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.
* * *
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.
***
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.
***
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.
* * *
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.