When Did Romanticism Begin?

The perpetual disappointment of doing history by means of constructs is that, while they seem to offer neat answers to big questions, they dissolve under close scrutiny.

It’s nice to divide Greek history into archaic, classical, and hellenistic periods. But if you ask when, precisely, did the archaic age end and the golden classical age begin, you will not receive a satisfying answer.

Likewise, the exact date on which the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance will never be found, not because we can’t find it, but because it doesn’t exist.

You see, such constructs are convenient categorizations for History teachers and History students, but they don’t exist in reality. They are retrojections imposed on the set of data points which is the raw material of history.

In the same way, to ask about the starting point of Romanticism, that broad movement which included not only poetry, painting, and music, but which also influenced the science of linguistics, the teaching of history, and political revolutionary movements - to ask about the starting point of Romanticism attracts merely a long series of unsatisfying answers.

Isaiah Berlin and Kenneth Clark, two of Oxford University’s top scholars, wrestled with the question and never quite settled on an answer. Professor Allen Guelzo, of Gettysburg College, writes:

Picking a starting point for Romanticism has long been a favorite parlor game: For Berlin, it was Herder and Kant; for Clark, it was alternately the Lisbon earthquake, the nightmare in 1764 that set Horace Walpole to writing The Castle of Otranto, Burke’s Inquiry into the Origins of the Sublime (1757), and Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons (1749).

Guelzo also relates the best guess of Cambridge’s Timothy Blanning on this question:

It was the day in July 1749 that the eye of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was caught by an advertisement for an essay contest on the question: “Has the progress of the sciences and arts done more to corrupt morals or improve them?” The promoters of the contest were confidently expecting variations on improve; it suddenly swam into Rousseau’s head that the real answer was corrupt, and from there flowed a lifelong declaration of war against reason, calculation, balance, law, and orderliness, which Rousseau believed had snatched away the “innocence” of humanity.

Of course, the question of itself is of very little importance. But it is an entry into the more significant question of what Romanticism is, and what its impact on the world has been. When Romanticism began isn’t that important; whether or not Rousseau is a paradigmatic figure in Romanticism is significant because it will point to the essence and to the effects of that movement.

If Rousseau is a central figure in Romanticism, and if Romanticism and Rousseau are the spiritual parents of the French Revolution, then Romanticism has much blood on its hands, as thousands of innocent civilians went to their deaths, first butchered in the “Great Fear” and then sent to the guillotine in the “Reign of Terror.” Guelzo writes:

Isaiah Berlin was deeply suspicious of fingering Rousseau as Romanticism’s progenitor, and Rousseau merits only one passing reference in Clark’s The Romantic Rebellion (1973).

Whenever Romanticism may have started, there is

a fairly extensive supporting cast for Romanticism’s debut, including Wordsworth (on the sublime), Hamann (on passion), Johann Heinrich Merck (on the deadness of reason), and Kant.

To which extent Rousseau was a founder of Romanticism, or whether he was an ancestor of it, or whether he was falling into line with an already-established movement: in any case, the notion that reason and orderliness were enemies of morality, the idea that balance and law and art destroy the innocence of the human race, - such notions are iconoclastic at least.

When people are free to buy and sell at the prices they voluntarily negotiate with others, economies generate continually increasing amounts of wealth. Yet Rousseau somehow saw the marketplace as the creator of need and want, and its oppression as the true liberation of mankind. Both counterintuitive and illogical, Rousseau’s ideas nonetheless held then, and hold now, fascination for many.

Rousseau represented a repudiation of everything the Enlightenment held at its core. Chief among those antagonisms was Rousseau’s (and Romanticism’s) hostility to both democracy and commerce. In a world of natural plenty, Rousseau believed commerce created artificial scarcity (Locke had believed the exact opposite — that this was a world of scarcity that commerce and property turned into a cornucopia). Those who led commercial lives did so under the most deadeningly and harshly rational rule of all, the bottom line, which reduced Nature to mere utility.

Famously, Rousseau felt that humans might not always know what’s best for them, and so his idealized state would be justified in violating the individual’s will - hardly a new idea. But what is new is that Rousseau claimed that in controlling the behavior of the individual, his envisioned state would be “forcing” people “to be free,” an Orwellian oxymoron.

Rousseau’s 1762 publication of The Social Contract revealed internal tensions, both inside Rousseau and inside Romanticism: he argued that traditional forms of the church and of Christianity were not helpful to people, and according to him oppressed people. Instead, he proposed a religion which he invented on his own, and promptly declared that anyone who failed to profess it should suffer the death penalty.

Whether Rousseau is an ancestor of, the founder of, or a follower of Romanticism remains an open question. In any case, he, and the paradoxes and contradictions inside his thought, cannot be ignored when studying Romanticism.

Freedom and Hayek

If a farmer owns some land, should he not have the right to decide whether he plants wheat or corn on it? If a butcher sells meat, should he not have the right to compete with other butchers by setting his prices as he sees fit?

In these material and mundane questions lies the core of the debate about freedom. Grand words about liberty are good and necessary, but history consists of concrete and specific actions.

Either one answers such questions in a manner which unambiguously affirms freedom, or one chooses to dismiss the very idea of freedom altogether. Do children have a lawful right to inherit the legal property of their parents?

To make a principled attack on the notion of rights, which is almost the same as attacking the notion of freedom, is indeed possible from certain moral and theological perspectives. But even from this perspective, which would deny that rights exist absolutely in the moral ontology of the universe, will allow that political rights, conceived as constructs, will be a necessary foundation to any political system which will correspond to our intuitive notion of justice.

