From Plato to NATO

The Idea of the West and Its Opponents

David Gress

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781439119013
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

An in-depth intellectual history of the Western idea and a passionate defense of its importance to America's future, From Plato to NATO is the first book to make sense of the legacy of the West at a time when it is facing its greatest challenges. Readers of Francis Fukuyama, John Gray, Samuel Huntington, and other analysts of the dilemmas of Western nations in the twenty-first century will find in David Gress's original account a fuller description of what the West really is and how, with the best of intentions, it has been misrepresented. Most important, they will encounter a new vision of Western identity and how it can be recovered.Early in the twentieth century, American educators put together a story of Western civilization, its origins, history, and promise that for the subsequent fifty years remained at the heart of American college education. The story they told was of a Western civilization that began with the Greeks and continued through 2, 500 years of great books and great ideas, culminating in twentieth-century progressive liberal democracy, science, and capitalist prosperity.In the 1960s, this Grand Narrative of the West came under attack. Over the next thirty years, the critics turned this old story into its opposite: a series of anti-narratives about the evils, the failures, and the betrayals of justice that, so they said, constituted Western history.The victory of Western values at the end of the cold war, the spread of democracy and capitalism, and the worldwide impact of American popular culture have not revived the Grand Narrative in the European and American heartlands of the West. David Gress explains this paradox, arguing that the Grand Narrative of the West was flawed from the beginning: that the West did not begin in Greece and that, in morality and religion, the Greeks were an alien civilization whose contribution was mediated through Rome and Christianity. Furthermore, in assuming a continuity from the Greeks to modern liberalism, we have mistakenly downplayed or rejected everything in between, focusing on the great ideas and the great books rather than on real history with all its ambiguities, conflicts, and contradictions.The heart of Gress's case for the future of the West is that the New must remember its roots in the Old and seek a synthesis. For as the attacks have demonstrated, the New West cannot stand alone. Its very virtues -- liberty, reason, progress -- grew out of the Old West and cannot flourish when removed from that rich soil.

CHAPTER ONE

Happy he who has come to understand the causes of things

—Virgil

The first step to recovering the history of Western identity from the wreckage of the Grand Narrative is to understand that the narrative was not some revealed truth about Western civilization temporarily granted to American educators during the hegemony of the classical—assimilationist, meritocratic, and humanistic—version of American liberalism in culture and education, and then taken away again as that hegemony succumbed to political and cultural attack in the 1960s and following decades. In hindsight, we can see that the hegemony of this centrist liberalism was rather brief: it gathered steam in the wake of Progressivism and World War I, rose to its first eminence in the Depression decade of the 1930s, became near-universal during and after World War II, and seemed to stand uncontested until 1965—until the moment when the Vietnam War began to divide the American elites, and the leaders of the adversary culture launched their long and magnificently successful march through the institutions.¹ The centrist liberal hegemony in culture and education lasted some thirty years, a generation, in other words. In terms of political history, it reached critical mass under one Democratic president, Franklin Roosevelt, and began to crumble under another, Lyndon Johnson. But even such an account overstates its power, for how could it give way so quickly from the mid-1960s on if it was not already seriously undermined from within? The adversary culture did not appear from nowhere in 1965, but had been there all along as a steadily more vociferous undercurrent in politics and in the elite colleges, media, and cultural institutions.

Nevertheless, the point here is not to trace the fatal flaws of American liberalism that led to its post-1965 split and permitted a bureaucratic, egalitarian, and multiculturalist version to replace the meritocratic and assimilationist version of earlier decades. Rather, the point is that the Grand Narrative, as a convincing and comprehensive story of Western identity and of America as the legitimate culmination of that identity, was not an independent discovery of scholars, but a political and pedagogical construct of the same spirit that drove centrist liberalism to its brief moment of power. It was liberalism’s historical and cultural account of itself, its roots, history, and legitimacy.

