On February 8, 1999, David Gress, the author of From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents, spoke at an informal Center seminar. Dr. Gress is a fellow of the Danish Institute of International Affairs and co-director of the Center for America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. The following is a lightly edited version of his summary of the argument of his widely acclaimed volume, followed by a condensed account of the ensuing discussion.

 
DAVID GRESS

To write or speak about the West today is to step into a minefield. For years, the idea of the West has been very contentious in American higher education and in American debate. Typically, if you go to a campus or other academic setting today, you will be told by implication or directly that the West is a bad thing, that it has a very unsavory history of exploitation, oppression, racism, sexism—the list is long and dolorous. This nasty West is best abolished, and America should de-Westernize.

The idea of the West is also thought to be bad because it comes from Europe; it is a Eurocentric ideology of oppression and imperialism. But if you go to Europe, you will experience the mirror image of this idea. Whereas to American liberal, progressive opinion the West is bad because it is European, to European conservative opinion the West is bad because it is American. There is a complementary though much less vociferous tradition since World War II, primarily but not only on the European right, that the West is an inferior American attempt to subjugate Europe to an American idea of a uniform, capitalistic, hyper-democratic, egalitarian model of how to live and do things that is alien to Europe and should therefore be rejected.

A distinguished version of this view, not at all simple-minded, is that of Norman Davies in his book The History of Europe. He actually has endorsed my book, From Plato to NATO, which I think is something of a coup because he devoted a lot of his own book to arguing that the West is a meaningless concept; it can be defined in so many different ways that it has no real content. Davies lists a range of definitions of the West—all of them, in his opinion, inadequate—to show that the phrase has no meaning and is best abolished.

The idea of the West, as currently contested in American higher education, has less to do with Western civilization as a historical phenomenon and as an actual entity in time and space than with current views of what the West should be. The main target of the attacks on the West is the familiar construct of Western civilization that has been taught to American students from World War I up to the present. I recount in a sketchy form in my book the history of that attempt to develop an idea of Western civ that would be common to all students and common to the culture. The idea of that Western civ was one that began with the ancient Greeks and continued through history to contemporary America. It is my opinion that this worthy attempt was flawed because it set up an idea of the West as one great idea after another. Inherent in the usual way of seeing the progression “from Plato to NATO” is the notion that you have a series of progressively superior insights into morality, philosophy, ethics, liberty, democracy, and human nature, and that these over time produced the modern West.

This kind of linear progression, this great-idea version of history, was in a way rightly vulnerable to the attacks of the 1960s. Those attacks were, of course, the origins of the current contention. The notion of the West as a sequence of great ideas and as a logical progression in history was called superficial, unfair, and unreasonable; it was said to create the view that the West consisted only of the great and the good. (This was back in the sixties, before the appearance of the “dead white male.”) And there was truth in these charges. History does not run in a straight line; it zig-zags and is full of unintended consequences. By setting up the Western civ model, its defenders made themselves vulnerable to the kind of attack that inevitably came in the 1960s.

The problem we have now is trying to put together some more adequate version of the West. The real West as well as the ideal of the West certainly has opponents, and they cannot be answered unless we go back and pick apart what the West really was.

About Those Greeks . . .

So what is the West? My account obviously cannot be comprehensive. I just want to point to a couple of issues that I found interesting in both the standard conservative view of the West as a story of progress and liberation and the left-wing view of the West as a story of oppression and imperialism.

My title, suggesting as it does a straight line from ancient Athens to the Atlantic Alliance, was ironic in that I do not believe the West can adequately be said to be rooted in the ancient Greeks. What I mean is not that the Greek legacy is not essential to the West, but that it is one of several equivalent legacies and is not to be taken as a measure of all that is Western. We do a injustice both to the West and to the Greeks if we assume that they were the first Westerners and that nothing more needs to be said because all their ideas can be translated to modern times. I’ll give two examples of both how the Greeks discovered something important for the West and how the Greek world was in important ways very different from the West.

The first one I take from a passage in Herodotus, the father of history, who explains in a famous passage the invasion of Greece by the Persians in 480 B.C. Herodotus sets up his familiar distinction of east and west; his whole work is predicated on the argument that the barbaric east was defeated by the numerically inferior but morally superior free west. The key part of this argument comes in the passage telling of the Persian army’s entrance into Europe and of this army’s great size and variety. Herodotus goes into great detail about the different contingents of the army in a section that is interesting to read because Arabs with camels, Ethiopians, Indians, Medes, Armenians, and all sorts of tribes that are famous in history make their appearance for the first time here under their own names. The point is that this vast and varied army marches under the command of one man—namely the Persian king—invincibly into Europe and invincibly into Greece.

Now at this scene, watching this procession of the army into Europe, is a Greek who is in the Persian army in expectation of taking power at home when the Persians win. Having been expelled from his town in a coup, he joined the Persians hoping to come back on their coattails and take revenge. The scene is set when the Persian king says to the Greek, “Look at my great army. Surely not one of the peoples of the West can stand against me because they are disunited and disorganized and far fewer than I am.” The Greek tells him, “Oh no, great king, you are mistaken. Your victory is not as assured as you think.” Then the king says, “This cannot be true, because it is well known that the Greeks are free,” by which he meant disorganized. “Therefore they cannot organize against me, and even if they could, they would still be far too few.” The Greek answers, “You still do not understand, great king. It is not that they are disorganized or few; it is that they have a higher law that commands them to fight, and this higher law they fear more than your subjects fear you. Your subjects are marching because you are desperate and they must march, but the Greeks will fight because they are free, and they will fight to win.”

