From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents

by David Gress

Overview

An in-depth intellectual history of the Western idea and a passionate defense of its importance to America's future, From Plato to NATO is the first book to make sense of the legacy of the West at a time when it is facing its greatest challenges. Readers of Francis Fukuyama, John Gray, Samuel Huntington, and other analysts of the dilemmas of Western nations in the twenty-first century will find in David Gress's original account a fuller description of what the West really is and how, with the best of intentions, it has been misrepresented. Most important, they will encounter a new vision of Western identity and how it can be recovered.

Early in the twentieth century, American educators put together a story of Western civilization, its origins, history, and promise that for the subsequent fifty years remained at the heart of American college education. The story they told was of a Western civilization that began with the Greeks and continued through 2,500 years of great books and great ideas, culminating in twentieth-century progressive liberal democracy, science, and capitalist prosperity.

In the 1960s, this Grand Narrative of the West came under attack. Over the next thirty years, the critics turned this old story into its opposite: a series of anti-narratives about the evils, the failures, and the betrayals of justice that, so they said, constituted Western history.

The victory of Western values at the end of the cold war, the spread of democracy and capitalism, and the worldwide impact of American popular culture have not revived the Grand Narrative in the European and American heartlands of the West. David Gress explains this paradox, arguing that the Grand Narrative of the West was flawed from the beginning: that the West did not begin in Greece and that, in morality and religion, the Greeks were an alien civilization whose contribution was mediated through Rome and Christianity. Furthermore, in assuming a continuity from the Greeks to modern liberalism, we have mistakenly downplayed or rejected everything in between, focusing on the great ideas and the great books rather than on real history with all its ambiguities, conflicts, and contradictions.

The heart of Gress's case for the future of the West is that the New must remember its roots in the Old and seek a synthesis. For as the attacks have demonstrated, the New West cannot stand alone. Its very virtues — liberty, reason, progress — grew out of the Old West and cannot flourish when removed from that rich soil.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743264884
Publisher:	Free Press
Publication date:	05/19/2004
Pages:	624
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

David Gress is an author and historian. He is widely recognized for his book From Plato to Nato, as well as first book, Demokrati eller?.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. The Grand Narrative and Its Fate

2. The Battle over Hellas

3. The Burden of Rome

4. Christianity and the Fall of Rome

5. Germanic Freedom and the Old Western Synthesis

6. Faith, Passion, and Conquest

7. From Christendom to Civilization

8. The High Tide of Liberalism

9. The Totalitarian Trap

10. The Cold War West

11. Battle in the Heartland

12. The Failure of Universalism and the Future of Western Identity

Notes

Index

Introduction

...This book argues that all the Wests emphasize some part of a broad story, that no story can ever be truly complete, and that the history of civilization is only one kind of history; as Davies trenchantly argued, there is also the political, religious, economic, and social history of particular regions, nations, people, faiths, territories, groups, and individuals.

Three themes run through the book. The first is that the standard story is partial and incomplete. It was created to serve the needs of mass higher education after the world wars and had, therefore, to be simple in outline but rich in content. Above all, the story had to be consistent, linear, progressive, with a start date in ancient Greece and an end date in 1950s America. But, midcentury American liberalism, for all its qualities as a political doctrine, was not the only legitimate or possible representation of the idea of the West. And to argue, as the story did, that the idea of the West found its fulfillment in that doctrine was dangerously wrong.

Dangerous for two reasons. First, because citizens whose notion of the West depended on the traditional story had little with which to resist those who challenged the story with the intention of destroying its influence. Thus, we saw American elites abandoning the liberal story in droves, starting in the 1960s, until by the 1990s the story, if it was told at all, was told mainly as a joke or as a butt of criticism and attack. And dangerous, second, because the narrow understanding of the West implicit in the traditional story made it difficult if not impossible to resist those critics who said that the West was not merely oppressive, white-male-chauvinist, and evil, but that it was morally empty and spiritually vacant.

A second theme is that the standard story was deaf to religion and theology as cultural forces in their own right, and not merely as contributors of ideas to a Grand Narrative. Thus, the standard story could use parts of what came to be called the Judeo-Christian tradition: dignity of the individual, value of each life, and the hopes and struggles for human rights and moral equality that flowed from that tradition. But it could not so easily use others: the belief that the next life was as important as, if not more important than, this and that worldly success was therefore not to be sought; the value of contemplation over action; doctrinal orthodoxy; intolerance; religious wars; anti-Semitism. Because it was deaf to religion, the standard story presented both classical religion and Christianity as peripheral, derivative, and largely irrelevant, except as providers of ideas whose true role was to function as stepping-stones in the great secular drama of Western ascendancy from Plato to NATO.

The third theme running through the book is that the standard story was flawed because it took only what it wanted from history and built a linear narrative from it: from the Greeks it took democracy and philosophy; from the Romans, law; from the Renaissance and Enlightenment, individual autonomy; from the revolutionary era, liberal democracy, from the modern era science and technology. But the Grand Liberal Narrative was possible only if you ignored great chunks of Greek, Roman, medieval, and early modern European civilization. The Greeks, Romans, and early Christians were not protoliberals.

