The West is a Messy, Inconsistent Concept

In an article for The Guardian titled, “There is No Such Thing as Western Civilization,” the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah noted that for the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, there was no such thing as “the West.” He categorized the globe into three continents: Europe, Asia, and Libya. Herodotus never made any reference to any group of people known as “European,” and he had no idea that these three continents linked to various types of people. In fact, he was much more familiar with Egypt and Persia, the places he went, than he was with the distant and exotic people of Northern Europe. The concept of the West must therefore be more modern than that. Actually, there is no one idea for what “the West” actually represents, which is an umbrella phrase that encompasses a variety of radically divergent societies and incompatible ideologies. According to Natalie Wynn a.k.a. “Contrapoints,” there are six different concepts often invoked under the heading of “the West.” Let’s talk about them now.

Concept 1: Christendom and “Judeo-Christian Values”

In the year 732, the Umayyad Caliphate’s expansion into Western Europe was effectively put to a halt when a soldier by the name of Charles Martel led Frankish forces to victory in the Battle of Tours against Islamic armies that had advanced from Spain into what is now France. Appiah claims that the first time the Latin term “Europenses” or “Europeans” has been used was in 754 when the winning forces of the Battle of Tours made the distinction between Christians and Muslims. The term “Christendom” first originated in the late Middle Ages and was used to set the Christian world apart from both paganism and the Islamic world. Perhaps the earliest inspiration for the contemporary notion of the West came from this concept of Christendom. It’s important to note that the phrase itself assumes an us-versus-them dichotomy, where Christians represent “us” and Muslims represent “them.”

Defenders of the West like Ben Shapiro and Professor Jordan Peterson continue to invoke the Christian legacy, frequently under the banner of “Judeo-Christian Values,” a term that is typically used to falsely imply that modern moral standards are derived from a document as general, narrow, and incomplete as the Ten Commandments, as if every major civilization didn’t have laws against murder, as if the prohibition of graven images has any contemporary influence at all, as if it isn’t an embarrassment that there are four laws  made for no reason specifically against offending “THE LORD” and none condemning slavery and rape. The other main use of “Judeo-Christian values” is as an attack on non-nuclear families and LGBTQIA people. And since we’re on the subject, what exactly are the family values that we receive from Christianity? Two children and maybe a pet like a dog or a cat? Well, no. The Old Testament openly acknowledges polygyny, and neither Testament forbids it. The Catholic Church increasingly imposed the one-man, one-woman concept of marriage during the Middle Ages, however this idea took some time to catch on in formerly pagan lands. Charles Martel’s grandson Charlemagne had 18 kids by at least 10 wives and concubines, which is ironic, considering his importance within Christendom.

Concept 2: Enlightenment Values

So in 1517, an obscure German professor of theology named Martin Luther launched an attack on the Roman Catholic Church by nailing his 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg’s Castle Church, starting a war between Catholics and Protestants that would drag on for 80 years. That eventually dies down, but then the 18th century rolls around and stuff’s just crazy. There are various fops and dandies and macaronis getting wired out of their heads at coffee houses and conversing about enlightenment values like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and François Voltaire hanging around among the common people. Then, 300 years later, a group of misogynistic men declared themselves to be the intellectual heirs of Rousseau and Voltaire before burying sexual harassment claims against specific atheists within the New Atheist movement and creating 55 back-to-back YouTube videos about how Anita Sarkeesian is ruining video games. (They weren’t talking about that in the Parisian salon.)

This is all really embarrassing, but even so, some of these enlightenment principles — science, liberty, and skepticism toward dogma — happen to be good ideas and are a part of the cultural movement we refer to as “the West,” but it’s crucial to remember that they are not “Judeo-Christian.” In fact, they’re specifically opposed to that worldview towards life. Because the history of the West is one of change and revolution, the totality of everything that is left of what we now consider to be “the West” actually contains major contradictions. So it might not be the best idea to just dismiss a new movement as some sort of evil postmodern neo-Marxist abomination when it emerges. For example, if a politically engaged group of people point out that, actually, our society is still pretty terrible to women, people of color, and gender and sexual minorities, it might represent the next reformation in a long history of reformations.

