Why we study Western Civ

A FEW years ago, I gave a talk to an audience in a small German town based on a book I had written about a prominent but dysfunctional family that had lived there 450 years earlier. When asked how I came upon and researched this story, I described a three-year period in which I spent fully as many waking hours reading and pondering the remains of my sixteenth-century subjects as I did in dealing with my daily life in present-day America. The next morning the headline over my photograph in the local newspaper read: "This is a Man From the Sixteenth Century." Although not such for the local journalist, certainly for a historian there could not have been a greater compliment!

History is every civilization's clinical record of human nature and behavior, for which reason it has always been cautionary and problem-solving for subsequent generations. We study the past not to avoid repeating it but to learn how previous generations survived the same mistakes we make. Historians worthy of the name have an ability to live imaginatively in the past as fully as they do in the present. In doing so they are chameleon-like, but not for the purpose of camouflage and deceit. Only by such abstraction can they become knowing insiders in worlds that no longer exist. In this regard, historians are people with dual or multiple citizenship, only their second and third countries are past civilizations and distant ages.

Who needs history?

The historian's natural enemy is people who know, and want only to know, their own immediate culture, which they accept as a supreme measure of humankind. It is the civic duty of historians to remind their fellow citizens that they are neither the first nor necessarily the most interesting people to have walked the earth, and that nations that lead their lives as if they were have often suffered terrible consequences.

Today, the distant past is a neglected vital resource. History fills comparatively fewer shelves in local bookstores and libraries, and the history that is most prominent there is about familiar subjects within our contemporary culture. Of the 16 books on the mid June 2004, New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, only two were history, both well-worn American (Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton and Cokie Roberts' Founding Mothers), while Dan Gordon's record-breaking misty fiction, The Da Vinci Code, led all categories of adult reading by wide margins. History majors in American colleges and universities overwhelmingly show a similar sensibility. Over the last three years only 20 percent of history majors at Harvard University enrolled in a field-specific tutorial in premodern history (ancient, medieval, or early modern history). For the other 80 percent, the world began in the more comfortable nineteenth century.

A major reason for such provinciality is the pervasive belief that the past is a benighted world of superstition and prejudice, or, less threatening, a world of fantasy and romance, in either case no proper guide for an emancipated modern age. "Bunk" was Henry Ford's famous word for it. Today, history is another word for dead and gone--"toast," as it is said--and any who think it a Rosetta Stone for their civilization risk irrelevance and scorn.

In casting about recently for the right venues for a book tour, my publicist was repeatedly told that "current events," not history, is what audiences want: talking heads and familiar faces, not the ponderous minds of strangers. "Current events" means today's business (national politics, foreign affairs, and popular culture), issues connected with the recent presidential election, an exit from Iraq, and Hollywood's latest. Having become society's most trusted guides, the present and the future, the one ephemeral, the other imaginary, effectively block a long perspective on our times from the distant past.

This, of course, is not a new problem for Americans. Woodrow Wilson, who was a professor and president at Princeton University before becoming the twenty-eighth president of the United States, blamed the historical illiteracy of his contemporaries on "a certain great degeneracy" born of misplaced trust in science:

   We believe in the present and in the future more than in the past,
   and deem the newest theory of society the likeliest. This is the
   disservice scientific study has done us; it has given us agnosticism
   in the realm of philosophy and scientific anarchism in the field of
   all politics. It has made the legislator confident that he can create
   and the philosopher sure that God cannot. Past experience is
   discredited and the laws of matter are supposed to apply to spirit
   and the makeup of society.

There have been times, however, when people believed "today" to be the last day to date in the history of human civilization, a profound legacy of baggage and proven ways. Our age is not one of them. "Today" has rather become the first day of the rest of one's life: an untrammeled fresh start, endlessly experimental, and with little need to look back. The longest shelves in local bookstores and libraries are filled with fiction, self-help, and current events (mostly the lives and politics of American leaders)--immediate, self-referential information serving personal amusement and struggle.

The battle between the ancients and the moderns has accordingly become far more difficult for the ancients. In this hermeneutical turn, a waxing present without much of a track record holds greater authority than a well-documented but waning past. Skeptical of history's inescapability and utility, not a few modern historians believe their calling is to sever the dead hand of the past rather than pore over its vital remains. For the reading public, the study of the past often seems a search for forerunners and blockers of modernity, a parade of people, ideas, and crises either lauded for having prepared the way to truths we hold to be self-evident, or excoriated for having opposed them--history as self-confirmation.