This part is quite well known, but then comes an interesting little passage that I think is a real example of how something profoundly Western can be traced back to the Greeks. The king goes on, “What is it about you Greeks that you think you are so special? Why do you think that you are going to be such good fighters?” Then the Greek says, “Well, great king, understand that Greece is a poor country and that because of its poverty, its people are forced to exploit their resources very effectively.” He doesn’t use that language, of course, but the point is that poverty forces you to be inventive and to use what you have with great skill. “Skill” and “virtue” in Greek are the same word. So his point here is that the skillful use of resources, material or spiritual, is the key to success and to social order. Here I think we have something that is profoundly Western and has been a great spur to the modern individualistic and yet socially responsible Western character.

The story is quite different when we turn to the religious element of Western identity. Here I think the Greek element is quite alien, interestingly alien, but certainly not Western. In some of the Greek legends the religious ideas of their culture become evident. For instance, take the legend of Agamemnon, the king who leads the Greeks to avenge the rape of Helen and to destroy Troy. In one important version of this story, King Agamemnon is told that the gods will kill him if he does not obey the divine command to go to Troy, because the rape of Helen was an insult to both divine and human law and must therefore be avenged. Unfortunately, the gods also tell him that in order to go to Troy he must sacrifice his only daughter or they will not send him fair winds. Well, killing your own child is also a crime against divine and human law, one for which the penalty is death. So the king knows that either he leaves the army and forsakes his duty, in which case he will be liable to death as a traitor and a shirker, or he kills his daughter and will be liable to death as the murderer of his kin. As we know, he does go to Troy; he kills his daughter, and he himself is killed when he comes back.

The point about this episode, which to the Greeks made perfect sense, is that there was no connection between merit and penalty and no connection between merit or good will and divine favor. Agamemnon had no choice, but that was no excuse. The gods were not the creators of the universe; like mortals, they were subject to emotions, to fear, envy, caprice, jealousy, and the like. But they were immortals, so they could never suffer the consequences of their emotions as mortals did. That in a nutshell is the classical Greek view: you cannot count on divine favor; the gods did not create you. The gods are powerful, and they can play havoc with your life or be nice to you if they so choose, but they are not responsible to you or for you.

Why Become Christian?

Without getting into a long discussion about the differences between Greek religion and Christianity, I want to mention one point that is of some interest nowadays because in our secular society, especially in our secular elite society, people openly wonder why the ancient world became Christian. They had this wonderful civilization, and then they chose to become Christian and destroy it all. This is the classic Enlightenment view of Christianity as a source of Roman decline. An interesting theory that I follow in my book a little is that Christianity really was a feminist enterprise in the Roman Empire. In both Greek and Roman culture, abandoning infants, especially girls, to die was an accepted practice. There is a striking passage in an ancient letter found in Egypt from a man who is traveling on business to his pregnant wife. He writes, “Dear wife: I hope you are well and don’t miss me too much. I hope that you have delivered your child successfully. If it is a boy, keep it. If it is a girl, throw it out.” It was taken for granted that one could do this. The reason, of course, is that in ancient society, girls were expensive because you had to give them a dowry when they married, whereas boys might marry girls with money and bring money into the family. So the pater familias, the head of the Roman family, as a manager of assets, would of course regard girls as basically a cost and boys as a potential source of family wealth.

We know that many girl babies were left to die, because the evidence shows that Roman families of any standing almost never raised more than one daughter. This produced a gender ratio in the Roman Empire much like what we are seeing in China today—at the height of the Roman Empire, 1.4 to 1. Now here comes Christianity with its Judaic heritage saying, “You can’t do this; abortion and infanticide are against the divine law, and a lot of other things are also against the divine law.” It is easy to see why Roman women, especially those of some social standing, would be attracted to this religion. Indeed, our evidence supports the idea that the primary converts were well-to-do women in the Roman Empire who got their husbands to convert and saved their daughters’ lives. That was one of the primary means by which Christianity succeeded in the Roman Empire.

In the formation of the later West, Christianity played a vast and varied role; this is just one aspect of it. Another, which the old idealistic story of the West used to raise, is that Christianity abolished slavery. That is a more complicated story; it did so, but the process took a long time, and there were also all sorts of economic reasons why it happened. Certainly some basic notions of ethical social conduct came into the Roman Empire through Christianity, along with the notion that there is a relationship between God the Creator and you the creation. This was unknown to ancient religion. Not utterly unknown: many in the Roman Empire were groping for some kind of monotheistic way of explaining the world. But Christianity provided the convincing answer to those questions, and therefore its success was not, in hindsight, astonishing.

A Certain Idea of Freedom

In my book I also address a third legacy in the West, besides the classical (Greek/Roman) and Christian. The third legacy, which is a little more complicated and unfamiliar than the others, is what I call the idea of Germanic freedom. This is problematic because in Nazi Germany, academics who sold their souls to Hitler tried hard to show that the Germans were the real core Westerners. You can go back and find all sorts of ridiculous statements by people who argued that Germans were really the modern Greeks and that the Greeks and the Germans were the real Westerners.

