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The Real Threat to Western Civilization

Anthony Mansueto

Western Civilization, it seems, is always facing one dire threat or another. If one listens to conservatives, that threat comes either from a resurgent Islam or from secular humanists. Both call into question our Christian –or for the more broad-minded our “Judeo-Christian” heritage. More recently a rising India and China have joined the list of ascendant powers that do not share our values. If one listens instead to the left, the threat comes from conservatives and especially fundamentalists who are questioning the Enlightenment tradition of rational autonomy and/or the postmodern values of pluralism and respect for difference.

What all these claims share in common is a focus on cultural factors –and a conviction that Western ideals, whether understood in terms of the Hellenic, Jewish, Christian, or Enlightenment traditions, cannot hold their own in a free contest of ideas.

I disagree. Western ideals have proven themselves enormously attractive to people all around the world, and while there is no reason to expect –or desire— that they should displace the ideals of other civilizational traditions, there is every reason to hope that they will do well in an emerging global dialogue between civilizations.

But I still believe that these ideals are under attack. The adversary, however, is not cultural. It is, as it always has been, economic. Western ideals are expensive and we still haven’t found a way to pay for them --and it is getting harder. In fact, it may well have just become impossible.

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Before we can make this argument, however, we need to attend to an important matter of definition. There are many Wests, and like everyone else for whom the idea of the West is important, I have my own. It is the West of classical humanism perfected by the spirituality, and especially the mystical traditions of Judaism, Christianity and, yes, Islam, and enriched by the experience of the democratic revolutions. Ancient Greece gave us the ideal of a public arena in which meaning had been radically called into question but the search for it by no means abandoned, in which free citizens –free because they had achieved rational autonomy as well as legal emancipation— struggled with each other over fundamental questions of meaning and value, over what it means to be human and ultimately to Be, and over how to build a society which realizes the values which flow from those meanings. Judaism gave us, in the name of its God, yhwh, the concept of Being as such, and that God’s absolute demand for justice. Christianity taught us that the struggle for justice stretches us beyond mere humanity, leading us where we do not wish to go, towards connaturality with that Being in a mystical union which we cannot achieve wholly on our own. And Islam, with its principle of commanding right and forbidding wrong, proposed actually doing that God’s will on this earth.

That is my West. But there are others. There are Wests which embrace one or another of these four traditions separately rather than in Convivencia or dialogue with each other, as I prefer. There is also the Protestant West which grounds human autonomy in the sovereignty of the God in whose image it was created and in that God’s gracious response to our wanton disregard for that image. Finally, there are the modern Wests. There is the West of humanistic modernity which not only attempts to extend the classical humanist ideal of the citizen and philosopher to the whole people, but attempts to build a collective political subject --the modern democratic state or the Communiist Party-- which makes humanity the master of its own destiny and thus allows it to pass from the real of contingent to the realm of necessary Being. And there is the West of positivistic modernity which seeks to transcend finitude by means of scientific and technological progress.

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The question, of course, is just which West, or what feature shared by several or all of these Wests, is so expensive. The answer turns out to be a bit difficult to pin down. It is tempting to say that it what makes Western ideals so expensive is their emphasis on the cultivation of the individual human person. It is the individual human person that questions established meanings and seeks new ones. It is the individual human person that is the subject of rational autonomy and of infused contemplation. It is the human person that fulfills the Law or that fails and is radically in need of forgiveness. And it is the human person which is the subject of scientific and technological innovation. And since democracy it has become impossible to advocate an ideal with advocating it for the whole people.

But this is not quite right. Humanity’s other civilizational centers also went through the process of religious problematization, rationalization, and democratization which took place in Israel and in Ancient Greece –what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age. Old meanings were called into question, image and story supplemented by concept and argument as ways of engaging those questions, and people outside the old priestly castes and lineages were admitted to the public arena in which they were engaged. These things are true of the great Indian traditions –Jaina, Hinduism, and Buddhism— and of the great Chinese traditions, Confucianism and Taoism. And all of these traditions do value human self-cultivation, each in its own distinctive way. The term, in fact, is more nearly associated today with the Confucian than with the Western tradition.

Nor is it quite right to say that Western ideals are innerworldly and Asian ideals otherworldly, and that it is this inner worldliness which is so expensive. Judaism and Islam, as well as the modern Wests are distinctly innerworldly, but Christianity is not. And the great Chinese traditions are certainly as innerworldly as any on the planet.
I would like to suggest, rather, that it is the classical humanistic ideal of citizenship, extended beyond a landed elite to the entire demos, which is so costly. This, and the extension of the ideal of citizenship into the spiritual sphere --an ideal of mature faith, of a sapientally literate laos which can make rationally autonomous decisions, and participate in public deliberation regarding, fundamental questions of meaning and value. This ideal is expensive because it requires an enormous investment, which our society is still very far from making, in cultivating a rational autonomous and sapientally literate citizenry and because it require significant leisure for continued engagement with fundamental questions. It also requires that citizens have an autonomous economic base --whether because they own their own enterprises or because they have secure tenure in their positions-- so that they can engage controversial questions without fear of economic reprisal.

