Endpapers — April 17, 2010 2:41 pm

Bring Back the West

By Zoey Orol

The value of the Western tradition in higher education

The idea of a Western canon has become unfashionable. When I arrived at Harvard in the fall of 2006, the university offered a course on celestial navigation but no survey course in British history. The English Department recently eliminated its required course in major British writers, which included Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Romantic poets. In those courses that have insisted on the usefulness of a Western canon, in fields ranging from art history to classical music, professors have felt the need to explicitly defend their approach in lecture.

I understand that this trend away from the canon is an attempt to remedy a perceived bias in higher education toward the Western tradition, taught to previous generations of students to the exclusion of all else. I am hardly in a position to say whether a pro-Western bias exists or whether changing course offerings to combat it is a successful remedy. But what I can say is that I have always found value in the Western tradition, and that there is a compelling argument to be made that the Western—in particular the Anglo-American—tradition is uniquely relevant to American students.

From a historical standpoint, shifting the focus away from the West creates an incomplete picture of global affairs. Imagine teaching a world history course that portrayed Britain and America as two countries like any others. Such an approach would make little sense, since the international affairs of the past two centuries—at the very least—have been largely dominated by those two countries. When the British Empire was at its peak at the turn of the 20th century, a quarter of the world’s population was under British rule. No other country in modern history has been able to make that claim. As two world wars crippled British power, Britain passed the torch of international hegemony to its former colony across the Atlantic. Churchill famously pleaded with  Roosevelt to enter World War II, knowing that Britain was unable to singlehandedly defend Western civilization from the terrorizing march of the Nazis. In this and so many subsequent world conflicts and events of the 20th century, American involvement has been vital to success.  To deny the monumental and disproportionate impact of these two countries would be to ignore historical fact.

But the trend away from canonical teaching in higher education is founded more on academia’s unwillingness to assert that different cultures have unusual relevance or value to American students. To insist on the equality of all traditions is to deny the inheritance that has been passed down to Americans from the earliest civilizations. Knowledge of the Western tradition contextualizes our own country and society in an historically illuminating way: our legal system, our liberal political philosophy, and many of our social norms and cultural values were developed in the West, specifically in Britain, centuries before America’s birth. Britain, in turn, had built on traditions handed down from antiquity. This cultural chain links America to previous epochs of world history, but higher education seems increasingly reluctant to acknowledge this reality. Inconveniently for academics, America falls on a historical continuum that does not touch all nations of the world.

In earlier eras, Harvard had no trouble establishing this hierarchy of relevance. Reading knowledge of Latin and Greek was once a requirement for entrance to the college, with the understanding that classical knowledge, recognized as the foundation of our society, was best imparted by reading seminal ancient texts in their original languages. I would not argue that Harvard should reinstate these requirements, nor, of course, would I say that the university should go back to denying admission to women and minority groups. But in academia’s attempt to erase all traces of its canonical, male-dominated past, we have gone to the other extreme, so eager to include that we minimize what is of greatest value.

We cannot become global citizens if we do not first understand our own national heritage.  In minimizing the value of our own history and traditions, American colleges and universities are doing students a disservice. Hopefully Harvard is not condemning us to prove the truth of the George Santayana adage: “those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

Zoey Orol ’10 is the Managing Editor Emeritus.

Photo Credit: Flickr (Hlkljgk)

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  • MC

    “Imagine teaching a world history course that portrayed Britain and America as two countries like any others. Such an approach would make little sense, since the international affairs of the past two centuries—at the very least—have been largely dominated by those two countries.”

    As an American history major, this is just embarassing to read, not to mention inaccurate. You (and many others) perceive that these two countries have “dominated” history precisely due to the forces that “non-Western canon” teaching can critique: a long history of white supremacy and imperialism. Harvard history professors can certainly teach a critical and comprehensive history of British and American imperialism, and they do (Vince Brown & Walter Johnson, among others.)

  • Christian

    This article, while better worded, is no different than Patrick Brennan’s startlingly uninformed and goofily racist depiction of the Ethnic Studies and WGS in contrast to the “Western” canon. It still ignores the fact that the attentive mind can find itself literally surrounded by Western cultural practices, creation myths, and inaccurate histories, and really needs no help in learning about them, and codifying them in its being – let alone going to college and having to pretend that it’s important. As someone who came to college to get smarter, I’d prefer to be on the cutting edge of knowledge, figuring out new ways to learn things, not learning the same stuff somebody else’s forefathers learned back in the day.

