Western Civilization and its Discontents

September/October 2005 · Historically Speaking41 Western Civilization and its Discontents Hanna H. Gray I recently read the symposia held on the fate of the Western Civilization course published in the History Teacher in 1977 and in the American Historical Review in 1982. My conclusion: plus ca change. Debates over teaching the history of Western Civilization have been with us for decades. Nor will they go away. These debates raise some quite different if related topics. One is auricular, having to do with conceptions of an ideal education, what education is for, what it is about, and how it should be organized and presented. Another concerns the problem of how history should be taught and where it fits into an essential program of a liberal education. Yet another relates to the definitions attached to the terms "Western" and "Civilization." How are the Western tradition and its history to be understood ? Can one legitimately identify a major or dominant narrative and theme or set of themes to frame a coherent history that will introduce non-historians as well as future history concentrators to some basic knowledge and some sense of what it is to think historically? Or is the whole idea flawed in and of itself? Has it and does it inevitably lead to a parochial or triumphalist view of the West that subordinates the rest of the world and its culture to its perceived superiority, that interprets history in terms of a progressive development toward certain goals assumed to be of ultimate value while ignoring the achievements—even the contributions made to Western thought and institutions —of other cultures? Are such courses inevitably tainted by their own historical origins (for example, as is sometimes alleged, by the motives pertinent to two postwar moments that were expressed in the rhetoric of those who founded Columbia's Contemporary Civilization or in Harvard's "Red Book")? Questions as to whether courses in the history of Western Civilization were simply outmoded or so seriously biased in their assumptions as to be dangerously useless were already current several decades ago. Support for their continuation has fluctuated among both students and faculty, with shifting perceptions of the priorities that liberal education should emphasize, conflicting opinions as to how to realize those in terms of pedagogic method, multiple views of history and even of its knowability, ofwhat in history is most worth studying and how. And, of course, the work of historians, and therefore the kind of history historians think important to convey to students, has developed in all Babylonian basalt lion with figures, Iraq, 1932. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-DIGmatpc -07380]. kinds of ways, in content, approach, and interdisciplinary styles. Above all, there is the issue ofwhether it is oppressively artificial to study Western, as opposed to world or comparative history. This is surely not the place to rehearse the arguments or review the many kinds ofcourses spawned by the disputes over core curricula and their alternatives. In fact, most of the alternatives to general education or core curricula do have at least some requirements, however lightly imposed through distribution , and even existing core curricula are full ofoptions for fulfilling the requirements they set. A very few colleges do continue to put all students through the same courses, but these in turn usually offer some variants within a common framework. Properly speaking, there no longer exists such a thing as a single required course in the history of Western Civilization. Ifthat is mandated, it is as a prerequisite for some special program and group of students. In the meantime, courses in the history of civilization have come widely to be seen as more or less fungible, with all civilizations regarded as equal. In my own university, for example, (and, I have to admit, rather to my distress) students now have a requirement called "civilization studies" that extends to a choice between ancient, European, Judaic, Russian, African, Latin American, South Asian, East Asian, and other variants. Each sequence, according to the catalogue, "provides an indepth examination of one ofthe world's great civilizations through direct encounters with some of its most significant documents and monuments." Nor is the civilization studies requirement designed...