The Golden Thread: A Manifesto

by Allen C. Guelzo

We live in a time of civilizational crisis. And if that sounds just a little too frantic to be true, simply listen to the voices all around us: a “process of moral disarmament … consciously seeks to undermine and explicitly reject the civilizational attributes of the Western world,” says one. “Western civilization is in crisis,” say another. “The foundations on which it was built are being systematically undermined by the various ideologies that saturate the cultural environment.” And yet another complains,“Any student of ancient, medieval or modern history will see the obvious decay in all Western institutions across the world.”

How has this sense of crisis occurred? At its most innocent, it grows out of a certain induced humility. In our world of hyper-communications, we know exactly how big the world is, and in the West, we feel we must accommodate all of it, to do it justice. That, in turn, shrinks the attention we pay to our own civilization.

Less innocent is the ideological argument that we can ignore anything called civilization because what we call civilization is really nothing more than a decorative “superstructure”; all real history is supposed to be about the movement of economic forces and the acquisition of power.

But at its worst, our civilizational crisis grows from a frank and open hostility to Western civilization, as the West is blamed for a host of evils – genocide, colonialism, imperialism, slavery, racism, sexism (and all as though these have not been present in other places and times).

And let me say bluntly that this accusing finger has some justification for pointing. In the previous century, the Western nations – which is to say, Europe and European Russia, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand – were the center of two hideous world wars, a complex of genocidal totalitarianisms, and no small amount of shameless exploitation of people elsewhere. It has not been difficult to amass a bill of particulars for which the West has been held responsible, and which has generated cascades of guilt and pity among Westerners who imagine that repudiating their civilization will shrive them of blame.

But will it? For one thing, every other civilization for which we have any record committed atrocities – and some continue to commit them – on equal scales with the West. But it is even more important to realize that it is not the West’s civilization which is to blame for these evils; rather, civilization is the very thing which kept those evils from metastasizing into horrors even more grotesque and universal.

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The term civilization surfaced in English usage as early as 1601, where it meant “to

bring out from rudeness, to educate to civility.” But the root of the word is Latin – civis – so that civilization is actually a social and legal process which refers to behavior in cities, where, unlike nomadic or pastoral environments, people had to find ways of getting along with others at close quarters.

What this has produced is an idea of civilization which embraces two basic things: a system of customs, practices, beliefs that bind a society together over long periods of time, and what we may call a breathing space, apart from work and war in which people think, act, design and create.

In writing The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, James Hankins and I speak of a Western tradition because we think of the civilization of the West as really a composite of several successive civilizations. We begin with the civilization of classical Greece, and then follow how Rome and its world continued and added to that, to be followed in turn by the civilization of medieval Christendom, which is in turn followed by the civilization of the Enlightenment.

This Western tradition, in its several layers, has been unique in a number of its components:

· its affection for language and literature. The civilizations which compose the Western tradition have been remarkable for their reverence for the written word, and in languages such as Greek and Latin which have possessed a flexibility and ease which have allowed an extraordinary depth of expression.

· its respect for debate and especially philosophical and ethical debate, based on a natural law which exists above human decision-making and is thus applicable to all.

· its curiosity about science and knowledge, in which it is understood that the goal of enquiry is truth, and the goal of education the accumulation of that truth.

· its submission to government and law, recognizing that humanity must co-operate to survive, but that co-operation cannot ultimately be merely one powerful individual’s imposition of that power.

· its passion for the arts and music, in which it is understood that beauty is ennobling and is kin to truth.

· its cultivation of faith and spirituality, based on monotheism, as having an authority which rises above the temptation to tyranny.

All of these civilizational characteristics were transplanted from Europe to what emerged as the United States, so that we may say that American history is both a manifestation and a testimony to the durability of the transplants. Perhaps even more, the colonies which became the United States invariably began as communities of cives – as groups of citizens living in cities. John Winthrop’s Boston was to be a city set on a hill; William Penn’s Philadelphia was named for the one city in St. John’s Revelation which earned only praise and no blame; America’s most famous national hymn speaks of its alabaster cities gleaming, “undimmed by human tears.”

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The importance of these components of the Western tradition may become clearer if we contrast them with civilization’s opposite, which is barbarism. We sometimes imagine that the barbarian is an individual who lives in a cave and wears skins. Actually, one can be dressed on Savile Row and still be a barbarian, because barbarism is essentially the worship of power above all the things we have described as characteristics of civilization. Barbarism prevails wherever humanity decides to give first place to the loss of self-control, to the pursuit of destructive religions or even anti-religions, to a contempt and indifference to the past, to ugliness in art, literature, music, and architecture, and to an obsession with technology at the expense of real science.

Close kin with barbarism, and another of civilization’s true enemies, is tribalism, which regards all outsiders as the enemy. A real civilization invites everyone into it who wants to live a more civilized life, anyone who adopts its common identity, affirms its highest ideals, and prays to its gods, be they religious or political or artistic. Tribalists, like barbarians, hate civilizations and are parasitic on them. Civilization is inclusive of all who cherish its program.

The voices which have been the most anxious about the threat to Western civilization are those which have seen how the modern age has begun to show signs of barbarism and tribalism – by the corruption of science, by the abandonment of natural law, by the glorification of perverted religion, by its fracturing into ever-tinier communities of interest, by its sheer pessimism. We see The Golden Thread as a call to remembrance and renovation of the marvelous things the West has accomplished: its personal freedom and autonomy on an unprecedented scale, its prosperity and freedom from age-old plagues, its gift of identity and purpose, and its arts and music which offer profound avenues to self-understanding.

And we are eager to do so because of one other great aspect of the Western tradition: its resilience. There have been moments before of deep failure in the Western tradition, after the fall of Rome, after the Great Plague of the 14^th century, after the religious wars of the 16^th and 17^th centuries. But even in the depths of those pits, the Western tradition has displayed a resilience, a capacity for renewal, which has rescued it and the nations of the West from civilizational eclipse.

The Golden Thread encodes that resilience even in its title, for the original ‘golden thread’ was what (in classical Greek mythology) led Theseus, after his defeat of the Minotaur, out of the Minotaur’s cave and back to the light of day. Through the two volumes of The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition and its companion, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, we invite you to join us in rediscovering and revitalizing that tradition, and bringing us to the light of a new day.