The Grand Narrative dominated elite higher education, and therefore elite culture, in America from the 1920s to the 1960s. It provided the cultural and historical basis of a liberal consensus about the merits and potential of the West that was unapologetically rationalist, progressive, and confident of the benefits of science and industry—a consensus that sought excellence in education, common ground in politics, and assimilation and harmony in social relations. And because the Grand Narrative was a construct of American liberalism, therefore, when American liberals stopped believing in excellence, reason, science, and assimilation, they also lost confidence in the Grand Narrative that underpinned those beliefs.

The second step is to understand why the Grand Narrative was invented when it was, and by whom. The typical version of the Grand Narrative was the undergraduate course in Western civilization as taught in elite colleges during the decades of centrist liberal hegemony. One common answer to why the story of the West was told in this way has been to say that these were the decades when higher education became a mass phenomenon—some said an entitlement—in the United States, and that educators realized that the many new beneficiaries of higher education needed some common ground, some common core of information and knowledge on which to build their citizenship in a mass democracy. That is true, but it is only part of the reason. Other industrial and capitalist democracies developed mass higher education during the twentieth century, but none felt the need to center that education on a common or general curriculum the way that American educators did.² There was nothing in the notion of mass higher education in itself that required a college-level core curriculum. Rather, it was the peculiar circumstances of America, as they appeared to leading educators in the early years of the twentieth century, that indicated not only that mass higher education was on its way, but that it should rest on a common core curriculum.

One critical difference between America and other Western countries was that America, at least until mass immigration ceased in 1924, was receiving relatively large numbers of immigrants at a time when the elites believed strongly in assimilation. Assimilation was therefore the main motive of those who constructed the Grand Narrative in the early years of the twentieth century. At that time, America was receiving more immigrants, relative to the size of the population, than ever before or since. And unlike the situation after the 1960s, the American elites considered it their duty to assimilate new arrivals to the dominant Anglo-Saxon political and economic culture and its accompanying social norms.

Assimilation took two forms. For those who were already adult when they arrived, assimilation was American life itself; the need to survive in the brutal economy of the day was, all by itself, a force sufficient to shave off whatever ethnic or cultural peculiarities the newcomers might bring with them, if those peculiarities hindered them in becoming efficient producers. For those who were children, a broader and more conscious strategy suggested itself. They were more malleable and had a longer future in America. It was especially important to see to it that the schools and colleges made them into genuine Americans, more American than their parents. “It was an atmosphere,” recalled a grandson of Hungarian immigrants, “in which the Anglo-American culture, the world of Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Jackson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Thomas Edison, Mark Twain and the Wright Brothers, was honored. We were all expected to learn it, absorb it, and become as much a part of it as any young Anglo graduate of Choate and Yale.”³

The catalyst that precipitated the Grand Narrative in its developed form was World War I. America helped win the war, but the American elite now found itself faced with another challenge of assimilation. This was the assimilation not just of immigrant children, but of young adults, who were not necessarily immigrants but who had not the least idea of the political principles of American government or the democratic heritage of Western civilization.

When America entered the war in 1917, the U.S. government asked educators at elite colleges to prepare for a mass influx of returning servicemen, and to prepare “War and Peace courses” to teach them what they had been fighting for and why. The returning doughboys were to be sent to college, there to learn the basics of Western civilization. Such teaching would perform two functions increasingly seen as essential in a modern society, and especially in America, the most modern and progressive of all societies. It was supposed to turn illiterate boys from the slums and backwoods of America into competent citizens, by means of Plato, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson. The power of the great idea and the great book was to be deployed to counteract the barbarization of war and to turn former soldiers into prospective philosopher-kings.

