and we should stop using it as if it describes something real.

We are all familiar with the expression ‘Western civilization.’ It regularly appears in textbooks, the media, and political debates to describe the distinctive cultural pedigree of Europe and the US (along with Europe’s other former colonies) as heirs to the cultures and ideas of ancient Greece, Rome, and early Christianity. On its face, then, ‘Western civilization’ simply describes this heritage, whose ancient underpinnings further position it as the “natural and somewhat ‘eternal’ identity for Europe and European colonized places” (Kennedy 2019).

However, the phrase ‘Western civilization’ is neither simple, natural, nor ancient. To begin, it entangles two problematic assumptions, namely that: 1) ‘Western civilization’ must be emphatically distinct from ‘Eastern civilization’ because 2) ‘Western civilization,’ as Greco-Roman antiquity’s direct cultural descendant, is not just the rightful inheritor of Greco-Roman antiquity’s achievements, but the intended beneficiary of one achievement in particular: Christianity, the divine word. (For more about these assumptions, see below). Additionally, the label ‘Western civilization’ was invented recently. True, the idea that ‘Western’ Greeks defended themselves against ‘Eastern’ Persians, or that ‘Western’ European Christianity was opposed to the ‘Eastern’ Islamic Ottoman Empire, is old. But the phrase ‘Western civilization’ first appears in mid-19th century texts. In 1844 (its earliest appearance?) it describes the US’s western frontier, which Christianity must civilize/convert; in 1846 it marks western Europe’s alleged ‘superiority’ over the ‘uncivilized’ Catholic nations east of the Danube; then in 1863, it desribes Protestant western Europe and its need to combat Czarist Russia’s ‘Eastern barbarism’ and Russian Orthodoxy (Kennedy 2019). Our current understanding of ‘Western civilization’ only materializes during World War I as an ethnnocentric response to the Ottoman Empire’s support of the German and Austro-Hungarian alliance: because the (largely Islamic) Ottoman Empire ruled eastern Europe, parts of North Africa, chunks of the Middle East, and all of Asia Minor, the allied Western Europeans and Americans characterized it as “an eastern civilization” (Coleburn 2017) entirely separate from — even culturally and religiously opposed/hostile to — ‘Western civilization.’ The expression ‘Western civilization,’ then, was recently, expressly created to differentiate the purportedly ‘civilized, Protestant Christian’ US/western Europe from whichever ‘barbarous other’ the moment required.

Yet also, the belief that the world can be divided into diametrically opposed halves of ‘West’ and ‘East’ which somehow exist in complete cultural isolation from each other is impossible. Human societies do not exist in static bubbles, and the Ottoman Empire “was never separate from the west; its peoples and cultures [regularly] interacted with western European peoples and cultures” (Coleburn 2017). European, Mediterranean, African, Middle Eastern, and Asian cultures have routinely interacted with each other since the Bronze Age (e.g., Cline 2021). Thus, treating these neighboring regions like culturally isolated, mutually antagonistic camps “denies centuries of complex systems of trade, communication and cultural exchange between different peoples” (Coleburn 2017). Ironically, too, the ‘Eastern’ Ottoman Empire — treated by the discourse of ‘Western civilization’ as culturally and geographically opposed to the ‘Western’ Greco-Roman tradition — considered itself the Roman Empire’s last remnant. To explain: by 395 CE, the Roman Empire’s immense size made it so hard to govern or defend that the royal brothers Honorius and Arcadius divided it into a Western half (ruled by Honorius) and an Eastern half (ruled by Arcadius). Each ‘Emperor’ remained loyal to and cooperative with the other. In 476 CE, however, a Germanic revolt triggered the Western half’s collapse, while the Eastern half remained intact. Thus, in 1453 CE, when the Ottoman Sultans conquered the Eastern half’s capitol Constantinople, they declared themselves its new Roman Emperors (making their ‘Eastern civilization’ arguably more ‘Greco-Roman’ than western Europe). In sum, there has never been a monolithic ‘Western culture’ standing in opposition to a monolithic ‘Eastern’ one.

Similarly, the ‘Western Civilization’ curriculum (and its canonical, usually classical texts) only materialized in academia after World War II ended (duBois 2001: 46). Why? Because “World War II and the Cold War heightened the sense of Americanness and a concern with things American” (Levine 1996:99). Likewise, the post-World War II decline of Europe’s colonial powers prompted them to assert their ‘superiority’ over their former colonies by claiming that Europe was heir to and the culmination of ‘Western civilization,’ which generated every positive cultural development — implying that ‘Eastern civilization’ has contributed nothing useful because it was/is ‘lesser.’ Finally (and ironically), as Saïd notes: “the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience” (1979: 1-2). Europeans used their invented ‘inferior, decadent East’ narrative as an opposite against which they could define themselves as ‘Western,’ ‘superior,’ and ‘civilized.’ The ‘East’ is a construct designed to be denigrated by the ‘West.’

Thus, European/American ethnocentrism and racism are not just intrinsic to but the motivation for inventing ‘Western civilization,’ which requires a ‘barbarous opposite’ to meaningfully exist. Further, because ‘Greco-Roman antiquity’ and the rise of Christianity are defining features of the ‘Western civilization’ construct, it implies that non-classical/non-Christian cultures are both inferior and an existential threat to ‘Western civilization.’ No wonder, then, that white supremacists, who have identified “a clear nexus of ‘Western Civilization,’ Classical antiquity, and white nationalist politics” (Kennedy 2019), believe that: 1) classical culture and Christianity are innately superior to all other cultures and religions; and 2) ‘Western civilization’ is engaged in a zero-sum, apocalyptic conflict with diversity, equity, and multi-culturalism (Kennedy 2017; Bostick 2021; Padilla Peralta 2017).

Despite all of this, however, scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity have been slow to address the field’s historical connections to the modern formations of Eurocentrism, racism, and ‘whiteness,’ or to confront those wielding ‘Western civilization’ as a weapon against democratic norms of diversity, equity, and inclusivity. Such inertia must end. “It is time for classical scholars to recognize that ‘Western civilization’ is a racist dog whistle” (Pharos 2019), and to stop “viewing the past history of the world through [the lens of] competing civilisations” (Colburne 2017). We must retire the harmful construct ‘Western civilization.’ Recognizing that every ancient culture has contributed to the modern world’s formation fosters not just a more inclusive, but a more accurate historical narrative.

Works cited:

Further Readings:

• Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
  Verso.
• Hall, E. 1989. Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-definition through Tragedy. Oxford.
• Jackson, P. T. 2009. Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West. University of Michigan Press.
• Maher, H., E. Gunaydin, & J. McSwiney. 2021. “Western Civilizationism and White Supremacy: The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation”, Patterns of Prejudice 55: 309-30.
• Patterson, T. C. 1997. Inventing Western Civilization. Monthly Review Press.
• Rose, P. 2003. “’The Conquest Continues’: Towards Denaturalizing Greek and Roman Imperialisms”. The Classical World 96: 409-15.
• Weller, R. C. 2017. “‘Western’ and ‘White’ Civilization’: White Nationalism and Eurocentrism at the Crossroads”, in 21st-Century Narratives of World History, R. C. Weller, ed. Palgrave-MacMillan: 35-80.