GERALD GILLESPIE
Preamble
Current efforts by the élites of many European states and populaces to
collaborate ever more closely have called forth a wave of commentary on the
possible kinds of union they may achieve. This complex question stimulates
philosophers of history and culture to offer advice and venture predictions.
Literary sociologists have taken the lead in thinking about the plethora of
discourses and forces at issue. An example is the work of the contributors to a
special issue of the journal SPIEL. They confront a heady mixture of
factors: among them, the ways cultural identities are formed; the relative power
of religious codes and ideologies; the evolution of legal systems; local,
regional, and national configurations; the specific inroads of globalization;
ethnic and linguistic diversity inside state borders; the cross-border phenomena
of minorities and immigrants; and historically grounded and sometimes
crisscrossing cultural fault lines.
What comparative literary studies can contribute is a sense of how complex a
task it is to synthesize a picture of living culture, especially at the
difficult level of multiple interactions. And to that end we have no better
resource than the works of literary artists who from time to time have reflected
on the character of Europe or a large part thereof. Their various attempts to
address such an enormous subject have been instrumental in creating the
many-stranded meta-narrative about “Europe” that is still underway. But what is
at stake in acknowledging the existence of a “new” versus an “old” world? The
transplanted American T.S. Eliot summed up the hopeful view of a longer-term,
transoceanic cultural sharing that was widespread in the immediate aftermath of
World War II:
[T]he Western world has its unity in this [literary] heritage, in Christianity,
and in the ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome, and Israel, from which, owing
to two thousand years of Christianity we trace our descent . . . [T]his unity in
the common elements of culture, throughout the centuries, is the true bond
between us. (Eliot)
My remarks, invoking Eliot, are not intended as a contribution to the debate
over whether such a constellation as “Western civilization” is actual or how
best to teach it. Nonetheless, we can garner valuable points from scholars like
Peter N. Stearns who do expound these issues. In assessing in Western
Civilization and World History (2003) the merits of the various temporal and
territorial frames that different camps apply in their acts of retrospection,
Stearns argues against going all the way back to the ancient Near East and Egypt
or to ancient Greece and Rome as foundational, and favors instead regarding the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance as the true crucible of the “West.” While I
disagree with a number of Stearns’ specific judgments, the main lesson is clear:
cultural retrospection involves a cumulative reordering of possessed and
retrieved memories, and the closer we get to our own day, the more likely we are
to perceive that certain habits of mind are linked to past moments.
The thumbnail reports on the views of various authors that follow are not meant
to chime in on any of their valuations of “Western civilization,” either in its
narrower confines as Europe or in the wider context including the newer nations
spawned by Europe. I leave the quantitative and qualitative measuring of
achievements by particular civilizations to experts like Charles Murray.
Likewise, I leave it to experts like Arthur Herman to evaluate theories that
deal with whether or why Western civilization may be winding down. In the face
of tens of thousands of statements in discursive and fictional works about the
“West,” I accept the idea of a larger “West” from the perspective of general
systems analysis, and I shall treat it here as a demonstrable repertorial item
of extraordinary density created in stages since the Renaissance. Eliot’s words
are just one tiny bit of the evidence that a joint heritage, a highly
articulated consciousness, had been elaborated before the twentieth century and
that this genre of consciousness depended on an enormous interlocking set of
hypertexts and their countless subsidiary texts. Discussion of hypertext(s) and
hypermedia is today commonplace. In my judgment, however, our acceptance of the
interpenetration of various media and virtual realities was prepared through the
material and intellectual development of European book culture, and the
European, eventually also Euro-American, humoristic-encyclopedic novel carried
the main burden in setting the trend.
Reliable historians have shown that some ingredients of the world-altering
technological waves spawned in the waning Middle Ages—notably the improvement of
ship-building and navigation and the invention of printing—had drifted into the
European orbit from Near Eastern and Asian sources. More important in the
metanarrative I outline, however, is how a broad conjunction of trends unfolded
in the Renaissance period in tandem with these technological revolutions. While
some Europeans were breaking out over the Atlantic sea lanes to establish far
flung trade networks and colonial outposts, by the late fifteenth century
growing numbers of Europeans were experiencing profound changes in their access
to, and attitudes about, their collective repertory of knowledge and beliefs
because of the exponential expansion of printed materials and lines of
communication. In due course, the story of European venturing, too, became built
into the repertory, and the repertory itself was exported to the outposts along
with other trafficked goods.