Acad. Quest. (2012) 25:65–93 DOI 10.1007/s12129-012-9276-9 WHY STUDY THE WEST A Civilization of Explorers Ricardo Duchesne Published online: 23 February 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 Measuring the Accomplishments of Civilizations The claim that there were “surprising similarities” between the West and the more advanced regions of Asia as late as 1800–1830, and that the Industrial Revolution was the one transformation that set Europe apart from Asia is central to the arguments of multicultural historians such as Kenneth Pomeranz, Bin Wong, Jack Goldstone, John Hobson, and Peer Vries. These historians theorize the “rise of the West” as if it were only a question of explaining the onset of mechanized industry, the use of inorganic sources of energy, and the overcoming of Malthusian limits to growth. One critical argument of my book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization,1 is that the divergence of the West cannot be abstracted from the developmental history of the Greek and Roman assemblies of citizens; the parliaments, municipal communes, universities, and estates of the medieval era; and the reading societies, representative institutions, journals, and newspapers of the Enlightenment. The rise of liberal democratic institutions was a defining characteristic of the West’s uniqueness and its rise to supremacy. Another argument of Uniqueness is that it is not any particular renaissance, revolution, or liberal institution that marks out the West but its far higher levels of achievement in all the intellectual and artistic spheres of life. I relied on Charles Murray’s book, Human Accomplishment: 1Ricardo Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (Leiden: Brill, 2011). See “Nowhere but the West,” a review essay of this work by AQ editor-in-chief, Stephen H. Balch, in the Winter 2011 issue. Ricardo Duchesne is professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John NB Canada E2L 4L5; [email protected]. He is the author of The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (Brill, 2011). 66 Duchesne Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950,tomake this argument.2 This is the first effort to quantify “as facts” the accomplishments of individuals and countries across the world in the arts and sciences by calculating the amount of space allocated to these individuals in reference works, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. Murray recognizes that one cannot apply a uniform standard of excellence for the diverse artistic traditions of the world, so he creates separate compilations for each of “the giants” in the arts of the Arab world, China, India, and Japan, as well as Europe. However, he produces combined (worldwide) inventories of the giants for each of the natural sciences, since world scientists themselves have come to accept the same methods and categories. The most striking feature of his list of giants in the sciences (the top twenty in astronomy, physics, biology, medicine, chemistry, earth sciences, and mathematics) is that they are all (excepting one Japanese) Western (84, 122–29). Murray concludes that “whether measured in people or events, 97 percent of accomplishment in the scientific inventories occurred in Europe and North America” from 800 BC to 1950 (252). One can debate the order of ranking of the top twenty, as Murray acknowledges, but in general, I think these lists capture rather well the most important figures and events. The overwhelming role of Europe does not alter when one considers only the arts inventories, particularly after 1400. Although Murray does not compare their achievements but rather compiles separate lists for each civilization, he notes that the sheer number of “significant figures” in the arts is higher in the West in comparison to the combined number of the other civilizations (113, 131–42). In literature, the number in the West is 835, whereas in India, the Arab World, China, and Japan combined the number is 293. In the visual arts, it is 479 for the West as compared to 192 for China and Japan combined (with no significant figures listed for India and the Arab World). In music, “the lack of a tradition of named composers in non-Western civilization means that the Western total of 522 significant figures has no real competition at all” (259). Limitations in Murray’s Accomplishments In this essay, I challenge Murray’s restricted view of individual greatness. He pays no attention to accomplishments in other human endeavors such as warfare, voyages of discovery, and heroic leadership. His achievements 2Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences 800 B.C. to 1950 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), xvi. Further references to this work are cited in text. A Civilization of Explorers 67 come only in the form of “great books” and “great ideas.” In this respect, Human Accomplishments is akin to certain older-style Western Civilization textbooks in which the unfolding and