What Can We Salvage of the West?
On the Future of our Folkhood
If you prefer audio of this article, click here.
What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem? — Tertullian
Last week we determined that the Western Canon is in need of revision. It’s too big. It doesn’t hang together. It lacks a holistic, coherent thread tying it together. There will always be some amount of tension because reality is messy, contradictory, and dialectical, but the tension can only go so far before the thing undergoes mitosis. We’ve long ago passed that point and it’s time for it to balkanize. The only thing holding it together now is history—the parts are now essentially separate households.
We could give some examples—take, say, the shame culture of the Homeric Greeks vs. the guilt culture of late antiquity. For the Homeric Greeks, the locus of moral judgement was outside the individual: the community judges your moral worth, whether you’ve met the standards of proper behaviour. We call this honour culture, and the basic enforcement mechanism is shame.
For the late antique world, the locus of moral judgement was within the individual: the divinity may be ultimate judge, but so it was for the archaic Greek. The effective judge of your moral worth was yourself—you decide whether you’ve met the standard of proper behaviour. The basic enforcement mechanism here is guilt, and we don’t have a word for this kind of culture the same way a fish doesn’t have an idea of water—this is our world today still.
The point is that these two are totally irreconcilable. Either the locus of moral judgement is internal or external—it can’t be both, and it is important enough that it can’t be ignored. We have canonical works that consecrate one or the other, and each is evil in the eyes of the other.
There are several lineages within what is now called the Western Canon, and they have basically nothing to do with one another at this point. It’s not enough that they’ve all been influential. They must all be edifying too, and some of them decidedly are not, some of them have led us to where we are today.
Although we will mention specific works in this article, this is not a list of what’s in and what’s out. Rather, I want to lay the groundwork for thinking about the question of what’s in and what’s out. I take it as self-evident that the Canon needs pruning; if you think Hesiod and Plotinus can live under one roof, we’re not on the same team.
This project is not unprecedented. Plato would have understood the need to prune the Canon—in fact, this was his project too. Heidegger undertook a similar project for metaphysics: he wanted to strip it back to presocratic notions of Being. And no one can doubt but that the Canon is not what it once was. Beowulf and the Eddas were once lost to the West—now they’re the subject of popular TV and movies and the inspiration for new canonical works. This process of change is not modern either—Homer mattered not at all to the Middle Ages but since the renaissance he has again become central. The Canon is a living, breathing thing, and it undergoes change, as does everything real.
Above all, the motivation for this project grows out of discussions I’ve had about my thesis that the move from the Archaic to the Axial world was a tragedy that can, should, and will be reversed. The main objection is that pruning the Axial acquisitions from our cultural life is too much—we would have to give up too much that’s great in the West. I hope to show, if only in a thumbnail sketch, how this is wrong. We will see how what constitutes the greatness of the West—ancient and modern—has very deep roots indeed.