of Kant, Hegel, Dilthey, and the like. We wrote papers, delivered them, and discussed such questions as: What is Western civilization anyway? Where is it going? It was a wonderful program.

As a teacher of Western Civ, I wonder if I am an endangered species on the way to extinction.

The next year, some few of us found a niche in the college Western Civ staff. At that time (1966), we were a large, disparate group of twenty to thirty teachers. We met from time to time to revise the readings, write the final comprehensive exam, and arrange for group reading of student papers.

The undergraduate course at Chicago at that time focused on carefully chosen primary source readings organized around se­lected historical problems. The readings were backed up by William McNeill’s terse and to-the-point Handbook of the History of Western Civiliza­tion. We had three hours of discussion a week on the readings and a one­-hour lecture on a special topic, usually out­side the students’ reading (Mackauer on “The World of Homer” or James Redfield on Book VIII of Thucydides, as examples). The first quarter of the course dealt with Greece, Rome, and early Christianity. We read Aris­totle’s Constitution of Athens, Thucydides, Plato’s Apology, and Crito, Sallust, Tacitus, the Gospel according to St. Matthew, some of St. Paul’s  letters, plus various other short selec­tions. Interpretive articles by Weber, Rostovzeff, and others on the fall of Rome were sometimes included, but not always. The second quarter covered the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment, and the third quarter began with the French Revolution and ended about 1950. A heavy burden rested on the student and the teacher to give these disparate works meaning and unity. It was the work of the course.

Yet not every young teacher had come to the University of Chicago bent on teaching Western Civ. Most considered the course an annoying distraction from their real work, be it the study of the city of Nuremberg in the 1650s or the Jansenist heresy in France, or the publication history of  the Encyclopedia. Here true history happened and was written. Western Civ was at best a gross generalization. rather left to Arnold Toynbee. It even pained one to speak in such grandiose terms as “Renaissance” and “Middle Ages,” or to make such irresponsible comparisons as Au­gustine versus Abelard! The young scholars at Chicago in those years were frankly un­trained in at least two out or the three quar­ters covered by the Western Civilization course. Hence, teachers often arranged to teach only their special section, be it ancient, medieval-early modern, or modern history.

The course, however, had been originally designed as a unit. I was most aware of this the year I taught a summer session in which we swept through all of Western civilization in a breathtaking ten weeks. In this concentrated form, and with few other distractions, one got to Mussolini, for example, before the students’ vision of Pericles had dimmed. It was marvelous, tracing the many elaborate connections and comparisons that had been built into the course.

In the hands of a master, such as Mackauer or Weintraub, the course hung together wonderfully well, and was one of the most respected and popular courses offered m the general education program, Chicago’s graduates referred to it frequently as the course in which they had learned the most, or which had been the most stimulating. I can still see Mr. Mackauer gripping the lectern, his white hair flying, and saying with his customary intensity: “If at the end of this year you no longer remember the date of the Battle of Salamis, I will not care—although of course it would be better if you did remember it. But if at the end of this year, you are not a changed person, then I will be disappointed.”

As the course increasingly came to be taught in three separate pieces by three separate specialists, its unity could not fail to come unstuck. Students wondered why they had to read Thucydides or City of God when it was never mentioned again, except on the dreaded comprehensive. The great connections and interweavings and intellectual leaps of the course were necessarily lost. When I left Chicago, the course was in the process of being fragmented. I hear it has since been revived. I hope so, but I fear for its fate at a school like the University of Chicago where teachers are expected to publish specialized books in their fields. Not many of us have the nerve to write in the field of Western Civilization.

As the course increasingly came to be taught in three separate pieces by three separate specialists . . . the great connections and interweavings and intellectual leaps of the course were lost.

