Western civilization 101

Civilization as a technological system

The concept of civilization in the West recognizes the origins of the term in civitas and civilité as the development of civil society and, in particular, the expression of the history of sympathy, manners and etiquette as a basis for the emergence of social and political institutions that regulate human relations as a higher order expression of ethics. With this interpretation the concept of civilization is not primarily seen as a technological system, although technology is indeed part of the concept as part of material culture. Rather civilization, on this view, is primarily assessed on the significance of the rise of abstract and symbolic systems – including writing, religion, philosophy, law, mathematics and those aspects of human endeavour that are the most difficult to research in past civilizations because they require inference from the systems of artifacts or from texts.

There is no doubt that technology considered as a system with its characteristics of autonomy, unity, universality and totalization provide the criteria for ‘progress’ in terms of automation, augmentation and control (Ellul, 1980). It is also clear that the ability to store and process information including writing and coinage was critical to the growth of early human societies (Shin et al., 2020). The Russian physicist Nikolai Kardashev designed a scale for measuring a civilization’s technological level based on the amount of energy it is able to use, differentiating between Type I civilization (Planetary) close to the current level attained on Earth able to harness all the energy from the Earth-Sun system (estimated at 1.74 × 1017 watts); Type II civilization (Stellar) capable of using and channelling the entire radiation output of its star (4 × 1026 watts); Type III civilization (Galactic) harnessing energy at the level of its galaxy (4 × 10³⁷ watts) (Kardashev, 1964; Lemarchand, 1992). The focus on scale levels is useful as there are examples of human civilization undergoing large-scale transitions such as the Industrial Revolution and, perhaps, the revolution of quantum computing to come but the Kardashev scale and its extensions to Type IV (Universal) such as ‘extragalactic’ suggested by Michio Kaku (2006) in his book Parallel Worlds: A journey through creation is certainly of interest in theoretical physics but has less of the power of application to understand and discriminate among past or existing world civilizations.¹ The possible alternative of information mastery first suggested by Carl Sagan in 1973 based on bits of information available to a civilization has interesting applications especially since it might be argued that we are now to all intents and purposes a single planetary civilization.²

My own philosophical and historical predilections orient me toward a hermeneutical model based on texts and the interpretation of texts that predisposes us towards recognising the fondness for natural metaphors that draw on organic models of ‘birth’, ‘growth’ and ‘death’ when analyzing complex social wholes that is emblematic of our deep cultural acceptance of the principles of developmental thinking that look to ‘the state of nature’ discussed in natural philosophy. The emergence of Darwinian evolutionary principles in the life sciences, in biology but also in the earth sciences, predisposes us toward an acceptance of a common ancestor. In philosophy and the humanities, the concept of development was used in relation to humanity well before the emergence of evolutionary sciences with Darwin and others in the nineteenth century, to refer to both well-being and to progress.

In the modern era Kant, Hegel and Marx interpreted the concept of development as a form of progress. Indeed, the march of civilization and history was based on the assumption of human perfectibility that was a major characteristic of Enlightenment thought. The study of natural history in the eighteenth century revealed that Europe and Europeans were both ‘civilized’ and allegedly superior to all other cultures, and as such were responsible for a civilizing mission in colonial world history. Later the same assumptions buried in historical teleology with buried Christological cosmologies seem to require the natural precondition of a concept of freedom as the basis for liberation, westernization and modernization – a seemingly natural consequence of the historic rise of the West.

In this paper I begin from `Civilization as civitas’, the birth of civil society, that I investigate by reference to Adam Ferguson’s history of civil society and Norbert Elias’s the civilizing process, before examining the fortunes of `western civ’ as a pedagogical concept.

