By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with
Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell in Cambridge and Alison Porchnik on Morningside Heights
If you think that the real crisis in America was that democracy was under attack, that must be because you’re not reading the pearls of wisdom nested inside the hard shells of deep thinkers like New York Times columnist Bret “Bretbug” Stephens and former Times columnist David “My Dinner With Jeffy” Brooks.
According to these savants, all of our problems can be traced back to a single cause: the supposed assault on Western Civilization by a non-Western elite which has supposedly banned the teaching of great chestnuts of that civilization in elite universities.
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| Bretbug: Why aren't they reading Plato? |
Here’s Brooks, taking a break from whining about the high price of Scotch at Newark Airport:
Many educators decided that because Western powers spawned colonialism — and they did — students in the West should learn nothing about the lineage of their civilization and should thereby be rendered cultural orphans
Name three educators who decided that. Three is a good number because it equaled the number of drinks Jeffrey Epstein’s boon dinner companion sucked down before decrying the death of the liberal social order at the Newark Airport Food Court.
Not to be outdone, here’s Likud spokesman Bretbug beating the same drum (probably a timpani to avoid any pollution by bongos or African percussion instruments):
What, exactly, is Western civilization? Americans younger than 50 might be excused for hardly knowing. A 2011 report from the National Association of Scholars found that not one of America’s top colleges and universities had a required survey course in Western civ and only 32 percent even offered it as an elective. In 1964, 80 percent of these institutions had some form of introduction to Western civ.
What many universities do offer...is what amounts to an education in anti-Western civ: the examination of all the ways in which Western civilization is, purportedly, an extended act of imperialism and colonialism, human exploitation and environmental despoliation, misogyny and white supremacy and phobias of every kind.
As for his smears about “Anti-Western civ,” Bretbug, like his illustrious ignorant reactionary forebear Col. Robert McCormick, “cited no authority, being it.”
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| If only she had been taught Aquinas, mourns Brooks |
At the risk of polluting this elevated debate with dreary facts, let’s take a look at what actual universities are actually offering their students. (We’ll let you decide for yourself whether historical facts justify a critique of Western countries due to tiny flaws like slavery, genocide, mass warfare, oppression of women and minorities, environmental catastrophe, and giving reactionary gasbags like Bretbug a no-heavy-lifting sinecure as a New York Times columnist).
Not far from here there’s a well-known university that offers a lot of courses on Western Civilization to their undergraduates, even if most of them involve sitting in the second balcony of Sanders Theater listening to some tenured gasbag bloviate.
Here’s one:
A course called “Justice: Ethical Reasoning in Polarized Times”, featuring readings from “Aristotle, Kant, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls,” all of whom sound pretty Western to us.
Or how about:
The Ancient Greek Hero, based on translated versions of ancient Greek classics. That’s as Western as Gunsmoke.
And if you really want to learn how we got so wrapped up in the distinction between Western Civilization and other stuff, try
The Crusades and the Making of East and West.
We’ll recommend that one to Bretbug specifically.
And these are plucked just from Harvard’s General Education offerings (the survey courses that Bretbug holds so dear).
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| The only civilization worth fighting for, says Bretbug |
There’s more stuff in the departments for those interested in Western Civilization from Plato to Netanyahu:
The Department of Classics offers a mere 31 courses this spring, although we’ll leave to greater minds like David Brooks whether the study of Hittite counts as Western Civilization.
The Department of Government, home to generations of reactionary white men bemoaning the supposed assault on Western Civilization, offers 57 undergraduate courses this spring, of which 10 are focused on non-Western states, as might be expected given that the Department, even in the halcyon days before wokeness ruled, regarded Comparative Government and International Relations as part of its remit.
Over in the History Department eager young minds can partake in 29 courses on various aspects of Western Civilization, including, for this purpose, the Holocaust,which last we looked did not occur either in Asia or Africa.
Columbia, now accused of all sorts of dastardly crimes against thought, has in fact pioneered just the kind of mandatory survey course that gets Bretbug hot. All Columbia undergrads must take a year long course called Contemporary Civilization. Here's the fall reading list (instructors choose from this list; if you tried to read everything on it in one semester you'd throw yourself in front of the 1 train):
The only highlight of Western Civilization Columbia omitted is the Colonel's 20-piece bucket.
Just for s***s and giggles, let's take a look at what is offered by the alma mater of David “Jeffrey, you're a genius” Brooks, the University of Chicago:
They too have a core curriculum requiring courses in civilization.
Shockingly however, their offerings include not only courses on Western Civilization but also the civilizations of cat and dog eaters and even some that dare to examine all civilizations, not just the one that gave us Bretbug and the Likud. But no one ever accused the University of Chicago of any pretensions to intellectual rigor, so we'll have to cut Dave's school some slack.
We could go on to obscure rural schools like Dartmouth, but the drift seems pretty clear: there’s plenty of attention paid to courses in Western Civilization in American higher education. Any claim to the contrary is simply falsified.
If their argument is just crap, what's the point of harping on it?
Many reasons.
First, it's an effort to shift blame for the corrupt white racist misogynist Mad King regime, which continues to be supported by unanimous Republican support and most powerful plutocrats, from white racists and plutocrats to these pundit's liberal adversaries. David “ Pass the Lafite, Jeffrey” Brooks actually claims that the Mad King's reign can be explained by the false narrative that Western Civilization is no longer being taught to eager young minds prepping for Rush Week at 'Bama.
Related to that argument is their prescription: not curbing the power of plutocracy and fostering a climate of tolerance and inclusion, but sending us back to church and Western Civ classes until in some distant era these problems magically vanish. It sounds astonishingly vacuous, but this is an accurate summary of Brooks's, um, thought.
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| You can learn so much from the ancient Greeks! |
Note that a key feature of these pundits' lament about the supposed decline of Western Civilization is the mockery of those who point out its modest shortcomings, like slavery, exploitation, genocide, and mass warfare. Bretbug might regard these defects as trivial compared to the magnificent achievements of Western Civilization including the endless pasta buffet at Olive Garden or cars that autonomously trap and kill their passengers, but the rest of us don't have to.
The Bretbugs of the world are in fact terrified about rigorous inquiry into the, shall we say, imperfections of our current culture because an honest reckoning with them might lead to discussions of appropriate remedies, like the triple horrors of diversity, equality, and inclusion. You can't understand DEI without knowing what makes it necessary, and the last thing that Bretbug and Brooks wants is for college students, or anyone else, to understand that reality.
Worst of all, it's the faculty lounge version of white supremacy, which sounds so much better in well-crafted if empty sentences on the Times Op-Ed page than in the mainstream Republican version as articulated by defenders of Western Civilization like Marco Rubio, Nick Fuentes and Rupert Murdoch's parade of racist sock puppets.
Now we have nothing against Western Civilization. We think more students should read Plato. And if they read the Symposium, they’ll learn one vital truth about the founder of Western philosophy that Republican bigots may prefer you didn't know: he was gay af.