Whether rights are understood as metaphysically real or as political constructs, the violation of, and disregard for, them is a defining feature of tyranny: from George III of England to Stalin, from Louis XIV to Mao, from Hitler to Pol Pot, from Robespierre to Castro.

Yet the bureaucrat’s incremental disassembly of rights is no less dangerous than the tyrant’s blatant breach of them. When Congress passes legislation micromanaging the farmer’s choice of which crops to grow, when the IRS confiscates property which the children of a deceased parent should inherit, or when both federal and state governments set not only maximum but also minimum prices for retail products, personal freedom is being dismembered.

Phrases like the “public interest” or the “common good” are routinely produced as justifications for infringement on the individual’s rights. It is true that many, if not all, common versions of the social contract call for either voluntary restraint regarding, or legislated limitations on, personal freedoms. It is also true that there is a natural, and evil, tendency inherent in government to expand its control over the individual beyond that which the logic of the social contract views as necessary.

It is ever inclination of government to govern more, and therefore too much. It is for this reason that the tale of Cincinnatus is not only heroic, but also almost miraculous.

Those who, by means of regulation and taxation, reduce freedom and gradually take away an individual’s rights, often do so while claiming to respect personal rights: these limitations are sadly necessary, they assert, sometimes even necessary to preserve those rights not violated by regulation. Sometimes this is done with noble intentions, sometimes with a cynical intent to grab power. Whether mouthed sincerely or insincerely, a stated belief in rights by those who violate rights has within itself, at the very least, a certain tension, if not an outright contradiction.

More coherent are those who simply deny the notion of personal rights. They argue that “rights” are fictions, and have no place in social or political calculations. Economist Friedrich Hayek writes:

In this respect much more consistency is shown by the more numerous reformers who, ever since the beginning of the socialist movement, have attacked the "metaphysical" idea of individual rights and insisted that in a rationally ordered world there will be no individual rights but only individual duties. This, indeed, has become the much more common attitude of our so-called progressives, and few things are more certain to expose one to the reproach of being a reactionary than if one protests against a measure on the grounds that it is a violation of the rights of the individual. Even a liberal paper like the Economist was a few years ago holding up to us the example of the French, of all people, who had learnt the lesson “that democratic government no less than dictatorship must always [sic] have plenary powers in posse, without sacrificing their democratic and representative character. There is no restrictive penumbra of individual rights that can never be touched by government in administrative matters whatever the circumstances. There is no limit to the power of ruling which can and should be taken by a government freely chosen by the people and can be fully and openly criticised by an opposition.

Note that Hayek describes the newspaper in question as “liberal” - reminding the reader of the long and trouble history of that word, morphing from the “classical liberals” like John Locke to the contemporary “liberals” who favor the statist program of taxation, regulation, and redistribution.

The newspaper’s use of the adverb “always” is troubling not only to Hayek. The passage in question is the newspaper’s argument for government power, which is necessarily opposed to individual liberty. The newspaper asserts that individual rights can be violated by the government at will, and there should be “no limit” to the government’s power.

Whether wittingly or not, whether sincere or cynical, the Economist has made an argument for totalitarianism. It is quite possible that the argument is both sincere and unwitting, because well-intentioned thinkers might envision a good-natured government which uses its powers only when absolutely necessary, uses them fairly and impartially, uses them in a way which respects individual freedom, and after using them, lays them down again. But those hoping for another Cincinnatus will be disappointed. It is not impossible that a Cincinnatus might appear and serve so nobly, but one cannot rely on that appearance, and certainly cannot cause it to happen.

One special case which presents the opportunity, or the temptation, for a government to make a swift attack on personal rights is the case of war. In wartime, the citizens of a nation are likely to offer less resistance to the violation of their rights, if this violation is presented as necessary to the war effort. Historians will recall Woodrow Wilson’s egregious infringement upon the First Amendment during WWI. It was clear that his restrictions on the freedom of speech were not, in many cases, in the service of the war effort, although they were presented to the public as such.

In addition to wars, governments can use any real or perceived danger as an excuse to breach rights. Floods, electrical power outages, shortages of vital consumer goods, and other special circumstances can be exploited by the government, as it tells the citizens that it must intervene to stabilize or somehow make a situation safe. To this pattern belongs the series, presented in rapid succession, of concerns about global warming, climatic instability, climate change, and climate disruption; these terms are designed to produce fear, and the fear is produced in order to persuade citizens to submit to governmental directives.

The government’s claim in this case is not entirely false. It is true that, on rare occasions, governmental intervention can produce a modest increase in safety or stability. Yet we must question the unspoken assumption that this increase is worth the cost.

Socialists governments, or other governments, can indeed increase security at the cost of personal freedom. The amount or degree of such increase is usually quite small in comparison to the amount or degree of liberty lost. A question of values arises: is the significant loss of freedom worth the modest increase in security? Slogans like “live free or die” answer that question.

Interventions labeled “necessary” during wartime will usually remain in effect during the subsequent peace. Again, men like Cincinnatus are more rare than many suppose. Hayek writes:

This may be inevitable in wartime when, of course, even free and open criticism is necessarily restricted. But the "always" in the statement quoted does not suggest that the Economist regards it as a regrettable wartime necessity. Yet as a permanent institution this view is certainly incompatible with the preservation of the Rule of Law, and it leads straight to the totalitarian state. It is, however, the view which all those who want the government to direct economic life must hold.

The best limitations on personal freedom are those imposed on an individual by himself. Maximizing political freedom does not imply maximizing moral freedom; on the contrary, moral self-restraint is necessary for political liberty. The failure of many modern, and postmodern, societies in Western Civilization is the failure that resulted from seeking political freedom without a corresponding ethical structure to guide the individual.