Civilization as civitas

The history of the concept is the history of the German word Kultur and the French word civilité from whence comes the English word civilization in the early eighteenth century. The word is derived from civil and cité, (city), from the Latin civitas that is a theory of jurisprudential contract binding citizens, granting them both rights and giving them responsibilities. The civitas is the collective social body of citizens and also the contract. The French historian Claude Nicolet (1980) traces the concept to the amalgamation of Romans and Sabines presented in the legends of Rome in his The world of the citizen in republican Rome in which he explores civitas along with census, militia, comitia (politics), aerarium (treasury), libertas, popularitus, as well as the army and the body. He explains from the time of the suspension of the tributum (167BC) how the ‘constitution’ ceased to function and the ‘assemblies’ were reformed several times. He argues ‘almost certainly, the structured balance of rights and duties which seemed to me to explain the principles of Roman civil life never existed in practice: it was kind of a blueprint, a theoretical model and ideal towards which Roman institutions tended in their heyday but never reached’ (Preface to the second French edition). It is an ideal that existed in the ‘communal mind’ even if it was never realized. The greatness of Rome, he says, rested on its civil base from whence the ruling oligarchy went on the Romanize the world and including an openness toward the foreigner. Popper appeals to Pericles of Athens as a motif and justification for the concept of the open society (Peters & Besley, 2016). Like the Greek concept of Polis the Roman term civitas referred to the citizen and citizenship, the community of citizens under Roman law that constituted an autonomous cell with its own council and magistrates that had the legal infrastructure to set up as a city, to carry out the law, to conduct the census and to collect taxes. This is significant because it provides the early history of a term that is on the one hand synonymous with civilization, and on the other connected to empire and the res publica (public, that which is held in common) the root word for republic and commonwealth, and a derivation of politeia (city-state). Nicolet then indicates how significant the idea of civitas is in the mind of its citizens, even if it never existed in practice, and this I would argue also applies to the word and concept civilization, as opposed to the historical or sociological reality. The implication is that there is a significant ideational aspect to the concept of civilization as well as its actual development in terms of material culture especially in relation to changes in technology (architecture, energy etc) noted by most definitions that suggest a list of criteria including the development of symbolic systems in communication, writing, math, law, religion and political organisation as well as the social complexity that comes with city development such as specialization and increasing division of labour. I stress the ideational component because it is the basis and outcome of the development of knowledge systems that in the case of early civilizations can only be accessed today through and archaeological analysis of material culture. These knowledge systems contain abstract and symbolic forms in writing, law, contracts, religion and philosophy – dare I say, spiritual, in the sense of the symbolic expression of universal values concerning human survival and well-being.

Ferguson’s the history of civil society

Adam Ferguson’s (1767) An Essay on The History of Civil Society begins with a discourse on ‘The General Characteristics of Human Nature’ by referring to ‘the State of Nature’ where he demonstrates the fashionable preference for metaphors of nature and natural growth and development:

Natural productions are generally formed by degrees. Vegetables are raised from a tender shoot, and animals from an infant state. The latter, being active, extend together their operations and their powers, and have a progress in what they perform, as well as in the faculties they acquire. This progress in the case of man is continued to a greater extent than in that of any other animal. Not only the individual advances from infancy to manhood, but the species itself from rudeness to civilization.

Ferguson (1723–1816) was a Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. He emphasized humans as social beings and believed in the progression of the species in terms of moral perfectibility. The book is made up of five parts: 1. ‘Of the general characteristics of human nature’ that examines principles of self-preservation, ‘union among mankind’, war and dissension, intellectual powers, moral sentiment, happiness and ‘national felicity’; 2. ‘Of the history of rude nations’ based on sources from antiquity, with commentaries on property and interest; 3. ‘Of the history of policy and arts’ including influences on climate, political institutions, establishments (as national objects) and ‘manners’, population and wealth, national defence and conquest, civil liberty, and the arts; 4. ‘Of the consequences of the advancement of civil and commercial arts’ comprised of the separation of arts and professions, ‘manners of polished and commercial nations’; 5. ‘Of the decline of nations’ including supposed eminence, relaxation of national spirit, and national waste; 6. ‘Of corruption and political slavery’ with a focus on corruption, luxury, progress and the termination of despotism.

Ferguson’s emphasis on ‘moral sentiment’, greatly influencing Adam Smith, and his emphasis on ‘manners’ predating Elias. His explication of moral sentiment together with ‘happiness’ and ‘national felicity’ lead to his articulation of ‘civil society’; as he argues at Part Third, Section VI

It is in conducting the affairs of civil society, that mankind find the exercise of their best talents, as well as the object of their best affections. It is in being grafted on the advantages of civil society, that the art of war is brought to perfection; that the resources of armies, and the complicated springs to be touched in their conduct, are best understood.