    Also, please take a moment and look around. Let’s not overestimate how much coloreds and women are taking over our campus – one Women’s Center in a basement of a freshman dorm and people get all jittery. Damn. We’ve still got enough ridiculously bad old white men teaching classes to go around. And after 5 years of Latin, I still haven’t used that junk.

  • Anonymous

    In relation to MC’s comment above: if you are really an American history major, I think it’s unlikely that you could disagree about American dominance in world affairs. And no country other than Britain can claim to have encompassed such a significant land mass and population base in modern history. Those are facts — regardless of your personal feelings on the long history of imperialism embodied by countries such as Britain, Spain, and France — and I would challenge you to explain why that assertion is incorrect. There is nothing wrong with teaching these histories critically, but the point in the article is that those histories are part of our inheritance — whether you like it or not.

    And as for Christian — how is it possible to learn about American or British history simply by hanging out in this country? That doesn’t make very much sense. You point out the dramatic amount of historical misinformation floating around; a university is uniquely poised to correct this misinformation in a way that simply living in America is not.

  • Christian

    A university is not poised to correct misinformation about history if it continues to even use language such as “dominance” “liberal”, and even “West” and “our” when referring to American and British history in an uncritical way. A context in which assumption of American and British dominance goes untroubled paves the way for a lot of other misconceptions about history and cultural practice, such as our creation myth as a republic founded on an understanding of the freedom of all people, or attempting to include me in a discussion that talks about “our cultural practices” that are inherited from the west.

    As MC pointed out above, Vince Brown and Walter Johnson, two men who are, unquestionably in my opinion, smart in a normative way and rigorous in their research (which their colleagues seem to also believe, given their tenure at the university), are good at pointing out. There’s a lot of people smarter than me, like Edward Said, who see the usage of the word “western” as an oppressive practice, for example. Look, my comment comes from a place of being just straight up tired with lazy pedagogy, which I see a lot of in my classmates.

  • MC

    Anonymous (if you’d like to identify yourself, we could discuss this over email as well):
    I would disagree with you that “the point in the article is that those histories are part of our inheritance.” Clearly I would not argue for a curriculum that erased American and British history, or even Western canon, entirely. If anyone on this campus can demonstrate that we’re somehow in danger of that happening, I would certainly love to hear that argument, considering Harvard offers about a dozen British history classes, compared to its 1 or 2 Latin American history classes (and that’s just one example.)

    So if I was arguing to erase all stories of America and England, I guess I’d agree with your criticism. Except that I believe what’s beneath this article — and Patrick Brennan’s similar critique of ethnic studies — is not a gentle reminder that the Western canon is important, and that we should acknowledge our inheritance. It’s the implicit push for a Western (which I would challenge is often code for “white” — for proof of this, you can look at the History department’s “Western” and “Non Western” classes) perspective to be privileged over “ethnic” or “other” perspectives, which are assumed to be less academic or lower on the “hierarchy of relevance.”

  • Nell

     Zoey — you have got to be kidding with this article. Surely you expect me to disagree with you. I’m glad someone pointed me to your piece because it truly does seem, if well written and infused with the passion of someone who clearly loves what she studies, poorly informed and ill thought-out. 

    I understand your appreciation of the Western “canon” — there can be no doubt that Chaucer and Shakespeare and a million other British and American authors are worth reading — and I share your enthusiasm about the relevance of their ideas to our lives now. And the fact that they wrote in some form of the language that we speak today is an immense bonus. I wish your article had just left it at that — your love for these two cultures and what you think we can learn from them. 

    Yet I find it deeply disturbing that you feel you may somehow dictate what is “important” for a student at Harvard College to learn. For one thing, it seems obvious that what is meaningful to Zoey Orol is not necessarily meaningful to someone else. Surely you have scientifically-inclined friends who complain about taking courses in British history and wish that science drew a heavier emphasis in the Harvard curriculum. But to tell me — a Sanskritist — that my interests are low (or at least lower than yours) on what you call a “hierarchy of relevance” is nothing short of rude. 

