Great article, I am saving it for future reference as it may become a standard text. At least it deserves so. Of course, being a dyed-in-the-wool old-fashioned liberal, I disagree with many things; I still believe the enlightenment values of human dignity and freedom of thought have universal appeal, as shown by the fact that many patriotic Chinese are happy to bring their money and their offspring away from the party's reach. On the other hand, maybe Spengler was right with his pessimistic view that in the end stage of civilizations there is disenchantment with liberal values and a tendency of the egalitarian masses to flock to "caesarian" rule by a strongman - we can see that in many Western countries, alas!
So many topics that need to be their own stand alone articles. Perhaps a collection of essays into a book needs to be done. My one critique is that you are taking Rubio far too seriously. He's not an intellectual with a vision, he's just playing one on TV (and in politics). So examining what he says, what it really means or doesn't mean, its connection or lack of connection to reality... He is not interested in any of that. He's just pretending because he thinks it's about power. "full of sound and fury..." Your very earnest big brains are wasted on his dalliances with being power-adjacent. On his own, he will not lead any significant constituency in America to do much of anything. He may be destructively influential right now, but it's his right to claim a bunch of hollow nothing declaring with whatever huffs he can muster. More disturbing is Mark Carney, as Ben Rhodes critiqued during his recent Ezra interview and when he named From the Ruins as a book rec. Here is someone serious but whose principles are at odds and once again displays the foolishness of our efforts at "rule of law" or post-Westphalian whatever notions of civilizational order...some idea where we want conflicts bounded, isolated even, so as not to spread violence with yet more violence that leads to endless justifications over endless wars until one strongman appears to settle all scores by sufficiently scaring the shit out of enough folks that they won't resist. Or just that people are exhausted from their own endless nonsense. This East v West Civilizational comparison stuff is a lot of roostering. No one will win, despite the many ways in which we deconstruct the underlying racism/prejudice/bias/bigotry in play. The more transcendent question is which civilization will provide "the good life" to their citizens? (and to take it further, can we find a path of synergy or win-win, the path of "AND" not "OR") And that question is now being better answered by China in ways that used to display that it was "The West" winning out. UK and USA citizens are now worse off on average, with other EU citizens tottering on the precipice. You know the details. It's quite stunning. China had nothing to do with it. The governments/leaders of "The West" did it to themselves all on their own. Freewill got them there. Let's not forget that "shipping jobs overseas to China" was a choice, an offer, for which "Western Freewill" could have said "no." In any case, you know the entirety of the details. Not disputing there isn't much to discuss about what "civilization" means to East v West and all that you analyze here... just that bringing Rubio into it should be circumstantial. ;)
Fantastic article Kaiser. Well done. Think about expanding it into a book - along with The Great Reckoning and the one on Berlin’s pluralism. Is there an audible version of this article?
Very stimulating, and I think the contrast between offensive and defensive (and the failure of so many pundits and even scholars to make the distinction) is a huge contribution to our understanding of what's going on both intellectually and politically, and how the two get confused.
But I want to go back to the relationship between the Cold War and Western Civ (I deliberately use the nickname here). As a freshman at the height of the Cold War in 1964-65, I was required to take a three-quarter course in Western Civilization (which we often just called Civ), and that more than anything else turned me from pursuing a career in astrophysics (a decision I sometimes regret--I still love astrophysics and cosmology) to one in the sciences humaines. Our textbook came out of Columbia, and it was called, rather incoherently, «Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West» or ICCW. It consisted of texts in a chronological sequence that was artificially woven into a thread, beginning with Gilgamesh and ending up with--not sure, but not Heidegger. It purported to trace a millennia-long tradition (sound familiar?) of ideas, and went light on the political implications, meaning what we freshmen missed the current interpretation that it was propaganda for "our side," especially since it included a reasonable amount of illiberal ideas, beginning with Plato, and including Machiavelli and others. We were just interested in the pure ideas, and argued Plato over clandestinely purchased beer in late-night dorm-room bull sessions. Whether we were bamboozled into thinking of philosophy as anti-politics is an ex post facto question. It never came up because we were--naively for sure, but we were only 17 or 18--in the ideas "themselves."