But Western Civ continues to thrive out in the boondocks, such as the community college where I teach. Its rival is not World Civilization, as William McNeill and others have proposed—at least not yet—but rather American history. Here at Piedmont there are ten sections of American history offered for every three of Western Civ, and they are bigger sections, too. Here, Western Civ might be called “non-American history.” A non-American history course is not required in this  state’s educational system after grade school. Most of the students who take it take it out of a sense of adventure, Their previous preparation in non-American history is usually nothing more than an exposure to classi­cal mythology and a vague acquaintance with the names of Julius Caesar, Marie Antoi­nette, and Napoleon. My students’ first reac­tion to the Iliad, their first reading assign­ment of the rear. is that it is full of foreign names.

Now would it be better for these students to take World Civilization, to put Lao Tse and Siddhartha alongside Achilles? Maybe, but I shudder at the thought of the speed at which one would then sweep through not just one, but all of the great civilizations of the world. Perhaps if one could count on the students having had some European history background from high school . . . but one cannot count on that at all.

In teaching I have come to the conclusion that less is more. Far better for the students to come to grips with one early Flemish painter, than to have memorized the names of a dozen. Once long ago I taught a group of students a unit on seventeenth-century political philosophy from a book that con­tained short selections from Hobbes, Locke, Filmer, and Harrington. Reading their exams, I was horrified to discover that a num­ber of them had hopelessly confused these four combatant gentlemen. Now they read Locke alone, and a great deal more of that. The mind boggles at four weeks of China, four weeks of India, and its impact on the ill-furnished mind. To my practical teacher’s mind comes hurried visions of Krishna amal­gamated with Kwanyin, of the Confucian code of the gentleman entangled with dharma and the caste system, of Ulysses and Siddhartha in unholy alliance.

Why focus on Western Civilization? We must live in the whole world, but our perspective must come from a thorough grounding in our own culture.

I think I would prefer a year of any single civilization as a history option r:uher than trying to fit them all together in uneasy fellowship into a year’s course. So why focus on Western Civilization? For better or for worse our political system comes from En­gland and France, our religions from Jerusa­lem via Rome and points north, our logic from Greece, our language from Germany and England. We must live in the whole world, but our perspective must come from a thorough grounding in our own culture.

Gilbert Allardyce has shown us (American Historical Review, June 1982) that Western Civilization courses are relics of outmoded World War I consciousness. Still it is important to remember that to the students it is all new. The tension between Athens and Jeru­salem may be a tired old concept to scholars, but to the students it is a new and exciting idea. The conflict between undying fame and the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, between “turn the other cheek” and sweet revenge, goes on right in their own heads. To consider the historical roots of such conflicts is intensely interesting. And one doesn’t have to push Western civili­zation as an intellectual imperialist in order to teach it. For example, consider the pro­gress of reason and liberty. Who can stand in front of a classroom at this late date and argue for that? Instead one can introduce some of the dominant cultural themes, such as competitiveness, male dominance and female submissiveness, bipolar Western logic, and the Western attitude toward nature and technology. Students are astonished to learn that these are Western rather than universal human attributes. The last quarter of the course inevitably leads to the breakdown of Western confidence in the twentieth century, My students have just completed a final essay comparing the complacent attitude of the British in Forster’s Passage to India with Her­mann Hesse’s Siddhartha.

In conclusion, I think there is still a place for the history of Western Civilization in our general education scheme and for general education in our college curriculum. My typi­cal student comes from a nonacademic background. Many are the first in their families to go to college. Most of these students have never heard of many of the books we read. The course can open up to them an intellectual world that has formerly been dosed. They frequently bring me magazine clippings or books to show me references to things we have just studied. See, here is Plato, here is Herodotus, here is Homer. As if to show me that they no longer believe I was making it all up. I think a college freshman in the 1980s needs to thrill to the trial and death of Socrates, the gentle blend of sanity and craziness in St. Francis, the dazzling array of intellectual building blocks of St. Thomas Aquinas. Then, after a hard, critical look at Western Civilization, they may be able to face the world.