Take the Protestant Reformation as an example. That undoubtedly appeared to be a civilizational threat to the Holy Roman Empire at the time, and in a way, it was. However, looking back, we now recognize the Reformation as being just as significant to Western society as the medieval era that came before it. However, the current counter-reformation, led by figures like Donald Trump and Dr. Jordan Peterson, insists on portraying it as some sort of threatening alien force. And as for the counter-counter-reformation, well, that’s what you have a left-leaning asexual like me and an inspirational transgender person like Natalie Wynn to do.

Concept 3: Western Culture

The medieval schism between the Western Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church is where the concept of “the West” first emerged. However, the concept of “Western culture” did not truly exist in the modern sense until the imperialist era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it was made famous in part by Oswald Spengler’s 1918 book The Decline of the West, which had a significant impact on Nazi ideology. Since there has been mention of “Western culture,” people have been concerned about its purported decline and degeneration. However, the concept of Western culture had an impact far beyond the Third Reich. The notion of a superior high culture of the West served as a convenient justification to plunder and exploit the enigmatic Orient at the height of European imperialism.

Even though the more blatantly supremacist rhetoric has been brushed under the rug, the idea of Western culture is still a fundamental idea in our schools and colleges, where you must study courses like History of Western Civilization or Western Literature. The consequence of this Western culture education is that we all now feel as though we are a part of a continuous civilization, whose greatest achievements include the Ten Commandments, Jesus Christ, the Athenian philosophers, cathedrals, Mozart, human rights, science, and smartphones. But in actuality, this is an essentialist amalgamation of a past that is considerably less linear than we typically believe. The Islamic world has a right to make the same claim that we in the West do regarding the ancient traditions of Aristotle and Abraham. Aristotle was primarily introduced to Christian universities by one of the most potent Catholic sorcerers, St. Thomas Aquinas, who would have never encountered his writings If Islamic academics like Ibn Rushd had not translated and annotated classical Greek philosophy. Aristotle may not have been well-known in Europe and the popularity of his ideas in the west would have never existed in the first place. Therefore, the roots of Western civilization aren’t actually all that unique to us. Additionally, the peculiar material that is unique is just a complete mess of contradictions. On the one hand you have Judeo-Christian values, and on the other hand you have play writers like William Shakespeare who wrote plays for men to dress up as female characters, which advocates of Judeo-Christian values would have condemned as a form of degeneracy today. Because if you didn’t know, in Shakespeare times, boys in drag played female parts.

Concept 4: The Free World

Henry Wallace, an agricultural scientist from Iowa whom Democratic Party elites detested for being what we’d today term a Democratic Socialist, served as Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president from 1941 until 1945. In a later third-party presidential campaign in 1948, Wallace advocated for universal health care, de-segregation, and opposition to the Cold War. For his spiritualism, his refusal to denounce the Communist Party’s endorsement, and what TIME Magazine called “his assault on the south” or his “ostentatious ride through cities and towns with his Negro secretary beside him,” Wallace was widely mocked in the media during the campaign and also splattered with tomatoes and eggs specifically for these reasons. The poor, naïve Wallace commented, “There is something so unlovely about hate when you see it distorting the human face.” Wallace ran for office in 1948 and only received 2.4 percent of the popular vote, but he is now best known for his speech from 1942, “The Century of the Common Man,” in which he contrasted the fascist “slave world” with the free world and said that the latter was the result of an ongoing and incomplete international People’s Revolution.