Fast forward to 1987, when I became director of the Honors Program at the University of Washington, about to be promoted to Professor of Anthropology, but always specializing in the Sinophone world. The Honors Program was all about Western civ (writ small), with required courses on humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. The absence of other "civs" was glaring to me, but not to the generation above me. So I changed the required curriculum to have one year-long sequence on Western Civ and one quarter on "some-other civ." Over the next few years that course covered whatever "civ" we could find the professors to teach. The point is, at that juncture I still believed in something called "Western civ," as a historical sequence of people who wrote in response to their predecessors. The Cold War wasn't quite over yet (though Gorbachev had set the gears in motion), and anyway, Marx was Western by that definition. I didn't see anything wrong, or anything necessarily political, about tracing those lines of guys who wrote about what their predecessors wrote about what their predecessors wrote. Whether it was universal or particular didn't matter because the mainstream of scholars and pundits in that tradition saw the only competition as coming from the not-yet-quite extinguished Marxist-Leninist threat, which in many ways was just an extension of some of the illiberal parts of the tradition that we had read back in the ICCW textbook. In a sense, the whole thrust of the curriculum in the 1960s and in the 1980s was particularistic--tracing a tradition that was consciously particularistic even as it was covertly universalistic, to radical critics, almost nothing but a justification for all the evils of colonialism.
So the question is, how did we get from these hidden meanings to the overt and explicitly political--even belligerent-- ones of today?
The arc you describe isn't much different from my own, as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, where we had a fantastic course called "Special Programs 44A/B/C/D" which featured an historian and an English/literature professor lecturing in tandem. We'd read the Homeric epics and hear lectures on Schliemann and Troy, on the Mycenaean world, etc — all the way up through the Enlightenment. Not quite Plato to NATO, but that was the gist. This was the 80s and we'd not yet seen a revolt. That we were still in the Cold War is, I believe, a very salient fact. I still very much believed in something called "Western Civ" too, and didn't at the time link it ideological rivalry with the USSR, but have since come to. There's a marvelous book on culture in the West during the Cold War by the New Yorker writer Louis Menand called "Free World" Art and Thought in the Cold War" which I read several years ago and which drew the connection more explicitly for me. But this is a fantastic question you raise. I'll give it some thought and respond when I've thought it through. Thanks, Steve, for engaging with the piece!!
A lot of thought provoking ideas in one essay. It's well written and you communicate very well. Is your Chinese as good as your English? If you wrote this essay in Chinese (not just translated), how would it differ, and how would it be received in China?
Thanks. No, my Chinese is nowhere close to as good as my English. I would struggle even in spoken Chinese to convey what I’ve written here: I just don’t have a sophisticated vocabulary in Chinese at all. I think were it to be faithfully translated it would be received quite differently by different Chinese readers. The more cosmopolitan liberal intellectuals would probably agree broadly — except the ones who are outright critics of the contemporary Party leadership, who would say that I don’t go far enough, and that China in fact is already well on its way to becoming an “offensive” civilizational state, which is a claim I deliberately resist making as I don’t believe it (yet) qualifies, though I’m open to the idea it might. I think there are many who would believe this to be a bunch of academic hooey: just hairsplitting that doesn’t clearly differentiate between "nation” and “civilization” in a meaningful way.
I love Tony P's question, which leads to a very mildly critical question about the essay. Namely, how transparent is the equivalency of Civilization and 文明? In the beginning of the essay, you briefly trace the etymology of 文明, and show how it has different roots from "civilization." Because of that, I have been tempted to translate it as "literization," since it has little to do, etymologically or referentially, with the ideas of citizenship and ultimately of urbanism that are contained in "civilization." As Levenson himself commented, it's all about books. But then in the latter part of the essay, you treat the two categories of universal and particular civilizational claims (or offensive and defensive, which almost map on to universal and particular, but not quite) as if they both translate transparently from Chinese to English and back again. But if you had to write the essay in Chinese, would the experience confirm or dispute the transparent equivalence that you assume in the latter parts of this essay?
I'm going to post a separate comment about "Western Civ."