    Nor is it very smart. For a few reasons. First, people who study Sanskrit at Harvard would practically kill for a department filled with as many tenured professors, capable graduate students, tutorials, seminars, and lecture classes as, say, the department of English and American Language and Literature. Other commenters have pointed out the alarming disparity between classes that focus on “Western” material (many of them) and classes that do not (achingly few), so I will spare you the statistics. Needless to say it would be both unwarranted and rather xenophobic to worry that “non-Western” studies are taking over the University. 

    You would argue that the English department *should* have greater resources than the Sanskrit department, since you believe that English is far more “relevant” than Sanskrit. (Just keeping it personal here.) Sadly for you, you’ve probably never studied the language, literature, history, or philosophy of Early South Asia — but if you had, you would have quickly discovered just how wrong you are about the supposed non-relevance of those places outside the UK and the United States. 

    Take Sanskrit and Sanskrit literary culture. This is a language that has been used for millennia longer than English has been, and whose heyday — which lasted roughly fifteen hundred years — is already thrice as long as the history of modern English literature. It produced proportionately more material — and more intellectually advanced — material, too. You think the Western philosophers give you something to think about? Wittgenstein? Try reading the early Buddhist philosophers, like Nagarjuna. He’ll really set you straight. Or literary theory — you think Iser had his way with reader response theory? Hell no. The Natyasastra invented the stuff, in the year zero. In India. Speaking of zero, who invented that number? Oh, right. Mathematicians in Early South Asia.` Want to see the most profuse and profound explosion of literary theory and analysis in the history of the world? Look no further than Sanskrit literary culture. It dwarfs — simply dwarfs — English literary theory. But you wouldn’t know that, would you?

    If you haven’t actually studied non-Western subjects, try not to judge their value. You simply don’t know what you’re talking about. How can you tell me that Bhasa’s ‘Pancaratram’ is any less worth studying than Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’? The two are so similar in ethic and aesthetic sensibility that it would be silly to claim one can learn more from Shakespeare’s work than from Bhasa’s. And it would be just as silly to claim the opposite. If you truly think that Harvard College students would learn more and better from Western sources, you are probably not giving them enough credit. We are smart enough to learn different languages (and not just French, either). We are smart enough to study what few have studied before. We are smart enough to know how to apply works of history and literature to our lives, no matter where and when those works were written.

    On a bit of tangent: Have you forgotten that some of the modern West’s greatest minds were heavily influenced by the literature and philosophy of India, the Middle East, China, and a host of other non-Western cultures? Goethe’s favorite play was Kalidasa’s ‘Abhijnanasakuntalam’ (India, 300 AD). The atomic bomb was dropped to the tone of the first verse of the Bhagavadgita, courtesy of Oppenheimer. Shroedinger was obsessed with the Upanisads, although no one can speak for his cat (hardy har har). And the list goes on — Orientalists, more Orientalists, and those who were slightly more sensitive than Orientalists — all of them assured of the fact that what other cultures produce can touch the minds and hearts of Westerners.

    There is a historical aspect to all of this, too. And, accordingly, the part of your article that hurt the most to read was the phrase in which you gloat about England’s dominance over a quarter of the earth as if it were unreservedly good, or as if it alone could make British history worth studying. This is horrifying for obvious reasons — the long-term physical and mental suffering of those who were subjected to British rule, of course, and the shocking violence, war, and loss of cultural heritage that has occurred in places where the colonists have come and gone.

    But your most striking blindness here is to the depth and significance of the history of places that are not the UK and the US. The English ruled a quarter of the world, you say? Just for fun, go to the Wikipedia page on “list of largest empires.” Conveniently they’ve done the math for me. Out of over a hundred large empires, only a handful are Western. Sure Britain is at the top, but the Mongol Empire is close on its heels — and you’ll see that even though the British Empire occupied the most space, the Mongol Empire covered the most people. Of the rest, the majority are Chinese, Indian, or Arab. How can you argue that British history is worth studying because of the sheer size of its empire, and then flatly ignore the Mongol Empire, the Qing Dynasty, and the Umayyad Caliphate?

    All this ranting to say: there is no such thing as a hierarchy of relevance. The true student is able to learn from every class she takes and every experience she has. Isn’t that what education is about? To me, it’s about making sense of life in whatever way is most meaningful to you — be it through math, science, British history, English detective novels, Buddhist philosophy, Chinese grammar, or (what else) Sanskrit literature. Wouldn’t you agree?

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