Freedom, in sum, is the ultimate political goal, but should never be the ultimate personal goal. In the context of a political structure, the individual’s freedom must be sought above all else. In the context of private life, self-discipline must be sought. We seek, struggle for, and fight for our freedom from the government; but once obtained, we voluntarily surrender that freedom, not to the government, but to ethical self-restraint. We struggle to gain rights, only in order to give them away.

Consider the example of “freedom of speech.” This freedom must be obtained and jealously guarded. But he who has freedom of speech is morally, not legally, obliged to refrain some some types of speech. Ethical self-restraint will prevent him from using speech to harm his neighbor.

One must not be naive to the point of assuming that this ethical self-restraint will be perfect. There will be transgressions. But that is no reason for abandoning the program of freedom. There is no perfect or perfectible society. An interventionist government will also have transgressions, and more egregious ones. We may only choose the lesser evil.

What Does It Take To Be Free?

The proverb "freedom isn't free" has probably been uttered many times - so that, like the boy who cried "wolf!" too often, it isn't heard as an opportunity to reflect on a deeper truth. Usually, the saying is taken in the context of necessary military readiness. But there are other dimensions. Freedom's price, beyond having the will to defend it, includes the will to take risks, and the will to self-discipline.

Being free necessarily entails risk. History places various societies, and the individuals within them, on a continuum between security and liberty. Those who opt for much liberty pay the price of reduced security; those who want more security will pay for it by giving up some of their freedom. Security here can be understood in terms of economics or in terms of a predictable social structure. Freedom here includes economic freedom, as well as the freedoms of speech, press, religion, and political discourse.

Freedom also demands a price in terms of self-discipline: if free men fail to behave themselves properly, a certain level of ensuing chaos will cause society at large to demand authorities to enforce some type of order, even if those authorities limit liberty in the process.

Famously, freedom requires defense. A free society will be such only as long as it is willing and able to defend itself. This does not necessarily mean war; deterrence suffices, and offers the added bonus of less bloodshed. If a free society fails to project an image of strength, if it fails to project the image that it is willing to defend both itself and its liberty, then it will, of necessity, eventually be attacked.

These three prices which one pays for liberty are expressed in a very different way by French scholar Jacques Ellul. He bundles these three costs together under the rubric of reason:

If the individual rejects every external restraint imposed by society, then he must be capable of restraining himself; in other words, he must possess tools that will enable him to make "good use" of his freedom or will prevent freedom from degenerating into the inconsistent behavior of the savage. Reason makes it possible for the individual to master impulse, to choose the ways in which he will exercise his freedom, to calculate the chances for success and the manner in which a particular action will impinge upon the group, to understand human relations, and to communicate. Communication is the highest expression of freedom, but it has little meaning unless there is a content which, in the last analysis, is supplied by reason.

Reason requires citizens to act with at least a modicum of altruism; reason requires that they act with self-restraint; reason requires that take some risks; reasons requires that they be prepared to defend their freedom. One peculiar feature of humanity - a feature which distinguishes humans from beasts and which demonstrates their rationality - is the ability to say 'no' to one's self: the ability to identify a drive, an impulse, or a desire, and deny it.

Reason is thus a structure deliberately built to balance the possibilities inherent in the freedom that has been won. Reason does not represent a "trick" but is really the result of an effort to find something that is neither an external constraint nor interiorized social imperatives and that will allow a man to be free and yet at the same time choose a behavior and express opinions which are communicable and can be recognized as acceptable and shared by the other members of the tribe. Here precisely we have the magnificent discovery made by the West: that the individual's whole life can be, and even is, the subtle, infinitely delicate interplay of reason and freedom.

This understanding of reason and freedom leads to the maxim, issued two thousand years ago, that one should examine one's self: introspection and reflection in the form of a rational self-critique. One should conduct a moral inventory of one's self: this imperative is a foundation of Western Civilization, or of European culture, or however else one might choose to label it. Ellul continues:

This interplay achieved its highest form in both the Renaissance and classical literature since the Enlightenment. No other culture made this discovery. We of the West have the most rounded and self-conscious type of man. For, the development of reason necessarily implied reason's critique of its own being and action as well as a critique of both liberty and reason, through a return of reason upon itself and a continuous reflection which gave rise to new possibilities for the use of freedom as controlled by new developments of reason.

On both an individual and a corporate level, the habit of morally evaluating one's self is necessary to maintain freedom. This self-evaluation takes many forms and spreads into many areas of life. It is no coincidence that Immanuel Kant's great book is titled The Critique of Pure Reason.

Give Civilization a Chance!

Among the various trends found in academia is worldview, held by enough scholars to be influential, that Western Civilization is overvalued and overemphasized, and the students would be best served by deemphasizing the West. In concrete terms, this manifests itself in demands that English departments at universities stop offering courses in Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Dickens; that art departments stop teaching Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Dürer; that music departments stop teaching Mozart and Bach.

Given that this trend is found almost exclusively in universities in Europe and North America, this worldview amounts to a form of collective self-hatred. Generalizing, this view claims that West's effect on the world is primarily oppressive, and the best we can do is to minimize the West to allow the rest of the world its freedom. It is taken as axiomatic by these scholars that anything which is not the product of Western Civilization is a priori superior to anything which is produced by Western Civilization.

To notion that the writings of John Locke and Edmund Burke should be ignored, to the notion that the ideas of Kant and Leibniz do not merit attention, to the notion that George Washington and Samuel Adams unleashed oppression instead of liberty - to these notions, French scholar Jacques Ellul responds:

Enough of that sort of thing! I wish only to remind the reader that the West has given the world a certain number of values, movements, and orientations that no one else has provided. No one else has done quite what the West has done. I wish also to remind the reader that the whole world is living, and living almost exclusively, by these values, ideas, and stimuli. There is nothing original about the "new" thing that is coming into existence in China or Latin America or Africa: it is all the fruit and direct consequence of what the West has given the world.

