A long post about Western Civilization, story telling, my mother, Robinson Jeffers, and rejecting narratives of exceptionalism

In this post last week, I suggested that I was going to take a couple of months away from blogging about animal rights and veganism. I asked for suggestions as to what I ought to blog about, and my former student Paul threw in “Western Civilization.” (I just threw back the famous, and perhaps apocryphal, Gandhi crack about it being a very good idea.)

Each semester, I teach six classes, and offer four different subjects. Every term, without fail, I offer women’s studies and a second Humanities or Gender/Sexuality history course. I also teach my Ancient Western Civilization and Modern Europe courses. These latter two are my “bread-and-butter” offerings, and between the two segments of Western Civ, I have far more students in these intro level classes than I do in my two (slightly more advanced) Gender Studies courses. But I don’t blog very much about teaching Western Civ.

I grew up familiar with the traditional narrative of Western Civilization. My mother taught philosophy, humanities, and religious studies at Monterey Peninsula College until her retirement in 2003. For nearly thirty years, she was a key component of MPC’s legendary Gentrain program. Gentrain (General Education Train of Courses) was and is an interdisciplinary program in Western Civilization, from its Mesopotamian origins down more or less to the present day. My mother started teaching in the Gentrain program in the mid-1970s, when I was about eight years old. And like so many teaching parents, she gave her children the same lectures she gave to her students. On long car trips (in our 1975 Ford Pinto), my mother would regale my younger brother and me with stories she had learned from her colleagues in the program as well as her own material. I don’t know what other kids heard on their car rides, but we heard lectures about Socrates, Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror, and even Abelard and Heloise. (The last of these became my favorite of my mother’s lectures. For better or for worse, I have a heavy dose of Peter Abelard in my soul.)

My father and mother were both professors; they had met in the graduate program in philosophy at Berkeley in 1962. My father thought very deeply; his lifetime work was on the philosophy of language, and he wrote papers (and one well-received book) on Kant, Wittgenstein, and nearly impenetrable topics like “Sentience and Apperception.” My mother, a Gemini like her firstborn son, was and is a generalist — she liked great sweeping narratives. Though she wrote a fine dissertation to get her Ph.D (on Hobbes), she loved teaching intro classes in Western Civ more than anything else. And she passed that love on to me.

Of course, we never had any sense growing up that there was something superior about Western Civilization. Unlike many of the reactionary voices one finds in academia today, my mother never suggested that 5th century BC Athens or 15th century Florence or 18th century Paris were somehow more important than their counterparts outside of Europe. I never got lectures from her on medieval Mali or the Han dynasty, but she made clear that was because the West was her area of expertise. For my mother, bless her liberal heart, familiarity did not breed delusions of superiority. And it was from that tolerant but focused perspective that I narrowed in on European history in my leisure reading as a boy.

I remember the first time I encountered an argument for the peculiar greatness of Western Civ. It came, famously, from the favorite poet of my childhood (and one of my favorites still), Carmel’s own Robinson Jeffers. A well-educated kid can’t grow up in Monterey County without being saturated in the writings of our county’s two greatest scribblers, Jeffers and Steinbeck; I liked the latter but adored, with almost indescribable passion, the poetry and plays of the former.

One of Jeffers’ most anthologized poems is, perhaps unfortunately, not his best. Indeed, his two best-known poems are often confused with each other: Shine, Republic and Shine, Perishing Republic. They are very different poems, of course (right-wingers tend to love the former, and be discomfited by the paganism of the latter.) It is the former that celebrates, in reactionary fashion, one aspect of European-American civilization:

The love of freedom has been the quality of Western man.

But in one noble passion we are one; and Washington, Luther, Tacitus, Aeschylus, one kind of man.

Many scoundrels, at least the slightly better read ones, have co-opted Jeffers’ words for their own xenophobic agendas. Note that the full poem is posted on the website of paleo-conservative Patrick Buchanan.