Inherent in the oldest recoverable meanings of the word West were the idea of movement toward or beyond the (western) horizon and the idea of sunset, evening, the fall of night. The English word west, unchanged since Saxon times, and its identical cognates in German and Scandinavian was an adverb of direction, as in "to go west." It derived from the Proto-Germanic *westra, and it, in turn, from an Indo-European word, *wes-tero, which was the comparative form of an adverb, *wes-, meaning "down, away." West thus originally meant "farther down, farther away," then, by extension, "something farther down and farther away; the direction of something farther down and farther away." From the Indo-European root *wes- also derived, or so linguists held, a word *wesperos, "evening," which became in classical Greek hesperos or hespera, which meant both "evening" and "west." This joint meaning provided rich echoes in classical mythology. For example, the Hesperides, the daughters of evening, lived on the western ocean, where they kept a tree of golden apples given by the goddess of Earth as a wedding present to Hera, the bride of Zeus, father of gods and men. One of the twelve labors of Hercules was to slay the dragon that guarded the tree and take the apples. The magical apple tree in the West appeared also in Celtic mythology, on the island of Emain Ablach, the home of the sea god Manannán mac Lir.

To the ancient Egyptians, to go west was to die, for beyond the sunset lay the kingdom of the dead. The evening sun, Atum, entered that kingdom and moved through it beneath the earth, to be reborn as the morning sun, Chepre, in the east. The two categories, death and rebirth, belonged to different kinds of time. The death that brought all beings, including the sun, to the "beautiful West" led out of time as change into time as permanent result -- jet -- a space in which the deceased continued their life without change, in eternal duration. The Celts also had stories about otherworldly realms beyond the West, such as the story of the journey of the hero Bran to Emain Ablach, or the Voyage of St. Brendan, one of the most popular tales throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. Tir na n-Óg, the land of youth, was sometimes placed beyond the sunset and could be reached only at the end of a particular kind of voyage, an immram, which was both a voyage in space and a voyage within oneself. At its end, one saw

Beanntaichean àrda is àillidh leacainnean
Sluagh ann an còmhnuidh is còire cleachdainnean
'S aotrom mo cheum a'leum g'amfaicinn
Is fanaidh mi tacan le deòin.

[High mountains with lovely slopes
Folk abiding there whose nature is to be kind
Light is my step when I go leaping to see them
And I will remain a while there willingly.]

Early in European culture, certainly by Roman times, people began associating a different idea with the geographical direction west, and with the sunset, namely, the idea of youth and vigor, the idea that lands to the west were fresher, younger, and more vigorous than those to the east. This idea was related to such myths as those of the apples of the Hesperides or of Emain Ablach, to Tir na n-Óg, and to the story of Bran's voyage to magical realms of pleasure and wonder, but in the classical world it became an idea about the immediate, not the magical, world. This notion was understandable because in the Mediterranean basin it happened to be the case, as it was also in China, that the lands at the eastern end had the older and more established culture, whereas those to the west were more recent, ruder, and less developed. The idea of the West as the direction of youth, innocence, and vigor contradicted the idea of the West as the country of sunset, which could be interpreted metaphorically as decline.

The most famous of all stories associating the West with youth and rebirth was that of King Arthur in the isle of Avalon. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Welshman descended from Bretons, who in the twelfth century retold many of the old Celtic tales about Arthur, the king was fatally wounded at the battle of Camlan, to which he had been treacherously lured by his evil son and dark counterpart, Mordred. His wound doomed him to death in the mundane world, but by divine grace he was transported to Avalon, "the island of apple-trees" in the West, where nine women with magical powers -- counterparts of the Hesperides -- healed the king and allowed him to remain alive in Avalon in a sort of half-state between heaven and earth, ready to return in the final battle of good and evil.

This idea of the West as the region of vigor and youth came into its own in the age of exploration. The other two ideas -- of the West as the region of sunset and decline, and as the goal of travel and yearning, whether mundane or supernatural -- returned to feed the romantic imagination of the nineteenth century and the cultural pessimism of the twentieth. All these ideas suggested a richer heritage that was in some ways as alien to the technocratic, liberal West as any non-Western civilization. As a prolegomenon to recovering some of this heritage, and particularly its Old Western manifestation, this book offers a rediscovery of a different past than that of the simple story of great ideas from Plato to NATO.

From the foregoing it will be clear that both the institutions and the resonances of myth that entered into Western identity were much deeper and broader than what was captured either in the Grand Narrative or in the critical antinarratives. For the same reason, the defense of the West mounted by some of the optimists and by neoconservatives in the 1980s -- the defense, for example, of William Bennett in his Book of Virtues -- was, however well meant, unable to restore the cultural balance. The problem with such defenses, and with the neo-optimist case that ignored the attacks, was that they took the liberal narrative for granted and neglected the multiple and alternative traditions of the West. Thus, they did not answer the critics on solid ground, but on the shifting ground of contemporary cultural debate. But if, as I argue, the Grand Narrative was itself flawed and was itself the basic obstacle to understanding Western identity, these defenses conceded both too much and too little -- they conceded the value of much of the critics' case but did not abandon the Grand Narrative. The defenses were partial. I want to show a broader picture of Western identity to give both defenders and attackers a better target.

