“What do you think of western civilisation?” an English journalist asks Gandhi in a widely shared but probably apocryphal anecdote. The anti-colonial replies that “it would be a good idea”.
Decades of decolonisation in politics, culture and scholarship have certainly dented the notion that “the West” has driven progress across the world. But for many conservatives in politics and academia, particularly in the English-speaking world, the idea of a “western civilisation” that stretches “from Plato to Nato” remains something worth defending. Indeed the idea remains a subconscious foundation from which it can be hard to escape. Naoíse Mac Sweeney argues that “the standard narrative of Western Civilisation is so omnipresent that most of us rarely stop to think about it, and even less often to question it”.
In this wide-ranging new book, Mac Sweeney does not so much question as dismantle. The “grand narrative”, she argues, is “both factually inaccurate and ideologically outdated”, and political and academic calls to defend it are “in reality, calling for us to rally to the defence of a morally bankrupt fiction”. The West, as we understand it, was invented, and Mac Sweeney uses the lives of 14 brilliantly diverse characters to trace the idea’s development over time. “The shape of history,” she writes, “is different depending on your vantage point.”
Mac Sweeney is at her most persuasive when exploring the changing uses of ancient history, and indeed the book could perhaps have focused entirely on that
Mac Sweeney is a classical archaeologist and she begins in the ancient world, with Herodotus, whose Histories have “provided a founding charter for Western Civilisation”. But neither “the father of history” nor most Greek thinkers saw diverse Hellenic civilisation in opposition to eastern “barbarism”. Nor, as Mac Sweeney explores through the life of Claudius’s sister Livilla, did the Romans, who saw themselves as the descendants of Trojan refugees, and conquerors not heirs of the Greeks. In neither worldview, Mac Sweeney writes, “was there a prevailing sense of the proto-West”. The idea of a western cultural lineage to a “Greco-Roman” world would have struck the ancients, and their medieval successors, as “bizarre”.
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Mac Sweeney is at her most persuasive when exploring the changing uses of ancient history, and indeed the book could perhaps have focused entirely on that. Through Barbarossa’s secretary, Godfrey of Viterbo; and the ninth-century Baghdad polymath al-Kindi, she shows how medieval minds dealt with the complexities of west and east, and in the life of Nicaean emperor Theodore Laskaris, she reminds us that even the idea of “crusade” was more about power politics than a “clash of civilisations”. “Even if it should come from far-flung nations and foreign peoples,” al-Kindi wrote, “there is … nothing more important than the truth.”
In the fascinating story of “Renaissance woman” Tullia d’Aragona, Mac Sweeney shows how the “first traces of the emergent narrative of Western Civilisation” came through the early modern “reimagining” of antiquity, a “gradual and disjointed process” by which Greek and Roman antiquity became “classical” and Europeans became that tradition’s “would-be heirs”.
As a European imperialism spread across the Americas, Africa and into Asia, the idea of “Western superiority” became increasingly racialised. While Portuguese colonialists could see the 17th-century west African queen Njinga as “wise as a Greek and chaste as a Roman”, barely a century later, in Massachusetts, a trial was required to prove that enslaved black woman Phyllis Wheatley could possibly have written a collection of classical and Christian poetry.
Not everything can be covered in such a large sweep, and Mac Sweeney’s breadth of knowledge and elegant style keep the book highly engaging
It was in America where this new shape of history moved beyond “intellectual discourse and into the real world”, in the “manifest destiny” that the United States “was to be the final and perfect culmination of Western Civilisation”, heir to ancient “democracy”. Back across the Atlantic, a similar “civilising” mission animated the Victorian British empire (”the new Rome”), and with the global supremacy of the West at its height, “it was the nineteenth century that saw the grand narrative … at its most strident”.
The format of Mac Sweeney’s book (its descriptive American subtitle is A New History in Fourteen Lives) means that, despite the fascinating selection of characters, its sweep can feel uneven, skipping for example from William Gladstone to Edward Said. It is inevitable that not everything can be covered in such a large sweep, and Mac Sweeney’s breadth of knowledge and elegant style keep the book highly engaging.
The fact that even Said “broadly accepted the grand narrative” is, Mac Sweeney observes, testament to its “strength and persistence”. But, as she argues in a thought-provoking final reflection on contemporary China’s rival “vision of global history”, the West no longer dominates how the world sees itself. Mac Sweeney sees the answer to that challenge not in grand narratives and ideological myths, but in an embrace of “the dizzying diversity” of history. After all, she asks, “what could be more Western than reimagining the shape of history?”
Dr Christopher Kissane is a historian and writer, and host of the Ireland’s Edge podcast
