In the wake of NATO’s retreat from Afghanistan — and the final nail in the coffin of Dick Cheney’s foreign policy said retreat entails — I have lately been considering a few questions about the West, cultural and moral relativism, the nature of truth, and a few of the seeming contradictions which may be threatening to drive our collective Western civilisation to a breaking point.
You know, as one does in the quiet moments while waiting in line for groceries or idling in traffic or taking a cursory look through pretty much any exchange on Twitter these days. Anyway, this has turned into a few meditations exploring what the West is, where it came from, and where it might be going. I don’t have any distinct vision for where that might be, exactly, but I’m hoping that by writing it down I can get it out of my own head for a while and think about something else for a few months.
What is “Western civilisation”, precisely? Is it even a coherent category? Is it simply a long and complicated magic spell designed to summon Moloch and thereby destroy the world? Is there even really a collective “Western” civilisation to worry about in the first place, or is this supposed collective merely an arbitrary assemblage of otherwise-unrelated parts? And, even if there is a real whole to worry over, is the worrying worth it? Do these as-yet-unenumerated “contradictions” that have been bugging me actually exist? Supposing they do, do they actually pose a threat? And if so, is that threat worth defending against?
These questions are vexing…or, at least, they vex me. And the stakes are not at all trivial; the brute reality is that living as a citizen in the West today is markedly different to, and in many ways better than, living as a citizen of Afghanistan, or of China, or of Iran, or most of Asia and Africa and Central and South America. That is not to say that living in the West is always better in every respect than living elsewhere, that every inch of ground that might be called “the West” is infinitely preferable to any patch of earth outside it…but it is obviously better in many ways that matter. If that were not the case, there would not be so many migrants risking so much for the chance to live here.
That reality is very much not inevitable, and it is not guaranteed to endure. We risk ignoring the tenuousness of the current state of affairs at our great peril. For all of its many faults, broken and not-yet-fulfilled promises, past and present crimes against humanity, and — dare I say it — contradictions, the West as it exists today is worth appreciating for what it is, and it is worth considering where it came from in order to get a handle on where it might be going.
But, again, what is “the West”? The easiest and least informative way to think of it is as a world map with most of Northwestern Europe and Europe’s Anglophone settler colonies coloured in, along with maybe Japan and South Korea. I believe it is more than a collection of nation-states that share a close history (though it is at least that); it is a civilisation, permeating these nation-states but not synonymous with them.
What, then, is Western civilisation? The way I reckon it, there are three overlapping spheres of social life which distinguish Western from non-Western societies. Namely, these are the legal, political, and cultural spheres in which we act out our lives.
Legally, Western societies enjoy a great deal of freedom and equality under the law, very much including freedom from compulsory religious observation (or the prohibition of the same). Western citizens can generally peaceably assemble for political and non-political purposes, publicly express almost any point of view, criticise their political representatives and institutions, and pursue an education and subsequent career without state coercion. Women generally have the right to abortion along with every public right that men enjoy, couples may get divorced or forego marriage entirely, and the state does not involve itself with the sexual identities or activities of its citizens beyond certain abstract incentives (such as tax structures slightly favouring monogamous state-sanctioned marriages over other lifestyles). Police are charged with a monopoly of violence in settling disputes and enforcing laws, and they are generally helpful in preventing and ameliorating crime; direct police corruption is rare and is often punished when it is discovered. Police violence and lawlessness is also rare — yes, even in the United States, though the police there are admittedly more violent and lawless than in other Western societies.
Politically, Western societies are multi-party social democracies in which governments are run by popularly-elected representatives who serve fixed terms. Consequently, Western governments are almost universally run by full-time politicians who make a vocation of acquiring and maintaining temporary political power. Usually the safest route to acquiring and holding this power is to deliver policies which significant portions of the electorate believe are to their benefit, and so Western governments reliably deliver such policies. Virtually all Western governments have agreed to provide or subsidise health care, old-age pensions, recovery from natural disasters, and regulatory schemes for insuring against more limited dangers that come with living in our uncertain world. What corruption exists is usually abstract and is quite often punished once it is uncovered, normally by electoral failure and sometimes by legal recourse (since politicians are citizens, and citizens enjoy legal equality). In general, citizens only rarely interface with government agencies, and these instances are thought of as hassles at worst and duties at best.
Socially, Western societies are technologically and medically and economically advanced, open, and peaceful. Conflict and crime are resolved by state action, including civil or criminal redress depending on the nature of the dispute. Couples (and more complicated romantic groups) usually form spontaneously following the direct desires of the parties involved, and they can decide whether and how many children they have according to their own judgments. Homosexuality is broadly accepted by the public at large and even celebrated by significant portions of the population. Basic education is universal and publicly-funded, while advanced education is available to any citizen with the means to acquire it (and there are usually options that put advanced education within reach of a significant proportion of the citizenry). Citizens are free to travel, both within their countries and between them, and Western passports are usually honoured the world over. Aside from participating in elections, citizens regularly engage in public discussions, protests, and lobbying efforts to convince their representatives and their fellow citizens to reform or introduce or abolish public policies. Citizens can choose where and how they work and can start their own enterprises; businesses operate within a framework of regulations designed to enhance public benefit and limit public danger resulting from the operation of a given business. A significant proportion of Western populations are direct immigrants or the children or grandchildren of immigrants, many (though by no means all) of whom come from outside the West in order to build a Western life for themselves and their families.