But what I am getting at is something quite different. I am trying to rehabilitate a much older idea of the Germanic legacy that goes back to the Enlightenment if not further. The Germanic tribes that conquered the Roman Empire and changed the geopolitics of Europe, producing the pattern that became the modern European state system, introduced an element that was not found in quite the same form in either the Greek or the Christian legacy. It is a certain idea of freedom that I see as a two-edged sword. It is a notion of freedom derived from some sort of tribal democracy, tribal individualism, but combined (and this is very important) with a very extroverted, aggressive, self-aggrandizing behavior. This of course was a Germanic pagan thing. When it met Christianity, the result was a peculiar mix that underlies the Crusades, underlies the discoveries of the sixteenth century, and underlies (I think Thomas Jefferson would agree with me) a lot of the ideas of early America. That is a combination of religion and exploration, extroversion, taking control of the world, and ambition. The impulse that led to the Crusades could take violent and bloody forms. In other aspects it could take peaceful forms, of course, but without this element, I think any account of the West would be deficient.

If we look at these three elements, ancient, Christian, and Germanic, and try to imagine the West without any one of them, we get a sense of their importance. First, a West without the Greco-Roman legacy would be a strange creature indeed. It would be a West devoid of philosophy and probably devoid of science (I am among those who think that science, though it is a seventeenth-century invention, has important Greek roots), so it would be a pretty strange place. I won’t say it would be devoid of democracy, because you can argue that Greek democracy is not directly ancestral to the West, but at least it would be without philosophy and science.

Second, a West without Christianity would be a West that still killed babies and had the rather peculiar and harsh outlook on life of the Greek and Roman world. It would be a West also without something very important, and that is respect for work, for productive activity. The ancient societies, both Greece and Rome, did not regard productive work as worthy of a free man. The free man (of course it was always men at that time) is he who does not have to work, who has slaves to do the work, because to work for hire, to work at other people’s behest to produce what they want, is to be subordinate to their wishes, and that is the mark of un-freedom. Again, a West without the Christian revelation of what work meant would be a West with this odd (to our minds) notion of work and of the demeaning nature of working for others.

Finally, a West without the Germanic legacy would probably be a West that consisted of a single imperial state in Europe and had never undertaken the voyages of discovery. It might even have been a West without modern individualism. So all three elements— ancient, Christian, and Germanic—are to be included, and none could survive without the others.

A Universal West?

To conclude, I want to say a few words about universalism. Since the end of the cold war there has been a rash of arguments over whether the modern West is going to be the universal civilization, and if so how, or if not, why not. The most famous of these is Francis Fukuyama’s thesis about the end of history. Fukuyama, who is often misunderstood, says that democracy and free markets are destined for political success because once they have been discovered, they are so obviously superior to other ways of doing things that they will percolate throughout the globe, regardless of culture. Democracy and the free market will trump culture and become universal in some time frame; he speaks of a century or two, so we ourselves will not see the proof of this. But his thesis is the thesis of the European Enlightenment: we have discovered the reasonable way of living and the reasonable way of securing prosperity, and these must prevail because they are so obviously in accordance with human nature and reason.

I’m somewhat skeptical of part of that thesis. I think the idea that capitalism, free-market economics, will spread is fairly uncontroversial. Once the dynamics of productive activity and economic development have been uncovered, then there is little question as to whether a society will allow those things to flourish. There is, as I think the record shows, a very strong inherent momentum in capitalist forms of society; they spread readily even to cultures where they were not native. So I have no trouble with the argument that capitalism, within some rather long time frame, will become global or almost global.

But I cannot say the same about democracy. Unlike Fukuyama and others, I don’t see democracy spreading apart from the culture that produced it. Democracy entails a number of assumptions about human nature and about how people interact and about incentives that are peculiarly Western and cannot easily be transplanted. A society may have a number of forms that call themselves democratic and may even have elections, but democracy is more than just elections. Democracy is a form of realism about human affairs and a form of risk-taking on behalf of freedom that evolved in Western Europe and America over a long period of time and cannot, I think, be replicated.

So on the one hand, we have the triumphalists about the West, Fukuyama and others, who say, What’s the problem? The West is obviously successful economically, and we won the cold war. All these good things—democracy, capitalism, science, the rule of reason, individual rights—are out on the table, and we should just wait for them to be chosen universally. On the other hand, we have within our own culture at home and in Western Europe two views of the transience of the West. One sees it as a very negative, very damaging culture that should be replaced by something superior; the other fears that the West is doomed to disappear, either in some globalized mass culture or simply by virtue of its own inner feelings. This strikes me as a situation we just have to live with. I don’t think there is any way of deciding that one or the other is right. Clearly the triumphalists have strong arguments at the moment; certain Western ideas have great appeal. And yet we cannot subtract from that the fact that the same West that is so triumphant outwardly is suffering domestically from serious doubts about its own identity.

