What is “the West”?
Defining Western Civilisation
In 2022, Dr. Jordan Peterson interviewed the Neoconservative journalist Douglas Murray about The War on the West for an episode of his podcast, (linked here). Peterson said “it might be regarded as a pretty inflammatory title, The War on the West and maybe we’ll start with that. What do you mean by war and why use that term?”
Murray responded that he thought Peterson would start by asking him to define “West”, saying that that was “a really really naughty one to untangle.” I’ll now untangle it.
This matters because if people who view Western civilisation as good don’t define what they mean, their opponents will define it for them.
In 2019, Ben Shapiro tweeted “Absolutely heartbreaking. A magnificent monument to Western civilization collapsing” about the Notre Dame fire. Briahna Joy Gray replied “Pretty sure it’s a monument to [G-d] but go off Ben.” Shapiro replied “It is. And that is why it is a central monument to Western civilization, which was built on the Judeo-Christian heritage.” A Twitter user complained “ Shapiro was tacitly saying the West is superior — but he always says that”. Shapiro replied “I wasn’t tacitly saying Western civilization is superior to other civilizations. I openly say it, because I believe Western civilization is superior to other civilizations. In fact, I wrote an entire book on the topic, in which I explain why.” (Shapiro’s book is called The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great. Shapiro filmed a Prager University video summarising it, linked here.)
Shapiro’s critics construed “Western” as a euphemism for ‘white’ and used that to justify lumping in Shapiro with racist pseudo-intellectuals like Richard Spencer. David French rightly denounced this as “an Inexcusable Smear Against Ben Shapiro”.
French’s colleague Jonah Goldberg agrees. In 2018, he wrote Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Nationalism, Populism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy. This book elicited accusations of racism. For instance, Jamelle Bouie of Slate complained that Goldberg celebrated the West’s roots in the Enlightenment but failed to take into account Enlightenment racism. Goldberg wrote a compelling rebuttal (linked here). He later said, amidst the Shapiro controversy, “the immediate assumption that praise for, or pride in, Western civilization is a species of bigotry and racism is a perfect example of the sort of civilizational suicide I describe in my own book on the subject.”
Anti-Western bias doesn’t end there. The British anarchist anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow begin The Dawn of Everything with a scathing critique of Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker. They claim that Pinker believes “that all significant forms of human progress before the twentieth century can be attributed only to that one group of humans who used to refer to themselves as the white race and now, generally, call themselves by its more accepted synonym, Western Civilization”.
This is why I consider it important for pro-Westerners to define “West”. If they don’t, anti-Westerners can easily get away with redefining “Western” as white thus smearing pro-Westerners as racist.
For the record, Pinker and Goldberg made it abundantly clear that “West” doesn’t mean “white people”. The question remains ‘what does it mean?’ A literal definition raises the question ‘West of what?’.
There are good frames of reference to define North and South. The Arctic is the northernmost point on Earth. You couldn’t leave the North Pole without going south and, no matter where in the world you are, you can’t go north without getting closer to it. That said, we don’t have West Poles or East Poles such that we must ask “west of what?”
When dealing with longitude, the answer tends to be ‘of Greenwich.’ The issue with this is that some countries (like Israel and Australia) tend to be classified as Western despite being in the Eastern hemisphere.
I should here mention, there’s a theory that Europe was named after the Akkadian word for ‘West’ (a reference to it being West of Iraq). That said, Murray doesn’t use “West” to mean Europe. He contrasted “Western anti-Westernism” with “Chinese anti-Westernism” and “Russian anti-Westernism”. A decent chunk of Russia is in Europe. So, what is the West?
Obviously, the difference between East and West is a political distinction. Perhaps by analysing it, we may know what the West is. In 1184 BCE, Mycenaeans sailed to Asia Minor and sacked Troy. About four Centuries later, Homer’s The Iliad told the tale of their having sailed to the East and having fought the Trojan War. (I’m aware the ancient Chinese described Xuanzang’s pilgrimage to India as a Journey to the West but The Iliad predates The Journey to the West.)
About three centuries later, the Greeks waged war against the Persian Empire. The historian Herodotus grounded his telling of the war in the mythology of previous conflicts like the Trojan War. Probably because, like the Trojans, the Persians hailed from the East. When Alexander later conquered Persia, he compared the Greeks who went to the East to fight the Persians to the Greeks who went to the East to fight the Trojans. Alexander’s empire fell apart after he died. What was left of it was ultimately conquered by the Romans.
