Sympathy and Greeting

Anyone who has ever opened an issue of The Economist or Harper's Magazine or the New York Times Sunday Book Review has surely seen the ubiquitous advertisements for "The Great Courses." Despite their relentless and even remorseless advertising -- I get a paper catalog in the mail about once a week, now -- I've been a fan of this company and its courses for years. Recently, my kids surprised me with a one-year subscription to "The Great Course Plus" as a Father's Day gift -- giving me unlimited access to hundreds of courses for free until next June.

All of the professors and courses are great but it would be tough to over-compliment Professor Robert Bucholz and his course on Modern European History.  Though recorded in the mid 2000s, and thus somewhat dated given recent developments (especially Brexit), I cannot recommend it highly enough.  Professor Bucholz's closing lecture on the "Meaning of Western Civilization" is so good, and so inspiring, that it really ought to be taught and rote-memorized by high school students across our fruited plain.  It is, among other things, a devastating rebuttal to those who push the dangerous idea that STEM and bean-counting are all that students need to learn to be successful and productive in the global marketplace.

I quote the majority of that final lecture below:

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So the book on Western Civilization at the close of this course is that it faces some challenges.  All of which should raise the question for us of where the past 500 years of Western history have actually gotten us.

In this course, we’ve seen the inhabitants of Europe change dramatically but not, I think, completely. 

For example, after years of struggle, Europeans shattered the Great Chain of Being and the assumptions behind it.  They embraced humanism, toleration, and the scientific method and revolution. They abandoned the role of subject for that of citizen.  They created societies of ever widening opportunity and intellectual curiosity. They gave birth to societies, in the Americas and in Oceania, that trumpet their openness and their hostility to hierarchy. And yet, Europeans themselves continue to value hierarchy, status, and tradition in ways that Americans often find puzzling.

Europeans profited from commercial, financial and industrial revolutions. They created great trading empires and industrial complexes and by the 19^th Century the wealthiest societies the world had ever seen. But these left in their wake many victims: Native Americans and African slaves abducted from their homes and used as farm machinery; urban workers reduced to the level of economic cogs in the great machine of national prosperity.

Europeans sought to exploit half the world in unregulated capitalism. But . . . yet . . . eventually, they recognized the inconsistency of that exploitation with Western ideals of freedom and equality and self-determination. 

And here, I think, we begin to get a sense of why the West is different.

In 1994, Bernard Lewis wrote: “In setting out to conquer, subjugate, and despoil other peoples, the Europeans were merely following the example set them by their neighbors and their predecessors,” that is, they were no different from any number of other civilizations which had preceded them on the planet. “The interesting questions are not why they tried, but why they succeeded, and then why, having succeeded, they repented of their success as a sin.  The success was unique in modern times – the repentance in all of recorded history.”

Imperialism, sexism, and racism are words of Western coinage not because the West invented these evils, which are (alas) universal, but because the West recognized and named and condemned them as evils and struggled mightily to weaken their hold and to help their victims.

In short, the West is seemingly, uniquely, capable of self-criticism and so of reform.  Europeans have in their history embraced hierarchy and intolerance, racism, sexism, imperialism, totalitarianism, and greed.  But also liberalism, romanticism, feminism, socialism, realism, and democracy in an attempt to build something better.

The experience of so many revolutions, so many movements, suggests that perhaps the real theme of this course is a persistent, inexorable, restless rejection of the status quo. When that didn’t work, they picked up stakes and they built alternative Western civilizations in the Americas and in Oceania.

At home, their experiments with one-Europe government, whether by Charlemagne, the Pope, Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Hitler, or the EU, have largely failed because of nationalist impulses.  But as this course closes, they have restrained those impulses to the point where another general European war seems unthinkable.

Note the latest Balkans crisis. But note that unlike in 1914, it did not precipitate such a war.

Why?

In part because Western Europeans seemed to be long past the notion that anybody could gain anything from that kind of a conflict.

This was addressed by one of the heroes of the Velvet Revolution, Vaclav Havel at the Charlemagne Plenary Address in Aachen.  Charlemagne is, of course, a great symbol of European unity.  It could be argued that he practically invented Europe in the Middle Ages.  Aachen, his capital, also known as Aix-la-Chapelle in France, is another symbol of the idea of Europe coming together. He delivered this address on the 15^th of May 1996 and in it he said:

“Humankind is entering an era of multi-polar and multicultural civilization. Europe is no longer the conductor of the global orchestra but this does not mean it has played out its role and has nothing to say to the world anymore. A new task presents itself, and with it, a new substance to Europe’s very existence. Europe’s task will no longer be to spread, violently or non-violently, its own religion, its own civilization, its own inventions, or its own power. If Europe wants, it can do something else – more modest, yet more beneficial. Through the model of its own being, it can serve as an example that many diverse peoples can work together in peace without losing any part of their identity. Through its own behavior it can show that it is possible to treat our planet considerately, and to think also of the generations that will succeed us. It can demonstrate that it is possible to live together in peace with other cultural worlds without a person or a state having to renounce themselves and their truth in the process.”

