We do not defend one civilization over another out of irrational passion. The West is not a football jersey we wear to compensate for our insecurities or our lack of personal identity. It is something closer to what the wise G. K. Chesterton said: “We are not asked to take off our heads when we enter the Church, but we are asked to take off our hats.” We do not adhere to Western values out of blind faith. We do so because there are a million reasons behind them.
The Christian West is undeniably better than everything else; proof of that is that, for centuries, much of the non-Western world has tried to invade our countries.
We defend the West because we believe it represents the most advanced and prosperous moral, political, and social order in the history of civilization. Because we believe it is better. The Christian West is undeniably better than everything else; proof of that is that, for centuries, much of the non-Western world has tried to invade our countries. I do not want to jump to conclusions, but I doubt they are fleeing absolute happiness. (RELATED: One Way or Another: The Insanely Easy Choice Facing America on Immigration)
With Scruton, we can argue that the West brought together, in its cultural and political inheritance, the rule of law, the separation of powers, individual rights, representative democracy, freedom of expression, modern science and technology, the market economy, and the abolition of slavery, among many other things.
Nor are we parrots repeating slogans. We do not believe the West is perfect. That would be like believing democracy is a perfect system. Democracy is often nothing more than the best idea we have come up with to avoid having to shoot each other every time we want to get rid of a cretin in government, which is incredibly tiring and stains your clothes terribly. (RELATED: When the ‘World-City’ Votes Socialist)
The West has experienced wars, harbored atrocious dictatorships, and served as the birthplace of a great many foolish ideas, including the wokism that ravaged civilization in this century. But what has made this civilization great is its ability to recognize those deviations and try to correct them, or at the very least condemn them. Many of the misguided ideas the West has produced are themselves products of freedom. And freedom is, for us, an unquestionable good. We embrace it knowing exactly what it exposes us to, and we prefer it that way. That is one of the greatest distinctions between the West and other civilizations and cultures.
In my mind, the West is a cathedral. Its foundations are laid in Greece and Rome, resting upon the thought of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca. Christianity raised those foundations, projecting them toward the heavens like beams of light and giving the cathedral greater height through saints such as Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Nothing in the development of Western civilization remained the same after it embraced Christianity, after the cathedral rose higher.
The West would not embody this continuous search for beauty and truth without Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo Galilei, or Isaac Newton. The pages of constitutional liberalism were written by authors such as John Locke and Montesquieu, while the history of politics and morality would never have reached its full stature without the contributions of Burke, Kirk, and Scruton, helping us understand the passage of time, the bloody novelties of history, and the modern age. It would, of course, be absurd to boast of the Western economic model without Adam Smith, or without the struggle of von Mises, Hayek, and Friedman to keep government from becoming a totalitarian monster crushing the individual.
Culture is not some forgotten supplement tucked away at the back of a newspaper. It is one of the central pillars of Western Civilization. In literary terms, the West is Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Dickens, and, of course, from distant Russia, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Closer to our own time, we need T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, Tolkien, Orwell, and Lewis to know ourselves better, to understand one another, and sometimes even to laugh.
The West is the scientific method, the steam engine, and the Internet. The West is religious liberty, property rights, and equality before the law. The West is judicial independence, limited government, and representative democracy. The West is free enterprise, international trade, and the rule of law. The West is the dignity of every human person, the family, gratitude toward the generations that came before us, and individual responsibility. The West is Roman law, medieval universities, cathedrals, and the Industrial Revolution. The West is The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, and Don Quixote. The West is the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo’s Pietà, Velázquez’s Las Meninas, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The West is also The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the golden age of Hollywood.
The West is the outright rejection of Soviet central planning, collectivization, and repression. The West is the opposite of the destruction of cultural heritage and the persecution of intellectuals. The West represents the antithesis of the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia, Nazi Germany, present-day North Korea, the revolutionary dictatorships of 20th- and 21st-century Latin America, Islamic terrorism anywhere and at any time, and Taliban Afghanistan.
No. Not all cultures are of equal value. Not all ideas deserve equal respect. Not all the barbarism found in the non-Western world can be explained away by the injustices suffered by those who commit it. The West, too, could have become its worst self. It could have remained trapped in Nazi barbarism, embraced bloody revolutions, or failed to resist the Muslim invasions. Instead, it chose to strive for its best self. Others did not. Other cultures, like the one Zohran Mamdani admires, struggle every day to return to their worst. That is why the following statement is neither arrogant nor provocative, but calm and firm: the West is better. And we should be proud enough to defend it to the end, just as our ancestors did.
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