In the best historical science, one becomes an expert on a particular age by gaining mastery of preceding ones. That is because human life in individual cultures is inter-connected from generation to generation and century to century. Subsequent events and developments root themselves in and incorporate previous ones, not unlike the way the early years in an individual's life continue to inform and shape the later ones. The most crucial and reliable information new generations need to seize their future effectively does not lie before them, but behind them. The past is more powerful and controlling than any future we can contemplate. This side of eternity, we are more the residues of history than the stuff the stars are made of.

Western Civ and its discontents

For new generations of high school and college students, rescue from present-day historical escapism and its great informational loss may begin in the mighty European or Western Civilization survey, which leaps over and through 25 centuries, from Mesopotamia onward, in a single academic year. Conceptually born in nineteenth-century European efforts to distinguish the culture and values of a presumedly superior West over those of a presumedly inferior East, Western Civ has been both a beloved and a hated introduction to the study of history in post-World War I America.

Three universities--Harvard, Columbia, and Chicago--played essential roles in creating this American original, appropriately born as an academic course of study in a nation that has believed itself to be a beacon to the world. Of the three universities, Columbia's required general education course ("Contemporary Civilization"), introduced in 1919 and expanded in 1929, and the teaching and writings of Columbia professor James Harvey Robinson, were key. In 1912, Robinson defended a long social, scientific, narrative history focused not on "fortuitous prominence" but on "the normal conduct and serious achievements of mankind in the past," peaking in modern Europe and America. Although he never taught an undergraduate course in Western Civ, the model he developed in his graduate courses and books between 1903 and 1919, which surveyed European history from the Middle Ages to the present, sowed the seeds. Between 1925 and 1930, a unified history of these centuries became the textbook we know today as Western Civ.

With a view to both world wars, the Western Civ course in America justified Allied sacrifice by presenting the creativity and glory of that civilization at a time when barbarian Germans threatened to destroy it from within. Ironically, it was the ancient and medieval forebears of those same Germans who originally mixed Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, and Byzantine cultures into the civilization we call European or Western.

While modern-day European educators take note of the Western Civ course as taught in America, and occasionally entertain versions of their own, the course has always seemed too thin and audacious for the traditional European university, which prefers a history that takes short, measured, finished strides. For critics on both sides of the Atlantic, impeccable period pieces and boutique courses reflective of academic specialization and the modern scholarly monograph are the rule. To its harshest critics abroad and at home, American Western Civ remains a Whiggish, Eurocentric sham of a course.

Yet no other battery of academic courses fulfills so well the historian's civic duty to inform his fellow citizens of the opportunities they inherit from the past and the burdens they must carry from it into the future. For most non-history majors in colleges and universities, Western Civ is their only chronologically deep, college-level acquaintance with European history. Chronicling, mapping, and explaining Europe's development from antiquity to the present, this sweeping survey has helped untold numbers of undergraduates find their place and time in the world.

Favoring a macro-historical approach around a socio-political narrative, the more recent versions of this bird's-eye view of history can be as open-ended conceptually as they are chronologically. Western Civ is an old-fashioned course that continually shops for new clothes, and over the years it has learned to be both down-to-earth and stylish, able to dig postholes in, as well as scan, centuries. The best textbooks treat events and structures, dates and ideas, message and reception, synthesis and analysis, freedom and determination as two peas in a pod. They also fold recent research into new editions and address the growing interest in the West's previously neglected world profile.

Still, it is difficult to imagine a successful Western Civ survey in which a strongly thematic or theoretical approach predominates, and not just for want of pages and time. Making sense of the past as it exists in contemporary records and is retold by modern storytellers living well after the fact opens many doors to subjectivity and parti pris, irresolution and ideology. The great danger to the genre is the loss of the story line of the past amid modern doubt and bias, conjecture and special pleading. Much as colorful loosestrife displaces the more useful but less strongly rooted marsh cattail, so do these four horsemen of deconstruction and political correctness threaten to trample the vulnerable European narrative.

Reading history forward

That is not to suggest that fables should hold priority over criticism or bare facts over grand ideas. The unexamined narrative is no more worthy than the anti-narrative. However, if Western Civ is to continue to achieve its goal, which is to spark lasting curiosity about the past, traditional narrative must be the sun and modern theory the moon. With regard to basic information about the formative forces of history, Western Civ presents a highly credible narrative. No knowledgeable person can doubt that Martin Luther laid the foundation stone of religious freedom and pluralism in Wittenberg in 1517, or that the French Revolution changed the relationship between the individual and the state forever. These are watershed events to be handed down to new generations, even though Luther's success came in spite of himself and the French Revolution was quick to undermine its own ideals.