Oooffff 😅 this is not an essay, it's a little book. I used the audio version and your essay accompanied me through making lunch, serving, eating, then through cleaning, washing, and finally organizing.
I'm glad Taiwan was mentioned near the conclusion, and it was short and sweet. Whenever people argue with me about Taiwan, I remind them not to only look at China since 1949, but at least see China from the 19th century.
Yes, it was a civil war, and the global position dominated by U.S.-led Western norms paused China and Taiwan from moving beyond their colonial positions.
In this one-and-a-half-hour long essay, you explained China in an unbiased way without framing yourself as Sinocentric. Your repeated comparisons of Chinese indigenous philosophies with Western philosophies really helped visualize the evolutionary movement of the Chinese mindset shifting, adopting, and integrating with the environment.
This essay helped solidify some of my own understanding. It also helped me question difficult issues and answer questions that sparked deeper thinking.
I was born and raised in Nanjing, China until age 10. I came to NYC and have been here for 36 years. My grandparents on both sides, my mother and father, were all shaped by China's last 100 years.
Recently I was counseling a millennial friend who lives in China and is at odds with her "old school" parents who make her question her own morals. She said her parents refuse to revisit the necessary past and choose to close their eyes and just move forward without worrying about the collateral damage they are creating.
I have the disability Tourette’s syndrome, which has been trending for the past two weeks after BAFTA and BBC media context without consent created what feels like a "race war" centered around two groups. A disability community event, overly represented by white voices, asking for empathy and sympathy from the Black American community during what has felt like the worst Black History Month in recent memory.
Both marginalized groups have experienced victimization and trauma through dehumanizing narratives. But comparing hundreds of years of systemic racism with mental or physical disability is almost impossible. Solidarity is not automatic.
In your essay you talked about how Chinese civilization and Western civilization often use the same words to describe their struggles, but the meanings don't always translate. That doesn't mean the two sides cannot coexist.
Clearly America feels like it is at its last leg, and Rubio's message invoking "civilization" could not be clearer.
Thank you for putting together this thought-provoking essay. Even though I finished listening, my mental gears are still clicking.
“Civilization” as used in this context is an abstract concept, perhaps useful for explanations. It’s sleight-of-hand magic to conjure it to life, then deploy it as a rhetorical weapon. People like JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Stephen Miller use the concept of civilization to exclude people from being “real Americans” if they have the wrong religion or wrong appearance (I won’t say “race,” another conjured thing).
You might argue that civilization is real enough if it’s an effective rhetorical device. Following the thesis of Karen Fields and Barbara Fields in the book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, the effects are real even if the rhetoric is nonsense. Also consider the large diaspora communities from China and India in the west, despite what you would describe as distinctly different civilizations in their original countries. If civilization were such a powerful force, how could so many switch to another civilization?
In contrast to the US, China uses “civilization” to support the unification of different cultures into one nation. I don’t understand why this is necessary, but it seems odd to toss the twists and turns of history in the region that is now the PRC into the notion of a single civilization.
I don’t see how this notion of civilization advances your intellectual project. (Correct me if this is wrong: liberal democracy is not the only nor necessarily the best way to organize a society. And, please, dear Westerners, shed your hubris when your societies have so many problems that they refuse to address or even acknowledge.) I wish you the best on your intellectual journey, although I think you will ultimately find it unsatisfying. For one thing, glance around at your fellow travelers.
While you’re not fond of Francis Fukuyama, he recently published a short video on Rubio’s civilization called “What is Western Civilization?” on his Frankly Fukuyama YouTube channel that you might find useful.
great article on an important subject. I would love to discuss this with my teenage (sino-German) children with whom we discuss cultural identity a lot. I think the text is a bit challenging, though. Would you consider creating a more accessible (maybe in parts?) version of it? (I asked Claude but don't find the result very satisfying)
Great article, I am saving it for future reference as it may become a standard text. At least it deserves so. Of course, being a dyed-in-the-wool old-fashioned liberal, I disagree with many things; I still believe the enlightenment values of human dignity and freedom of thought have universal appeal, as shown by the fact that many patriotic Chinese are happy to bring their money and their offspring away from the party's reach. On the other hand, maybe Spengler was right with his pessimistic view that in the end stage of civilizations there is disenchantment with liberal values and a tendency of the egalitarian masses to flock to "caesarian" rule by a strongman - we can see that in many Western countries, alas!
