Have We Forgotten We’re Westerners?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 5/21/22

I believe it can be said of practically 100% of my colleagues in the teaching profession that they were future-oriented. Of course teaching itself is all about the future and even though its subject matter is the past, the task of the teacher is to point students forward.

            To teach is to hold a grip on the pulse of the times. The interests, values, goals, and conduct of teens and college students are a reliable cultural indicator of what the nation’s future will be like. They are also a measure and indicator of how parents are parenting. In a sense every teacher is a history teacher as well as a futurist.

I fault modern education for a particular failing, one for which the creators of curriculum are chiefly responsible. That failing is the diminishing instruction in the meaning and significance of Western culture. Western culture is being put to death by multiculturalism and diversity and so few seem to know or care.

My personal beef lies in the field of history. While schools teach and most require a passing grade in American history to graduate, their teaching of history too often fails to connect America’s history to that of Europe. Today most Americans are of European or African descent, and while we might hail “the American experience,” we feebly if at all show students what it is that makes America “exceptional.” That exceptionality is based on what our founders detached us from – Old World monarchy – and on what they put in its place, a written constitution that reached the peak of what middle and lower class Europeans had been yearning for. That constitution epitomizes Western values as opposed to the persistent autocracy of the Middle East and the Far East.

The teaching of literature doesn’t present this failing. Most high schools across the country teach America literature to 11^th graders and English literature to 12^th graders. Many school systems offer World literature or Literature of the West. Therefore, in literature classes students can see clearly what birthed and fed America’s political, social, economic, religious, and literary life. They can also see how America’s first writers exalted the New World (America) with its personal and religious freedom and rugged individualism. Although Britain, steeped in kings and queens and “the divine right of kings,” did not always honor these specifically American ideals, like all of Europe she was steadily moving toward them. Perhaps a required semester in European history would bridge this informational gap, showing us the good and the bad of the Old World and how Western culture spread.

It was the Greeks, the Romans, and the British who set personal liberty in motion, even if in small degree. Who considers the Chinese people a free people? North Korea? Saudi Arabia? How about Russia? Even if Sarah Palin and other Alaskans can see Russia from their living room window, and even if Putin was “elected,” Russia is no Western nation.  Western civilization or “the Western world” always refers not to geography but to those nations that cradle and nourish liberty. Interestingly enough the geographical East has long been short on personal freedom.

We Americans are heirs of the “classical” Greeks and Romans. Without their innumerable contributions we Americans could not be what we are. Each of those civilizations had their monarchs, but they also produced a Pericles and a Cicero, from whom came a high regard for the individual as opposed to rule by the elite.

How fares America in all of this? Today the word “classical” is considered snobbish and so yesterday. We honor the “contemporary” be it in music, dress, or thought. Our greatest fear, as C.S. Lewis put it, is “our fear of the Same Old Thing.” Yet, to cut a plant or a civilization from its root is to kill it. America today is chiefly run by those who promote self-loathing. Unlike Pericles, Cicero, and more recently Churchill, our ruling party scoffs at deep love for country. We are all racists. Repent of it. We are all sexists. Accept the New Sexuality. Localism is passé. Trust central government. Parents, schools know what your children need. Let us have them. Equity is the highest goal. Get out of our way. The family is a little paradigm that doesn’t work. Forget it. The past is over. Pull down the statues.

Forgetfulness, thy name is contemporary America. And wherever they lie buried, Socrates, John Milton, James Madison and other such “classicists” are shaking their heads.  Abolitionist John Brown, while being escorted to his execution atop his coffin through the Virginia countryside, muttered “This is a beautiful country.”

And it still is, whatever the self-loathing deniers of our past may say. Yes, we’re Westerners.

 

 

Roger Hines

May 19, 2022