This is so under conditions of peace through the emergence of sympathy (empathy) and the restraints of law tied to the protection of property rights: ‘The enjoyment of peace, however, and the prospect of being able to exchange one commodity for another, turns, by degrees, the hunter and the warrior into a tradesman and a merchant’ (Part 4). As Ferguson famously writes discussing the history of political institutions: ‘Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design’ and also writes in his notes: ‘Mankind, we are told, are devoted to interest; and this, in all commercial nations, is undoubtedly true: But it does not follow, that they are, by their natural dispositions, averse to society and mutual affection: Proofs of the contrary remain, even where interest triumphs most.’

Ferguson (1723–1816) as one of the key thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment attempts to reclaim and revitalise the nature of citizenship and participation in the modern state and to demonstrate the significance of civic and communal virtues as an indispensable part of commercial society based on the social nature of human beings. It is a conception that shares many features with thinkers of the French Enlightenment, with Buffon’s Histoire naturelle and with Montesquieu including an account of a conception of progress as an unintended consequence (invisible hand) of the division of labour. Ferguson’s historical model of the significance of active citizenship differs from those of his countrymen, both Hume and Smith, in embracing a distinctive approach to modernity.

Michel Foucault (2008, p. 298) [1979] recognises the importance of Ferguson in The Birth of Biopolitics when he writes of civil society in relation to the ‘principle of spontaneous synthesis’ well in advance of Hayek, to propose an account of civil society that ‘gives man his humanity’ and makes room for ‘sympathy’ (and equality) in a communitarian sense:

To simplify matters, I will take the most fundamental, almost statutory text regarding the characterization of civil society. This is Ferguson’s famous text, translated into French in 1783 with the title Essais sur l’histoire de la société civile, and which is very close to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the word ‘nation’ in Smith, moreover, having more or less the same meaning as civil society in Ferguson. We have here the political correlate, the correlate in terms of civil society, of what Adam Smith studied in purely economic terms. Ferguson’s civil society is actually the concrete, encompassing element within which the economic men Smith tried to study operate. I would like to pick out three or four essential characteristics of this civil society in Ferguson: first, civil society understood as an historical-natural constant; second, civil society as principle of spontaneous synthesis; third, civil society as permanent matrix of political power; and fourth, civil society as the motor element of history.³

For Ferguson ‘The nature of human nature is to be historical, because the nature of human nature is to be social. There is no human nature separable from the very fact of society…So, the social bond develops spontaneously’ (p. 299). It has no pre-history where ‘the happiness of the individual is the great end of civil society (p. 301) where civil society can support and encourage the economic interactions without being reduced to them. Civil society, then, is not simply an association of economic subjects or directed purely to the end of profit through exchange: ‘what links individuals to each other in civil society is instinct, sentiment and sympathy, it is the impulse of benevolence that individuals feel for one another…’It is not purely economic egoism but also ‘disinterested interests wider than egoism itself’ (p. 301). This textual examination is a prolegomena to Foucault’s analysis of liberalism and the emergence of a form of political rationality that mediates a juridical conception of governance that recognises and is commensurate with the rise of English liberalism.

Norbert Elias’ the civilizing process

The rediscovered sociological classic of Norbert Elias’ The Civilizing Process; Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations was originally published in German in 1939 as Über den Prozess der Zivilisation in two volumes and not published in English until 1978 and 1982. It is the acclaimed text that attempts to explain how Europeans came to think of themselves as more civilized than past or other societies. Elias’ analysis of the civilizing process explained how changing conceptions of manners, especially shame and embarrassment, were related to larger international forces in Europe governing the struggle for power and security with the birth of sovereign states. Generational changes in social behaviour from the thirteenth until the eighteenth centuries in ‘manners’ (or etiquette) relates social attitudes and organisation to state formation –a decline in intra-state conflict as the state assumed a monopoly on violence allowing people to become more interconnected and able to enjoy the fruits of trade and services. It was this ethos of growing mutual dependence and benefit with fellow citizens only encountered at a distance that established rules of interaction and complex patterns of self-restraint. Elias held that European civilization was an improvement on the forms of barbarism which it replaced.

