On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a speech while standing in front of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. His address was a call for America and its European allies to unite in the renewal and defense of a shared cultural tradition — what he and many others name as the “West” or “Western Civilization.”
For Rubio, the West is something real, with demarcated qualities and boundaries. He speaks of “the Western mind” and “the Western imagination.” This civilization has “essential traits” that define it.
I feel much more ambivalent about this language. In a sense, the West both exists and doesn’t exist.
“For Rubio, the West is something real, with demarcated qualities and boundaries.”
A genuine historical lineage is being named; in broad terms, it is the confluence of the Christian religion with Greek and Roman culture and its subsequent developments. But an emphasis on recurring patterns of thought and behavior tends to paper over the tremendous diversity of that lineage and the porousness of its claimed borders.
To speak of “the West” is therefore not to name a self-evidently distinctive object. Rather, the West is more like what the philosopher Walter Bryce Gallie called an “essentially contested concept” — an abstract term whose meaning is open to endless debate.
In fact, the idea of Western Civilization as a cohesive culture came into being in the last period of European imperialism as a means of distinguishing the colonizers from the colonized. In this already-somewhat secularized era of expansion, it replaced the older unifying concept of “Christendom.”
This absence of consensus on the meaning of Western Civilization manifests as contradictions in Rubio’s very speech. Somehow, he can refer to a civilization that holds to a “common view of man and of his place in the universe” but values “daring exploration and invention” as well as “insatiable curiosity.”
Unfettered inquiry has a habit of breaking with beliefs held in common.
Similarly, the West is defined both by duty, honor and loyalty to one’s nation, but also by “fierce individuality and relentless ambition.” In a single sentence, he refers to “unbreakable loyalty to one’s code, one’s cause, one’s country, our heroes” as if these were all perfectly aligned. And this comes only a few sentences after recounting the execution of Socrates, which exemplified the conflict between personal conviction and social order.
Speaking of Greek philosophers, I find it interesting that Rubio dismisses what he calls a contemporary fashion; namely, that “enlightened foreign policy means prioritizing the global community over one’s own people.” This he contrasts with the “men of ancient Greece” who knew “there was nothing selfish or wrong” about defending the interests of your nation “above all else.”
Socrates statue in Athens in front of the National Academy (Shutterstock)
Certain men of ancient Greek definitely understood themselves as belonging to a universal humanity. Socrates and Diogenes the Cynic, famed challengers of cultural convention, each were credited with claiming to be a “citizen of the world” when asked where they were from. Cosmopolitanism became a central ideal for the later Stoic philosophers. The founder of Stoicism, Zeno of Citium, wrote in his Republic that all human beings were fellow citizens united by reason rather than geography and custom.
As a theologian, for me the greatest contradiction appears between the Christian faith and the defining Western trait that gets the most attention in Rubio’s speech.
It seems that, for Rubio, the chief characteristic of the West has been its cultivation of the “great man” (never the “great woman”) who pursues excellence and glory in competition with others. Once again, he credits the historical Greeks with setting the example, turning their cities into arenas for men to “hone their potential through perpetual struggle” and “inch ever closer to perfection.”
But we, their civilizational heirs, have gotten soft, supposedly striving for a “world devoid of risk” that holds the exceptional hostage to the ordinary and mediocre. Western Civilization is faltering due to a failure of will or, as he puts it, a lack of what the Greeks called thumos — an inner spirit of passion and pride.
There is no grace in the works-based salvation of the great man. Rather, through determination and grit, he pulls himself up by his bootstraps and “obtains immortality through his own deeds.”
Rubio sounds positively Homeric here.
Rubio name-checks St. Augustine of Hippo but he either has not read Augustine or forgot what the bishop wrote concerning the passion and pride of the supposed “great man.” In The City of God, Augustine defines pride as “the craving for undue exaltation” when the soul abandons God for personal satisfaction as its purpose.
The competition among persons and societies that crave glory fuels the “lust for domination” as a chief characteristic of a world left to its own devices. The result is not so much discovery and progress as it is bloodshed, subjugation and destruction.
“Rubio celebrates the lust for domination even as his speech sanitizes it.”
Rubio celebrates the lust for domination even as his speech sanitizes it. Philosophy, the building of cathedrals and landing on the Moon find equivalence with the violent achievements of conquerors: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Hernán Cortés. Their names are elevated while their victims are left unremembered.
Naturally, this paean to Western success spills over into American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. On par with the administration’s reactionary rewriting of history, Rubio troublingly depicts pre-Colonial America as an “open and wild land.” It was, of course, neither of these, having long been peopled by many Native cultures, including those that built cities and practiced agriculture and forestry.
Like other contemporary promoters of Western Civilization, private citizens and Trump administration officials alike, Rubio presents an ideology in which Jerusalem, Athens and Rome fit together snugly. In doing so, however, Christianity becomes mere window-dressing to sacralize a realpolitik of dominance and self-aggrandizement.
And so, while Rubio once refers to “the gospel of Jesus Christ,” once to Christian martyrdom and once to the natural law tradition, his “Western moral imagination” is defined by love of the self and love of the in-group rather than love of God fulfilled in love for all one’s fellow-image bearers and, further still, for the creation God called good.
As a matter of fact, there is no reference to love at all in Rubio’s speech. There is nothing about charity, equality, humility or other virtues that Christianity — not exclusively, and often very imperfectly — infused into what has been called the West.
In their absence, we are offered cultural chauvinism, collective egotism and violence against the other, all baptized as good news that will save us.
If this is the meaning of civilization, may God make us uncivilized.
Christopher Schelin serves as dean of students at Starr King School for the Ministry in Oakland, Calif., and as a senior research fellow at the International Baptist Theological Study Centre in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.