All civilizations - both Western and Eastern - make contributions which merit study. It is, however, duplicitous to use the word 'multicultural' as it is used in many schools and colleges. Those who most loudly proclaim their affection for things "multicultural" have in fact no interest in any culture: while despising and ignoring the West, they in fact have no desire for serious study of other cultures. This is demonstrated by their willingness to lump together under the heading "non-Western" all the civilizations for which they allegedly hold such great affection.

It is, in fact, among the champions of Western Civilization that one finds those most willing to study and appreciate other civilizations. It was in the German universities of the nineteenth century that the most energetic and numerous investigations were made into topics such as Sanskrit philology and Tibetan literature. In American universities of the twentieth century, study of the Ethiopian language Ge'ez declined precisely in proportion to the rise of this so-called multiculturalism.

The value of other civilizations is not lessened in saying that the West has formulated a worldview which other civilizations now use both to shape their own self-concepts and to criticize the West. Ellul continues:

In the fifties it was fashionable to say that "the third world is now entering upon the stage of history." The point was not, of course, to deny that Africa or Japan had a history. What the cliche was saying, and rightly saying, was that these peoples were now participating in the creative freedom of history and the dialectic of the historical process. Another way of putting it is that the West had now set the whole world in motion. It had released a tidal wave that would perhaps eventually drown it. There had been great changes in the past and vast migrations of peoples; there had been planless quests for power and the building of gigantic empires that collapsed overnight. The West represented something entirely new because it set the world in movement in every area and at every level; it represented, that is, a coherent approach to reality. Everything — ideas, armies, the state, philosophy, rational methods, and social organization — conspired in the global change the West had initiated.

In East Asia, encounters with the West have been the turning points in the development of those civilizations. China and Japan will never again return to a mindset in which no alternative to imperial rule is even conceivable.

It is not for me to judge whether all this was a good thing or bad. I simply observe that the entire initiative came from the West, that everything began there. I simply observe that the peoples of the world had abided in relative ignorance and a hieratic repose until the encounter with the West set them on their journey.

Prior to encounters with the West, not only the rulers, but also the Chinese and Japanese societies themselves viewed the common population as an undifferentiated mass. Thousands and millions of peasants were conceptualized as identical and interchangeable, not only for all practical purposes, but also philosophically as well. The peculiarly Western idea of the individual changed the working dynamics of these societies. Before the encounters with the West, narratives, both factual and fictional, were content to speak of "a peasant" with no further descriptor; the West will replace this generic character with the concrete and unique individual.

Please, then, don't deafen us with talk about the greatness of Chinese or Japanese civilization. These civilizations existed indeed, but in a larval or embryonic state; they were approximations, essays. They always related to only one sector of the human or social totality and tended to be static and immobile. Because the West was motivated by the ideal of freedom and had discovered the individual, it alone launched society in its entirety on its present course.

We can honestly give the West its due credit for its peculiar discoveries and values - the dignity of the individual, the quest for liberty, the equal value of each human life - without disparaging other civilizations. We can freely acknowledge Confucius as a rival of, and in some cases the superior of, Aristotle. Not only was he temporally prior to Aristotle; he made some of the same analyses about the fundamental relationships out of which larger and more complex societies are constructed, and in some cases, he made them more accurately.

When we consider the ubiquitous praise for Gandhi, it must be remembered that he began his career as a supporter of the caste system in India, and resented the British for not maintaining the strict separation of the castes. Studying in England from 1888 to 1891, Gandhi was not comfortable in British society and did not particularly enjoy it, but he was excited by the ideas of John Locke and Edmund Burke, by the Magna Carta, and by the English Bill of Rights of 1689. It was in England that Gandhi was introduced, not only to the study of the New Testament, but to the study of the Hindu Bhagavadgita. It was among the English that Gandhi developed a taste for Hinduism.

In South Africa, Gandhi made his mark as a civil rights leader by applying those British icons to the concrete situations in which he found himself. Gandhi became Gandhi by working out the implications of John Locke and Edmund Burke and the Magna Carta. Ellul writes:

Again, don't misunderstand me. I am not saying that European science was superior to Chinese science, nor European armies to Japanese armies; I am not saying that the Christian religion was superior to Buddhism or Confucianism; I am not saying that the French or English political system was superior to that of the Han dynasty. I am saying only that the West discovered what no one else had discovered; freedom and the individual, and that this discovery later set everything else in motion. Even the most solidly established religions could not help changing under the influence. We must remember that the Hinduism which drew such an enthusiastic response from English spinsters in 1930 and is today inspiring the young with revolutionary fervor, represents a modernization of the Hindu tradition through contact with the West. What an incredible experience the world has undergone due to the West!

Although the West has maintained itself as a leader in economics, in the natural sciences, and in technology, these are mere byproducts to those core values which make the West uniquely what it is. To codify freedom or liberty as a value is a specifically Western habit. In ancient Mesopotamia, generations of peasants were born, worked, and died without leaving a trace. In the early Middle Ages, in Europe, the practice began of recording names and dates, births and baptisms, weddings and funerals. Each individual was given the dignity of having a name recorded in the community's books. This is the distinctively Western practice of respecting the individual, or, as Ellul phrases it,

It was not economic power or sudden technological advances that made the West what it is. These played a role, no doubt, but a negligible one in comparison with the great change the discovery of freedom and the individual — that represents the goal and desire implicit in the history of all civilizations. That is why, in speaking of the West, I unhesitatingly single out freedom from the whole range of values. After all, we find justice, equality, and peace everywhere. Every civilization that has attained a certain level has claimed to be a civilization of justice or peace. But which of them has ever spoken of the individual? Which of them has been reflectively conscious of freedom as a value?

