What We Owe to the West

The West is not falling, it has fallen. But as the world turns ineluctably Eastward, as new powers take up the mantle, what is it that we leave behind in the rubble? Let us glance back, if only for a few minutes, to consider what it is that the West really was. I invite you, dear readers, to stop and move aside the dirt and debris, to see if there are not treasures here that we ought to pick up and take with us. 

Western Civilisation comprises those societies that arose from Europe. It can be split into three parts: there is a pre-Christian West, a Christian one, and a post-Christian one. The “Modern West” is not merely “post-Christian”, it is a parasitised husk of a previous living beauty. The West that gave us many incomparable treasures no longer thrives, but pieces of it linger on in books, in works of art, and in ideas that we take for granted.

Go East Young Man

If you have any kind of good values today, it is easy to despise the Modern West and find respite in the East. The Modern West is now synonymous with degeneracy, anti-natalism, and ugliness.

Eastern families seem to have preserved things such as a basic respect for the differences and roles of men and women in society, dignity, modesty and for motherhood and children. Many eastern societies consider it strange that Westerners even entertain such silly ideas as a man and woman living together before marriage. 

Whereas the Modern West endorses and exports ideologies such as the acceptance of sexual deviancy, and isolation from one’s family. It encourages women to prioritise careers over family, for young people to engage in casual sex and materialistic relationships. In the West, it is considered rude or uncouth to say obvious truths such as “women should get married young” or that “obesity is not a good thing” or even that “a man cannot become a woman”. The Modern West has turned the white man, its native man, into its ultimate scapegoat, and punishes anyone who dares to judge based on merit rather than race. It scorns heroes, and worships victims. One of the sculptures in the centre of the West, New York City, is of a pagan goddess celebrating women's’ “rights” to murder their unborn children. 

It is no wonder that the best among us, who are tired of the West, are turning Eastward, where their children might have a better chance at growing up without the mental illness, sexual immorality, secularism and rejection of nature that is nearly guaranteed in the Modern West. But in this move East, what should we take with us from the West? What should we pack our bags with? What is infected with the rot and what is a gleaming treasure that cannot be easily rebuilt?

The Very Idea of Human Rights

As a fish does not realise it is swimming in water, people can often become ignorant to those ideas that have always been around them. Cultivating a sense of history is a way of the fish to poke its head above water and see that birds fly in the air and animals walk on land; similarly, historical literacy teaches you other ways of organising society that you might never even have considered rational or possible.

For most of the ancient world, there was no such thing as the individual. This is very difficult for a modern person to comprehend because modern society lives on the other extreme where there is nothing but the individual. People were extensions of their family, tribe, caste or clan. Human beings had value only in reference to a collective in which they were subsumed.

The predominant distinction was between public (the collective) and private (the family). Within this structure, all manner of brutality was permissible so long as the pater familias or the collective deemed it to be useful to the collective. For example, if an infant was weak, he could be left out to die and there was no moral system to proclaim that it was wrong. If it served the group to torture one individual, then it was not a moral issue because the concept of “human rights” had not been invented...because the concept of the individual had not been invented. If someone had the misfortune to be cast out from their clan, tribe or collective, they might become a slave. Roman slaves were referred to as “non habens personam” literally translating to “not a person”.

Christianity provided the fundamental philosophies that gave birth to what we understand to be the West in its best aspects in so far as it pulled Western Civilisation away from many of those ideas that it shared with other civilisations around the world. Christianity was the first to speak to the individual, rather than to the polis or the family. It treated people as independent moral agents who were capable of good and evil deeds, who can have a direct and personal relationship with God and a personal responsibility for their souls.

The idea of the soul is the prerequisite to the idea of the individual. Without it, we are material beings that can be subsumed by the collective when it is convenient, torn up and repurposed for parts as needed by Pharaoh. Even the idea of “consent” the weak thread of morality in the modern world, hinges upon the idea that the individual soul is a moral agent. (I suspect this thread is already under way to be broken via virtue signalling that tells us we ought to throw ourselves into the fire to resolve climate change). Pagan religions that preceded Christianity in Europe and flourished elsewhere in the world, do not have this idea of the individual. If this idea exists around the world today, it is because it is a western export.

The philosophical turning point that overturns the anthropology of the ancient world, is a few lines written in Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for all are one in Christ, Jesus.” This means that every person is an individual, with his or her own moral agency. This is not to say that social hierarchy does not exist, or that some people are not better than others in some ways, rather, it is to say that each individual is equal in value as a human life which must not be abused.

