Preface

Have you ever given much thought to civilization? It is one of the most important words in the cultural lexicon, but what does the concept actually bring to mind – that’s of course if it brings anything to mind at all? It is one of those concepts that you are expected to recognize instantly, along with others with which you are probably more familiar, such as the nation-state. Let’s imagine that you are a reader from the West. If so, you might identify with ‘Western civilization’. But, when you hear that term, what image does it conjure up, if any? Perhaps the great cathedrals of Europe, such as York Minster and Chartres? Or such intense expressions of beauty as the pictures of Raphael (1483–1520) or Rembrandt (1606–1669)? Or, as you are making the effort to read this book, perhaps you are better acquainted with a unique literary canon that dates back to the epic poems of Homer?

Possibly you may be more interested in ideas. Is Christianity, for you, still a bedrock of Western civilization, as it was for the poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) when in 1948 he wrote Notes on the Definition of Culture? Or perhaps you are more enthused by secular ideas such as freedom and individualism, which you will find celebrated by Hollywood in films such as 300, Zack Snyder’s over-the-top account of the battle of Thermopylae. If you believe the historian Herodotus (484–425 BCE), claims Victor Davis Hanson (who acted as the historical adviser for the movie), the battle was the centrepiece of a ‘clash of civilizations’ that set Eastern ‘centralism’ against a Western belief in individualism (Hanson 2010: 55). Hanson’s views are not shared by all, and you may fault Snyder’s film for continuing to propagate an ancient myth that has shaped Western thoughts and feelings over the centuries. Such myths, however, are real enough even if they tend to blur the difference between truth and fantasy in ways that suggest that the boundaries between them may not be as fixed as we would like.

Anyway, you may feel disinclined to regard your own civilization as a Hollywood blockbuster with a fast-moving plot and many leading players, some of them from central casting. You may even be relieved that the Western Civilization 101 courses that used to be part of the standard academic syllabus in the United States were largely abandoned in the 1960s, although on some campuses they are now making a comeback. Perhaps you look at your own civilization through more jaundiced eyes. Back in the 1960s you might have been particularly scornful of those Dead White European Males (DWEM) who are still considered in the popular press to be the ‘founders’ of your own civilization. The acronym was not, of course, intended to be a mark of approbation. These days it has been superseded by the term WEIRD – Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic – i.e., the people who still tend to form the bulk of the database in the experimental branches of psychology, the cognitive sciences and economics. For a long time researchers in these fields made the mistake of supposing a species-level generality in their findings. But this is now under challenge. As a Westerner, you may indeed be different from everyone else thanks to cultural and social conditioning. If that is indeed the case, then it can no longer be taken that you speak for the rest of humanity; you may count yourself among the weirdest people in the world.

Of course, whether you identify with Western civilization or not, you will be seen by others to come from a distinctive family, and all families, as we know, tend to exclude others. Other people’s families cut us out of the conversation, sometimes even when we marry into them. Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), the author of Brave New World (1932), put it rather well in an essay he wrote in the 1920s:

‘Do you remember Aunt Agatha’s ear trumpet? And how Willie made the parrot drunk with sops in wine? And that picnic on Loch Etive, when the boat upset and Uncle Bob was nearly drowned? Do you remember?’ And we all do; and we laugh delightedly; and the unfortunate stranger, who happens to have called, feels utterly out of it. Well, that (in its social aspect) is Culture. When we of the great Culture Family meet, we exchange reminiscences about Grandfather Homer, and that awful old Dr. Johnson, and Aunt Sappho, and poor Johnny Keats. ‘And do you remember that absolutely priceless thing Uncle Virgil said? You know. Timeo Danaos . . . Priceless; I shall never forget it.’ No, we shall never forget it; and what’s more, we shall take good care that those horrid people who have had the impertinence to call on us, those wretched outsiders who never knew dear mellow old Uncle V., shall never forget it either. (Huxley 1994: 91)

You may not have read ‘Uncle Virgil’ (70–19 BCE) at school (certainly not as, three generations ago, you might have been expected to in the original language, Latin), but if you visit Ground Zero in New York you will find a wall at the lowest level displaying a phrase from Virgil’s great epic poem The Aeneid: ‘No day shall erase you from the memory of time.’ And if you visit the wall that contains the remains of the fallen, you will find another quotation from the original poem about two warriors, Nisus and Euryalus, who gladly embraced death for a greater political cause. It’s a noble enough sentiment, isn’t it? But, if truth be told, it is also a rather ironic one. Doesn’t it, asks one writer, fit the hijackers of September 11 more closely than their victims? (Crawford 2015: 515–16).

The Greeks have been part of the script of the War on Terror since the beginning, and that is important because terrorism is now woven into the fabric of American life: its imagery is omnipresent on the news, in TV series such as Homeland, in the political rhetoric of politicians (of all parties), and even in the collective subconscious of the American people. As for the classics, since 2007 Homer’s Iliad has been translated into English at least seven times. (And why not? Given the state of the world, a poem about rage and the need to defend honour resonates even more on each re-reading.) At West Point, Robert Fagles (1933–2008), the late awardwinning translator of Homer, was invited to the college to read out the first lines of his latest translation of the Iliad to hundreds of students, some of whom were being sent off to battle (Higgins 2010). When American soldiers went on campaign in Afghanistan in 2010, they found themselves taking part in an operation called ‘Operation Achilles’. And when they return from the battlefield, broken in mind if not in body, they are now offered something called Theater of War, a $3.7 million funded programme set up by the Pentagon in 2009 which helps them to deal with their psychic wounds by exposing them to the healing powers of two plays by Sophocles (497/6–406/5 BCE).

Some years later the programme was introduced into Guantánamo Bay, the military prison in Cuba which remains in operation despite the closure order which President Obama signed on his first day in office. The play performed there is Prometheus Bound, by the earliest Greek playwright Aeschylus (525/524–456/455 BCE). It is based on the myth of the Titan who defies the gods and gives mankind fire and technology, an act of insubordination for which he is condemned to perpetual punishment. It is interesting that for the most part the guards tend to identify with the victim, Prometheus, not with his judge, Zeus (Doerries 2016). The prisoners, of course, don’t get to see the play – they hail from a different culture. And, while all prisoners may dream of freedom, in this case, a Greek tragedy is unlikely to offer much possibility of spiritual escape.

So, although you may not have given much thought to the concept of civilization, there is really no escaping it, is there? Indeed, whenever there is a terrorist attack in Brussels or Paris or London, the newspapers are quick to invoke the Western values that are being attacked. In an article following the Paris attacks of 2015, the journalist Gideon Rachman regretted the fact that cultural reassertion was ‘narrowing the space for those who want to push back against the narrative of a “clash of civilizations”’, a reference to the famous thesis put forward by the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington (Rachman 2015). I will return to Huntington in a later chapter, but there is no gainsaying the fact that Rachman had a point. In Malaysia, for example, there has been a significant narrowing of the space for non-Muslims. In Bangladesh, Hindu and other non-Muslim intellectuals and journalists have been murdered by religious fundamentalists. In Indonesia, the Muslim scholar Syafi’i Anwar talks with alarm of the ‘creeping Shariaization’ of Indonesian society (Sen 2006). And religious minorities around the world now find themselves in trouble. The persecution of Christians in the Middle East is even seen by some as a religious version of ethnic cleansing. Before 1914 they made up 14 per cent of the population; today they have been reduced to 4 per cent as a result of emigration and religious repression, not to mention falling birth rates (usually a sure sign of cultural demoralization).

Even the very concept of civilization is being challenged. ‘This is the world’s fight . . . This is civilization’s fight . . . Either...