So many topics that need to be their own stand alone articles. Perhaps a collection of essays into a book needs to be done. My one critique is that you are taking Rubio far too seriously. He's not an intellectual with a vision, he's just playing one on TV (and in politics). So examining what he says, what it really means or doesn't mean, its connection or lack of connection to reality... He is not interested in any of that. He's just pretending because he thinks it's about power. "full of sound and fury..." Your very earnest big brains are wasted on his dalliances with being power-adjacent. On his own, he will not lead any significant constituency in America to do much of anything. He may be destructively influential right now, but it's his right to claim a bunch of hollow nothing declaring with whatever huffs he can muster. More disturbing is Mark Carney, as Ben Rhodes critiqued during his recent Ezra interview and when he named From the Ruins as a book rec. Here is someone serious but whose principles are at odds and once again displays the foolishness of our efforts at "rule of law" or post-Westphalian whatever notions of civilizational order...some idea where we want conflicts bounded, isolated even, so as not to spread violence with yet more violence that leads to endless justifications over endless wars until one strongman appears to settle all scores by sufficiently scaring the shit out of enough folks that they won't resist. Or just that people are exhausted from their own endless nonsense. This East v West Civilizational comparison stuff is a lot of roostering. No one will win, despite the many ways in which we deconstruct the underlying racism/prejudice/bias/bigotry in play. The more transcendent question is which civilization will provide "the good life" to their citizens? (and to take it further, can we find a path of synergy or win-win, the path of "AND" not "OR") And that question is now being better answered by China in ways that used to display that it was "The West" winning out. UK and USA citizens are now worse off on average, with other EU citizens tottering on the precipice. You know the details. It's quite stunning. China had nothing to do with it. The governments/leaders of "The West" did it to themselves all on their own. Freewill got them there. Let's not forget that "shipping jobs overseas to China" was a choice, an offer, for which "Western Freewill" could have said "no." In any case, you know the entirety of the details. Not disputing there isn't much to discuss about what "civilization" means to East v West and all that you analyze here... just that bringing Rubio into it should be circumstantial. ;)
Excellent ~ among your most insightful work!
Fantastic article Kaiser. Well done. Think about expanding it into a book - along with The Great Reckoning and the one on Berlin’s pluralism. Is there an audible version of this article?
Not yet but I will record one soon! Thanks!
Very stimulating, and I think the contrast between offensive and defensive (and the failure of so many pundits and even scholars to make the distinction) is a huge contribution to our understanding of what's going on both intellectually and politically, and how the two get confused.
But I want to go back to the relationship between the Cold War and Western Civ (I deliberately use the nickname here). As a freshman at the height of the Cold War in 1964-65, I was required to take a three-quarter course in Western Civilization (which we often just called Civ), and that more than anything else turned me from pursuing a career in astrophysics (a decision I sometimes regret--I still love astrophysics and cosmology) to one in the sciences humaines. Our textbook came out of Columbia, and it was called, rather incoherently, «Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West» or ICCW. It consisted of texts in a chronological sequence that was artificially woven into a thread, beginning with Gilgamesh and ending up with--not sure, but not Heidegger. It purported to trace a millennia-long tradition (sound familiar?) of ideas, and went light on the political implications, meaning what we freshmen missed the current interpretation that it was propaganda for "our side," especially since it included a reasonable amount of illiberal ideas, beginning with Plato, and including Machiavelli and others. We were just interested in the pure ideas, and argued Plato over clandestinely purchased beer in late-night dorm-room bull sessions. Whether we were bamboozled into thinking of philosophy as anti-politics is an ex post facto question. It never came up because we were--naively for sure, but we were only 17 or 18--in the ideas "themselves."
