Western culture’s paralyzing crisis of confidence
New York Times columnist David Brooks, in his April 21 piece The Crisis of Western Civ, has opened a serious debate on the collapse of confidence in western civilization. His stunning conclusion: “These days, the whole idea of Western civ. is assumed to be reactionary and oppressive.”
Brooks notes that this cultural pessimism is most fully developed in our institutions of higher learning. For several decades, our universities have stopped teaching western history as a progressive narrative of human liberation and begun blaming the West for all the ills of the world.
The truth is demonization of the West is nothing new. The problem began with the Enlightenment. The 18th century Enlightenment was an ideological bridge between the despotic feudal past and the modern world. The Enlightenment awoke a populist giant by painting a futuristic picture of society in liberty and freedom. However liberating the Enlightenment may have been in the realm of thought, at the time it instantly created an intellectual gap, between the world as was (monarchial despotism) and what ought to be (Enlightenment’s ideal).
Three major Enlightenment philosophers tried to fill this intellectual gap. In doing so, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and JeanJacques Rousseau essentially cast the modern world’s intellectual frame of reference.
Rousseau (1712-1778), is responsible for much of the negativity about western civilization, then and now. Rousseau was a tormented soul, crushed by the inequality and cruelty of pre-Revolutionary France. The father of Romanticism, he’s famous for saying, “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” In Rousseau’s “state of nature,” humanity is all innocence and social perfection. If the natural state of humanity is perfect liberty, then society itself must, by definition, be the source of human suffering — the oppressor of humanity’s natural freedom. For Rousseau, the very presence of inequality implies restraint, in fact, active oppression.
This philosophical disease has infected many university professors, environmental activists and stridently intolerant youth.
Locke (1632-1704), on the other hand, had a more pragmatic perspective on the “state of nature.” Far from being a state of perfection, Locke appreciated that in the absence of society, humanity descended into chaos.
For Locke, society was the source of order, from which social improvement was possible if individuals were allowed to pursue their self-interest in consort with the human capacity for reason.
It seems our modern philosophical orientation has shifted from the pragmatic Locke to activist Rousseau. Perhaps we’ve become too technocratic, trapped in the digital present. We seem to have lost our historical memory and degraded the study of real philosophy. The bad news is we’ll be forced to repeat the mistakes of the past because we refuse to acknowledge our history.
Robert McGarvey is chief strategist for Troy Media Digital Solutions Ltd., an economic historian and former managing director of Merlin Consulting, a London, U.K.-based consulting firm. Robert’s most recent book is “Futuromics: A Guide to Thriving in Capitalism’s Third Wave.” Distributed by Troy Media.