“Western Culture” was the name of a course at Stanford that all students had to take as a general education requirement. The minority activists didn’t like it because it was too Eurocentric, too many Dead White Males on the syllabus, and so they demanded that it be dropped from the curriculum. (The Stanford faculty did, in fact, end up scrapping the course.) In olden days, Stanford did have a “Western Civilization” requirement that lasted a full year, but it had ended nearly 20 years earlier. A few years after that, Stanford revived it in modified form but gave it the different label, namely, “Western Culture.”
That people often say “Western Civ” instead of “Western Culture” when recounting the 1987 incident may strike readers today as an insignificant error. Whether “culture” or “civilization,” it’s still an attack on the Western heritage, right? But “culture” and “civilization” don’t mean the same thing. Indeed, the substitution of the former for the latter many years before the late ’80s culture wars erupted paved the way for the takedown of the Western lineage that until that time students were asked to appreciate. The policy of a Western culture requirement was doomed from the start.
Here’s why: Civilization is a hierarchical term, culture is not. When we think of civilization, great books, noble conceptions, masterpieces of art, civic ideals, and architectural monuments come to mind. We imagine Notre Dame Cathedral, the Pyramids, ancient Greek plays, the King James Bible, ideas of democracy in Locke, and the Declaration of Independence. Civilization is made up of the best and the highest. It is a rarefied body of creations.
You can see how this troubles individuals of egalitarian belief. Not only does it rank some creations over others, for instance, classical music over popular songs. Worse, it says some peoples are better than others, the ones that have produced more works that count as brilliant, beautiful, and monumental. We end up privileging this group and slighting that one, and that’s not right.
This is why, over the course of the 1980s, the term civilization disappeared from elite and mainstream colleges. Culture took its place, doing the work of “de-privileging” the dominant heritage, that is, Western Civ. Hence, the term “Western culture” could not last, not as a required object of study. Once we took culture as the framework, an obvious question arose: If culture is culture, why stick to the West? If all cultures have equal status, then Western culture has no special claim upon us. Now that we’re not caught up in things of greatness, we can recognize every culture as interesting and edifying. College catalogs are filled with courses on cultural practices that have no civilizational dimension.
Last summer, my son and I spent a week in Rome touring its Renaissance and Baroque marvels, lots of Michelangelo, Bernini, and Borromini. Thousands lined up to stroll through St. Peter’s and absorb the overwhelming genius and sublime. It convinces me that the egalitarians have been fighting a losing battle. They have flattened the curriculum, yes, but they have not killed the thirst for beauty, and a meaningful past lurks in every human heart. People want to encounter brilliance and talent. They are drawn to works that belong to the ages.
Back in the ’80s, when the Stanford student newspaper polled the student body to get their opinion of the Western Culture course, they expected their peers to be as hostile to it as were the activists. The results showed the opposite: Students found it worthy and satisfying.
I’m not surprised. They show the same attitude toward sports. I expect to see civilization make a comeback in the near future.
