A story of human achievement

Yesterday we reported the good news that universities are jostling for funds from the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, which has set out to sponsor humanities programs focused on the great books of the Western canon. Perhaps money (and the right values) can begin to undo what ideology has done. Most universities in the Anglosphere long ago gave up any serious study or teaching of Western civilisation, and this dismal truth was recently confirmed in Australia by an Institute of Public Affairs audit.

The typical approach is to apply a series of victimology filters — race, sexuality and post-colonialism, for example — to a distorted sampling from Western civilisation. This is activism in the guise of scholarship and it offers up a sharp contrast between the diversity imperative and a monolithic legacy of dead white males.

In his commentary article yesterday the centre’s chief executive Simon Haines used the figure of Roman playwright Terence to expose the caricature that has been made of Western civilisation. Terence came to Rome as a Carthaginian slave, probably a brown-skinned Berber. He found fame as one of Rome’s great comic playwrights and earned his position in the Western canon. His famous line — “I am human, so nothing human is alien to me” — expresses a universalism that would irritate the sectarian activists of identity politics. But that’s the point: Western civilisation is broad and deep enough to accommodate all manner of thoughtful study and engagement. As Professor Haines put it: “Is it beyond us to imagine Western identity for our students as a breathtakingly rich, cosmopolitan multiverse of sameness-in-diversity, rather than a thin set of worn-out mugshots?”

Courses in Western civilisation are meant to introduce students to some of the best ideas, artistic creations, institutions and innovations that define our history. It’s not meant to be triumphalist; there is plenty of room for debate, which is why the centre’s choice of small group tutorials is ideal. But the starting point has to be a genuine attempt to come to grips with Western civilisation, not an academic hatchet job preordained by ideology.