On the other hand, there is no hard and fast consensus on what either the Reformation or the French Revolution meant to contemporaries, who were divided into two sides. Nor is there any sure agreement why those events should be important to an even more opinionated modern age. Over the last two decades, a prominent, theory-driven new historiography, smitten with popular culture and fighting notions of early modernization, has argued that no sharp breaks with the past occurred in the great Protestant lands of Germany and England, and also that where the Reformation was most successful, namely, in iconoclastic fury and embrace of the state, its legacy was harmful to posterity.

The medieval Crusades and family life raise similar issues of meaning and legacy. Contemporary Christians, Jews, and Muslims left different assessments of the Crusaders, and modern scholars of family and gender draw diametrically opposed accounts of spousal and parental love from surviving criminal records and family archives. Between contemporary perceptions and the resifting of evidence by historians, a sense of futility in dealing with the past threatens. But given such sources, one need not manufacture virtual histories to get at the truth. Counterfactual questions are endemic to the smallest historical event; for the wide-eyed and willing, history opens its own alternative paths.

As a rule, Western Civ has treated history's contradictions as more enriching than undermining of narrative. Exploring the reasons why medieval Christians, Muslims, and Jews held differing views of the Crusaders, students receive a lasting lesson in cultural dissonance. In much the same way, conflicting texts and contexts reveal the variables and constants in the family life of the past.

The great strength of the Western Civ survey within the history curriculum is that it reads history chronologically forward, not backwards from a commanding latter-day event or popular modern theory, a strength that may excuse its sometimes plodding narrative. Since history is not an equal opportunity employer, what is possible and deemed good in one era is not necessarily such in another, a truism to bear in mind when one evaluates the past, or, more ambitiously, sets out to change the world.

The modern inclination to read German history backwards from the 1930s, or to read premodern history generally in the light of the civil rights movements of the 1960s, is a highly prejudicial perspective on the past that can only find fault. Being German, or being free, has not meant the same thing in every time and place. For most of their long history, Germans successfully embraced authority and order without totalitarianism and pursued freedom and equality without liberal democracy. Totalitarianism and democracy have been twentieth-century experiments for Germans, not their mainstream historical polity. Only the historian's carefully cultivated contemporaneity with the past, his ability to "be there" in imagination and the language of an age, makes clear both the great difference and continuity between the past and the present.

In the postmodern world, many can imagine nothing worse than the infringement of individual liberties. Yet throughout most of history, when a choice had to be made, every age and culture has recognized that physical security is more basic to life than the freedom to come and go as one pleases. Before free and vibrant societies can exist, there must first be safety in the streets, productive work, and food on the table. Freedom is not everything; it is only the icing on a very large cake, which is the essential thing. That cake is a mix of stable political institutions, effective educational systems, and fluid social organizations. Freedom is the easy part; the discipline to build and maintain the pillars that support it is what is hard. Liberty and democracy are utterly meaningless concepts if all one is doing is trying to feed oneself and stay alive.

For this reason, we find few homilies in the past extolling egalitarian ideals of freedom. Most societies in the past believed a perverse egalitarianism to be their major problem: too many self-absorbed people and groups doing as they pleased, fragmenting and provoking society, making it impossible for strong cultural bonds to unite rival groups. What has been missing, according to history's contemporary critics, is the citizen's or subject's sense of obligation to a larger world beyond the individual, the family, and the clan. Even the Athenians, who created democracy and arguably loved it most, did not hesitate to suspend their constitution and allow despots to rule over them when aristocratic factions and peasant revolts threatened to destroy civilization. In the rural societies of the Middle Ages, the great problem of life was not to overthrow a tyrant, but to find an effective one. Resort to such rule in time of crisis became an honored political tradition in Europe down through the Renaissance. And therein lies a vital lesson of history for a Western world puzzled by other cultures' rejection of liberal democracy.

Western Civ meets Global Civ

As an academic dean in the 1980s, I recall the student who protested having to take courses outside of her major. When I asked why, she explained that she had to tutor the alien classes in Michel Foucault's philosophy before there could be any fruitful discussion or proper conclusion! Having grown up with the Internet, the present student generation, to its credit, likes to gather its own information. Unfortunately, it also wants that information delivered in bottom-line fashion without difficult labor and circuitous argument. Yet the same students recognize that their professors' theories and models, while capable of sparking cool, consensual discussions, lack legs and, in the end, indoctrinate.