In a complex and schizophrenic dialectic, the West's products are working against each other: for, at the same time, it was both advancing the ideas of liberty and individualism, and yet occasionally engaging in the very opposites: enslavement and mass socialization. The civilization which taught the rest of the world to seek and value freedom was caught violating that freedom; the civilization that taught about the dignity of the individual was treating individuals as interchangeable machine parts. The West's own words have come back to haunt the West. Only a critique formulated by the West's own values could be so devastating to the West.

The decisive role of the West's discovery of freedom and the individual is beyond question, but the discovery has brought with it two tragic consequences. First, the very works of the West now pass judgment on it. For, having proclaimed freedom and the individual, the West played false in dealing with other peoples. It subjected, conquered, and exploited them, even while it went on talking about freedom. It made the other peoples conscious of their enslavement by intensifying that enslavement and calling it freedom. It destroyed the social structures of tribes and clans, turned men into isolated atoms, and shaped them into a worldwide proletariat, and all the time kept on talking of the great dignity of the individual: his autonomy, his power to decide for himself, his capacity for choice, his complex and many-sided reality.

In refining such a critique of the West, the rest of the world is becoming ever more like the West. The day may yet come when the East is more Western than the West.

The Direction in which History Flows

As generation after generation of students move through the familiar Western Civilization curriculum, they encounter both the micro and the macro: both the details of individual persons and events, but also the broad sweep of history over millennia. The specific data about the people and places fuels the big picture, while the big picture gives a context and a direction - a teleology - to those concrete individuals.

Although many in contemporary academia now dismiss Western Civilization, or even condemn it, a larger historical understanding informs an appreciation of the West. That which we call Western Civilization is the emergence and clarification in history of two concepts: liberty and the individual. Scholar Jacques Ellul writes:

Here is where the contribution of the West comes in. As I have indicated, in this slow, subconscious, spontaneous historical process no one has ever set the goal in advance, no one has said what he was seeking, or even expressed what he was about. But it was precisely the meaning of the whole process that the West discovered (not through sociological research, but in the form of a proclamation); the West gave expression to what man — every man — was seeking. The West turned the whole human project into a conscious, deliberate business. It set the goal and called it freedom, or, at a later date, individual freedom. It gave direction to all the forces that were working in obscure ways, and brought to light the value that gave history its meaning. Thereby, man became man.

The West made explicit freedom as a goal and as a value. The Hebrew mega-text provides us not only with the Exodus from slavery in Egypt, but another from captivity in Babylon. Throughout the Pentateuch, Moses chips away at the institution of slavery - ascribing rights to slaves, and finally limiting a person's time as a slave to a finite number of years. Slavery is being diminished, liberty expanded, and the process set into motion will inevitably yield the abolition of slavery.

To understand the westernness of this step, consider how odd it would have seemed to a Babylonian or an Egyptian to say that a slave had any form of "rights" - yet Moses does precisely this, and in so doing, delivers a blow which places a fatal crack into the foundation of slavery.

The West attempted to apply in a conscious, methodical way the implications of freedom. The Jews were the first to make freedom the key to history and to the whole created order. From the very beginning their God was the God who liberates; his great deeds flowed from a will to give freedom to his people and thereby to all mankind. This God himself, moreover, was understood to be sovereignly free (freedom here was often confused with arbitrariness or with omnipotence). This was something radically new, a discovery with explosive possibilities. The God who was utterly free had nothing in common with the gods of eastern and western religions; he was different precisely because of his autonomy.

Independence is one aspect of individualism and freedom; the Greeks understood this, and their failure to unite the cities of Greece into a nation-state or empire was actually their victory in the name of independence. Although certainly imperfectly conducted - Greek government in Athens during the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries B.C. was nothing like modern Western republics with their freely elected representatives and universal suffrage - the Greeks nonetheless articulated a new concept of citizenship in which the citizen was more than the property of the monarch. Even if the Greeks limited citizenship to small segment of the city's residents, they still structured the cooperation of the citizens in such a way as to ensure the city's sovereignty over itself, and the citizen's sovereignty over himself.

It is in this understanding that the steps taken by Cleisthenes, Solon, and Draco emerge not as random bits of progress, but as the systematic unfolding of a larger concept - the direction history took. Even Pericles with his insincere propaganda, and Thucydides who sees realistically through Athenian hypocrisy, existed, and could have existed only, in this larger cultural current.

The next step in the same movement saw the Greeks affirming both intellectual and political liberty. They consciously formulated the rules for a genuinely free kind of thinking, the conditions for human freedom, and the forms a free society could take. Other peoples were already living in cities, but none of them had fought so zealously for the freedom of the city in relation to other cities, and for the freedom of the citizen within the city.

Ellul goes on to make the claim that even the Roman wars of conquest were expressions of liberty. Although we are tempted to think that he must be mistaken, if we entertain his hypothesis, we note that Julius Caesar did begin the practice, followed later by some of the emperors, of granting full legal status to many in the newly-acquired provinces. True, this had, at least in part, a self-serving motive: they were less likely to rebel and more likely to cooperate, having been made complete Roman citizens. But it is also true that these new citizens were made heirs to the traditions of the Roman Republic, and the notions of senatorial representation and due process were thus spread into distant parts of the globe. As a result of Rome, people in remote places learned to demand fair treatment through the normal judicial system, especially as a citizen's entitlement.

