Trashing the West is the ultimate form of self-loathing

THE refusal to offer university students a course on Western civilisation shows just how little people truly understand when it comes the history of democracy, writes James Morrow.

AT this point in the culture wars, it’s fair to ask just what it is about the words “Western civilisation” that give them kryptonite-like power against university academics?

For the past several weeks, an entire 2,500 year old intellectual tradition has found itself caught in the crossfire of the culture wars.

The issue has been driven by the quest to find a home for a proposed Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. The ANU in Canberra rejected it out of hand, citing concerns about independence.

At the University of Sydney, meanwhile, academics went public with an open letter denouncing the very idea of the centre, saying it represented, among other things, “European supremacism writ large.”

How original.

Now we all know that the West is perpetually in the dock for all manner of -isms: Colonialism, racism, sexism, yada yada yada.

But this shouldn’t disqualify it as worthy of study. As has been pointed out, Australian universities have had no such qualms about taking money to set up study programs focusing on, say, Chinese or Islamic civilisation.

Any honest study of modern Chinese affairs would have to note the rather colonial vibe given off by Beijing’s attempt to take over the South China Sea and its “One Belt, One Road” venture.

Despite being from opposite sides of the political spectrum, John Howard and Kim Beazley both supported the launch of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation (Pic: Peter Rae)

And the early spread of Islam was nothing if not a militarist, imperial project that came with theocratic governance straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale. This dystopia is still in force today in countries like Saudi Arabia which funds Islamic centres around the globe and only just this week decided to let women drive a car.

Because here’s the thing: The left-wing, right-on progressive academic class wouldn’t exist were it not for this very same Western tradition its members find so horrifying. Trashing the West is the ultimate form of intellectual self-loathing.

No other society, whatever its charms and achievements, ever managed to create the conditions for the Enlightenment which — for better and sometimes worse — also created the conditions out of which modern, progressive leftist thought was born.

After all, Western thought takes it all in, right and left, statism and anarchy, faith and atheism. Plato’s proposed government by philosopher-king and Aristotle’s individualism. Communism’s Karl Marx and capitalism’s Adam Smith. It’s all there.

One theory holds that the problem is in the very way universities look at themselves.

In his bracing new book Why Liberalism Failed, American political science professor Patrick Deneen delivers an indictment of higher education in the US, but much of his ire applies in Australia as well.

Higher education, he says, fell into the same trap that has ensnared the rest of society. Previously freedom was defined as liberation from base desires, something which came from cultivating the mind, and led to becoming a responsible citizen.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott is also another major supporter of the course. (Pic: Mick Tsikas)

This would, thanks to the work of enlightenment philosophers like John Locke and J.S. Mill, eventually become synonymous with self-fulfilment and doing what you want, free from the restraints of morality or community or religion.

“To be free — liberal — was an art, something learned not by nature or instinct but by refinement and education”, Deneen writes.

And though universities for a time resisted the change, in the middle of the last century Deneen says that “the university structure was reoriented to stress innovation and the creation of ‘new knowledge’. The guiding imperative of education became progress, not an education in liberty derived from a deep engagement with the past.”

While in some fields this change led to all manner of scientific and engineering progress and innovation, Deneen writes that the need to “discover” new things led the humanities to fracture into ever more esoteric and mind-numbing disciplines, as if to prove something to their counterparts in the hard sciences.

“By adopting a jargon comprehensible only to experts, they could emulate the scientific priesthood, even if by doing so they betrayed the humanities’ original mandate to guide students through their cultural inheritance”, Deneen continues.

“Professors in the humanities showed their worth by destroying the thing they studied.”

A similar process has occurred in Australia, with consequences that reach far beyond the university gate. The annual orgy of self-loathing around Australia Day, and other attempts to marginalise our post-settlement roots, are just the tip of the iceberg.

It’s a shame, then, that rather than the pendulum starting to swing back in the other direction thanks to an institution like the Ramsay Centre, our Western inheritance remains a punching bag.

James Morrow is The Daily Telegraph’s opinion editor.

Originally published as Trashing the West is the ultimate form of self-loathing