There is no such thing as western civilisation - by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Like many Englishmen
who suffered from tuberculosis in the 19th century, Sir Edward Burnett
Tylor went abroad on medical advice, seeking the drier air of warmer
regions. Tylor came from a prosperous Quaker business family, so he had the
resources for a long trip. In 1855, in his early 20s, he left for the New
World, and, after befriending a Quaker archeologist he met on his travels, he
ended up riding on horseback through the Mexican countryside, visiting Aztec
ruins and dusty pueblos. Tylor was impressed by what he called “the
evidence of an immense ancient population”.
And his Mexican sojourn fired in
him an enthusiasm for the study of faraway societies, ancient and modern, that
lasted for the rest of his life. In 1871, he published his masterwork, Primitive
Culture, which can lay claim to being the first work of modern
anthropology.
Primitive Culture was,
in some respects, a quarrel with another book that had “culture” in the title:
Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy,
a collection that had appeared just two years earlier. For Arnold, culture was
the “pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the
matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the
world”. Arnold wasn’t interested in anything as narrow as class-bound
connoisseurship: he had in mind a moral and aesthetic ideal, which found
expression in art and literature and music and philosophy.
But Tylor thought that
the word could mean something quite different, and in part for institutional
reasons, he was able to see that it did. For Tylor was eventually appointed to
direct the University Museum at Oxford, and then, in 1896, he was appointed to
the first chair of anthropology there. It is to Tylor more than anyone else
that we owe the idea that anthropology is the study of something called
“culture”, which he defined as “that complex whole which includes knowledge,
belief, arts, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits
acquired by man as a member of society”. Civilisation, as Arnold understood it,
was merely one of culture’s many modes.
Nowadays, when people
speak about culture, it is usually either Tylor’s or Arnold’s notion that they
have in mind. The two concepts of culture are, in some respects, antagonistic.
Arnold’s ideal was “the man of culture” and he would have considered “primitive
culture” an oxymoron. Tylor thought it absurd to propose that a person could
lack culture. Yet these contrasting notions of culture are locked together in
our concept of western culture, which many people think defines the identity of
modern western people. So let me try to untangle some of our confusions about
the culture, both Tylorian and Arnoldian, of what we have come to call the
west.
Someone asked Mahatma
Gandhi what he thought of western civilisation, and he replied: “I think it would
be a very good idea.” Like many of the best stories, alas, this one is probably
apocryphal; but also like many of the best stories, it has survived because it
has the flavour of truth. But my own response would have been very different: I
think you should give up the very idea of western civilisation. It is at best
the source of a great deal of confusion, at worst an obstacle to facing some of
the great political challenges of our time. I hesitate to disagree with even
the Gandhi of legend, but I believe western civilisation is not at all a good
idea, and western culture is no improvement.
One reason for the
confusions “western culture” spawns comes from confusions about the west. We
have used the expression “the west” to do very different jobs. Rudyard Kipling,
England’s poet of empire, wrote, “Oh, east is east and west is west, and never
the twain shall meet”, contrasting Europe and Asia, but ignoring everywhere
else. During the cold war, “the west” was one side of the iron curtain; “the
east” its opposite and enemy. This usage, too, effectively disregarded most of
the world.
Often, in recent years, “the west” means the north Atlantic: Europe
and her former colonies in North America. The opposite here is a non-western
world in Africa, Asia and Latin America – now dubbed “the global south” –
though many people in Latin America will claim a western inheritance, too. This
way of talking notices the whole world, but lumps a whole lot of extremely
different societies together, while delicately carving around Australians and
New Zealanders and white South Africans, so that “western” here can look simply
like a euphemism for white.
Of course, we often
also talk today of the western world to contrast it not with the south but with
the Muslim world. And Muslim thinkers sometimes speak in a parallel way,
distinguishing between Dar al-Islam, the home of Islam, and Dar
al-Kufr, the home of unbelief. I would like to explore this opposition
further. Because European and American debates today about whether western
culture is fundamentally Christian inherit a genealogy in which Christendom is
replaced by Europe and then by the idea of the west.
This civilisational
identity has roots going back nearly 1,300 years, then. But to tell the full
story, we need to begin even earlier... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/09/western-civilisation-appiah-reith-lecture