I was in ninth grade when I read this poem for the first time. What shocks and repels me now inspired me then, at least for a time. Certain kinds of teenage boys tend to be dangerously susceptible to the seductive message that they are heirs to a noble legacy, one that has been bought and paid for in blood, one that they themselves are called to preserve against decadence, modernity, and civilizing maternal influences. The Nazis appealed to that sort very effectively, and though Jeffers rightly despised Nazism and was hardly a fascist himself, his writing (like Buchanan’s) has at times an ugly sense of exceptionalism at best and racism at worst.

Fortunately, my flirtation with Jeffers’ celebration of pagan occidental superiority didn’t last. I liked Western Civ because it was a marvelous narrative of human beings struggling to understand themselves and the world around them. It was also, I grasped in college, the story of a long battle fought by various people to impose their version of order on what they imagine to be a chaotic world around them. If there’s one unifying feature of Western Civ (I suppose this is also true in Chinese history, but I don’t know enough to say), it is the almost omnipresent anxiety about the threat posed by the Other, the Barbarian. Be they Huns or Saracens or Sioux, Western culture certainly uses fear of the enemy as a unifying force.

Fortunately, I grew up in a sufficiently progressive environment (and went to one of the great citadels of liberalism, Cal). I learned quickly that “Othering” was a tactic used to build solidarity and deflect criticism; I took enough courses in the history of non-Western peoples to dispel the myth of Euro-American exceptionalism; I learned to appreciate Jeffers as the great poet laureate of the natural order, and not a first or even second-rate historian. But I still loved Western Civilization as an exciting, interesting, compelling narrative. And by the time I left my undergrad years behind, I was fairly certain that among other things, I wanted to teach the subject myself.

In graduate school, I studied the medieval church, scholastic philosophy, theology, and the history of sexuality. But I knew that at least when it came to pedagogy, I was more my mother’s son than my father’s. My mind was and is too restless, and to be frank, in some ways too superficial (I am an ENFP Gemini, after all) to focus on any one topic too deeply or for too long. I knew I wanted to finish my Ph.D, but I also knew that I wanted to be a generalist, teaching a little bit about everything. Creating an exciting, engaging narrative turned me on; the thought of hours of research in archives, wrestling with more or less indecipherable manuscripts (I did a lot of this in the process of getting the damn doctorate) depressed the hell out of me. A university career was thus not for me; a community college, like the one at which my mother had spent so many years, was clearly the best choice. And here I am, in my sixteenth year of teaching Western Civilization and various sexuality-themed courses at Pasadena City College.

I believe that a functioning understanding of the sweep and scope of Western history, from the Mesopotamians to the Great Wars of the Twentieth Century, remains a useful and interesting component of the general curriculum. Our culture, like it or not, is shot through with what we have inherited from the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans, the Medieval English, and so forth. Of course, our ever-evolving culture is also heavily influenced by the Arabs, the Chinese, the Africans, and the indigenous peoples of the Americas. And so let me be clear: the fact that I believe Western Civilization is “useful and interesting” does not mean that I believe in the moral, political, or ideological superiority of the West. Europe is not the incubator for all that is good and right in the world, nor is it the laboratory for the worst and the darkest. The right and the left may celebrate or denigrate Western heritage as part of a particular ideological agenda, but invariably, they miss the larger point — which is that the “West” is more of an ever-shifting idea than a stable reality, and there is much of which to be proud, and much of which to be ashamed, over the course of reviewing those shifts.

I like teaching Western Civ. In the end, when people ask me why I love teaching the same intro courses over and over again, I reply “I like teaching it because it is a great and grand story that happens to — mostly — be true.” They then ask, “Yeah, but why should we learn all this stuff? Just because it’s grand and true?” “Yes”, I reply, “but also because in learning the names and dates and stories I will give you, you will have a vocabulary for speaking about the past and the present. And for better or for worse, having that vocabulary, having that frame of reference, will mark you as an educated person in the eyes of the world.”

“And besides”, I say, “there are some really good stories.”

I am privileged to be paid to tell some good stories. Even if I don’t believe in the glorious “stubborn flame of liberty” that is, allegedly, unique to Western man.