Given this situation, it is better to give students a variety of contemporary keyholes onto the life of the past than to extend to them a presumed magical key to human nature. There, in the past, they may behold, firsthand, struggles not unlike those of their own age and watch their own lives being played out in different times and places, even romantically, as in the riveting twelfth-century love story of Abelard and Heloise. In present circumstances, merely whetting an undergraduate's appetite for historical perspective and precedent may be challenge and accomplishment enough. How skillfully students ultimately swim is not as important as their initial jump into the great pool of the past. For it is only in their thrashing about there that life-sustaining historical thinking is born.

In introducing undergraduates to the study of history, the Western Civ survey has generally spared them heavy doses of modern theory. It has rather suited them up in basic chronology and geography, immersed them in the most accessible document pools (translations), and let them sink or swim on the buoyancy of their native intelligence and the course narrative, a rewarding exercise at any age. Responding to student interest, publishers today increasingly provide auxiliary readings compatible with the text-book narrative, while remaining independent of it. Such aids now compete with the once sovereign textbook narrative, which increasingly appears in briefer versions. And even the condensed narrative faces stiff competition from enterprising "make-your-own-Western-Civ-course" packages assembled from publisher-supplied sources. All of which is further evidence of the adaptive nature of this old, yet ever young, genre. From the beginning too full of itself, Western Civ today still wants to be more.

The Western Civ textbook has long surrounded its socio-political narrative with hundreds of illustrations, scores of primary-source documents, numerous maps and timelines, and a variety of alternating special effects. These great battleships of the history curriculum are well-equipped to respond to the changing conceptual and virtual history interests of students while sustaining a strong narrative. In the textbook to which I contribute, The Western Heritage, one special feature ("Art and the West") discusses the works of artists as commentaries on both themselves and their times, ranging from an ancient Akkadian victory stele to present-day minimalist art. Another ("The West and the World") compares the endeavors of European and world civilizations to develop new weapons of destruction and find new sources of energy. Still another feature ("Encountering the Daily Life of the Past") illustrates the pastimes people have shared across class lines, from divination in ancient Mesopotamia to modern European toys.

Although these add-ons threaten to become gimmicks and clutter the text, they also meet two powerful needs: that of students to venture beyond the mainstream textbook narrative and that of editors and authors to document their ingenuity on the textbook battlefield. In such features we also find the cutting edge of macro-historical scholarship and can sense the influence of history's invisible hand.

Today, World Civ competes with Western Civ, while a new Global Civ challenges them both. Can Western Civ survive such competition? Western and World Civ focus on the genesis and evolution of national cultures, while Global Civ targets the crossroads of civilizations where cultures interact and commodities, capital, techniques, slaves, ideas, and even germs are traded. Here, the key interests are not the essence of individual cultures and civilizations but rather who influences whom, who gets what from where, what one culture or civilization owes another--in a word, how the world's civilizations intersect. Although interesting and certainly au courant, a history that preoccupies itself primarily with the boundaries of civilizations runs a risk of becoming marginal history.

If the reach of all three exceeds their grasp, surely Western Civ grabs more, and grabs it more firmly. Students must first know their own history in some depth before they can presume to study those of faraway lands, otherwise, how can they recognize a civilization, much less compare it with their own? If Western Civ is Eurocentric, World Civ and Global Civ seem to have no defining center at all. And if World Civ and Global Civ are more inclusive, they are also far more elusive.

What students need to know first and foremost about European and world civilizations is what inspires and haunts them: what each has made of its opportunities and how it has suffered over time. Students want the big picture, blurry though it may be, but they need surer footholds even more. In the end, all history, like all politics, may be local; surely, it will be such if students have only small, modern segments of their own history to compare with the world around them. Before World Civ and Global Civ began their circumnavigations, the pedagogical goal of the Western Civ survey was to interest students in some part of that long history by showing them as much of it as possible. The hope was that each might somewhere, anywhere, become engaged and make history a lifetime guide to one's place and time in the world. Instead of rushing pell-mell to the fiction, self-help, and current events sections of their local bookstores and libraries, the graduates of Western Civ would make a beeline to the mighty history shelf.

COPYRIGHT 2005 The National Affairs, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group