This is partly why I wrote From Plato to NATO. I think that the way to go forward is not to go back and start to harangue about how wonderful the West has been. Rather, we should look at the remarkable history of the West and see how, by a combination of unlikely and unforeseeable events and developments, a matrix was produced in a certain part of the world previously disregarded, namely Western Europe, that generated a great deal of energy and activity, making possible this country, among other things, and also the very doubts with which we now plague ourselves.

Robert Royal (moderator): It seemed to me when I read your book that there was an important issue you touched on but didn’t develop very much. You emphasized how important it is for us to be in a sort of organic continuity with what you call the old West, which is the classical heritage, the Germanic heritage, and the Christian heritage, and to understand how that energizes the new West. But in most of the intellectual debate over the West, that is precisely where the problem is.

David Gress: You’re right. It’s difficult even to get a hearing for the argument that we should go back to the old West. The prevalent view is that the new West—which is, very crudely put, the West of democracy, capitalism, and science—is a wholly new departure, unrelated in any but the most basic sense to what we had before. The universalists who say we are heading toward a universalized world culture can say that only if the Western forms that will be dominant in that culture are divorced from history. And you are right, that view is maintained in the universities and among many of the elites.

I don’t know how to go about changing this except to say that it simply makes no sense. First of all, cultures don’t transform themselves like that; there is no point in history where you say, here in the year 1776 or 1750 everything changed; everything that came before is the old West, and everything that came after is a new West. The point is that the new West reaches deep into the old West. Take democracy and capitalism and science: they don’t begin in the eighteenth century. It’s a very complicated story, but you can find the beginnings of democratic behavior not just among the Greeks, who had a very different understanding of what democracy is than we do, but in medieval Europe, in the city-states of Italy and Germany, in the Swiss cantons. Here and there, as elements in other types of societies, you find democratic ideas beginning to evolve: the notions of representation, of the right of a large body of people to have some say in what the minority does. These sorts of ideas begin to crystallize in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries and then become an increasingly powerful undercurrent until the Enlightenment, when they take over.

Capitalism, too, is misconceived as a truly modern phenomenon. There has been capitalist behavior in all times and places. Even under the Soviet Union, capitalism was going on in some places. Certainly in ancient China, ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia, there were capitalists—merchants, traders, people who engaged in productive interchange. But they were not respected, and the culture did not consider their activities morally worthy. That change begins to come in Europe, again in the Middle Ages; it is in the much maligned and misnamed Middle Ages that the turn from what I call the old West to the new West begins.

So to answer your question by a roundabout way, the new West makes no sense without the old West. What is interesting is how deep into the past these elements—democracy, capitalism, science—go, and also, of course, how they are transformed. In our contemporary era of multicultural interaction, it is quite dangerous for advocates of the West, and critics too, to put forth this notion of a very recent, rather simplistic West that can be defined without much problem and exported without much problem.

Chris Gray: Professor Harold Berman, in his book Law and Revolution, traces the explicit notion of human rights to canon lawyers in the twelfth century. This is at odds with what lovers of ancient Greece want to portray. Twelfth-century lawyers clarified what ancient Jews had done in giving women rights, protecting them from being beaten by their husbands, and keeping children from being left out to die. This was a tremendous revolution. John Paul II has restored this medieval aspect of the papacy and made it completely contemporary. But unfortunately a lot of people in the conservative movement are deeply influenced by both Leo Strauss and Eric Voeglin, and they don’t want to see that there was a break or that the Catholic Church made this great contribution to human rights. It took the notion and explicitly clarified it in the twelfth century.

DG: Professor Berman’s book was one of the formative ones I read in developing my argument. The problem is that it is not either/or. You cannot say that modern Western freedoms are either ancient Greek or medieval Catholic; they are both. Of course, the genius of the West is that these things are combined. If you follow the history of Western ideas, you continually see this interplay as some development occurs, like the early tradition of rights, based on biblical and ancient sources, Catholic theology, and canon law. Then someone comes along and injects some Greek and Roman stuff, and the result is some sort of new synthesis. That strikes me as what is characteristic. So I don’t think that one has to attack Straussians or disregard them.

Of course, Voeglin was himself a Catholic, and if you read him carefully you get a different view: that it is both, not either/or, it is a symbiosis. At certain times, the ancient element prevails in interpretation. I think that in modern times, despite the attacks on the Greeks, we have had a long period in which the Greek model has prevailed. For a number of reasons—anti-Christian prejudice is one of them—contributions of the Church have been very much left to the theologians and to the precommitted. That is what I’m trying to bring back out as well.

Ernest Lefever: Some philosophers of history make a distinction between culture and civilization. I believe Arnold Toynbee did, and to some extent Samuel Huntington does. Do you think such a distinction clarifies or confuses the issue?

DG: I think it is a valid distinction, though I don’t use it much in my book. Civilization consists more of values and principles, while culture is more objective. Culture is morally neutral: our culture is the way we do things. Civilization has a more specific, higher, ethical dimension. But in my book I don’t get into areas where that sort of distinction is relevant, so I tend not to use it. Hunt-ington does use it a little in his book The Clash of Civilizations, though he doesn’t develop it much either. In fact, one quarrel I have with his otherwise interesting and provocative ideas is that he doesn’t really define civilization. He uses the term, more or less in the short definition, in the beginning and then just goes on using it. I guess that is a political scientist’s privilege, to use it because it is a useful concept. As a historian, I would like to see more justification of it. But Huntington wasn’t making a historical point; he was making a point about international relations now.

