Don’t Let Western Civ Fall

I n his essay “Cultural Debris,” Russell Kirk wrote that “not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.” The fabric of civilization, according to Kirk, is a complex tapestry woven from historical and philosophical threads. For any civilization, and particularly for the West, those threads are exemplified by its canon.

As a conservative academic, Kirk spent much of his career concerned with the state of the modern university. In his eyes, the university’s lurch away from the liberal arts and towards “career education” undermined the purpose of education proper. His pessimism on the subject was well-founded. Thirty years after Kirk’s death, the situation hasn’t improved much. Liberal arts broadly and the study of Western civilization specifically — if they can be considered separate fields — have both withered away.

There are glimmers of hope, however. Last summer, the University of Florida announced the launch of the Hamilton Center, a new program for civics education with the stated purpose of “developing a curriculum focusing on the Western intellectual tradition and the ideals of the American Founding.” This week, the center hired William Inboden, former director of the Clements Center for National Security at UT-Austin, as its own founding director. Armed with $13 million in total funding, the Hamilton Center is part of Florida’s much-discussed infusion of higher education with traditional Western values. Governor Ron DeSantis has proposed adding Western Civ to the core curriculum for all Florida college students. According to the new center’s mission statement, it will aid in developing this new curriculum.

Ventures such as the one being pursued at UF (where, full disclosure, I am a student) are very much needed. As of 2020, only 17 percent of American universities require students to learn Western Civ. It has been replaced with a hodgepodge of progressive priorities. This shift has failed. Rather than generate interest in broader cultures or a more nuanced understanding of the West itself, it has all but killed the humanities.

The reasons that students should study Western civilization are numerous. The West is the source of the modern world, as Rich Lowry correctly asserts; it follows that Americans should understand it. The West is, moreover, our inheritance. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke explained why inheritance matters:

The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice.

Though he specifically references property, the principle holds true for the cultural hallmarks that make up our civilization as well. Maintaining continuity between generations requires a common foundation to build upon, both in material and philosophical terms. Handing down the history and literature that defines the West is necessary for the maintenance of civilization itself.

Why should universities place Western Civ studies at the center of their curriculum? Because it is good and necessary for the university to do so. The Chesterton line that a man who lacks belief in God will believe not in nothing but in anything is as applicable to institutions as it is to individuals. The original Western universities were erected to educate priests and monks. The belief in God resided at their center, and the worldview that radiated outward from that molded both the attendees and the university itself. The demise of the metaphysical soul of the academy has not produced institutions that lack a worldview; it has produced institutions that hold a decidedly mechanical and utilitarian worldview. As Kirk explains in his essay “The Conservative Purpose of a Liberal Education”:

If college and university do nothing better than act as pretentious trade-schools; if their chief service to the person and the republic is to act as employment agencies—why, such institutions will have dehumanized themselves. They will have ceased to give us young people with reason and imagination who leaven the lump of any civilization. They will give us instead a narrow elite governing a monotonous declining society, rejoicing in a devil’s sabbath of whirling machinery.

Kirk emphasizes the external outcomes of such a shift. But it affects a university’s intrinsic composition as well. By their very nature, universities require foundational dogmas. If those dogmas are not rooted in the civilization the university exists in, the dogmas will tear away at the spirit of the university itself. In the West, those dogmas must be the cultural productions that our civilization has produced. In “Cultural Debris,” Kirk makes this explicit by identifying as the second of his three planks for Western civilization the “corpus of imaginative literature” that makes up Western canon. If those are not placed at the center of the university’s spirit, the outcome is not a neutral institution. It is an institution that is decidedly hostile to the very civilization that birthed it.

If you believe, as I do (and unlike Russell Kirk), that the West is not doomed and can be saved, such salvation necessitates returning to our universities the spirit with which they were founded. Modern public universities will never be the home of Christian dogma, as they were in Medieval Europe. They can, however, be the home to the dogmas of the West. For their sake, they should be.

The Hamilton Center has a daunting challenge before it. To weave these subtle threads back into the academy’s soul will be no small task. But for the sake of the academy — and indeed, for the sake of the West itself — it must be done.