The Birth (and death?) of Western Culture

Two recent books with curiously complementary titles convincingly delineate the birth, and possibly the death, of Western civilization.

"The Victory of Reason" by Rodney Stark (Random House, 2005) is subtitled "How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success." Stark advances the striking thesis that Christianity, nothing else, produced the "victory of reason" that powered liberty and science in Western culture, developments seen in no other culture past or present. That Christianity fought and retarded scientific and political progress, as so many believe, is a myth, Stark says, and he makes a persuasive case for it.

He quotes a leading modern Chinese scholar: "We have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion, Christianity. That is why the West is so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics."

Early church fathers made the all-important ruling that it was permissible to reason about God (theology) and God's creation (the secular sciences). Other faiths, in contrast, have belittled reason and made it utterly subordinate to revelation. For Christianity alone is revelation a thing to be increasingly clarified by human reason over time.

Islam's revelation (the Koran) is not to be reasoned about, only blindly obeyed. Its fatalism leaves no room for free will, or therefore for worldly progress. To formulate natural laws (as science requires) is blasphemy, for such laws would necessarily restrict Allah's freedom to act capriciously at any and all times. As the French philosopher Condorcet wrote, "The religion of Mahomet seems to condemn the whole of that vast area of the earth where its empire has held sway to eternal slavery and incurable stupidity."

Christianity is unique among major religions not only for its belief in free will but for its worldly optimism. As Stark chronicles, even monks in their monasteries were as concerned with the things of this world as with those of the next. Indeed, he says, the first capitalists were the great monastic estates of medieval Europe.

And the Renaissance was the work of believers. The Sorbonne, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, all the great schools were founded by churches. The prominent Enlightenment scientists, such as Newton, were devout Christians. Much-reviled Cotton Mather introduced America to vaccination for smallpox, and actually opposed the obscurantist Salem witch trials.

Whether Western culture can continue to advance when severed from its Christian roots, as in these militantly secular times, is taken up in "The Suicide of Reason" by Lee Harris (Basic Books, 2007). Harris's subtitle shows his specific concern: "Radical Islam's Threat to the West." Western leaders, he says, dangerously misunderstand the nature of radicalism in the contemporary world, particularly Islam. Moslems live in a tribal world, without recognition of the autonomy of the individual as developed and celebrated in the West. Thus are young Moslems conditioned to die for their faith. As a Chechen "freedom fighter" ominously boasted, "We will win in the end because we are willing to die and you are not." Harris faults multicuturalism, "the creed du jour of the intellectual elite," for "encouraging Westerners to feel ashamed of their own cultural traditions. While Muslim children are taught to look upon their own traditions as binding and mandatory, as the fountain of all truth and goodness, the children of the liberal West are taught that they should free themselves from the traditions of the past." It's "the triumph of multiculturalism over (true) liberalism." In other words, the West no longer inculcates and upholds its own basic principles: free will, reason, individualism. Indeed, it even insists on granting "equal time" to principles hostile to its very existence.

Reason, far from being inherent in all men, is the product of our unique culture, which must be deliberately implanted in each succeeding generation.

"Yet the goal of secular education in America, England, and France has been radically transformed from its original objective. It has become the aim of 'enlightened' educators to 'liberate' their students from the traditions that created the culture of reason." Once again, it's the modern Western education system that's to blame! It suffers from the illusions that fanaticism is nearly extinct, that all men are reasonable, and that nobody any longer need die for his culture. This would be all very well, as Harris points out, in a world where there were no cultures (such as Islam) that believe the exact opposite.

Francis Fukuyama's notable "The End of History and the Last Man" was incorrect, Harris says, in positing an "end of history," but he accurately predicted the coming of the "last man," i.e. "the last real (macho) man." "At the end of history, there may be baboons and chimpanzees and gorillas that are alpha males, but there will be no more human beings who fit this description. They will have all died out, or given up. In short, the end of history is predicated on the end of testosterone." Unfortunately, this will be true only of the West.

"In the West, we are getting down to our last man indeed. Liberal democracy among us is achieving the goal that Fukuyama predicted for it: It is eliminating the alpha males from our midst, and at a dizzyingly accelerating rate. But in Muslim societies, the alpha male is still alive and well. While we in America are drugging our alpha boys with Ritalin, the Muslims are doing everything in their, power to encourage their alpha boys to be tough, aggressive, and ruthless. We teach our boys to be good students, to aim at getting good jobs with large, safe corporations, to plan prudently for their retirement. They want their boys to be holy warriors."

It's high time we started "refusing to extend toleration to those who are unwilling to tolerate others."

"For reason to tolerate those who refuse to play by the rules of reason is nothing else but the suicide of reason."