Causa Belli: Why We Fight

Really, can you say any human culture isn't worth saving? Would Whittaker Chambers' priest friend say this about a dwindling Amazon tribe or Asian nomad people?

Lose any culture and the human race is impoverished. Each contributes something unique: the West has given us the scientific method, the constitutional democracy, the printing press and all its products... And the fruits of those seeds still thrive best here. People in the West are more educated and have more options available to them -- even the poorest -- than ordinary people ever had a hope for through most of history. Western society functions efficiently, compared to other modern places crippled by corruption and civil strife and clannishness. Western countries have found a remarkable if unstable balance. Immigrants still stream to Europe and the US... The lands of plenty, the lands of hope. The lands of rocket ships and rock music.

It's not by any means perfect. It has the vices that belong to those virtues. But it is an old and big and robust culure, and there is no question that it enriches the human race.
 

I've often asked this question, especially when reading people like Max Weber. Weber always makes me question one of my most essential qualities, my "Protestant" work ethic. Personally I wonder if he should have called it that... his archetype of the ethic is Ben Franklin, who is revered by many people who cut themselves off from Luther and Calvin long ago. So to me it seems "Western" instead of "Protestant." In any case, it's part of my job to question things like industrialism or hospitals, even if I still believe in them at the end of the day.

As usual, Mary beats me to the punch.... I think all the things she cites about the West are probably worth saving. Some of the "more efficient" is relative... as Mary has pointed out to me before, feudalism or tribalism are often very effective ways to run certain societies. But I do believe that at least some of the advances of the West would be accepted by the majority in any civilization if they had the choice.

Yet that makes me question if those institutions are "Western" at all. We don't talk about agriculture as "Middle Eastern" or geometry as "Greek" -- though that might be because of history as much as the essence of those ideas. If democracy (or Christianity, for that matter) were to fail in its homeland, would the cultures that keep them alive still talk about them as "Western"? I doubt it.

Anyway, to take it down a notch, my gut answer to your question is "freedom." Not "democracy" (which has shown up in various forms in many cultures, I'd say) or "rights" (just because I get tired of the word) but the ability of individuals to make decisions for themselves. And I do think that includes freedom to do nasty things, even abortion or the Holocaust. I want human beings to change and learn, and I don't see how we can do that without making some awful mistakes. That's why I don't look back on the West's history with regret, hope that I can be a part of the West's future.

--Andy
http://just-curious.blogspot.com/
 

The test of a culture's "value" (why else should would it need saving?) is ultimately the condition in which it allows its participants to live. Western countries, with their often-cited and often-practiced, moral vices live in the most efficeint, most prosperous societies in human history. Economically, the West continues to produce and innovate at an incredible pace, which occurs, to me at least, because of the power of its ideas.

The reason that the West produces the most products, wastes the most resources, creates the most technologies is due largely to an economic system that provides incentives to do those very things. Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, not only explained fundamental principles of specialization and supply and demand but also inherited a Western tradition that embodied the fundamental economic laws he was elucidating. The idea of the "market," a place for buyers and sellers to come together to trade goods and services for a particular price, would be impossible without freedom.

What is most remarkable about Western countries' economies, relative to history and the usual rhetoric regarding class, is that their populations both produce the most wealth but also spread the most as well. The market, founded on the principle that individuals must be allowed to act without coersion, produce at what economists term the socially effient level of outpout; that is, the level at which the most people will benefit based on its relative value to them. If the West is worth valuing and ultimately worth saving, one need not look much farther than their pocketbooks.
 

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