Loving the West

Both in the cries of my peers who have taken to activism, and in the conversations I hear and take part in daily, criticizing “the West” seems to be much in vogue. To anyone on Harvard’s campus—or, I suspect, on most campuses—or anyone who has viewed the Ivy League Snapchat story over the past couple of days, or anyone who has read a college newspaper, a sometimes vague and sometimes sharp anti-Western sentiment is palpable.

The charges against the West are plain and severe: sexism, racism, homophobia, and all the evils they precipitate. Both to signal our disapproval of these wrongs, and to prevent them from taking hold of new generations, I have heard suggestions ranging from universities mandating classes in women and gender, African and African-American, Latin American, and East Asian studies, to deemphasizing the importance of the Western canon. In the next couple of paragraphs, I want to argue against both the sentiments and the suggestions attached to them. The West and its canon contain deep truths, beauties, and insights that would be lost if not studied. And the complaints leveled against those texts, I believe, are incoherent.

Let’s take a moment to reflect on the fact that to offer an unqualified defense of Western civilization might be seen as provocative. But because it might be, it behooves me to clarify exactly what I am and am not arguing. I am not preaching some sort of Euro-centrism or Euro–supremacy. I am not saying that only what the West has to offer is worthy of study or has value. I am too ignorant of other traditions to make those comparative statements. Instead, this is more of an attack on an attack. I want to push back against the Western tradition’s most recent campus critics, and in doing so highlight the important role it should serve in our education.

The first point to note is that there might not even by a Western tradition that one can criticize or defend. Commonly, when one refers to the West, one is referring to something that spans millennia, cultures, languages, and even continents. It is startlingly diverse. The West has produced “The Five Books of Moses” and “The Communist Manifesto”; Voltaire and Plato; Churchill and Hitler. In the West, we are somehow able to coherently praise the self-effacement and humility of Jesus as well as the bravado of the Greek heroes. When the West looks for beauty, it can direct its gaze at a Pietà or a Man Ray. The West encompasses a lot, and to speak of it as a monolith, as if all it contains speaks with one voice or has one common vision, is to be frighteningly reductive and ignorant.

I have always found it strange that we have a strong concept of Orientalism but no real conversations about Occidentalism. Just as I think it shameful that for so long many Westerners reduced the Eastern world—as complex and variegated as the West—to a minaret, a spice trader, or an opium den, I think it shameful that others continue to reduce the West to English aristocrats sipping tea, German and French philosophers absorbed in their own suffering or mental efforts, or a bunch of dead Greeks and Romans.

I anticipate that my interlocutor has a rebuttal. True, someone might say, the West is diverse, so diverse in fact, that it only has one thing in common: its exclusion and oppression. That is, the seminal figures in the West have nearly all been white, male, heterosexual, cisgender, et cetera, and studying the West therefore precludes the experiences of people who do not fit into those categories, and thus excludes the people themselves. How, the argument goes, can a Native America learn from John Locke, who authored, among other things, a charter for an early colony?

But is not this charge somewhat strange? It rests on a severely restricted vision of empathy and imagination, both for the creators and consumers of culture. Who better to read Kierkegaard or Camus (two, I should point out, extremely different thinkers) than someone who feels alienated from today’s society? Tolstoy’s “A Confession," which takes the reader through his crisis of faith and the depression it induced, is perfect for the disillusioned, not the comfortable. Great works, in short, are great because they can speak beyond the circumstances in which they were created.

There is also something transcendent about knowledge. One does not need to be a Scott or a Britt or a man or straight to make sense of Hume’s critique of induction, and Kant’s criticism of revolution does not raise problems only for those rebelling in Germany. For the critics of the West to argue against this point would be self-defeating: If non-Westerners cannot learn from the West’s canonical figures, how can they expect Westerners to learn from their greatest thinkers? To make racial, sexual, and cultural sameness a prerequisite of learning from someone is to Balkanize knowledge, and make learning impossible.

I also endorse the hard case, where the figure in question was, either in his work or in his life, explicitly racial and hateful. What I have just written is not just words for me, but something that I actually live by and with. As a Jew and the grandson of four Holocaust survivors, I come from a tradition that was not just excluded from the West, but actively persecuted by it. It was not long ago that a part of the Western world tried to exterminate Judaism, and even recently Judaism has been under assault in Europe.

I can recognize that Martin Heidegger—a member of the Nazi Party whose anti-Semitism was a non-trivial part of his philosophy—was a brilliant philosopher who has much to teach me, just as I can recognize the beauty in one of Wagner’s operas in spite of his famed anti-Semitism. It would have been pathetic of me to not get past the ostensible anti-Semitism of Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” and therefore deny myself the opportunity to access and debate the ideas contained within. If I fail to struggle with the West’s complicated legacy, and fail to embrace the undeniable offerings it has because of that, I am the one who loses out.

Isaac G. Inkeles, ’16, lives in Leveret House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.