When there is the concept of an individual then there can be a concept of human rights. Of course there were many kings and rulers in other parts of the world who also granted such rights to their subjects, but it was not done in any kind of philosophically systematic way, but rather by accident of grace from that particular ruler. When that ruler was gone, the grace disappeared along with him, with no system or philosophy left behind except perhaps memories of sentimentality, that would allow his clemency to persist. 

The systematic conception of the idea of human rights was born in the West from the idea of natural law in Christianity. Of course there are many instances where human rights and the human being was abused, exploited and tortured even in Western Civilisation. Nevertheless, even when human rights were not respected in the West, there was an idea that it was contrary to some moral structure that existed. There was some basis to oppose the violation of human rights because the concept had been codified. If a child bride was burned at the stake with her deceased husband in ancient India, there was no law or philosophy to inform society that something wrong was being done...except perhaps a little voice in their hearts, where the laws of God are written but have not found their expression.

In the modern world, it was a western society, the British, that first outlawed slavery. It was a western society that conceived of the Magna Carta and later, the philosophies of the enlightenment that were able to craft something like the Bill of Rights of America. When the British went to India and gained power through the East India Trading Company, they outlawed things such as widow-burnings and many of the inhumanities of the caste system which treated lower caste people as subhuman. When the Indian National Congress, led by Mahatma Gandhi, was demanding independence from the British and claimed to speak fro all of India, its claims were hotly contested by India’s 100 million Muslims, 50 million untouchables, and 546 independent Princes. Britain would have liked India to be like Canada or Australia but it was very difficult considering the caste system in India divided the country so thoroughly and many lower caste people felt their human rights were not respected by a Hindu dominant government.

It is not a coincidence that the ideas of fair working conditions for people was introduced and persists most strongly in the West whereas Eastern countries still lag behind in many ways in this area. 

Many human rights are violated every day in the Modern West today. The Modern West has perverted the idea of human rights, into the “human right to sin” and this is possible because the idea of human rights has been separated from the religion from which it was conceived. Anything and everything has become a “right”. A man in Canada today has “the right” to kill himself under the MAID program. It makes sense that Eastern societies would not want foreigners to bring this corrupted idea of “human rights” to their societies. 

However, we should not leave behind the idea of the individual, and the value of each human soul, because when a society genuinely does not believe in the individual, history stops, and the age of the Pharaoh whipping his slaves, can return again. Without the original idea of human rights as they are coupled with Christianity and the value of human life, people are once again vulnerable to the caprice of Kings who judge whether or not they will show clemency to human life based on their temperament or based on what is ultimately good for the collective.

“The whole world is not worth one soul”

The Arts 

Every culture in the world has some degree of artisanship. People around the world have decorated pots and made beaded necklaces, they have painted tombs and temples, embroidered clothes and created songs. But it is only the West that created what we call the humanities. The humanities, and in particular, the Arts, are a study of human artistry and not merely a technical training in artisanship. Artisanship was always learned by apprenticeship with a master. But artistry is a distinct intellectual task that takes its proper place in the Humanities as a scholarly discipline. I have described in another essay what makes the artist different from the artisan. The artist doesn’t just make an image or a work of art to “decorate” or as a part of a mythical, religious ritual, he creates the image to capture an idea in his own way. 

The Sistine Chapel didn’t just decorate the church ceiling, Michelangelo took the story of the Old Testament and expressed the narrative in his own way. The way he painted the characters added a dimension to the story, and his own interpretation. For example, he drew comparisons between Noah and Adam by depicting the characters in similar poses and figures. He showed the story emerging from the prophet’s minds as it unfolded spatially above their heads. There is a reason and logic to the way the images are depicted that says something about the stories and the ideas they contain. In this way, Michelangelo was not merely a painter, but also an artist. These artists, like Raphael and Michelangelo, had many painters (artisans) working for them, but it was their creativity and intellect that set their work apart.

Perhaps other civilisations once studied the humanities and their work is now lost to the sands of time. But it is western civilisation that has been able to preserve this discipline for a thousand years. Today, the humanities have been corrupted by leftism and politics, a destruction championed by the mantra “anything can be Art”. But the idea that art is worth studying and the artist an important part of society, is something we owe to the west and should preserve. 