One place where the call to devise courses on War and Peace had particular resonance was Columbia College in New York, which became the alma mater of one of the two main forms that the Grand Narrative took in American culture of the twentieth century. In 1919, teachers at the college presented the first version of what they called the Contemporary Civilization course. This course covered the history of Western political and social ideas with particular reference to America and American identity over two semesters. It remained, in 1998, a required course for all Columbia undergraduates; Columbia, indeed, was one of few colleges in the 1990s that still prescribed an extensive core curriculum, rather than allowing students to design their own. When it was first taught in 1919, the Columbia Contemporary Civilization course was one of the most important spinoffs of what became known as the general education movement of the 1910s to the 1930s, and which transformed American higher education. This was done not just by introducing the standard Western civilization course, but by introducing the idea that everyone ought, ideally, to receive some college education, and that this education should not be vocational, but “general,” that is, it should consist of nonspecialized teaching about great ideas and great books. Thus was born the modern, twentieth-century, and, as it turned out, short-lived idea of liberal higher education.

One of the young men of Columbia who helped devise the Contemporary Civilization course and who went on to become a leading exponent of the Grand Narrative was John Herman Randall, who in 1919 was majoring as an undergraduate in history under Charles A. Beard and James H. Robinson, two leading American historians of their generation. Beard was about to leave Columbia to found the New School for Social Research, in lower Manhattan, partly because his book The Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, published in 1913, had offended more traditional historians by its argument that the American Founding Fathers had economic and political interests, just like other powerful groups in history, and that one could not understand the whys and wherefores of the American Revolution without taking those interests into account. Young Randall did not follow Beard to the New School but remained at Columbia for the next fifty years. His classic texts The Making of the Modern Mind, first published in 1924, and The Career of Philosophy from the 1960s represented the Columbia version of the Grand Narrative in elegant and comprehensive form. These books were detailed expositions of the philosophical systems that shaped the modern West and of the intellectual and cultural conditions of their emergence. Brilliantly learned and well written, Randall’s books shared the Grand Narrative’s basic characteristic—that it was a history of great ideas and of how superior ideas replaced inferior ones until the “modern mind” was fully shaped.

The second fundamental version of the Grand Narrative was that associated with the University of Chicago and its “Great Books” program. This idealistic endeavor had a different genesis from that of the Columbia Contemporary Civilization course, although the two formed a powerful and complementary duet of cultural assimilation and liberal humanism in their heyday. The two versions overlapped in the person of Mortimer Adler, who took the Contemporary Civilization course at Columbia before doing his Ph.D. at Chicago and joining the law faculty in 1928. The Chicago operation was largely the brainchild of Robert Maynard Hutchins, one of the most brilliant and certainly the most precocious American educator of his time. Hutchins, who was born only a month before Randall in 1899, was dean of the Yale Law School at twenty-eight and president of the University of Chicago at thirty. At Chicago, Hutchins met Adler and recruited him to help in an ambitious reorganization of the university’s entire spectrum of undergraduate study. The Hutchins-Adler team produced the “Chicago Plan” for undergraduate study, which emphasized broad reading and comprehensive examinations rather than specific courses leading to specific tests of knowledge. The axis of the Chicago Plan was the study of Great Books. Undaunted by the timidity of later ages, Hutchins and Adler had no problem deciding what books were Great; and in true American technocratic fashion they went so far as to publish, for the general market, special editions of the chosen works, fifty-two in number, under the title Great Books of the Western World.

Hutchins and Adler had complete faith in the civilizing effect of study and reflection on the great ideas of the past. Born intellectuals both, they saw reading and knowledge as direct sources of virtue and citizenship and could not understand why anyone at a university would want to pursue any other activities than those of the mind. As president of Chicago, Hutchins downgraded athletics, while Adler had been refused his diploma at Columbia for refusing to take part in obligatory physical education. From the 1940s on, both were associated with the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which despite its name had become an American operation and which, in its American incarnation, became one of the most successful operations in mass-marketing knowledge and information of all time.