Robert Royal: I think it is worth mentioning that this distinction is really an eighteenth-century one. It tried to get at a continuing problem, because civilization was the universalistic element that David was talking about, and culture was the multi-cultural reaction of its day against an abstract Enlightenment. It starts in Germany, where the Romantics emphasize Kultur. Then the French start to emphasize culture against their own Enlightenment. That issue has not been resolved. One of the big questions about globalization is to what extent universal principles are going to be accepted everywhere, and how we can combine the idea of a universal culture with the kind of particularistic cultures that we all want to see thrive because they enrich the human situation. So it is not just an academic debate; this is something that goes back to the point at which universalism started to be assertive in a serious way and provoked some sharp reactions.

James Reichley: That distinction, I think, was very much made by the Germans in the first World War. They didn’t think culture was a neutral thing; it was something superior to civilization, in their view. This gets to my question. It seems to me from your brief synopsis that you could get along without the Germanic strain to explain the characteristics and qualities that you mention. I would think that the aggressive, imperialistic side of the West could be traced to Rome or even to Athens, the individualistic side to Christianity. I don’t think that the Germanic strand is as important as the other two. True, some ideas about nature, an idealistic quality, come from the Germanic side. But for the particular qualities you mentioned—I don’t think you really need the German culture to find their sources in the West.

DG: But the rise of a pluralistic, non-imperial mosaic of political communities, after the Germanic invasion of the Roman Empire, owed a lot to the Germans, in the sense that something about the way in which these tribes conceived of their mission or their nature feeds into and helps to shape later national identity. I am very struck by that point, because if you read books on nationalism, you are told that this is a modern invention. Nationalism is said to have arisen in the French Revolution and to have been largely a device of the governments of the day to mobilize and create a uniform citizenry.

But I find much more intriguing and plausible the notion that nationality—maybe not nationalism, but nationality—has much deeper roots. One of the roots I mentioned earlier was the idea of Herodotus and the Greeks that there was something that bound the Greeks together, a certain frugality and ingenuity in living a simple life. Another ancestral source of nationality was the ethnic mosaic that the Germanic tribes largely created. The Roman Empire did not have that kind of nationality. There is some contribution there that is not reducible to either the classical or the Christian heritage. Also, in parts of the Middle Ages we see the concept of chivalry, the notion that the noble person defends the weak and fights for God, the holy- war idea in a Christian context. Some of these things have something more than the classical heritage behind them, and that is what I call the Germanic element.

J. Bottum: I am a little uncomfortable with your presentation. You contrast Christianity to the Greeks, but of course the Gospels were written in Greek, several hundred years after Alexander had spread that Hellenistic world. To some degree Christianity had already made the move that you are describing and had absorbed a great deal of the ancient world. Some strands of the New Testament and early Christianity set Christians over against the Greeks. Others show that the Greeks are to be included in the synthesis that is Christianity. When you set up an opposition between the Greeks and Christianity, two separate streams pouring into the long river of the West, it seems to me that you end up with a view of Christianity as works-righteousness. That is in fact exactly the description you gave Christianity when you described it as productive, as over against a Greek religion that didn’t recognize merit. The Protestants among us and those of us who are Catholic might balk, however, at works-righteousness.

That leads me to my other problem with the picture you give. Capitalism, it seems to me, works in the West precisely because it is not the most important thing. Work is celebrated by not being celebrated. It is not the highest thing. Money, the economics that you describe—these are not good in and of themselves. They are secondary goods. If a West that has forgotten the primary goods makes those secondary goods valuable, then it is no longer connected in quite the way that you want. Or at least there is a break between that old West and the new West.

DG: Those are very interesting points and could lead to another, much longer discussion. You’ve shown the perils of trying to give short summaries to long arguments. I think I deal with those points in the book, but let me try to do it briefly here. First of all, you are absolutely right, of course, that Christianity rises when Judaism, its matrix, is already Hellenized to a great extent. In the Roman Empire at that time there was a tremendous interaction, and there was a very powerful Greco-Roman political and Greek philosophical and linguistic takeover of the Near East, including Judaism and Christianity. And you are right about the Gospels. There is a big debate going on over whether they were perhaps written first in Aramaic. There is some evidence that the Greek language used is a very odd kind of Greek, and it has clearly Semitic sentence structure underlying it. Christianity comes into the world fairly Hellenized and takes over the Roman Empire because it speaks a language that Romans can understand, that is to say, basically a Greek philosophical language.

But the content is a bit different; that is the whole point. There was a cultural environment that could hear the message, but the message is not what they were hearing from Plato or the neo-Platonists or the Aristotelians or the Stoics. The Stoics are the great heroes of the multiculturalists today because they supposedly said that there is no difference between a Greek and a barbarian. They did say that, but they also said that the future world society will be a society of the wise and the good; there the multiculturalists are elitists in some ways.