The Romans took the third step by inventing civil and institutional liberty and making political freedom the key to their entire politics. Even the conquests of the Romans were truly an unhypocritical expression of their intention of freeing peoples who were subject to dictatorships and tyrannies the Romans judged degrading. It is in the light of that basic thrust that we must continue to read Roman history. Economic motives undoubtedly also played a role, but a secondary one; to make economic causes the sole norm for interpreting history is in the proper sense superficial and inadequate. You can not write history on the basis of your suspicions! If you do, you only project your own fantasies.

That these grand ideals were imperfectly implemented does not compromise their value, and does not eliminate the West's significance. Nobody will argue that Western Civilization is perfect. But against those who claim that it is worthless, who claim that it is a source only of oppression and violence, and who claim that it must not be taught but only despised in our schools and universities, we must argue that the West contributed its peculiar values to the world. The West has been guilty of slavery, as has the rest of the world; but only the West exercised a self-critique, condemned itself for such slavery, and sought to abolish slavery. Governments in the West have, at times, been guilty of torture, as have governments in the rest of the world; but only in the West did the idea occur that torture was wrong or immoral - and only in the West could that idea occur, because it was an extension of the idea of the individual. Torture is a violation of the individual - in other societies, the individual was regarded as merely an atom, like every other atom, in the structure of society; the individual was merely a segment in the undifferentiated mass of humanity. In those societies, it would not occur to anyone that torture was wrong, and in fact, such societies conducted their torture in public as an acknowledged part of their legal systems. Only in the West was torture forced into hiding. Only in the West is there massive public outrage when torture is discovered in its hiding places.

I am well aware, of course, that in each concrete case there was darkness as well as light, that liberty led to wars and conquests, that it rested on a base of slavery. I am not concerned here, however, with the excellence or defects of the concrete forms freedom took; I am simply trying to say (as others have before me) that at the beginning of western history we find the awareness, the explanation, the proclamation of freedom as the meaning and goal of history.

In the grand sweep of history, then, we can see in the narrative of Abraham and Isaac, in the narrative in which for the first time, an individual decides not to commit human sacrifice - we see in chrysalis form the notion that each human life has some dignity, dignity which demands respect. In the Mesopotamian societies of the Ancient Near East, human sacrifice was ubiquitous and unquestioned; as part of fertility religions, it was understood as being done for the common good. How odd, how antisocial, Abraham's rejection of human sacrifice must have seemed to his neighbors. But it is the font from which flow all our modern notions of human rights and the distinctively Western notion that each human life is valuable.

In this meta-historical narrative, almost Hegelian in scope, we see in Moses, in embryonic form, the struggle for freedom as slaves leave Egypt, and the effort to construct a just society as the laws given at Sinai hint at a society in which men and women are moving toward legal equality, hint at the final complete abolition of slavery, and do more than hint at the establishment of a legal due process. While Hammurabi legislated consequences for an unfaithful wife, Moses prohibited infidelity by either spouse equally. While Hammurabi saw a slave as the owner's property and gave the owner complete power over the slave, Moses prohibited the slaveowner from either beating or killing the slave - and Moses imposed a deadline by which slavery must end. While Hammurabi was content to issue a sentence based on nothing more than a bald accusation, Moses required two or more witnesses. While Hammurabi relied on trial by ordeal, Moses described the particulars of impartiality in judicial proceedings.

Between Moses and Abraham, then, a seed was planted in the soil of history. The germination and growth of that seed is the story of Western Civilization.

No one has ever set his sights as intensely on freedom as did the Jews and Greeks and Romans, the peoples who represented the entire West and furthered its progress. In so doing, they gave expression to what the whole of mankind was confusedly seeking. In the process we can see a progressive approach to the ever more concrete: from the Jews to the Greeks, and from the Greeks to the Romans there is no growth in consciousness, but there is the ongoing search for more concrete answers to the question of how freedom can be brought from the realm of ideas and incarnated in institutions, behavior, thinking, and so on.

The desire for liberty is to some extent innate in all people, but in the West, that desire became conscious, that desire became concrete, and that desire became precisely articulated. The desire to be recognized as an individual is to some extent inborn in all humans, but in the West, recognition of the individual became a stated goal, became a communal value, and became part of the cultural identity of the West. These are the peculiar characteristics of Western Civilization.

Today the whole world has become the heir of the West, and we Westerners now have a twofold heritage: we are heirs to the evil the West has done to the rest of the world, but at the same time we are heirs to our forefathers' consciousness of freedom and to the goals of freedom they set for themselves. Others peoples, too, are heirs to the evil that has been inflicted on them, but now they have also inherited the consciousness of and desire for freedom. Everything they do today and everything they seek is an expression of what the western world has taught them.

As the rest of the world accuses the West, it makes accusations which are based on ideas which came exclusively from the West. If the West is called to account for the brutality of Europe's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonization efforts, from whom did the plaintiffs learn that brutality is wrong? The West. If those colonization efforts are indicted as having violated the human rights or civil rights of the natives, from whom did learn about such rights? The West.

It is no random coincidence that Gandhi's education, the education which enabled him to lead a stellar anti-colonial movement, was an education centered on documents like the Magna Carta, and centered on texts like John Locke's.

Yet Western Civilization is dismissed, not only by the non-Western cultures from other parts of the world, but by many scholars who engage in a bizarre form of cultural self-hatred. Why the demand that students not learn about Shakespeare and Mozart, about Aquinas and Michelangelo? Why the demand that Western Civilization be presented as only oppressive and violent? Why the demand that, instead of learning about non-Western cultures, students are taught merely to praise them?

As to the motives of such academics and their anti-Western demands, we can only speculate. Perhaps some Oedipal complex writ large; perhaps out of ignorance.