Fast forward to 1987, when I became director of the Honors Program at the University of Washington, about to be promoted to Professor of Anthropology, but always specializing in the Sinophone world. The Honors Program was all about Western civ (writ small), with required courses on humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. The absence of other "civs" was glaring to me, but not to the generation above me. So I changed the required curriculum to have one year-long sequence on Western Civ and one quarter on "some-other civ." Over the next few years that course covered whatever "civ" we could find the professors to teach. The point is, at that juncture I still believed in something called "Western civ," as a historical sequence of people who wrote in response to their predecessors. The Cold War wasn't quite over yet (though Gorbachev had set the gears in motion), and anyway, Marx was Western by that definition. I didn't see anything wrong, or anything necessarily political, about tracing those lines of guys who wrote about what their predecessors wrote about what their predecessors wrote. Whether it was universal or particular didn't matter because the mainstream of scholars and pundits in that tradition saw the only competition as coming from the not-yet-quite extinguished Marxist-Leninist threat, which in many ways was just an extension of some of the illiberal parts of the tradition that we had read back in the ICCW textbook. In a sense, the whole thrust of the curriculum in the 1960s and in the 1980s was particularistic--tracing a tradition that was consciously particularistic even as it was covertly universalistic, to radical critics, almost nothing but a justification for all the evils of colonialism.
So the question is, how did we get from these hidden meanings to the overt and explicitly political--even belligerent-- ones of today?
The arc you describe isn't much different from my own, as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, where we had a fantastic course called "Special Programs 44A/B/C/D" which featured an historian and an English/literature professor lecturing in tandem. We'd read the Homeric epics and hear lectures on Schliemann and Troy, on the Mycenaean world, etc — all the way up through the Enlightenment. Not quite Plato to NATO, but that was the gist. This was the 80s and we'd not yet seen a revolt. That we were still in the Cold War is, I believe, a very salient fact. I still very much believed in something called "Western Civ" too, and didn't at the time link it ideological rivalry with the USSR, but have since come to. There's a marvelous book on culture in the West during the Cold War by the New Yorker writer Louis Menand called "Free World" Art and Thought in the Cold War" which I read several years ago and which drew the connection more explicitly for me. But this is a fantastic question you raise. I'll give it some thought and respond when I've thought it through. Thanks, Steve, for engaging with the piece!!
I enjoyed reading this. Lots of things to think about.
Excellent. Thank you. I write a lot on this subject and your post helps me hugely.
A lot of thought provoking ideas in one essay. It's well written and you communicate very well. Is your Chinese as good as your English? If you wrote this essay in Chinese (not just translated), how would it differ, and how would it be received in China?
Thanks. No, my Chinese is nowhere close to as good as my English. I would struggle even in spoken Chinese to convey what I’ve written here: I just don’t have a sophisticated vocabulary in Chinese at all. I think were it to be faithfully translated it would be received quite differently by different Chinese readers. The more cosmopolitan liberal intellectuals would probably agree broadly — except the ones who are outright critics of the contemporary Party leadership, who would say that I don’t go far enough, and that China in fact is already well on its way to becoming an “offensive” civilizational state, which is a claim I deliberately resist making as I don’t believe it (yet) qualifies, though I’m open to the idea it might. I think there are many who would believe this to be a bunch of academic hooey: just hairsplitting that doesn’t clearly differentiate between "nation” and “civilization” in a meaningful way.
I love Tony P's question, which leads to a very mildly critical question about the essay. Namely, how transparent is the equivalency of Civilization and 文明? In the beginning of the essay, you briefly trace the etymology of 文明, and show how it has different roots from "civilization." Because of that, I have been tempted to translate it as "literization," since it has little to do, etymologically or referentially, with the ideas of citizenship and ultimately of urbanism that are contained in "civilization." As Levenson himself commented, it's all about books. But then in the latter part of the essay, you treat the two categories of universal and particular civilizational claims (or offensive and defensive, which almost map on to universal and particular, but not quite) as if they both translate transparently from Chinese to English and back again. But if you had to write the essay in Chinese, would the experience confirm or dispute the transparent equivalence that you assume in the latter parts of this essay?
I'm going to post a separate comment about "Western Civ."
Oooffff 😅 this is not an essay, it's a little book. I used the audio version and your essay accompanied me through making lunch, serving, eating, then through cleaning, washing, and finally organizing.