On to your second and more important point, on capitalism and works-righteousness. We could put this in Christian terms, or indeed in classical Greek terms. Aristotle made a distinction between activity that is purely gain-oriented and activity that helps us toward some de-finition of the good life that we set out to achieve, activity we must do in order to make a living and satisfy our needs. In the latter case, the activity is a means to an end. The difference is between a culture in which the good life has meaning and most people work to achieve the means of the good life, and a culture in which gain for the sake of gain is dominant. I certainly would agree with you that there is something about the modern West that encourages gain for gain’s sake to become dominant and competition to become prevalent. In my presentation I had to be very brief, and so I probably gave the erroneous impression that Christianity largely served to justify that, which, of course, isn’t true at all. I wouldn’t even agree with the Max Weber thesis that modern capitalism arose because Protestants, who were worried about their salvation, worked very hard to try to prove that they were successful. That simply doesn’t hold up either historically or theologically. But nevertheless there is some connection, and it has to do with the value of work, not as an end in itself but as an acceptable, noble part of life that is not to be scorned.

I would say that if you focus solely on the distinction between an economic life that is subordinate to other ends and one in which economic ends are sought for themselves, there clearly are some powerful tendencies in the modern West, especially in modern America, that would support the notion of a radical break. But then you step back and look at something else and say, modern America is the place that is most divorced from the old West because here work, competition, and materialism are the most prevalent, and yet America is also the most Christian country in the West today. There always is more than one thing going on.

Robert Royal: And I think it is worth saying that in a strange way the West starts out as multicultural, though it is accused of being non-multicul-tural these days. Between the Greco-Roman heritage and the Hebraic and Christian parts of the tradition, there already are fault lines. And things keep coming back. Part of the Greek heritage is there at the beginning; another part is rediscovered and reemphasized in the Middle Ages and comes back again in the Renaissance. There are these fault lines that continually allow new things to happen. None of this is totally divorced from what precedes it; it just gets turned in different ways. We are probably at a point where this works-righteousness that you talk about is being rethought by a lot of people who are just tired of working so hard and not knowing why.

Marc Plattner: I was puzzled by the discussion, brief though it was, of universalism at the end of your talk. You stated rather boldly that the final message of your book is that universalism is wrong because the world is not the West. I wonder if you could elaborate in terms of a specific example you used: democracy. Why is universalism wrong? Because other people outside the West will not accept democracy? Because they will accept it but can’t make it work? Because it would be bad for them if they did accept it and make it work? What exactly is the nature of the barrier to universalism?

DG: There are two kinds of barriers. One is an aggressive assumption that we know best, not only in general but in particulars, so that particular ways of doing things in the West, in the United States, are therefore also globally valid. The question of democracy is complex. I am not saying that democracy cannot spread. But look at Russia and China. It isn’t easy to transplant these institutions, because they are institutions; they are not just mechanisms. You can have mechanisms, you can have votes and parties, but democracy is also a way of existing and a way of defining human nature that is culturally specific. I doubt that we can, should, and will export these things. I am not saying that we shouldn’t stand up for democracy and say that it is a good way of doing things. It has worked here, but it has worked here for reasons that have to do with history and culture. To transplant or learn or copy it is not easy.

Marc Plattner: Are you saying that it won’t work elsewhere and that is too bad, or that it won’t work elsewhere and that is good?

DG: Neither, only that it probably won’t. There are successful examples, but those examples tend to prove that it requires a lot of time and a lot of Western intervention. Take India. To a point it is a functioning democracy. But India was occupied by the British for two hundred years and may for other reasons have cultural predispositions to accepting democracy. In Russia I don’t think it is working; they have the form but not the content. As for China, which everyone says will become democratic in twenty years—well, I wonder. Japan is a democracy on the outside, but how democratic is the society is behind that facade? Some would argue that Japan is a totalitarian society. I wouldn’t go that far, but one shouldn’t be deceived by the fact that they have elections and parties.

I think it would probably be a good thing for democracy to be universalized, but I don’t think it can be, at least not simply and quickly. And therefore universalism is bad, because universalism is the idea that this is fated and that making it happen should be an important part of U.S. foreign policy. That I think is just inviting disaster. In a general sense, democracy is a good thing, and for the world to be democratic would probably be a good thing. But that isn’t going to happen, at least not for a very long time.

Marc Plattner: The question I’m ultimately pointing at is whether the basic ideas of the West—both the Greek heritage of philosophy and the Judeo-Christian heritage of monotheism—are not themselves, in some fundamental way, universal. In other words, isn’t it somewhat contradictory to claim to be going back to the roots of the West and at the same time to eschew universalism?

DG: Universalism clearly is a Western trait and has been for a very long time. The Roman Empire was universalist in its way, and certainly Christianity is universalist. But there is also a contrary tendency. The West was also the first culture to say, let’s look at the others and see what they are like. Bob Royal has written that the debates over the American Indians in the sixteenth century were unique, because no other culture has stepped back and asked, Who are those other people out there? They are not like us, and this raises a question for us. So the West has been interested in anthropology and history and all these studies of the Other. There is this two-sidedness: universalism and particularism. Each is an impulse, and of course now we are in this odd era where we have domestic malaise and yet universalism as sort of a foreign policy, or at least as an understanding in many circles about how the world is moving. I find this troubling because I think that universalism can lead to errors, at least in a short-term policy sense.

