This is a critique of an Arena article by the Griffith University (Qld) academic Bruce Buchan
It can be found at: https://arena.org.au/look-on-my-works-ye-mighty-and-despair-by-bruce-buchan/
“Australians are inhabitants of ‘an antique land’. For us Western Civ appears as once mighty Ozymandias, a tumbled monument from a former time when the claims of civilisation were thought to justify the horrors of colonisation. Now the ruins have been exposed by the actions of our own governments, which have invoked civilisation in more recent service to power: deceit to justify the ‘Forever War’ on terror . [ITS?] ; spurious security [ITS?] to justify brutality on our borders. . [ITS?]
“Like the ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone’ standing in the desert, how are we to understand the ‘colossal Wreck’ of civilisation resuscitated for our times?”
(The square-bracketed expressions [ITS?] the reader will encounter in the quote above are not in the original. They are short for “Is That So?” I found places to insert nine of them in the course of my critical reading of my downloaded copy of Bruce Buchan’s piece above. Also, all emphasis via italicisation of text below is mine, and not in Buchan’s original.)
Buchan argues that there should be no distinct field of study entitled ‘Western Civilisation.’
“As it was used in Western Civ courses and its textbooks, civilisation referred to a globally significant culture that subsisted in the salient institutions, norms and values that transcended the petty divisions between language groups, empires, nations, churches and ethnicities. Inherently, however, Western Civ gave voice to a fundamental assumption that civilisations were also hierarchical. While many cultures may at different points have been significant, the civilisation of Europe was the most desirable because only that civilisation gave expression to the highest yearnings of the human spirit for freedom, humanity and truth.
“This inherent normativity was built into the very purpose and structure of the courses. That explains much of the success and wide appeal of the curriculum but also its great weakness as a pedagogy. The normativity of the courses created a fissure in their credibility. Western Civ was supposed to be an account of a process of development adorned by Europe’s invention of humanity itself. [ITS?] “
I assume that by ‘hierarchical’ Buchan means not internally, but rather ‘externally’. As all functional societies down to and including families, are internally hierarchical in terms of age, experience, authority etc, we can only assume here that Buchan means falling into a hierarchy when compared with each other. So the question becomes ‘is Western Civilisation, however defined, superior overall to say, Islamic Civilisation or Oriental Civilisation, however defined: taking the civilisation categories from Samuel Huntingdon’s The Clash of Civilisations? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington#%22The_Clash_of_Civilizations%22
“Democracy, human rights, liberty, science, the Renaissance, artistic beauty, poetry and literature, architecture, and the self—these were all located in the narrative of Western Civ as originating in Europe and transmitted to the rest of the world. And yet from its inception Western Civ was not merely a narrative of development; it was also an assumed telos or end point of that process of development. It was not just history; it was also and at the same time its culmination.”
So let us examine that section I have put into italics here:
Democracy, human rights, liberty, science, the Renaissance, artistic beauty, poetry and literature, architecture, and the self—these were all located in the narrative of Western Civ as originating in Europe and transmitted to the rest of the world.
Democracy and human rights as written-down concepts began as far as I am aware in Periclean Athens, though they have been strong in communities isolated by geographic boundaries as in mountain valleys and on remote islands. But liberty? Nice topic for a seminar. And someone known presumably to Buchan but left unidentified here believes that ‘science …, artistic beauty, poetry and literature, architecture, and the self [!]’ originated in Europe!
But there is an easy way around this. Just define the well-known Babylonian, Egyptian, Indus Valley, classical Chinese and other Asian civilisations as European; and their art; and their architecture; and their music... I am genuinely surprised that nobody has thought of it. ;-)
And the clincher: there is apparently someone known to Buchan who believes that horse shit, and Buchan puts it forward as an excellent reason for banning any and all academic study under the rubric of Western Civilisation. Yet I venture to cautiously guess that Buchan would be dead-set against banning a course on Islamic Civ because Islamophobia. Or Eastern Civ. Or Whatever Civ.
Except not Western (choke! caaargh! splutter! hawk! spit!*) Civ.
Which brings me to my final point about this dubious article. Buchan does not believe in citing any sources. Nor when he says “we are told….” does he condescend to tell us by whom. (Though I suspect he refers to Samuel Huntingdon and Francis Fukuyama.)
If Buchan’s rant were a term assignment submitted for assessment in some undergraduate course, it would be ploughed. Well at least, it would have been in my undergraduate days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington#%22The_Clash_of_Civilizations%22
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