What is the West?

May/June 2008 Historically Speaking 19 love letters a thousand years ago—are all too common . The notion that the past has nothing to teach us is the obverse of the cult of the new, and it endangers our ability to remedy the shortcomings, or build on the strengths, diat have shaped our culture. What is crucial is the ability to wonder at the genuinely new. The alternative is to keep reinventing the wheel. But one cannot recognize the genuinely new without the sense of history that diese days is as rare as it is important. If we are to understand how different our views are from those of our ancestors, we need to recapture something of the stance of Herodotus. Always interested in determining what people considered normal and expected , he was seeking the roots of the cultures he encountered. None of us can aspire to be another Herodotus. But as we try to understand the meaning of the new, his example can help us emphasize the decisive importance of history. Even our own acceptance of change is better appreciated if we perceive that it comes out of a distinct tradition, shaped by particular forces unique to the West. Theodore K. Rabb is emeritusprofessor of history at Princeton University. Among his many books and articles are The Making and Unmaking of Democracy: Lessons from History and World Politics (Routledge, 2002) and The Last Days of the Renaissance and the March to Modernity (Basic Books, 2006). What is the West? Ricardo Duchesne What made the Greeks stand out in the world of antiquity, Theodore Rabb tells us, was their restiess, inquisitive desire for the new and die unknown. It was diis striving for new knowledge "in and of itself" that laid the "roots of modern science." Rabb cites Eratosthenes 's calculation of the circumference of the earth as an excellent example of this peculiar Greek urge to explain the nature of things without consideration for its applications. According to Rabb, this Greek legacy shaped the "oudook" of the West—not right away, in a continuous way, but in the long run. The Romans and medieval Christians made important contributions —aqueducts, roads, windmills, miracles, and universities—but they barely made any contributions to "newness of the Greek kind." While Tacitus 's Germania was about a new subject, it was not driven by a desire to discover something new about the customs and beliefs of Germanic peoples, but by a pragmatic preoccupation with the growing laxity and corruption of Romans. He also says that Marco Polo's travels to the East were instigated less by wonder and curiosity than by a desire for trade. All in all, the people of the Middle Ages "were notable for a profoundly hesitant attitude toward the new—truth was received, not discovered." The Crusaders ventured into new lands, but only in response to the convenient objectives of the Church. One lone character, Abelard, proposed new ideas, but they were either fervendy opposed or ignored. A perspective that frames the cultural resdessness of the West in terms of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is rather limiting. The irony is that the Greek invention of theoria was tied to a metaphysics that envisaged the true nature of reality as eternal and transcendent and, further, insisted that this reality was intelligible only by a serene and contemplative mind unperturbed by the restiveness of the daily world. The moral disposition of this influential Platonic oudook was one of rational acAn Albrecht Dürer woodcut depicting a man with a lion, and Hebrew, Greek, and Latin texts, 1497. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. quiescence with the laws of nature. It was not one of experimentation, transformation, and newness. Rabb is all too aware that the Western encounter with the new involved "resdessness," "determined competitiveness," and a "constant quest." But how does one square the disinterested curiosity of Aristode with the physical contestations of the Olympic Games? Rabb highlights die Vikings as a people "constantiy looking for the new" and "die most ambitious founders of new colonies and new settlements." But where is the link between their pursuit of the new and Eratosthenes's urge to...