Sir, - Desmond Fennell (September 27th) provides his own idiosyncratic version of what constitutes Western civilisation. However, it is doubtful if his formulaic rules are an accurate summation: replace the word "Christian" by "Islamic" and you get an excellent summary of (for example) the civilisation of Saudi Arabia. The nearest Western equivalents were the dismal quasifascist "corporate states" of the 1930s, like Salazar's Portugal, which was hardly a peak of Western civilisation. Looking at the ideologies on offer at the time when American liberalism became dominant in the West, no variant of fascism or communism seems preferable.
Surely, an important way to judge a "civilisation" is how it treats its out-groups or "others". Since 1945, the West has seen a continual liberation of out-groups - women, homosexuals, blacks, people of different culture. This trend pre-dates 1945. True, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is anything but universal in its application, and Western states themselves have been perpetrators of most terrible wrongs. However, no American statesman ever described the Hiroshima atomic bombing as a positive good, rather than a regrettable necessity.
The United States is still inspirational by its existence as a successful, diverse nation with the rule of law and an open society, and by being perennially receptive both to immigrants and to novel ideas. The US did sustain its vision of civilisation in the wider world when it was under threat. American liberalism's rivals became ferociously genocidal in their treatment of out-groups, whether Jews or "class enemies". Mr Fennell's updated version of Franco's Spain does not constitute a free society as we understand it today.
Western civilisation is not an arid set of immutable rules; rather, it is an open society, where free debate, free institutions and the right to change according to the will of the people are the core values. It is also true that the spread of the open society has seen a coarsening and devaluing of many things that I (and probably Mr Fennell) hold dear, but in my view the gains outweigh the losses. - Yours, etc.,
Toby Joyce, Windermere, Clonsilla, Dublin 15.