Whatever the causes behind such antipathy to the West, reason finds arguments to justify such hatred of the West neither persuasive nor plausible. Reason finds the West, like the East, far from perfect. But reason also finds the West to be the sole source of concepts which have worked to pull humanity away from that which is degrading, and toward that which dignifies human life, that which honors human life, and that which respects human life.

The West's Good, the West's Evil

Common sense tells us that no civilization is perfect, that no society will be perfect, and that no culture can be perfect. Humans, and the world in which we live, are flawed.

By the same token, every human tradition contains something good, and every nation contains something praiseworthy. So we may issue no blanket condemnations, nor may we offer general approval. People and their institutions remain a mix of good and evil.

Sadly, however, as the old proverb tells us, common sense is not common. People still make the error of idealizing one culture and demonizing another. Starting in the second half of the twentieth century, the general trend of thought in many schools, colleges, and universities has been to dismiss that conglomerate known as Western Civilization. Students have been directed away writers, thinkers, and artists who have been part of that cultural tradition.

At the mildest, people like Shakespeare, Chaucer, Bach, Brahms, Leibniz, Descartes, Dürer, and Michelangelo have been classified as tired, stale, and irrelevant. At the worst, they've been tagged as hypocritical, oppressive, and chauvinistic.

The tendency to demonize one culture seems often to coincide with the tendency to idealize another culture: a drive to establish a clear and distinct dualism. Thus those who dismiss Western Civilization seem to praise blindly some other society. The blindness in their praise is the product of ignorance. Anti-western academics praise them merely because they are not western.

Non-western cultures have praiseworthy aspects, and have created artifacts and texts worth studying. But those who proudly proclaim, under the banner of multiculturalism, their affection for these other civilizations generally have little or no knowledge of them. A class titled "Non-Western Civ" usually teaches little about non-western civilizations, but rather is merely a vehicle for a critique of, or even a verbal assault on, the West.

Scholars who seriously study Sanskrit literature or Confucianism, who study the grammar of Nubian or Ge'ez, have both a knowledge of and an affection for these non-western cultures, but do not do so merely as a way to insult the West.

Those who know little about any culture, and loudly proclaim their multiculturalism, are in fact anti-cultural, desiring to instruct their students only in how to disparage the West, and not to be conversant with the treasures of any culture, East, West, or other.

Into this fray steps French scholar Jacques Ellul, who argues for an even-handed treatment. The West has done both good and evil; other cultures have done both good and evil. The standard practice of contemporary academics of painting the West as bad and the non-West as good is simple-minded and intellectually lazy. To assume the opposite view would be equally wrong: we cannot portray the West as good and other cultures as backward. Ellul writes:

I shall not wax lyrical about the greatness and benefactions of the West. Above all, I shall not offer a defense of the material goods Europe brought to the colonies. We've heard that kind of defense too often: "We built roads, hospitals, schools, and dams; we dug the oil wells . . . ." And the reason I shall say nothing of this invasion by the technological society is that I think it to be the West's greatest crime, as I have said at length elsewhere. The worst thing of all is that we exported our rationalist approach to things, our "science," our conception of the state, our bureaucracy, our nationalist ideology. It is this, far more surely than anything else, that has destroyed the other cultures of the world and shunted the history of the entire world onto a single track.

Ellul argues for a different approach. Since we know that no culture is ideally virtuous, and no cultural damnably evil, let us analyze each civilization to identify both its strengths and its weaknesses - both its crimes and its nobility. Any culture will have plenty of both.

But is that all we can say of the West? No, the essential, central, undeniable fact is that the West was the first civilization in history to focus attention on the individual and on freedom. Nothing can rob us of the praise due us for that. We have been guilty of denials and betrayals (of these we shall be saying something more), we have committed crimes, but we have also caused the whole of mankind to take a gigantic step forward and to leave its childhood behind.

And so we have the West's sins and the West's blessings. Perhaps the greatest sin of the West is the promulgation of the technological society - by which Ellul indicates something more than merely the existence of machines and electronic devices. The least significant aspect of the technological society is the existence of transistors and microchips, of airplanes and radios. The more powerful, and arguably more harmful, aspect of the technological society lies in the psychology of technique - the technological man subordinates all areas of life to the concept of technique. This devitalizes and alienates humans.

Another sin of the West is the great leveling, by which the world becomes more homogenous. Everywhere one now finds blue jeans, Coca-Cola, Elvis Presley, and McDonald's. In this homogenizing, we have lost cultural treasures.

But if the West is guilty of these sins, it has also bestowed certain benefits on mankind. The fair-minded scholar will admit this, and many contemporary academics will not.

Ellul notes two main achievements of the West: the concept of the individual and the concept of freedom. Each of these requires volumes of unpacking.

If we examine societies prior to the rise of Western Civilization, or those which existed simultaneously but without significant contact with Western Civilization, the emphasis on the corporate at the expense of the individual is clear. Whether in ancient Mesopotamia, or in later centuries in China and India, the significance of the individual was minimal. This is manifested in the lack of record-keeping. Names of ordinary people - their births, marriages, and deaths - were not seen as data worth preserving. The anonymous grave and the scattered ashes left no trace.

In the West, the individual's name was a matter of public record, and preserving it was a communal duty. The individual human being was more than merely a cell in a corporate whole.

The West's other main contribution, freedom, was assigned to the individual. Certainly, the West did not embody perfect political liberty; it sinned greatly against that concept. But it also exclusively produced that concept. The West crystalized and expressed the concept of freedom so well that it has been embraced by other cultures.