Hutchins left Chicago in 1951, after which the university abandoned the Chicago Plan, although it continued to publish the Great Books. He spent the latter decades of his life at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he tried to create a community of freewheeling scholars discussing the fundamental issues facing the contemporary world—peace and war, individual freedom, ecology, and, toward the end, the rights of minorities and women. This well-meaning but utterly ineffectual effort symbolized a basic flaw of the Grand Narrative, at least in its Great Books version: the fact that it consisted exclusively of great ideas divorced from their historical, ideological, and institutional context.

A third form of the Grand Narrative that differed from the Columbia and Chicago versions in being directed not at students, but at interested citizens, and in being based not on a naive faith in the power of study to produce virtue, but on the idea that the history of culture should include all of history, was that of Will Durant. This version was never represented in a college curriculum or a Great Books list, and it was the product of one man—later of two people—rather than of distinguished academics. It had also a longer history, since it began before World War I. For these reasons, Durant’s contribution was not precisely comparable to the Contemporary Civilization course or the Chicago Plan, though it arguably had a greater effect.

It began humbly among the uneducated workmen of New York City. Even before World War I, churches, workmen’s associations, and other volunteer groups had begun, on their own, and mostly in the big cities, to offer night classes on history, philosophy, and culture to ordinary working people, most of whom had, at best, a grade school education. Some of these groups were politically radical, and the purpose of their schools and evening classes was to raise up generations of citizens prepared for dramatic social change and fired by visions of justice. One of these schools was the Ferrer School of New York City. At that time, radicals believed that one of the greatest sources of social and economic inequality was that the poor and the oppressed lacked education. If you could teach the poor, the ordinary working people, you were handing them the tools of their own liberation and the key to the revolution that was to come. Therefore, in early-twentieth-century radicalism and socialism, education in the classics and in the great books and ideas of the West was not seen as limiting or as imposing the hegemony of dead white males, but on the contrary, as opening possibility and laying the essential foundations of social change. For in the radical world-view, the new world to come would necessarily be an enlightened, educated world, one in which to know Plato, Locke, and Jefferson was not the privilege of the few but the right of the many.

In 1911 the Ferrer School welcomed a new teacher, a twenty-six-year-old former journalist, college instructor, and lapsed Catholic seminarian named Will Durant. He had leaped from Catholicism to the equally demanding faith of radical political ideology, and like his radical friends he believed strongly in education as the key to mass liberation. But Durant’s future turned out to be quite different from that of his radical friends in 1911. At Ferrer, he discovered that he had a fantastic knack for presenting the history of ideas, societies, and manners in a way that gripped his audience, removed them from their humdrum and exhausting daily lives, and gave breadth of vision and a taste of a wider world. Durant soon ran up against his own limitations of knowledge. Having in the meantime found a patron, he took two years off to tour Europe and take graduate courses at Columbia, in biology and philosophy as well as in political and cultural history. Since this was the early twentieth century, these topics were limited to their Western aspects; history then was the history of the West.

In 1914, Durant returned to the streets of New York, specifically to the Presbyterian Church then located at Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue. Fortified by his travels and studies, he began to give here the lectures that he later published as The Story of Philosophy. This book became an instant bestseller and could have kept Durant and his wife, Ariel, comfortably off for life had they so wished. But Durant had now realized just how much he enjoyed learning and teaching. His ambition grew: he was going to tell the working men and women of New York City the story of their civilization, and he was going to write this story down so it could be read and enjoyed anywhere. Thus he began the long program of study and teaching that, in 1935, bore fruit in the first volume of The Story of Civilization. The project continued to grow, as the Durants ploughed through time from Egypt and Persia via Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance and the Reformation. By the late 1950s, Durant, now in his seventies, was tackling what he called the Age of Reason, and began including his wife’s name on the title page. Undaunted by age, the Durants continued their task until the age of the French Revolution and Napoleon, published in 1975 when Will was ninety and Ariel seventy-seven. They both died six years later, within a fortnight of each other.