There is, of course, a bit of variation between different Western societies’ applications of these ideals, and quite a lot of legal and political and cultural diversity along unrelated axes. Not every society within the territories ruled by the laws and customs of Western civilisation has been allowed to participate in building and enjoying that civilisation, and there are many lingering effects of that sort of inequality which continue to affect the stability of Western nations to this day. But as a generalisation, the above characterisation is fairly robust in differentiating Western from non-Western societies. Many non-Western societies enjoy some of these characteristics, but few to none enjoy all of them; pretty much every society one might call “Western” does enjoy them.
This dichotomy is difficult for Westerners themselves to understand; even the well-traveled tourist will have to put in a special effort to actually encounter an authentic non-Western society, as most tourist destinations are locally fairly Westernised and can give tourists quite the wrong impression of what life in non-Western countries is like. (If one were feeling trite, one might term this “Western privilege”. For the purposes of this meditation, one shan’t be trite.)
Again, as banal and quotidian as the above customs may seem to those of us who grew up in the safety and security of the West, there are an enormous number of societies in which few (if any) of these customs apply — gangster states, theocracies, tribal societies, juntas, dictatorships. Places where blatant, open corruption is rife in the police and civil service, or where the rule of law is whatever a gang of thugs with guns says it is, or where the population are little more than livestock for well-connected oligarchs to exploit and impoverish, or where the only recourse to wrongdoing is the personal application of retributive violence. Where marriages are arranged and homosexuality and non-monogamy are capital offenses. Where the only large gatherings tolerated are in support of whatever the ruling class allows, and non-sanctioned expression is punished by lengthy prison sentences and sadistic torture. Where every single interaction with a government agent carries with it the credible risk of spending the rest of your life in a locked room if you do or say anything that agent takes a dislike to.
No two non-Western societies are exactly alike, and they each have their own fascinating histories and cultures and many aspects worthy of appreciating and cherishing by the people those societies comprise, but each one of them lacks something fundamental that Westerners take for granted. To be clear, I am not arguing that non-Western societies should strive (or be forced) to become Western; I am merely expressing clear and obvious differences between Western and non-Western societies.
It is worth outlining a few things that Western civilisation is not, or in some cases isn’t any longer. In particular, it is not a static collection of nation-states, and it does not comprise a particular ethnic or linguistic family. It is no longer an instrument or a spreader of a particular religion. People of all colours, faiths, and tongues have joined Western society and have become integral citizens of nations encompassed by Western civilisation. Many non-Western countries have carved out more-or-less Western exclaves, where Westerners and certain very lucky native citizens can enjoy a Western lifestyle not afforded to the host nation’s general population. Contrariwise, some Western countries such as France and the US have ghettoised enclaves or long-neglected parallel societies where the rules of Western society are only weakly applicable, to the point that these ghettoes and parallel societies could be hardly considered Western at all, despite their presence within the boundaries of Western nation-states.
It is worth noting here that both France and the US, in major ways we will explore in some subsequent installments, epitomise and originated the ideals of open liberal democracy grounded in universal suffrage which are peculiar to the West. That they also contain the most notable non-Western ghettoes, and in some ways have so deeply failed to live up to those ideals, is perhaps one nascent contradiction which has so begun to trouble me of late.
That the West has a long history of exploitation of nearly every non-Western society and causing or exacerbating problems within those societies is also something to keep in mind; it might very well be that the civil society Westerners enjoy today is a direct result of the West exporting its misery to the rest of the world, and all of our freedoms and advantages might only have been possible at the expense of visiting ruin and famine and pestilence upon others.
Anything approaching a comprehensive analysis cannot resolve this question neatly; the West is definitely guilty of impoverishing and destroying multiple societies throughout the world over the course of its history, but there is no civilisation for which we have evidence that is not guilty of such crimes. There is thus no credible alternate history in which liberal democracy and a free and open civil society could have been developed without being predicated upon a long and bloody history of exploitation and war and slavery and genocide, since these practices were ubiquitous for the entire history of civilisation.
The free and open society which we have built in our own timeline is quite recent, and many of the freedoms and privileges which Westerners now enjoy came into practice within the lifetimes of a good chunk of us who are still around today. For most of the relevant history, the societies antecedent to those we call Western were horrible places to live, rife with poverty and disease, ruled by feudal thugs and their inbred poncy descendants who claimed the right to boss everyone around with the self-arrogated authority of a priestly class which brooked no challenge to its divinity. These societies were peopled largely by peasants who lived and died under conditions any modern Westerner would immediately identify as abject slavery. By any measure we can apply today, the West was at best a peer of its contemporary civilisations, and was occasionally outclassed by them — sometimes quite thoroughly — until just a couple of hundred years ago, if not more recently.
I think it is worth summarising that journey, which I will do in subsequent posts, before circling back to explore where our society might be heading if we are not very careful.