But behind that you are right. There is a tendency toward universalism that is based on the perfectly reasonable conclusion that science is science, whether it is in Washington or Beijing. That is true. You can be a scientist in many cultures. But it doesn’t mean that there aren’t enduring differences between those cultures. I think one of the important questions for the future—not just for foreign policy but for anything pertaining to national direction—is, How far does the universalism go? Does exporting science mean exporting democracy and capitalism? There are those who have the seamless-garment idea that if you import one Western idea you somehow are going to wind up being Western. I question that. I think you can perfectly well have science and be a good Muslim, and you can probably have capitalism without becoming Western. Democracy is a little bit different, and I think that is why democracy is also more difficult to transplant, although it has been done.

Stan Rosenberg: A point for further clarification and also a methodological question. First, on the matter of Christianity and its contribution to the West: it seems that there are two foundational issues we often turn to. The first is the doctrine of the imago dei combined with the notion of the Fall that seems to guide the Western political tradition and the general sense of anthropology. The other is the development of the doctrine, especially in the fourth and fifth centuries, of creation ex nihilo, out of nothing, which reinvigorated science. Greek science and philosophy had fallen into a high degree of mythology at that point, spiraling off in various directions. So this sense that the world is real has a significance. The world has meaningful existence, so therefore it is rational, and therefore the human observer is rational. All these structures that are part of the Western tradition seem to come out of this bedrock of the Judeo-Christian tradition. I didn’t hear that in what you said: yet those seem like fundamental pieces as opposed to the more peripheral pieces.

Next, my methodological question, which is a historiographical question. A danger in attempting to do work like this is that it is relatively easy to say what A causes—A leads to B—but it is very hard to look backwards and ask what all the things are that caused B to occur. It’s easy to say that when I got in my car today I drove here, so I ended up here; but it is very much harder to track down all the causes that led to my being in this seat here and now. This is a significant historiographical question for the kind of work you’re doing. How do you handle it?

DG: Again, that is the danger of having to give a brief summary. Your first two points, about the doctrines of imago dei and creation ex nihilo, I don’t address, partly because this book was written for a secular publisher and I thought that if I was too strong on religion and theology, it would be bracketed as a book on theology. I really wanted to bridge the gap between the religious accounts of the West and the more macro-historical structural accounts of the West. I wanted to show how these two lines can be brought together without getting into specifics that require theological assumptions. Certainly theologically and anthropologically and in terms of understandings of human nature, the image of God and the Fall and the creation out of nothing were crucial. And there are such books that show the religious roots of the Western scientific tradition. But that is just not my book.

About your question on method: If I try to do one thing in my book it is to argue that there are no deterministic outcomes and that modern democracy and its concomitants are not the only possible outcome of events, not even the only plausible outcome. The rise of modern liberty, for example, I take as a fortunate accident made possible by Europe’s fragmentation. There was no empire, and so it was possible for different social models to be tested and for rulers to compete to show whose model worked best. Those who did best were the ones who were not completely oppressive; they created conditions of prosperity and property rights, and therefore they succeeded. None of these factors was planned.

James Skillen: Assuming continuity between the old West and the new West, is there any element of what we consider the new West, or modernity, that you would see as new, however contiguous with the past? Is there anything that you could say wouldn’t have arisen from a Greco-Roman/Christian/German synthesis? And are there elements of contemporary life in the West that you see as still conflictual precisely because of their roots in those different traditions? For example, is the rise of neopaganism based simply

on a romantic ideal, or has it taken place because some people are dissatisfied with the modern Greco-Christian synthesis and want to become more integrally non-modern? Are there factors that have never been synthesized adequately and are still part of the conflicts that drive the West?

DG: The elements are constantly changing, so you can’t say that a certain element, such as modern democracy or capitalism, is a product or direct result of the past. But there are changes in degree, and certainly one of those changes in degree in modern times is the vast expansion of technology. While technology was a factor in the Middle Ages, obviously its vast expansion, its control of our lives and also its great benefits to our lives through medicine, communications, and the like, are truly modern. We have yet to see the full impact of that on culture.

The move from a print culture to a visual culture leads some to fear that people are going to stop reading. Of course, at least one recent book argues that literacy was really a terrible thing because it taught people to use only their left brain, their linear, logical brain, and this was the source of many evils, oppression of women being one of them; therefore going from literacy to a culture of images will lead to greater aesthetic appreciation, be better for women, create a gentler society, and so on. But the threat to the print culture is serious. People don’t read as much as they used to and don’t write letters. Students can’t write papers. These are consequences of technology that are being allowed to happen, and they certainly make modern life very different from life in the old West.

We also have mass democracy, which a shift from the understanding of democracy as a complicated checks-and-balances system to one in which popular will is transformed to general will more or less directly. Politics is issue driven, personality driven, and emotion driven. That is a late-twentieth-century modification of a long tradition, and it’s worth trying to understand and, if possible, counteract it.

About your second question, whether factors that have never been synthesized adequately are part of contemporary conflicts: yes. I would hate to leave anyone with the impression that what I am arguing is that the West is a uniform, harmonious whole. On the contrary, more than other cultures, it is a rather conflictual whole. You mentioned neo-paganism. Neo-paganism is certainly a manifestation of a great anger and impatience with huge chunks of the West, namely Christianity and probably a certain kind of modern rationalism. Rationalism and Christianity are sort of siblings that fight. Rationalism, which is a Greek legacy and a Western legacy, can go overboard. When you start questioning everything, you end up with total relativism and skepticism, and rationalism then becomes self-defeating. We see that phenomenon all around us, especially in the elite academy. Over-driven rationalism becomes completely divorced from reality and ends in nihilism.