The West failed to purely instantiate personal freedom - in fact, the West committed a wide variety of crimes against freedom. But it was also in the West that such things were identified as crimes. Only the West saw slavery as wrong, even as it committed slavery. Only the West saw torture as inhumane, even as it committed torture. These insights are the West's gift to the rest of the world.

Languages: It's a Family Thing

The science of historical linguistics is both fascinating and inexact. The notion of uncovering, branch by branch, a family tree of the world's languages, showing how each is related to every other, and how they all emerged from one common ancestral language, is fascinating. Given the lack of precise evidence - much of this familial development occurred either in an era without writing, or in an era whose writings did not survive for archeologists to find - it is inexact. Linguists work hard to retain the status of a science; some less than rigorous linguists have given ammunition to those who would question whether or not linguistics is truly to be counted among the sciences.

Robert Wright details the methods of linguists as they analyze the systematic changes made as sounds shift within languages to yield new languages, or at least to yield new versions of old languages:

Resurrecting dead and unfossilized languages would be easier if the laws of phonetic change were simple and universal - if, for example, p's always turned into f's, given a millennium or two, and f's were always the residue of former p's. It doesn't work that way. Still, there are vaguer things that can be said about phonetic drift generally. For example, p's often turn into f's - and, moreover, f's almost never become p's. (Try uttering pf, then try fp. Doesn't the second effort feel more like a struggle against biomechanical forces?)

For example, the linguist Jacob Grimm articulated a pattern, noted by earlier linguists, called Grimm's Law or die Erste Lautverschiebung. In this pattern, p's do indeed turn into f's, and the word for foot, which in the most primitive languages begins with a p as in the case of the Sanskrit word for foot, begins with an f in developed languages. Likewise the word for fish. Grimm's Law also reveals patterns in which b's turn into p's, d's turn into t's, and g's turn into k's. Many of these changes can be documented, because they are recorded in some of the earliest samples of writing to survive. But such shifts do not apply with the consistency of algebraic properties. The shifts may occur at different times for different regions or for different sets of vocabulary; there are exceptions of various types.

This complex algebra of sounds gives rise to an intricate science. It is sounds which primarily interest the historical linguist; the written symbols must be understood as merely the conveyors of sound. Writing can be misleading in this regard, for the same th that represents the sounds in thick and thistle also represents the different sounds in lithe and tithe. And, of course, the different letter of the Greek and Cyrillic and Runic alphabets can present the same sounds.

While not strictly universal, shifts such as those described in Grimm's Law provide clues to linguists, because they are directional. In large numbers, p's turn into f's, but not the other way around.

An example of how this directionality comes in handy is the reconstruction of of the proto-Indo-European word for "birch." Here is the word in four Indo-European languages, each drawn from a different main stock: German (Germanic) birke, Lithuanian (Baltic) berzas, Ossetian (Iranian) barz, and Sanskrit (Indic) bhurja. To judge sheerly by numbers, you might guess that the third consonant in the proto-Indo-European word was a relatively soft sound - like the z in berzas or the j in bhurja - and that through a freak mutation it got hardened in the German birke. But it turns out that such a mutation would be freakish indeed. It is common for a "velors" (k or a hard g) to shift into "affricates" (ch or j, respectively), and even to slip further, winding up as "fricatives" (s or z), but the reverse is almost unheard of. So it looks as if the third consonant in the proto-Indo-European "birch" was a hard sound, a velor.

The exact reconstruction is one part of historical linguistics; that reconstruction yields clues, and deciphering the historical meanings of those clues is another part. We can learn about conditions and societies which left no written record, because when we reconstruct their languages, we find that their vocabularies reveal their lifestyles. Societies which lived in the desert or in tropical regions have no word for "ice" or "snow," and civilizations located far from coastlines have no word for "whale" or "jellyfish." William Bennet writes:

Common Indo-European words indicating seasons, flora, and fauna, together with ethnic and geographic data, suggest that the home of the Indo-Europeans was a district connecting southeastern Europe with Asia, probably southern Russia. As the tribes expanded over an increasingly wider area, they became separated into numerous smaller groups, which absorbed varying proportions of other populations. Whether the Indo-Europeans were already of mixed origin is a matter for conjecture: their possession of a common language indicates only that they had been affiliated by social and cultural ties. In the course of the expansion and ethnic mixture, extending over many centuries, the speech of the separate Indo-European groups became progressively divergent, though within each community some degree of linguistic reintegration must have taken place as certain dialects became predominant and others became extinct.

It is a commonplace that the landscape of Russia contains more birch forests than, say, the landscape of North America. And so the fact that the original Indo-Europeans had a word for "birch" is historically significant, even if our reconstruction of their word is only approximate. As Robert Wright notes,

At any rate, the letter-for-letter accuracy of each reconstructed word is in some ways moot. For historians and archaeologists, how the Indo-Europeans pronounced the word for "birch" is less important than that they did pronounce it: apparently they lived somewhere in the vicinity of birch trees. And "birch" is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a whole book called Proto-Indo-European Trees, and countless hours have been spent trying to infer the Indo-Europeans' homeland from their flora and fauna. Maps of Europe and southwestern Asia have been drawn with birch zones, beech zones, beaver zones, and so forth, in hopes of finding a region common to all. It hasn't worked. Argument about the proto-Indo-European homeland persists.

From that homeland, wherever it was, a few groups emerged, wandering hundreds and then thousands of miles in various directions. Those few groups - Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Indo-Iranian, Romance, Greek, etc. - multiplied as each of them subdivided: the Germanic group yielded Dutch, Swedish, Flemish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, Gothic, German, etc., while the Slavic group yielded Polish, Russian, Czech, Slovakian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Bulgarian, etc.

Historical linguists, in effect, are researching the family tree of civilization and culture.