While India, China and the Middle East have each contributed greatly to the Arts in their own ways, it is only in Western Civilisation where proper study of the Arts is encouraged and systematised. Even today, parents from eastern cultures dissuade their children from studying the arts as something frivolous. They do not understand that the arts distill and promulgate the ideas that codify the core ideas of their society. For example, the sculpture of David by Michelangelo codifies the idea that heroism is good and that a man, when blessed with divine grace, is strong and capable of defeating even giants. The modern sculpture “NOW” by Shazia Sikander, placed atop the New York City Supreme Courthouse on Madison Avenue, depicts a demonic female figure with snake like arms and horned braids. The work of art is a testament to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her contribution in supporting a woman’s right to murder innocent children. 

In another essay, I have explained in detail how the work of art venerated by a society can both represent and shape the society in which it is placed. Art distills, codifies and transmits the values of a society. When the David sculpture was placed at the centre of Florence, it was both to show that Florentines value beauty, strength and the defeat of evil, and to inspire these qualities in any who would look on the sculpture and remember its story. Today, there is a sculpture of Medusa at the centre of New York City beheading the hero Perseus, a symbol for a society that punishes heroes who oppose the gorgon of feminism that devours men, and a warning to any who would dare to oppose her. Cultures that neglect or do not understand art, leave it unmoored by spiritual values, or worse, open to corruption by evil people who do understand the power of art in society and use it to nefarious ends. 

If we leave behind the Arts in the crumbling building of the Modern West, one thousand years of ideas in colour, form, sculpture, perspective, rhetoric and visual poetry will be lost. It may take another thousand years to get another Bernini. It may take another thousand years for another Botticelli to be born and paint Venus’ shining eyes and remind us of the perfection of God’s creations. Though modern western Art has done much to destroy and corrupt the idea of Art, let us go into the attics and basements of these rapacious modern institutions and take back with us the true beauty and human excellence that cannot easily be recapitulated.

We owe our understanding of the Arts to Western Civilisation. Even today, the best art museums and architecture continues to be found in Europe. While incredible architecture does exist in places like China and India, it is either built by Europeans or by ancient civilisations that could not preserve or pass down their knowledge about these structures. This idea may offend many people, but it should not be taken personally. If you wish, as a society, to understand how to build and preserve beautiful cities and great art, in any culture, it is Western Culture that must be studied...real Western Culture and not the perverted version that leftism has turned it into.

The Study of History

The study of the humanities is not just about the fine arts, but a study of history itself. In his book, The Last Mughal, Scottish writer Dalrymple notes that the National Archives he consulted for his research for the book had been untouched by any scholars before him and what he consulted was an old French translation from the 1940s. Delhi is known to be one of the most neglected ancient cities. Dalrymple continues to write that although he wished to study Indian accounts of their own history and not simply European ones in order to reduce bias, Indian accounts either didn’t exist or had never even been looked at. One would be hard pressed to find true historical scholars from Eastern societies. Though they undoubtedly exist, they do not hold the resources, prestige and respect that Western historians held until recently. 

Most Indians learn their history from Bollywood movies and modern leftist propaganda designed to be anti-western for political reasons. What are these political reasons? To be pro-western is to be pro-natural law and human rights. Big corporations who seek to make money by any means necessary rely on governments suppressing these kinds of ideas. They would not be permitted monopolies and rapacious business practices in a true free market. Therefore these corporations must endorse the destruction of traditional western thought. This is done through the marketing of revisionist history and “post-colonial” narratives that teach white people to apologise for the excellence of their ancestors and everyone else to be a victim. In the midst of these identity politics, everyone forgets about excellence, meritocracy and the objective judgement of ideas.

Non-western cultures generally are not interested studying their own history. Napoleon Bonaparte was the first to initiate a program to study the ancient history of Egypt when he visited. In 1798 he set up the Institute of Egypt dedicated to studying archaeological and historical investigations and learning. Before the arrival of Napoleon, it had not occurred to the native people who lived there to study their own ancient history and it was largely neglected if not robbed or defiled. It was only in 1821 that Jean-Francois Champollion translated the first ever cartouche of hieroglyphics. You can read a meticulous and beautifully written and illustrated twenty volume text called The Description of Egypt published by the Institute of Egypt originally in French.

