In the last 40 years, we have seen an assault on the humanities at the high school and college levels. It's not just an attack on Western history. There has been an attack on Western literature, philosophy, art, and religion as well. We have several generations now of students who have graduated from college and gotten advanced degrees, yet whose knowledge of Western civilization amounts to a warped view of the extraordinary accomplishments and contributions of Europeans and Americans to the collective wisdom and understanding of the world.
White Europeans, including the Greeks and Romans, were racist oppressors who considered African and Asian civilizations inferior to their own. Only Western imperialism and racism kept Africans from matching the accomplishments of the West.
Academic radicals began censoring the story of Western civilization in the early 1980s. The campus unrest of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in almost all schools dropping surveys of Western civilization as a required course. As a result, most adults today have no clue who Aristotle or Socrates were, or why Roman civilization was so vital to us today.
Harvard historian James Hankins, writes in Law and Liberty, "Most obviously, students today have next to nothing between their ears to block the negative stories being told them about the Western past." Because of that, we're in serious jeopardy of losing one of our most valuable commodities: a shared history of ourselves and a connection to a treasured past with all it has to teach us.
"Yes, the Western past is marred by racist and sexist beliefs, by the practice of chattel slavery, and by exploitative forms of colonialism. But no, it’s not true that these civilizational failures are unique to the West," Hankins writes. Indeed, inconvenient facts about the Africans, the Arabs, the Chinese, and the Native Americans are left out of any critique of the West. Every one of those civilizations owned slaves. Each of those civilizations practiced land grabs and slaughtered innocents.
But it went against the "narrative" of white Europeans being responsible for all the evil in the entire history of humans on this planet.
Students today also know next to nothing about the positive achievements of the West. The learning loss is not trivial. Without understanding the struggle in the West over millennia to preserve liberty; without understanding the uniquely rich development of the Roman law tradition; without appreciating the roles that argument, hypothesis, mathematical modeling, and replicable experiment have had in Western science since the Greeks, the young are more likely to acquire the frivolous state of mind, now common, that thinks great civilizational achievements can be jettisoned without loss, once found guilty of “white supremacy.”
Hankins concludes, "We who live now in Western countries, from whatever part of the world our parents and grandparents came, have received an extraordinary—and yes, unique—inheritance from the Western tradition."
It should humble all of us. I was lucky enough to grow up in a house where the genius of Western civilization was embraced wholeheartedly, and we learned as young children how special and, yes, great Western civilization was.
Hankins makes the case to require the teaching of a Western civ survey again. It's not going to happen with this crew of woke radicals running higher education today. Nor are the internationalists going to take a chance of offending students from hellhole countries who don't like to be reminded how bad things are where they come from.
It's up to the parents to encourage their kids to turn off the screens and read about the real-life exploits of Alexander, Leonidas, Homer, Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus, and Trajan. All of those figures from Greek and Roman history affect our lives today.
Wouldn't it be nice for our children to know how that is?