All of the other Wests become expensive only when they embrace elements of the humanistic ideal. This is why it is neoliberal advocates of positivistic modernity who are least likely to see Western ideals as under attack. Their West, while it requires investment in scientific and technical education, research, and development, generates a return on that investment. Ours does not, at least not in an economic sense. And of course positivistic modernity thrives on the greater surplus extraction made possible by proletarianization. Classical humanism does not.

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Now for the economics. Classical humanism emerged in Ancient Greece in a society, which had found a way to profit from the emergence of what eventually became a global market in luxury goods by exporting wine and oil and the ceramic containers in which they were shipped. This allowed an impoverished, marginal ecosystem, which had always had difficulty supporting urban life, to become home to flourishing cities grouped around thriving sanctuaries. Trade exposed the Greeks to diverse cultures, calling into question their own mythos and the meanings it embodied, and catalyzed a process of rationalization, so that the questions of meaning and value ceased to be engaged exclusively through image and story but now, also, through concept and argument. But it also led to growing economic polarization and the displacement of large numbers of peasants. When these peasants eventually revolted, they demanded not only land and credit reform, but a voice in the public arena and full participation in the cult (these not really being distinguished). The Greek ruling classes, which were not utterly defeated in these revolts, paid for reform by turning instead to chattel slaves captured in wars of expansion to work their vast estates. Eventually the military machines needed to prosecute these wars and take these slaves –the Hellenistic and later the Roman Empires-- so overshadowed the democratic public arena it was supposed to subsidize that people lost their faith in the classical humanistic ideal, on which the Empires in turn depended on for their legitimation. Those Empires either fell or found a new means of legitimation, Christianity.

Other Wests found other ways to pay for their ideals. Ancient Israel relied on a system of land redistribution, which ensured a rough equality and left time and space for ordinary Jews to participate in public and religious life. Later Judaism found a way to exploit the tragic dispersion of the Jewish people, transforming it into a comparative advantage in the mercantile world of the Silk Road economy, subsidizing a rich culture of widespread Talmudic scholarship and Kabbalistic mysticism. Dar-al-Islam used a wealth tax, the zakat, which subsidized scholarship and education, among other things. In Christendom the combination of low population densities and a guild system drove up wages well above world market levels and forced Europe to enter the global economy on the high end, competing on quality rather than price. This led to the formation of a class of prosperous, autonomous artisans who eventually became the subject of a new wave of democratic revolutions and a culture of advanced lay literacy and engagement with fundamental questions of meaning and value.

None of these economic strategies were actually adequate to the task of realizing classical humanistic ideals. Chattel slavery, of course, so contradicted the ideals of classical humanism that it led to a civilizational collapse. There were always poor Jews (the vast majority, in fact) who could not live the life of scholarship and Talmudic debate to which they aspired and which became the Jewish image of God’s own bliss. Islam, like later socialism, was much better at centralizing surplus for big civilization building projects like the Bayt Hikmat, the House of Wisdom built by the Abbasids, and at preserving a rough social justice, than it was at building an open, pluralistic, public arena. Christendom’s craftsmen were saved temporarily from the normal results of a successful economic strategy (growing population densities and declining wages) only by the Black Death which temporarily reversed Europe’s natural growth curve, and were eventually undone by their own greatest invention, the printing press, which undercut the monopoly of the guilds and helped pave the way for the technical division of labor, an essential precondition for the Industrial Revolution. And the level of literacy which was open to medieval and early modern craftsmen was not, in any case sufficient to support full participation in the public arena. Such participation requires the ability to make and evaluate arguments regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value in the context of full mastery of the philosophical and theological traditions present in the public arena, something which requires many years of formal study. The results of partial literacy are visible in the dynamics of the Protestant tradition which has constantly reproduced a culture of uninformed lay interpretation.