Now I know that neither Lewis nor Havel actually denied the critique of Western society. Europeans have behaved with rapacity and gross insensitivity to other peoples – as those peoples have often behaved to each other. What is unique to European civilization is its willingness to confront its own sins, to renounce them, to make amends for them. Admittedly, it has done that slowly and unwillingly and only partially. It has, and is doing so, still today.

Now, it’s a theme of this course that, wherever we come from, we in America are all Europe’s children – Europe’s heirs. Perhaps because we are so young, we in the United States seem to be allergic to any suggestion that we might ever have done something wrong. To ask the very potentially fruitful question – a very Western question – “why do they hate us?” has been branded as somehow justifying the hate. 

In this, I think, the Europeans are ahead of us. Stripped of their world hegemony, brutalized by their own internecine wars, forced by war crimes trials and secret police files and video footage to confront their own multifarious failings, they have resolved not to repeat them.

Can we, their heirs, make a similar claim? It seems to me that someday, sooner or later, we will have no choice.

Admittedly, in an age of global terrorism, all this progress seems to be cast in doubt. Can Western civilization, and in particular, civilization so open to self examination and doubt live with and survive the continuing challenge of non-Western civilizations?

I think that it can.

But only if we, its students, continue to embrace that part of the Western heritage which has always emphasized the freedom of the intellect, the dignity of the individual, rationality as antidote to superstition and jingoism, a healthy skepticism.  And finally, the notion identified in their different ways by Lewis and Havel: that other peoples and cultures are valuable in their own right.

That’s how we survive: by flexibility and rationality and recognizing the inherent value of others. And we’ve known that since at least the Peace of Westphalia. That, I think, is the meaning of the West – the meaning of Western civilization.

Now admittedly, other meanings are possible. In the midst of defending these principles, we could very easily become the mirror image of our enemies and revert back to an unthinking submission to authority, intolerance, jingoism, superstition, and suspicion – in an attempt to find something safe and comforting to believe in, to hide in.

Certainly Western history, certainly European history provides plenty of precedents. But I would like to think that if the experience of the last 500 years has taught us anything it is that those solutions are temporary, and in the long run, destructive.

So that is, I think, what the West can teach us.

  

But what of civilization itself? What of history? What are their meanings?

Well before I address that, I feel compelled to issue a variation on the disclaimer that I offered at the very beginning – in the first lecture of this course.

Let me say, that it has been a very great privilege for me to share with you my version of the story of modern Western civilization. I fear that over the course of these 48 wide-ranging lectures it is not unlikely that I have offended with my omissions and my errors and my biases.

For the omissions, I plead that we only had so much audio and video tape and the crew in the studio can only stand so much of me.  For the errors, I do apologize most heartily. This course demands knowledge of everything from deliberative bodies, to diseases, to Dreadnoughts.  I still have much to learn. One of the most frustrating things about being a professor is that you spend most of your life out on a limb. And too often, that limb breaks. 

But I would argue that another essential duty of being a professor is to profess – to tell the truth as he or she sees it after years of study in his or her discipline. And so I cannot offer an unqualified apology for my apparent biases.

I promise you that I have tried my best to be objective, fair, and balanced. But like any human being, I’ve most likely failed. After all, it should hardly be surprising, that after studying and teaching Western civilization for, well, maybe four decades – ever since my beloved grandfather gave me my first model airplane kit and I started reading that little history about how this plane was used and what it meant to the history of the West – well, I’ve developed some opinions and some sympathies and some convictions that you have been exposed to, for good or ill, in the course of these lectures.

In fact, I’ve come to believe, that such opinions are part and parcel of this course for this course is not simply a course on the history of Western civilization. It is a course in civilization itself.

And so I stand here, as a student of civilization, as a man who aspires to be civilized someday myself, to profess that there are lessons to be drawn from this history. There are lessons to be drawn from civilization. Lessons, in fact, in how to be civilized. Like Martin Luther, standing before his Emperor “I can no other, God help me.”

The lessons of civilization are, I believe, to be found in a few simple principles.

War is a terrible thing. You had better be sure you know what you are doing when you engage in it.

Certainty is a wonderful thing when deployed in defense of the defenseless and the down-trodden. At all other times, it is suspect.

Power does not last – even superpower. Art and culture do. So do cruelty and generosity.

Most people never got to be kings or queens, dukes or duchesses. Most people were underdogs caught up in vast historical forces beyond their control. We should, I think, resist the temptation to think that we are somehow different – immune from the political, social, economic, or cultural tidal waves of history. We are all swimming in that same ocean. We should not laugh at our predecessors, even at their most ridiculous, for someday we too will look ridiculous to our successors. We should spare a thought for the underdog.

Finally, as I proposed in the lecture on the Holocaust, this course should remind us that civilization is fragile. It has certainly broken repeatedly. That’s because, as I said then, it is not a building, or a book or a law. It is not a theorem or an opera. It is a daily and conscious act of respect and consideration for others. An act of veneration for what the past can tell us. An act of critical thinking and skepticism. Of openness to new ideas and other cultures. And of a quest to make ourselves something better than we are. That act is born of what we learn and it is sustained by what we teach our children.