embodiment of the ideas of reason and liberty are the central themes. David Gress dubbed this type of historiography “the Grand Narrative.”3 By teaching Western history in terms of the realization of liberal democratic values, these texts “placed a burden of justification on the West…to explain how the reality differed from the ideal.”4 Gress called upon historians to move away from this idealized image of Western uniqueness, and address the realities of Western geopolitical struggles and mercantile interests. Norman Davies, too, has criticized the way early Western Civilization courses tended to “filter out anything that might appear mundane or repulsive.”5 My view is that Europeans were not only exceptional in their literary endeavors but also in their contentious and expansionist behaviors. Their scholarly achievements, including their liberal values, were inseparably connected to their aristocratic ethos of competitive individualism. There is no need to concede to multicultural critics, as Norman Davies believes, “the sorry catalogue of wars, conflict, and persecutions that have dogged every stage of the [Western] tale.”6 The expansionist dispositions of Europeans were themselves driven by an intensely felt desire to achieve great deeds. Conversely, the “great ideas”—Archimedes’s “Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world,” Hume’s “love of literary fame, my ruling passion”7—were associated with aristocratic traits, disputatiousness, and defiant temperaments. The Faustian Soul of the West It has been said that when Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization he answered, “I think it would be a good idea.” Academics today interpret this answer to mean that the actual history of the West—the Crusades, the conquest of the Americas, the British Empire— belie its great ideas and great books. Below I challenge this naive separation between an idealized and a realistic West, using Oswald Spengler’s image of 3David Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 1. 4Ibid. 5Norman Davies, A History of Europe (New York: Random House, 1997), 28. 6Ibid., 15–16. 7David Hume, “My Own Life,” in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. with introduction by Charles Hendel (New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1955), 10. 68 Duchesne the West as a strikingly vibrant culture driven by a type of personality overflowing with expansive, disruptive, and creative impulses. Spengler designated the West as a “Faustian” culture whose “prime-symbol” was “pure and limitless space.”8 This soul type was first visible in medieval Europe, starting with Romanesque art, but particularly in the “spaciousness of Gothic cathedrals”; “the heroes of the Grail and Arthurian and Siegfried sagas, ever roaming in the infinite; and the Crusades,” including “the Hohenstaufen in Sicily, the Hansa in the Baltic, the Teutonic Knights in the Slavonic East, [and later] the Spaniards in America, [and] the Portuguese in the East Indies.”9 “Fighting,”“progressing,”“overcoming of resistances,” battling “against what is near, tangible and easy”—these are some of the terms Spengler uses to describe this soul.10 This Faustian being was animated with the spirit of a “proud beast of prey,” like that of an “eagle, lion, [or] tiger.”11 Much like Hegel’s master, who engages in a fight to the death for pure prestige, for this being “the concerns of life, the deed, became more important than mere physical existence.”12 This spirit infused every cultural sphere of Western life. As John Farrenkopf puts it, the architecture of the Gothic cathedral expresses the Faustian will to conquer the heavens; Western symphonic music conveys the Faustian urge to conjure up a dynamic, transcendent, infinite space of sound; Western perspective painting mirrors the Faustian will to infinite distance; and the Western novel responds to the Faustian imperative to explore the inner depths of the human personality while extending outward with a comprehensive view.13 8Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, vol. 1, Form and Actuality (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1973), 183. 9Ibid., 183–216. I will leave aside here my disagreements with Spengler’s image of classical Greece and Rome as cultures that conceived things in terms of proportion and balance in recurring, cyclical patterns, except to agree with Nietzsche that the Classical Greeks were singularly agonal and driven by an aristocratic-individualist ethos. 10Ibid., 12, 315. 11Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 19–41. 12Ibid. 13John Farrenkopf, Prophet of Decline: Spengler on World History and Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 46. A Civilization of Explorers 69 Spengler thus writes of the “morphological relationship that inwardly binds together the expression-forms of all branches of Culture.”14 Rococo art, differential calculus, the Crusades, and conquest of the Americas were all expressions of the same restless soul.