Optimists, pessimists, realists, and enemies of the West all had their favorite moments in history, when the particular feature or features they considered as the essence of the West made their appearance. Those who admired or praised the West looked for what I call Magic Moments, those who despised it or foresaw its decline looked for Original Sins. All such groups were engaged in establishing or inventing some particular idea of the West to suit their interests. In the late twentieth century, the searches both for Magic Moments and Original Sins took place against the background of the Grand Narrative. What did this narrative look like?

Copyright © 1998 by David Gress

Editorial Reviews

Norman Davies author of Europe: A History The idea of Western civilization is under attack. Some denounce it for racism, elitism, and exclusivism. Others, like myself, think that it presents a false view of European history. But no one interested in history, culture, or education can ignore the conflict. Whether one wants to sling a shot at the ramparts or to stand shoulder to shoulder with the besieged, one has first to ascertain where the battle lines are drawn. David Gress's book, which is written to strengthen the defense, outlines the progress of the siege so far. It can be read with pleasure and profit by participants and spectators alike.

From the Publisher

Can the West survive -- and thrive -- in the third millennium? The answer depends in part on whether the 'chronological mypoia' and 'historical illiteracy' that Mr. Gress warns about worsen. No one has the answer to that question, but From Plato to NATO is a welcome sign that the battle has not been lost. -- National Review

Roger Kimball

An account of the evolution of the idea of the West. . . .Gress' defense. . .of rationality, science, technology, and liberalism is, on its own, worth the price of the book. —The New York Times Book Review

Anthony Gottlieb

Though I liked this book very much, I sometimes wondered if its author quite realized what he was opposed to in writing it....He gives us capsule summaries of a huge range of historical, economic, sociological, religious, and philosophical thought....at times I wished he had arranged his book, as it is encylopedic in scope, in encyclopedic form.
— The New Criterion

James Bowman

Conventional historians, asserts Gress in this original, sweeping study, see Western civilization as a progressive, linear sequence 'from Plato to NATO,' meaning that our modern ideals of freedom and democracy flowed directly from classical Greece. To the contrary, argues Gress, the notion of modern political liberty -- a set of practices and institutions -- took shape between the fifth and eighth centuries in a synthesis of classical, Christian and Germanic cultures. Gress' thesis that the Germanic tribes who invaded the former Roman Empire infused new energy and an ethos of heroic, aristocratic freedom was popular in the U.S. until the early 20th century, but, as he notes, it fell out of favor after two world wars and the experience of Nazism. The real strength of his scholarly inquiry lies in its fertile dialogue with Gibbon, Tocqueville, Goethe, Nietzsche, Marx, Montesquieu, T.S. Eliot, Joseph Campbell and numerous others as he wrestles with Western survival and the concept of Western identity. Arguing that the U.S. remains the bulwark and heartland of democratic liberal Western values, Gress mounts a withering attack on those he considers motley critics of modern capitalism and the West, including Sartre's slavish Stalinism, Toynbee's anti-Americanism, postmodernist nihilists (Jacques Derrida, Jean-Fran ois Lyotard), multiculturalists who assume that no single culture is preferable to any other and 'Singapore school' economists who divorce economic development from political liberty.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This is a must read for every serious student of Western civilization, not only for its argument that Western civilization does not begin with the Greeks but because it invites us to appreciate anew the West's historical faith in reason, democracy, science, capitalism, and the possibility of human progress. (LJ 6/15/98) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

An erudite examination of the history of the West and what this history has meant to both its proponents and opponents. The West is not, for Gress, a fellow at the Danish Institute of International Affairs, simply an idea. Presented as an unblemished history of progress from ancient Greece to the present, this idealized 'Grand Narrative' in its perfection was easy prey for those who would oppose the West; it couldn't possibly live up to its billing. This 'Grand Narrative' was bad history, and Gress attempts to present a better history. He finds that the modern West evolved not as an idea but as a series of practices and institutions, some quite accidental and fortuitous, some tragic. Specifically, he finds the West to be an amalgam of ancient Roman, Christian, and Germanic cultures (the 'Old West') mixed with the Enlightenment creations of liberty, reason, and economic freedom (the 'New West'). The scholarly detail with which the author presents this history is truly impressive. In the end, he concludes that the West of today, while not universal, not a destination at which all nations will or must arrive, is beyond question worth preserving and defending. He has, however, no patience whatsoever for those who would disparage the West. While his history is an intellectual marvel, his depiction of critics of the West consists of caricature and intellectual chicanery. Any criticism of the West is, for Gress, an attack on the whole tradition, so that the anti-Americanism of the Vietnam era simply became reformulated as anti-Westernism, so that "environmentalism" is nothing more than something invented by people to serve an authoritarian agenda. Thus does scholarship become reduced topolemic. Still, despite its flaws, this is a thought-provoking work, whether one is 'for' or 'against' the West.

Kirkus Reviews