So if I were to boil this down to one major conflict, it would be the conflict between a kind of aggressive secularism and what I call the legacy of the “good Enlightenment.” Radical secularism is the Enlightenment of Rousseau and in some respects Jefferson, where you reject the past and want a rational society that has cut its links to the past. The good Enlightenment, which is more that of Montesquieu and of some of the American founders other than Jefferson, says that yes we live in an age of reason and democracy, but that these things exist on the basis of Christianity and the past. Without that basis, they wither. That’s the main point of conflict today: Do we agree that the historical legacy is relevant and essential, or do we say that we really have to get rid of all that because it is an unnecessary burden or even harmful? So the secular/religious conflict really is the most essential of those modern conflicts that you mentioned.

Paul Marshall: In regard to democracy, one element is the need for mechanisms to insure that the government somehow corresponds to the sentiment of the people. Another element in democracy is how to limit government, to stop it from being involved in areas where it should not be involved. Regarding that second element, I would argue that a key factor is the existence of the Church. The Church exists as a discrete institution, a sacerdotium distinct from a regnum. The Church places a huge area of the social order off limits to the power of the political sovereign, even though in going back and forth nobody quite knew what the limits were. Because of that, it has been ingrained in the West that while states have a particular area of sovereignty, there are other areas where they should not be involved. The organization of a church distinct from the political order is, I think, a key element.

DG: Absolutely. Even the most rabid critics of the West would argue that this is an important feature. Then they will argue that the Church was equally oppressive, so that we have two evil things, church and state. But the bipolarity is accepted, and I think that is quite right. [Paul Marshall: Two evils are better than one!] That is why there is a danger whenever the Church is politicized or the political system is clericalized or taken over by some sort of fundamentalist or other enthusiasm. Totalitarianism is a result of the latter. We see many examples of the politicization of the Church in our own day. This bothers me, because I think that the balance is an important component of modern Western liberty. It means that no one pole can dominate.

Chris Gray: But what is wrong with the politicization of the Church as an opposing power? It is one thing to be politicized; it is another to actually be a power.

DG: It is a problem when the Church is involved in what is not really hers. The Church takes a position on all sorts of contemporary issues that may be forgotten tomorrow. It is a striking point that rationalism is a feature of Western society. Extreme rationalism ends in nihilism, because you have undermined everything by reason. And that is the dilemma of many so-called liberals today. They want to believe in freedom, but because they have undermined everything substantive by their rationalism, it is like freedom for everyone without limit, and it becomes chaos.

So what is left? Who is defending the idea of democracy as an objective truth about man? Well, the Catholic Church. The encyclicals, especially the most recent ones, contain the argument that democracy corresponds to human nature; its philosophy and way of life express that human nature and therefore are right for human beings. A liberal wouldn’t dare to say this anymore. So we have a curious reversal. The Church can take positions and must do so, but the politicization of the Church is a danger because it evacuates the Church’s authority. If the Church is simply another voice, another pressure group, then you lose the bipolarity of church and state.

Josh Good: It seems you may be suggesting that it is really not helpful to seek the enduring or the unchanging or the universal. But how about if—instead of democracy, which is in itself a political institution—we talk about the enduring political responsibility of every citizen, something that could be translated into different cultures?

DG: I wouldn’t be opposed to that. I would just warn you that it could turn into activism. If every citizen must be politically active, you are imposing a duty to be political. That was the error, if you will, of the ancient Greeks. In the ancient Greek society, every citizen had to be political, and not to be politically active every day was to be a useless person. So when you say “the political responsibility of every citizen,” you have to build into that definition the right not to be political, to say, I’d rather take care of my family and my business; I really don’t want to have to be out there every day being political.

Josh Good: Would that do away with the political dimension? Just the decision not to act politically?

DG: No, not if you said, be political when there is a reason to be, when there is an election or a crisis. But I’m concerned about any suggestion that you should be political always and that this is a definition that somehow is culturally broader than democracy. This is a bit tricky. What does it mean to be politically active? That would vary from place to place; certainly it would be different in China than it is here. If you wanted something broader than democracy, I think it would be freedom, liberty. Freedom has many meanings; it is a concept that has some meaning in almost all cultures. To start with those different meanings and build up from there might be a more fruitful approach.

Robert Royal: To those who haven’t read From Plato to NATO, let me say that we have just scratched the surface of a wonderfully rich, deep, complex book. Thank you very much.

 
DISCUSSION PARTICIPANTS

Robert Royal (moderator), vice-president for research, Ethics and Public Policy Center; J. Bottum, Books and Arts editor, The Weekly Standard; Josh Good, assistant to the president, Ethics and Public Policy Center; Chris Gray, associate, Swick and Shapiro; Ernest W. Lefever, senior fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center; Paul Marshall, senior fellow, Center for Religious Freedom, Freedom House; Marc Plattner, editor, Journal of Democracy; A. James Reichley, professor, Georgetown University; Stan Rosenberg, professor, Trinity International University–Washington; and James Skillen, executive director, Center for Public Justice.