The modern West has relied on industrial technology, product of the Scientific Revolution, to secure a privileged place in the world economy. Industrialism has, of course, been at the center of positivistic modernity’s strategy for divinization through scientific and technological progress. But the rest of us, aware that we lacked any other way of supporting our ideals, made a devil’s bargain with modern industry. And for a long time, it seemed to work for us. Industrialism, capitalist or socialist, was always, to be sure, been a fragile base for the humanistic ideal. This is because, unlike the great spiritual traditions which emerged from the axial age, and even humanistic modernity, it does not accept meaning as a problem. Instead, it assumes that humanity is ordered to divinization, in the sense of infinite power, and that it has discovered the unique means to this end. Science tells us how the universe works; industrial technology makes it work for us. Scientists and engineers and private or state entrepreneurs, rather than philosophers and theologians and organizers and citizens become the real drivers of civilizational progress. There is nothing left to discuss, and thus no real need for an open public arena or for the cultivation of sapiential literacy or spiritual development. And proletarianization, which is a precondition for Industrialism, undercuts the autonomy necessary for real citizenship.

The Humanistic and Jewish and Christian Wests (Catholic and Protestant) have survived Industrialism in large part because positivistic modernity has not been our only ideal. Humanistic modernity, and its political expression in the democratic revolutions aspired instead to create a collective subject which would make humanity the master of its own destiny. This in turn required an open public arena and the cultivation of sapiential literacy. And the democratic revolutions have forced the bourgeoisie to share enough of the surplus generated by Industrialism to make at least some widespread cultivation of human capacities possible.

It is Industrialism, however, which has been paying the bills. This creates two problems. First, it means that the Other Wests have been reduced to the status of always vulnerable junior partners. As a result, our freedom of action has been progressively constrained. Second, and more to the point, the monopoly on industrial technology which has generated the surplus on which have depended for two hundred years has largely disappeared. The knowledge needed to innovate is no longer a Western monopoly. It is being produced all over the world and if someone lacks the patience or the resources to produce it, it can be stolen. It only takes one engineer. A couple of lawyers may even be able to make the result legal. And as Robert Reich pointed out in his 1992 The Work of Nations, it is only high level innovators and problem solvers who will be able to earn above world market wages (actually world market wages supplemented by monopoly rents on skill). And so the space to be a philosopher or theologian or organizer or even a citizen is gradually disappearing. As wages in the US, Europe, and Japan are pushed down to world market levels, people will work more hours and make more cautious decisions regarding what they study and the social space for living the Humanistic or Jewish or Christian ideals will gradually disappear.

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Where does this leave us? Prophets of Western collapse on both the left and the right often like to imagine a new “dark ages” in which civilization will be conserved by small communities of scholars and artists living in remote rural settings, living, like their predecessors, off the produce of the land, hopefully in harmony with it and with other communities of producers with whom they exchange wisdom and knowledge for food and crafts. This is an appealing image in many ways and, in the event of a civilizational collapse brought on by ecological and/or economic crisis, it may well be in such communities that the human civilizational project is conserved and renewed. But this is not, by itself, a way to save the West. Humanism returned to the West and began to take its modern shape, we will remember, only when the ideals conserved by the monasteries were taken up by new urban populations that had found a way to prosper in the global market. This is because creating an open public arena constituted by deliberation regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value and extending that area and the degree of self-cultivation it presupposes to the whole people, is what defines the Humanistic ideal in the first place. Monasteries, by their very nature, can never do that.
This is why, I think, that so much of the spiritual energy in the West is currently bound up with an engagement with Indian and Chinese traditions, and especially with Buddhism, for which a monastic future simply represents a return to the historical norm. People –especially good, capable people who nonetheless fall short of being real world transformers-- embrace ideals which can be lived fully in the world as it is rather than those which require so many compromises with reality that their commitments become meaningless. Buddhism offers them that. I think that it is also why Christianity and Islam and to a lesser extent even Judaism have pulled away from their long détente with humanism, classical and modern. It will be easier for them to conserve their spiritual ideals than it will be for them to extend the capacities historically associated with their best scholars and theologians and mystics to the people as a whole.

What is to be done? Maybe nothing. Maybe we will just have to live through the coming dark ages, working in our neomonastic communities to ensure that humanistic ideals survive alongside others until we find another way to support their return to the public arena. We must, in any case, be prepared to do at least this. But we need to include among our tasks not only the conservation and cultivation of the sapiential disciplines –those which seek wisdom—and of the art of politics, of engaging questions of meaning and value effectively in the public arena, of actually building public arenas which engage such questions. We need to find a way to pay the bills which sets us free, once and for all, from dependence those who do not share our ideals. This means developing new technologies and new economic strategies conserve the integrity of the ecosystem, which themselves require and promote the cultivation of human capacities, and which will generate sufficient surplus to support the widespread cultivation of sapiential literacy and active civic engagement. Industrialism never met these standards and never will. We can and must do better. The fate of Western Civilization, after all, depends on it.