The dispute about the Ramsay Centre sponsored Foundation for Western Civilisation had everything for those who like pub brawls: university governance, teachers unions, Howard and Abbott, culture wars, academic freedom, the power of money in establishing institutes, and a three-line whip for media bullies. These issues have been noisily herded and milked.
The question least discussed but perhaps most intriguing is precisely what may be meant by Western Civilisation. Protagonists in the debate seemed certain of its meaning, praising or damning its ideological associations, but rarely troubling to share their understanding of it.
Yet neither western nor civilisation nor their joining in the sonorous phrase, Western Civilisation, is self-explanatory. If Western Civilisation is taken to include its religious traditions, it immediately extends to the Middle Eastern cradle of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. If it is defined by its antecedents, it must include the Roman Empire, which included much of the Middle East and Eastern Europe. If it is identified geographically with Western Europe, it must take account of the Jewish and Muslim contribution to Spain.
If Western Civilisation is defined by the intellectual traditions which shaped it, it must certainly take account of the philosophical and literary tradition of Greece and Rome. But it must also give full weight to the ways in which this tradition was filtered through Christian thinkers and institutions whose origin lay in the Middle East and in modern day Turkey.
The Christian tradition cannot be understood without reference to Christian thinkers and schools in Syria, Egypt and modern Turkey who helped shaped Christianity in Western Europe. Nor can the flowering in the western half of Christianity and culture in the 12th and 13th century be understood without taking account of the contribution of the Islamic thinkers in recovering lost sources and through their scientific and philosophical studies.
All this is to say that what is meant by western, by any definition, cannot be defined exclusively. It can be understood only through complex networks of interlocking relationships between people, schools of thought and centres of power and trade that in today's terms are not western. Those relationships were ones of interdependence, even when they were described by the participants as hostile.
Nor is civilisation easy to define. Its use is often evaluative rather than descriptive. It is normally a laudatory phrase — opposed to primitivity and barbarity, and normally associated with the development of towns and cities, with a literate culture, long endurance and lasting monuments. We speak of nomadic cultures but normally refrain from referring to nomadic civilisations.
"There is something to be said for making the tests of any civilisation its inclusion of the different and compassion for the weakest. A centre that assessed civilisations by these criteria might have something going for it."
We also expect civilisations to be civilised in their institutions and relationships. When referring to their achievements we focus on their art, architecture and elegance. Practices like public disembowelments, burning of witches, massacres and the persecution of minorities are usually seen as primitive survival or untypical fault lines within a civilisation. They are, of course, seen as the norm in non-civilisations.
Finally, and often most important, civilisations are identified and celebrated for their economic and political strength. Civilisations are conspicuous for their empires, client states and colonies. That is why critics of Western Civilisation evoke such rage. They are seen not only to take a wrongheaded intellectual position, but also to bite the teat that nourished them.
Civilisations invite the long view, the broad generalisation and the firm value judgment. In the case of Western Civilisation the value judgment has usually come first, followed by the generalisation and the long view.
In my youth a popularised Catholic account that focused on intellectual themes saw Western Civilisation reach its high point in the 13th century in a Europe united in faith, confident in reason, and under one rule and with a shared, coherent view of the world. That coherence was undermined by the intellectual shifts of Duns Scotus and William Ockham, further fractured by the Reformation, and undermined by the Enlightenment. From this declining civilisation, Marx, Stalin and the violence of the 20th century were seen as the natural reaping of the whirlwind.
This account differs sharply from a common secular view, which focuses on the contribution of Greece and Rome to rational thinking, its eclipse in the Christian Empire and the Dark Ages, its resurrection in the focus on the individual in the Renaissance and Reformation, culminating in the Enlightenment and the scientific culture it engendered and in the continuing struggle for individual freedom against religious or cultural obscurantism.
You can take your pick of these and other such large views. There is something to be said, though, for making the tests of any civilisation its inclusion of the different and compassion for the weakest. A centre that assessed civilisations by these criteria might have something going for it.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.