India today is a culture that glorifies only the doctor and the engineer, utilitarian affairs, and is not interested in “useless” endeavours such as studying the past. Many Indians today still believe that Winston Churchill personally caused 4 million Bengalis to starve to death in 1943. This is because of a sensationalist book Churchill’s Secret War published in 2010 by Madhusree Mukherjee that tries to blame the famine on Winston Churchill. In reality, it was caused by Japanese occupation of Burma and Bengal and Hindu grain merchants refusing to sell to Muslim-led coalition government in Bengal. In fact, at the end of 1944 when the British War Cabinet realized the severity of the famine, they immediately sent a million tonnes of grain to Bengal and ended the famine. The real history is available in the Government of India Archives which Indians generally are not interested in consulting.

The study and the value of history is a phenomenon of western civilisation and is a western value. This value has been transmitted to the world, and we owe the west this awareness that to understand one’s past is to prevent ourselves from being manipulated by politics in the present.

The Question Itself

Even the ability to ask the question “What do we Owe the West” can be considered a Western Invention. The idea that we should be able to ask questions, debate and have opinions is a phenomenon that emerged from the West. For most of human history and in most cultures, any person who dared to do such a thing would have been severely punished by their ruler. This is eerily similar to the Modern West, which is why I argue that the modern west is not western at all. Its universities and institutions function as the limbs of an ideological cult rather than as a free and just society. The first western man in history, in my opinion, was Socrates, and he was punished for just such an endeavour: for daring to question the institution and encouraging his students to think critically.

The topic I have chosen for this essay, in fact, could form the subject of PhD thesis, but would never be accepted today by any Western Institution, no, not even Oxford University would dare to support a project that in any way spoke positively of Traditional Western Civilisation. They would conjure ideological cult words like “Cultural Relativism” and “White Supremacy” to discredit any genuine discussion about the quality and excellence of ideas. “All cultures are the same” is the mantra of the Modern West as it bows down to the golden calf of “equality”. Perhaps there is no greater proof that the West is long gone. The place that conceived of the idea of philosophy, questioning and scholarship, now abhors it.

I fear that as we leave Western Civilisation trampled in the dust, we also leave behind our ability to ask questions and continually refine and discuss important ideas about our world. In other words, we leave behind our prerogative as human beings to examine our lives. Both the Modern West and the East suffer from this problem of censorship. There are those people like Elon Musk and organisations like the Claremont Review and Substack that continue to champion the idea of questioning, critical thinking and open discussion, but it is increasingly becoming dangerous in the modern world if not outright illegal already. 

Some may argue that “Free Speech” is what destroyed the West in the first place because it permitted evil people to share their unnatural ideas. However, these people were successful not because they were able to share their ideas, but because people who opposed them were not permitted to share theirs. It was a selective censorship of anyone who opposed degeneracy that caused the degeneration of the West, not Free Speech itself. The ability to discuss, critique and to ask questions is important because it safeguards against despotic rulers who may not have the best interests of their people at heart. It also safeguards against bad ideas that can circulate and enthral a population because they are presented in a very persuasive way.

Why Learn from a Fallen Civilisation?

I imagine the fallen West as dead and sick bodies laying around a tree. Perhaps taking Western ideas is foolish because it was the fruit from the tree that poisoned the people. But look closely and you’ll see it was not the fruit that killed them, but arrows in their hearts. It was not Western values that killed the West, but a rejection of them.

The Traditional Western Civilisation is more similar to modern Eastern societies than it is to the modern West. This is because the value for traditional families, chastity, hierarchy, patriarchy and reverence for God were all central aspects of original Western  Civilisation as well. In fact, the way that Traditional Western Civilisation most differs from the Modern East is that it also valued natural law which led to ideas such as human rights, the sanctity of innocent human life and the right for each man to own and defend his property. The Modern West rejects all of these ideas wholesale. This was its demise. I believe this demise was brought about by secularism and materialism in the mainstream. I believe this had a lot to do with the Industrial Revolution...although that is another essay for another day.

The Modern East is a land of opportunity. It is doing something right by preserving its core values of family and God. The brightest minds in the world, interested more in meritocracy rather than identity politics, and in protecting their children from pedophiles, are all migrating East to escape the miasma of the Modern West. Where they go, the spark of humanity will follow.

We have a chance to build a better society and in this essay I have suggested a few things that we ought to take with us from the West: natural law, human rights, and a respect for the arts and humanities. Coupled with the East’s value of family and God, I believe we will be equipped to build a much brighter future for our children, than was left to us by our parents and grandparents.