Western Civ Can Save Us — Again

Marco Rubio gave a speech Saturday to the Munich Security Conference in which he extolled an ideal that’s supposedly long out of fashion.

“We are part of one civilization: Western civilization,” the U.S. secretary of state told his largely European audience. “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”

The speech got, and deserved, a standing ovation.

What, exactly, is Western civilization? Americans younger than 50 might be excused for hardly knowing. A 2011 report from the National Association of Scholars found that not one of America’s top colleges and universities had a required survey course in Western civ and only 32 percent even offered it as an elective. In 1964, 80 percent of these institutions had some form of introduction to Western civ.

What many universities do offer (even more so now than when the N.A.S. issued its report) is what amounts to an education in anti-Western civ: the examination of all the ways in which Western civilization is, purportedly, an extended act of imperialism and colonialism, human exploitation and environmental despoliation, misogyny and white supremacy and phobias of every kind.

This pedagogy in civilizational self-loathing — some of it justified and overdue, much of it distorted by factual fudging and decontextualized historical judgments — has done three kinds of damage.

First, it helped spawn a generation of self-certain progressives, notably the pro-Hamas demonstrators on college campuses during the Gaza war, who only dimly seem to recognize that they are the very people they are being taught to hate. Who, after all, is more of a settler-colonialist — a Protestant, white, English-speaking undergrad in Los Angeles or a Jewish, Mizrahi, Hebrew-speaking one in Jerusalem? And does a typical Hamas militant despise a fervent Christian evangelical any more than he despises an anti-Zionist trans activist?

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Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook

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