This essay is an abridged version of a presentation by Alan Charles Kors on November 13, 2000 to FPRI's InterUniversity Study Group on America and the West, chaired by Professor James Kurth. Dr. Kors is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, Senior Fellow at FPRI, and President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. For information about the Study Group or about our larger body of work on America and the West, contact William Anthony Hay, Executive Director of FPRI's Center for the Study of America and the West, wh@fpri.org or call 215-732-3774, ext. 210.

The willingness to contain Communism, to fight its expansion overtly and covertly, to sacrifice wealth and often lives against its heinous efforts of extension was, with the struggle against Nazism over a much briefer period, the great gift of American taxpayers and the American people to planet Earth. As England under Churchill was in 1940, the United States from 1945 to 1989 was the West, drawing from its values to stand against what was simultaneously its mutant offspring and its antithesis. In the twentieth century, the West met and survived its greatest trial.

On the whole, however, Western intellectuals do not revel in these triumphs. Where is the celebration, and, just as importantly, where is the accounting? The absence of celebration, of teaching the lessons learned, and of demands for accountability is perhaps easily understood on the Left. Convinced that the West above all has been the agent of creating artificial relationships of dominance, subservience, the commodification of human life, and ecocide, Left intellectuals have little interest in objective analysis of the manifest data about societies of voluntary exchange. Nor do they have interest in coming to terms with the slowly and newly released data about the conditions of life and death under the Bolsheviks and their heirs, or in the confirmation and disconfirmation of various theories in the outcome of the Cold War (let alone, given their contemporary concerns, in analysis of ecological or gender politics under Communist or, indeed, third-world regimes). Less obvious, but equally striking, in some ways, has been the absence of celebration on so much of the intellectual Right, because it is not at all certain something worth calling Western civilization did, in fact, survive the twentieth century.

The view that Western civilization has ended has had various incarnations, with the most sensitive souls of many epochs imagining themselves to be the last bearers of the Western torch. One needs perspective in such things: the question, in many ways, was more compelling when Athens fell; when Christian Rome was sacked by barbarians; when the Norsemen ravaged settled Europe; when feudal warlords reigned unchecked; when, at the end of the first millennium, all signs indicated a divine disfavor that seemed to presage the end of the world; when the Black Death left soul and society without mooring. Indeed, imagine the question posed to Catholic and Protestant apologists of the sixteenth century, viewing each other's religions as the Antichrist and seeing Western Christendom rent first in two and then into a multitude of competing sects. How fragile, if not spent, the West seemed during the religious civil wars, or, indeed, during the devastation of the Thirty Years War. There were lamentations in profusion during the Terror, the decades of Revolutionary and then Napoleonic Wars, and again, with gravitas, there were the inward and outward sermons on the West uttered on the slaughterfields of World War I, or at Auschwitz, or in the Gulag.