Another way of putting this goes back to something a great teacher used to say at my Alma Mater Cornell.

If you’ve enjoyed these lectures, one of the things you may have enjoyed about them, is the enthusiasm that I feel for history and for the academic life in general.  I suppose I first identified that enthusiasm – I know that I always had it, I just didn’t know what it was – when I was an undergraduate student at Cornell University. Now, if you’ve ever visited my Alma Mater, you know that it is visually and aurally the university from central casting.  It’s got lovely leafy quads. It’s got imposing towers “reared against the arch of heaven” as the Alma Mater would have it. There’s ivy everywhere.

And tucked away, in all sorts of spots probable and improbable, all sorts of statutes and plaques and benches that are intended to commemorate the glories of learning while giving the scholar a place to rest his weary bones.

I suspect that every Cornellian knows what I’m going to say next.

If you were to visit my Alma Mater, you might find yourself drawn to a particularly beautiful spot, facing west, under the library bell tower.  There, as so often at older academic institutions, you would find a bench, and on that bench, an inscription:

To those who shall sit here rejoicing,
To those who shall sit here in mourning,
Sympathy and Greeting,
So have we done in our time.

Now I’m told – I was never actually able to take a course from him – that Professor M.H. Abrams, the editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the author of The Mirror and the Lamp, a seminal text for understanding those English romantic poets we talked about in Lecture 25, that he used to end his survey of English Literature by saying that here, in that inscription, was the meaning of all art – “Sympathy and Greeting, So have we done in our time.”

Now with apologies to Professor Abrams, I will go him one better. Here is the meaning of the entire inheritance bequeathed to us by civilization. Here is the meaning of human history itself.

Greeting – because civilization is the means by which the generations communicate with each other. It is a sort of greeting card from past generations to the present. And what does that card say? Well it says: “We lived and died. We loved and hated.  We struggled, and won, and lost all the while “rejoicing and mourning” as you do now. Don’t forget us. Listen to us.  You might learn something. You might learn what happens when people think that their religion, their political system, their culture is the superior or only way – as in the Spanish Inquisition or the Reign of Terror. What happens when people pursue material wealth at the expense of all else – as in the slave trade or the industrial revolution. What happens when they become drunk with Nationalism or the desire for vengeance – as in 1914 or the Balkans or what used to take place regularly on the Franco-German border every generation. What happens when they choose Order or Security over Freedom – as in Britain after the Napoleonic Wars or Germany in the wake of the Depression. What happens when they embrace new knowledge, remain open to new ideas, and fight for justice – as in the Scientific and Rational revolutions and countless reform movements. And what happens when they don’t -- too often to name."

Sympathy – because if you pick up anything at all from the history of civilization it should be a kind of Sympathy for all those human beings who have gone before. I don’t think that you can study history, I don’t think that you can listen to that Greeting for very long without developing a compassion for those who fought the good fight of life before us. Especially those who struggled against injustice or great odds – serfs, Levelers, industrial workers – or those whose death came unjustly or too soon – slaves, Holocaust victims, and all those dead soldiers and sailors in all those wars we covered.  History should in particular give its students a strong sense of justice and injustice if only by exposing them to all the best and all the worst that human beings have done for and to each other since the beginning of time.

But Sympathy, too – on a deeper level because history reminds its students that their way is not the only way. Other times and other cultures have had their own ways of ordering the universe, the state, the family, relations between the genders, the business of getting and spending. Indeed, if the first half of this course is all about how Europe became modern, the second half is about how European’s modern experiences have rendered their attitudes and behaviors so different from ours in America at the dawn of the 21^st Century.  

We often wonder why we don’t understand.  Well, it’s helpful to learn to understand that past in order to explain that present.

Thus Sympathy – as taught by history, also implies a kind of humility, a realization that we in the West do not have all the answers, that other cultures have much to offer, that other people have their reasons for doing what they do.  The end result of such understanding is what Havel meant by living "in peace with other cultural worlds without a person or state having to renounce themselves and their truth in the process."

Now that does not mean automatic approval of every truth. This is not an argument for relativism – cultural or otherwise. This kind of Sympathy does not mean that we do not condemn the slave owner, the concentration camp guard, the terrorist. But it does call us to that most difficult of intellectual exercises – to try to understand the experiences and motivations of those who hate what civilization loves – if only so that we may more effectively discredit their hatred.

Now as you know, humankind still retains the power to destroy civilization as we know it in about the time it has taken me to deliver this lecture. Should that ever happen, it will be due to a failure of Sympathy.  The politician who presses the button, the gunman who takes one life, the terrorist who takes many can only do so by a failure of human Sympathy – a failure to hear the Greeting of history, a failure to listen to the lesson of civilization.

And so you see, I’m arguing that this course – enjoyable as I hope it has been – is much more than a way to pass the time.  It is rather a toolkit for any citizen of the West, a survival kit for any citizen of the world. It is essential equipment for those of us who wish to become civilized and remain so – in a world which is dangerous and complicated but also beautiful and round and very delicate and rather small.

It seems to me that we dare do no less.

We can no other.