A recent unexpected attack against the concept of Western civilisation occurred at the prestigious BBC Reith Lectures when the philosopher and cultural theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah told his audience: “Whether you claim it or rebuff it I think you should give up the very idea of Western civilisation. I believe Western civilisation is not at all a good idea.”
How could anyone make such a claim against a civilisation that gave birth to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and which produced world-class literature, classical music and great works of art?
It was Western civilisation that gave the world democracy and human rights, and which created the science and technology that raised millions of people all over the world out of ignorance, poverty and disease.
Western civilisation is being besieged not only by ‘barbarians’ but also by revisionist cultural theorists from within who tell us that we should ‘give it up’. Perhaps Appiah’s prejudice against Western civilisation is due to the fact that he was brought up in Ghana and not in Europe.
In his 1969 television series Civilisation, art historian Kenneth Clark observed that, in the aftermath of the pillage and destruction by Goths, Vandals, Huns and Vikings during the Dark Ages, “in so far as we are the heirs of Greece and Rome, we got through by the skin of our teeth”.
We have to be on guard to make sure that Europe will not face a similar catastrophe.
Beneath the veneer of civilisation lurks barbarism. As J.G. Frazer wrote in his book The Golden Bough: “We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below.”
Historian Will Durant observed that “civilisation is the precarious labour and luxury of a minority. The basic masses of mankind hardly change from millennium to millennium.” He defined civilisation as “that subtle and precarious luxury without which life would have no beauty, and history no meaning.
“Eternal vigilance is the price of civilisation. A nation must love peace but keep its powder dry. Around every Rome hover the Gauls; around every Athens some Macedon.” (Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization, 11 volumes).