The Story of Civilization was the apotheosis of the Grand Narrative. Vastly superior to the textbook versions, immensely learned, vividly written, and informed throughout by an obvious delight in storytelling that never, or rarely, turned into condescension to the reader, the twelve-volume, nine-thousand-page, four-and-a-half-million-word saga covered all of life, as defined by Western civilization. Philosophy, climate, poetry, diet, music, disease, politics, sexual practices, architecture, passions, class distinctions, and the endless variations of custom, taste, and belief—these were the interwoven themes of Durant’s version. It was a nearly perfect achievement, within its, admittedly broad, limitations. First of all, Durant defined civilization as Western civilization and its history as one tending to more freedom, greater equality, and broader rights, which was the ideological core of the Grand Narrative. Second, he had his favorites, and religious or mystical people, times, and places were not among them. He was polite and, within his secular limits, understanding, but his tolerance to the reader was not always matched by tolerance to his characters. After a few thousand pages, even the most curious reader might begin to weary of the sheer liberal urbanity of the man, his unshakable sense that he knew best, and that the reason he knew best was that he had read and understood everyone of any importance, and many of no importance. Above all, Durant’s story was a story with a goal and a moral, and a story that demoted all those characters, events, or situations that did not square easily with the goal and the moral. The goal was an idealized, progressive, individualistic America, and the moral was that the West was good, but was most truly itself when engaged on the long march to that worthy goal.

The Grand Narrative rose to its culmination and began its fall while the Durants were writing. The first volume appeared in the era of Franklin Roosevelt and the Depression, when optimistic progressives such as Durant still believed that one key to progress was education in the great books and great ideas. The last volume appeared the year that Saigon fell to the communists and American helicopters lifted a few lucky escapees from the roof of the American Embassy, symbolizing the ignominious retreat of American power. The Vietnam War that thus ended had been, in America, the single most significant triggering event of the radical movement of the 1960s, which, among much else, had on its agenda to attack and delegitimize the liberal story of the West and Western identity itself.

Shortly before the attack on the Grand Narrative began, a University of Chicago historian produced a book that, if one judged by its title, might easily be taken for a triumphalist restatement of the narrative on the eve of its fall. This was William McNeill’s The Rise of the West, subtitled “A History of the Human Community,” which first appeared in 1963. Writing about it in 1988, McNeill admitted that “in retrospect it seems obvious that The Rise of the West should be seen as an expression of the postwar imperial mood in the United States.”⁴ McNeill had attended Chicago early in the reign of Hutchins and Adler, but explaining great books or teaching working-class Americans about the roots of Western culture was not among his self-imposed tasks. His book was rather an attempt to understand cultural change as a never-ending process of interaction between societies, each equipped with its own package of skills, interests, and material conditions. In McNeill’s world view, history was the result of such interaction and of cultures learning—consciously or not, willingly or not—from each other.

Most people who heard the title, however, assumed that because the book concluded that the West was in fact dominant in the twentieth century, therefore the book was a celebration of that fact, which it was not. To critics of the narrative, The Rise of the West was merely another politically objectionable expression of the Western triumphalism they saw in the Grand Narrative, and that they were determined to destroy.

As radical students in the 1960s, Martin Bernal and Kirkpatrick Sale—to name just two—encountered the Grand Narrative, saw the Vietnam War, and drew the conclusion that the one was part of the enabling apparatus of the other. American imperialism, hunger in the Third World, racial injustice at home, and the capitalist rapacity that exploited poor people as well as the natural envi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Grand Narrative and Its Fate
• 2. The Battle over Hellas
• 3. The Burden of Rome
• 4. Christianity and the Fall of Rome
• 5. Germanic Freedom and the Old Western Synthesis
• 6. Faith, Passion, and Conquest
• 7. From Christendom to Civilization
• 8. The High Tide of Liberalism
• 9. The Totalitarian Trap
• 10. The Cold War West
• 11. Battle in the Heartland
• 12. The Failure of Universalism and the Future of Western Identity
• Notes
• Index
• Appendix