I'm glad Taiwan was mentioned near the conclusion, and it was short and sweet. Whenever people argue with me about Taiwan, I remind them not to only look at China since 1949, but at least see China from the 19th century.
Yes, it was a civil war, and the global position dominated by U.S.-led Western norms paused China and Taiwan from moving beyond their colonial positions.
In this one-and-a-half-hour long essay, you explained China in an unbiased way without framing yourself as Sinocentric. Your repeated comparisons of Chinese indigenous philosophies with Western philosophies really helped visualize the evolutionary movement of the Chinese mindset shifting, adopting, and integrating with the environment.
This essay helped solidify some of my own understanding. It also helped me question difficult issues and answer questions that sparked deeper thinking.
I was born and raised in Nanjing, China until age 10. I came to NYC and have been here for 36 years. My grandparents on both sides, my mother and father, were all shaped by China's last 100 years.
Recently I was counseling a millennial friend who lives in China and is at odds with her "old school" parents who make her question her own morals. She said her parents refuse to revisit the necessary past and choose to close their eyes and just move forward without worrying about the collateral damage they are creating.
I have the disability Tourette’s syndrome, which has been trending for the past two weeks after BAFTA and BBC media context without consent created what feels like a "race war" centered around two groups. A disability community event, overly represented by white voices, asking for empathy and sympathy from the Black American community during what has felt like the worst Black History Month in recent memory.
Both marginalized groups have experienced victimization and trauma through dehumanizing narratives. But comparing hundreds of years of systemic racism with mental or physical disability is almost impossible. Solidarity is not automatic.
In your essay you talked about how Chinese civilization and Western civilization often use the same words to describe their struggles, but the meanings don't always translate. That doesn't mean the two sides cannot coexist.
Clearly America feels like it is at its last leg, and Rubio's message invoking "civilization" could not be clearer.
Thank you for putting together this thought-provoking essay. Even though I finished listening, my mental gears are still clicking.
isn’t this true about india too
Yes I discussed India in the essay.
"Western civilization is the only civilization that has attempted to become universal." - AI
“Civilization” as used in this context is an abstract concept, perhaps useful for explanations. It’s sleight-of-hand magic to conjure it to life, then deploy it as a rhetorical weapon. People like JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Stephen Miller use the concept of civilization to exclude people from being “real Americans” if they have the wrong religion or wrong appearance (I won’t say “race,” another conjured thing).
You might argue that civilization is real enough if it’s an effective rhetorical device. Following the thesis of Karen Fields and Barbara Fields in the book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, the effects are real even if the rhetoric is nonsense. Also consider the large diaspora communities from China and India in the west, despite what you would describe as distinctly different civilizations in their original countries. If civilization were such a powerful force, how could so many switch to another civilization?
In contrast to the US, China uses “civilization” to support the unification of different cultures into one nation. I don’t understand why this is necessary, but it seems odd to toss the twists and turns of history in the region that is now the PRC into the notion of a single civilization.
I don’t see how this notion of civilization advances your intellectual project. (Correct me if this is wrong: liberal democracy is not the only nor necessarily the best way to organize a society. And, please, dear Westerners, shed your hubris when your societies have so many problems that they refuse to address or even acknowledge.) I wish you the best on your intellectual journey, although I think you will ultimately find it unsatisfying. For one thing, glance around at your fellow travelers.
While you’re not fond of Francis Fukuyama, he recently published a short video on Rubio’s civilization called “What is Western Civilization?” on his Frankly Fukuyama YouTube channel that you might find useful.
I hope you’re enjoying Beijing!
I actually really like Francis Fukuyama, especially his books "The Origins of Political Order" and "Political Order and Political Decay"
Excellent, thought provoking piece. Thank you.
great article on an important subject. I would love to discuss this with my teenage (sino-German) children with whom we discuss cultural identity a lot. I think the text is a bit challenging, though. Would you consider creating a more accessible (maybe in parts?) version of it? (I asked Claude but don't find the result very satisfying)
Sure! I can try my hand at that!
I had a longer comment, it starts with "I loved this text" but it ends badly ;))
Here: https://e1luka.substack.com/p/china-in-search-of-narratives