To quote in the words of Henry Wallace himself, “No Nazi counter-revolution will stop it; the common man will smoke the Hitler stooges out into the open in the United States, in Latin America, and in India. He will destroy their influence. No Lavals, no Mussolinis, will be tolerated in a free world.” During World War II, when the term “the free world” first entered widespread usage, it was normal to include all the nations opposing the Axis forces, including the dirty Reds. Wallace had a particularly left-wing perspective on it, but the term “Free World” was still frequently used in American politics after the war.

However, the meaning had undergone a paradigm shift. It was speaking of the capitalist West as opposed to the communist East, instead of the global coalition against fascism. This confusing concept we call Western civilization still heavily relies on the notion of the free, capitalist West. Therefore, it initially seems as though Jordan Peterson is trapped in the 1980s or something when he claims that Marxism and the West are in conflict. Does he not realize that the Eastern Bloc has fallen?

Professor, what year do you think it is? Are you still at war in your head with the Russians? (They’re on your side now, remember?) The truth is that he is merely invoking a Red Scare perspective against the social reformation of the average person by using buzzwords like Neo-Marxism and Cultural Marxism. But the point I’m trying to make is that the West is a notion, or rather a collection of conflicting notions, that is consistently put out in specific political contexts as one side of an us-versus-them opposition. Whether it’s the Christian West versus the Anti-Christian Forces, the Enlightenment West versus Radical Islam, the cultured West versus the colonized savages, the capitalist West versus the communist East, or the white European West versus the Jewish Cultural Marxist plot to bring about the downfall of the sons of the North by corrupting the purity of their fair maidens and flooding their countries with a barbarous horde of Third World migrants. Okay, we need to have a talk about that.

Concept 5: Blood and Soil

If you ask Richard Spencer, a prominent Nazi social media influencer, what he thinks the West is, he will explain to you that the West is a heritage that fair-skinned forebears left to Europeans in terms of culture, geography, and genetics. Because Spencer believes that to be Western is to be Aryan and that to be Aryan is to be white, the idea that someone of African or Asian heritage can be a member of the West is ridiculous in his eyes. The interesting thing about that is that it’s not even wrong as a critique of the way people typically refer to “the West.” It’s untested. Consider Latin America, where the predominant languages are Spanish, Portuguese, and French and where Roman Catholicism is the predominant religion.

Why is this area typically not considered to be in the West? Why do immigrants from this area get a bad rap as alien intruders? Because they have too much melanin to be members of the club. Or, to be more precise, the open-ended and historically varying conceptions of whiteness and the West have been built to specifically exclude them. It is enough to state that the connection between whiteness and the West is always there below the surface, and when it does so triumphantly, it leads to the most heinous acts that our civilization is capable of. Because of the refugee crisis in Europe and the rise of racial demagogues in the United States, the machinery of those crimes’ middle phases is once again in operation as we speak. And once more, barbed wire, refugee ghettos, and internment camps brimming with kids who have been separated from their parents are all across both continents.

Concept 6: The Evil West

In many ways, the idea of “the West” as superior to non-Western nations in terms of culture, holiness, and civility is fundamentally supremacist. However, there are some insane college professors that take this tale wholesale and turn it completely around on its head. They contend that rather than being uniquely civilized, the West is uniquely uncivilized, cruel, imperialistic, racist, and genocidal. However, this merely repeats the original essentializing mistake. Europeans aren’t actually inherently more evil any more than they’re inherently more civilized.

Four-hundred years ago, if capitalist imperialism had sprung out of Africa or Asia, the outcome would have been just as brutal. So rather than demonizing the West, I suggest we should do away with this idea altogether, take a more cosmopolitan and non-parochial perspective on who we are, and realize that the world is too big and complex to be reduced to simplistic us-and-them dichotomies. However, this does not mean that we must abandon Aristotle, classical music, or the Cheesecake Factory. We can maintain all of those things while getting rid of the injustice and propaganda that surrounds them. Natalie Wynn has a YouTube channel called “Contrapoints” that covers the topic of the West as a concept in a specific video also titled “The West.” Special thanks to Mx. Wynn for inspiring me to explore a complex but understandable topic.