Students of the West leaving Cold War warriors behind

By Dirk Moses

The Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has announced that he is seeking to speak with the vice-chancellor of the Australian National University regarding its decision to break off negotiations with the Ramsay Centre about establishing an undergraduate program in Western civilisation. This is a remarkable turn of events. How often do national leaders concern themselves with the internal decision of universities?

Malcolm Turnbull may feel the need to act in view of the relentless News Corp media campaign vilifying the ANU and Australian universities in general for supposedly ignoring Western civilisation. Worse still, we are told, our higher education system is beholden to an austere political correctness and leftist intolerance that actively corrodes Western civilisation by focusing on its negatives rather than positives.

I wrote a critical analysis of this campaign on the ABC Ethics and Religion site that soon went viral on Twitter, splitting the room between left and right in the usual way. But my intention was less to strike a blow in a contrived culture war than to understand the intense, even vehement concern with Western civilisation, and the feeling that it is about to collapse.

Cultural pessimism and feelings of impending doom are nothing new. They can be traced to antiquity and, more recently, to the Ottoman-Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 that threatened “Christendom”.

“Civilisation” gained currency during the 18th-century French Enlightenment to refer to the new sense of secular culture in relation to an authoritarian Church and to non-Europeans, who were rapidly being incorporated into European empires and trading networks. Despite hybrids like “Christian civilisation” counter-posed to other, seemingly inferior ones, like Chinese civilisation, the dominant sense was that civilisation and Europe were coterminous, marked by the spirit of scientific discovery, religious freedom, and international commerce. Barbarians and savages, many Europeans thought, were in thrall to primitive superstitions and cultural practices that inhibited material progress.

The addition of “Western” to civilisation developed only last century, particularly after the Second World War when Europe was split by the iron curtain, and national liberation movements challenged imperial rule. Liberals and Conservatives now contrasted western civilisation to the communist and the colonial worlds. They also promoted a related concept, “Judeo-Christian” values, to incorporate Jews into what had hitherto been an exclusively Christian civilisation. Christian antisemitism could rightly find no place after the Holocaust.

Most of the avatars of Western civilisation are products of this Cold War culture, and continue the struggle today, perceiving in every corner a “cultural Marxism” that undermines the values they think hold the West together.

The fact is that they won the Cold War but Western societies have changed.

The world of today's students is radically different to that of the old cultural warriors, let alone mid-career academics like me. No longer can cultural transmission be steered largely by the institutions of the family, school, church (or temple or mosque), and university. The internet and social media are revolutionising what and how they learn.

This development presents obvious opportunities but has also its drawbacks. One senses that students tend not to think anything exists unless it can be found online. The sustained concentration needed to read challenging books is evaporating in the face of smart phoneaddiction (which, alas, has affected me as well).

The cultural knowledge I take for granted dissipates with the explosion of available information. Keeping up with the present is impossible let alone understanding even then not-so-distant past. When I asked my first-year European history students whether they knew who Marlene Dietrich was – we were covering Weimar culture – only two of 100 students ventured an answer. One suggested, creatively, that she was the Kim Kardashianof the 1950s. The other knew the answer because she studied drama. Taken aback, I
asked them: who do you think inspired one of Madonna’s personas? Blank faces. Who’sMadonna?

Forget Marx. Today's students aren't even aware of Madonna or Marlene Dietrich.

Photo: Peter Bregg

Even so, the student body, now far more diverse, already appreciate that “Western civilisation” looks different in different parts of the world. It’s one thing to be have studied at Oxford and quite another to have chafed under British rule in one its colonies. Both experiences are “true”.

A humanities education teaches not only perspectival thinking, but also how to manage complexity – like the instability of the concept of “the West” itself. Where is “the West” when the Hungarian and Polish governments imagine themselves as protecting Europe from Muslim hordes while embodying authentic Western and Christian values against the degenerate pro-gay Western Europeans?

One wonders whether this version – partly reminiscent of the Viennese mood of 1683 – is shared by some Australian conservatives. If so, the marriage equality decision suggests that young people in particular have other values, but they are no less Western. They are the logical conclusion of the Enlightenment’s commitment to freedom and equality.

Students also appreciate that there is more to “Western civilisation” than poetry and literature. Scientific research, which is institutionalised in universities, is a basic component of the West’s success, yet is disputed by those who deny climate change research.

The values of today's youth trace a line back to the Enlightenment.

Photo: Anna Kucera

It is true that dedicated programs called “Western civilisation” do not – to my knowledge – exist in our curricula. That is because the default position of the Bachelor of Arts is predominantly the content of European culture and its settler colonial offshoots. Any perusal of the units offered in departments of European languages, English, History, Classics, Philosophy and so forth reveals the standard topics and texts. I do teach new global history and global studies units but in many ways little has changed over the decades, leading a few voices to call for the “decolonisation” of a BA they regard as Eurocentric.

Yes, students are not taught in the spirit of veneration and advocacy that Ramsay Centre supporters appear to seek. That is unnecessary. Young people study, say, German, because they want to learn or already love the subject. (So do their teachers, who have devoted years of training to master difficult languages, sources, and literatures). Students have the right, indeed obligation, to choose their courses after all. Besides, they are adults now, and need the freedom to make up their own minds about questions of value and justice. We are more interested in reasoned arguments than with high culture as an object of worship.

I would be surprised if Turnbull, a Sydney and Oxford graduate, disagrees. If there is a renewed government commitment to the humanities and social sciences, something positive will have come out of the current discussion.

Dirk Moses is professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney.

https://www.canberratimes.com.au/national/students-of-the-west-leaving-cold-war-warriors-behind-20180608-p4zkbv.html