Since then, the Roman Emperor Diocletian relocated to Nicomedia, in Asia Minor, and appointed appointees to rule the rest of the Empire using Italy, Germany and Syria as their respective bases. The new system didn’t survive Diocletian’s death and instead led to Constantine becoming emperor and establishing Constantinople (now Istanbul) as his capital. His death split the empire in two. The Western Roman Empire was based in Milan and the Eastern Roman Empire was based in Constantinople. The split of the Empire eventually resulted in the Great Schism of 1054 splitting Christianity into the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. At this point, it makes sense to understand the difference between the East and the West as a religious distinction. Western civilisation means Christians were predominantly Catholic and Eastern civilisation means Christians were predominantly Orthodox.
That said, in 1095, the Eastern Emperor asked the Vatican for military assistance against Seljuk invaders. Pope Urban responded by launching the First Crusade against the (Muslim) Seljuks in the Holy Land. (Yes, I know the Crusaders also attacked Jews.) At this point, Christendom would be a good term for what is now called “the West” whereas the “East” would be the Muslim world.
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Since then, the rise of Protestantism, the Thirty Years War, the Treaty of Westphalia, the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution led to some level of secularisation in much of what was once Christendom. The question then becomes, at that point, what’s the difference between the East and the West.
Thomas Jefferson may provide us with an answer. Jefferson was a Deist, a supporter of religious freedom, and the man who coined the phrase “separation of Church and state”. As President, he led America through an overseas war against the Barbary pirates. The Barbarys were Muslim but that didn’t stop Jefferson from agreeing with his friend John Ledyard that what the Muslim world most needed was to rid itself of Ottoman tyranny and thus embrace liberal democracy.
Jefferson and Ledyard were (partly) wrong. The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire was swiftly followed by the rise of radical Islam which was hardly an improvement. Indeed, some voters in the Muslim world have democratically elected radical Islamic groups like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood thus exacerbating terrorism. You can’t copy and paste American liberalism to a country with a radically different history and assume it will work. (I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole of determining what reforms are necessary to combat radical Islam, at this time.) That said, Jefferson and Ledyard were right that the US is founded on a liberal tradition worthy of being conserved and that their liberalism’s natural opposite is tyranny.
To be abundantly clear, liberalism is limiting the power of the government to protect individual liberty. The US is a liberal country. Its liberalism is derived from John Locke who based his ideas on both the politics of Holland and the constitutional and revolutionary history of Great Britain. That said, the liberal idea can be adapted to any country whose people, by and large, are willing to embrace it. Thus we have an answer. “The West” refers to countries that are firmly rooted in the liberal tradition. Thus Japan can be considered Western, despite its geography, because it embraces liberal democracy. (I’m aware that getting there was not an easy process.)
Indeed, Shapiro filmed a Prager University video titled If We Lose John Locke, We Lose America (linked here) specifically arguing that Locke’s ideas (aka liberalism) are essential to the survival of the American Republic. Shapiro’s argument about reason and moral purpose making the West great ultimately boils down to believing that the embrace of Greek-style logic and philosophy combined with the embrace of the Judeo-Christian morality is necessary for liberalism to survive. (Per Shapiro, the former without the latter leads to the evils of Communism whereas the latter without the former leads to religious fanaticism, such as radical Islam. He views the fusion of Athens and Jerusalem as how liberalism can survive.) Murray and Peterson would certainly agree. (Less so for Pinker, who doesn’t view religion as essential to liberalism, though he also supports the liberal West.)
Jonah Goldberg would likewise agree. Per Goldberg
“Forget calling it Western civilization for a moment. Instead think of a kind of party platform with a bunch of planks:
- Support for human rights
- Belief in the rule of law
- Dedication to democracy
- Free speech
- Freedom of conscience
- Admiration for science and the scientific method
- Curiosity about other cultures
- Property rights
- Tolerance or celebration of technological and/or cultural innovation”
Every single one of those was either created in or popularised by countries now considered Western. That’s why it makes a certain degree of sense to refer to these ideals as “Western values” instead of solely as “liberal values.” When Goldberg, Pinker, Peterson, Shapiro, and Murray celebrate the West, they’re celebrating the countries that have these liberal values and they’re celebrating them for having said values. And they’re right to do so.
My name is Matitya. This has been an episode of Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters.