In the first volume Elias observes changes in the behaviour of the secular upper classes in the west commenting on the ‘Sociogenesis of the Antithesis between Kultur and Zivilisation in German’ with examples of courtly attitudes of the court nobility in Germany before examining the ‘Sociogenesis of the Concept of Civilisation in France’ including Physiocratism and the French Reform Movement. ‘Civilization’ is considered as a specific transformation of human behaviour and Elias briefly provides a history of the concept of civilité from whence the English word ‘civilization’ comes. He also examines medieval manners including ‘Behaviour at Table’, that is so-called table manners, and the rise and decline of concepts of courtoisie and civilité. Civilizing of eating habits such as eating meat, using a knife and fork, also help to make distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour that embraced attitudes to natural functions such as blowing one’s nose and splitting as well as changes in attitudes to relations between men and women, especially in relation to aggression and the life of a knight.

The second volume focuses on state formation and civilization with reference to feudal society and state formation with a set of observations on the rise of the absolute state and its power dynamics and attention direction to new elements in the structure of medieval society as compared with Antiquity. Elias examines the first stage of the rising monarchy focused on competition and monopolization within a territory while acknowledging differences between England, France and Germany, and finally, the last stages of the free competitive monopoly of the state and its balance of power with the formation of a central ‘Royal Mechanism’ and the monopoly of taxation. He provides a synopsis of a theory of the civilizing processes focused on the spread of self-constraint with ‘Courtization of the Warriors’ and ‘The Muting of Drives’, including the psychologization and rationalization shame and repugnance. It is a masterwork and once rediscovered in the 1980s become the theoretical marker for civilizational studies which had been dominated by the debate on Kultur and Zivilisation in nineteenth century and early twentieth-century Germany drawing on the false distinction between ‘community’ as a natural living organism and ‘society’ as a mechanical aggregation (Tönnies, 1963). With Zivilization referring to an open and pluralist culture it became possible to talk as Spengler does of the decline of culture.⁴

Civilization as a pedagogical concept

In the postwar period civilization studies emerged as a major pedagogical concept in the US. As Gilbert Allardyce (1982, p. 695) remarked: ‘The rise of ‘Western Civ’ is one of the great success stories in the history of the historical profession in America. For a time between the First World War and the campus protests of the 1960s, all roads led to the Western Civ course’ dominating the college curriculum. Civilization courses were offered on campus with a study abroad option throughout the US. As the University of Chicago College course program puts it, the emphasis is on ‘the ideas, cultural patterns, and social pressures that frame the understanding of events and institutions within a civilization’ with a sequence that explores ‘the dynamics of conquest, slavery, colonialism, and their reciprocal relationships with concepts such as resistance, freedom, and independence, with an eye toward understanding their interlocking role in the making of the modern world.’⁵ The formulation of program goes back to the 1950s when Robert Redfield, the anthropologist and ethnolinguist, as Dean of Social Sciences developed the Comparative Civilizations project. The emphasis was on Western Civilization with a focus on America; the study of non-Western civilizations was added somewhat later. Many such courses were first developed in the 1920s by US universities and later introduced elsewhere in the Western world, although recently there has been kick-back by students and staff that these ‘great book’ courses promote a ‘Western supremacist’ perspective,⁶ and are becoming less popular as with the growth of Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Indigenous Studies since the 1970s. This reflected a political change away from the Western Civ curriculum. In 1988 The New York Times ran the story ‘In Dispute on Bias, Stanford Is Likely to Alter Western Culture Program’⁷ reporting students protested that undergraduates had to take ‘a course in Western Civilization, which they denounced as Eurocentric, white-male indoctrination’. This was one of the protests that began the canon wars and setting off a multiculturalist movement away Western Civilization courses based on the argument ‘that Western Civilization was a myth concocted in the 1910s aimed at assimilating immigrant minorities and justifying American imperialism – multiculturalists argued for a broader, richer presentation of peoples and traditions’ (Bauerlein, 2020). Thus began the decades of the culture wars. Stanley Kurtz (2020) of The National Association of Scholars (NAS), produced The Lost History of Western Civilization. The NAS is a politically conservative advocacy group opposed to political correctness on American campuses, originally set up in 1987 with the goal of preserving Western intellectual heritage and upholding the standards of a liberal arts curriculum ‘that fosters intellectual freedom, searches for the truth, and promotes virtuous citizenship’.⁸ Embodying this general framework, Kurtz (2020) argues:

The Western tradition is the source of America’s founding principles and constitutional system. That is the most important reason for civic minded citizens to study it. And while America has been shaped by the particularities of Western civilization, the liberal principles nurtured by this tradition represent our best hope for national reconciliation across boundaries of race, ethnicity, and religion. This report can be read as 12 an argument against those on either the right or the left who associate Western civilization with “white identity politics.” The distinctive idea that emerged in the West—to be taken up into what we used to call the American Creed—is that a polity based on the principles of liberty and equality belongs to all citizens, as individuals, regardless of race, faith, ethnicity, or national origin. This is the way out of the trap we have fallen into. How we lost our way is the subject of this report (pp. 11–12).

As Kurtz makes clear Western Civ courses were replaced by courses in world history that yielded to the concept of globalization, identifying the ‘radical skepticism of one generation’ driven by forces in the American academy that were ‘skeptical, relativist, historicist, and even nihilist in character’. Kurtz questions the idea that Western civilization is a modern invention, a thesis he lays at the door of Gilbert Allardyce and the multiculturalist, deconstructionist, and globalist historians that followed. The full argument emerges as summarized in four major propositions:

1) Postmodern academic skepticism, and the broader collapse of faith it reflects, has backed us into a corner in which inflated accusations of racism, bigotry, and genocide are virtually the only remaining sources of collective purpose; 2) Postmodern academic skepticism has become a petrified orthodoxy every bit as due for critique as the Aristotelianism of Hobbes’s day; 3) So-called multiculturalism isn’t really about preserving traditional cultures at all—instead “multiculturalism” has ushered in a radically new sort of culture in which perpetually expanding accusations of racism, bigotry, and genocide stand as quasi-religious ends in themselves; and 4) The American experiment cannot survive without checking or reversing these trends (p. 13).

Kurtz wants to contest the thesis he attributes to Allardyce that the Western Civilization course is ‘a characteristically American invention’ with the intent of dislodging Allardyce’s historical evidence on the timing of the construction which is the thrust of Part One. Unfortunately, Kurtz wants to attribute the beginning of the decline of the pedagogical concept of Western Civ to postmodernism without much understanding of the claims he is making.

I have attempted to investigate what I call ‘the neoconservative critique of the university’ and particularly the attack on multiculturalism and postmodernism that initiated the culture wars in the US by seeking to explain these developments by an analysis of the thought of the political philosopher Leo Strauss (1961, p. 140) who held the view that the crisis of liberalism was because it had abandoned its absolute foundation and became relativistic. US neoconservatism began as a label used to describe leftist New York intellectuals who had come to doubt their own political views and came to exhibit a revulsion of anti-communism abroad and the 1960s counterculture at home, and complained of the inability of the university as a liberal institution to resist the counterculture. They also came to picture themselves standing in a direct line to Leo Strauss ‘as the greatest American philosopher of classical political theory – a tradition that seeks above all a stable and ordered moral foundation based on American values against the forces of cultural anarchy and libertinism – America as the apex of civilization and defender of the western tradition’ (Peters & York, 2011, pp. 12–13). The first generation of neoconservative intellectuals, included Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Peter Berger, Nathan Glazer, Edward Shils and Seymour Martin Lipset many of whom flirted with Trotskyism and Marxism in the 1930s and 1940s, only to move to the right thereafter. They were strongly motivated by the question of values in relation to Americanism, to American identity and the American way of life. Later, they also held to the assertion of America values over national interests in foreign policy and national security (p. 13). The second generation of neoconservatives, (including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle), were students of Albert Wohlstetter and Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago, both of whom were Leo Strauss’s students. Francis Fukuyama was Bloom’s student. The neocons were big on American civilizational values but seemingly immune to the question of civilizational decline which displayed itself in the historical revisionism in relation to the war in Vietnam and for going to war in Iraq. Francis Fukuyama (2006) in America at the crossroads: Democracy, power, and the neoconservative legacy details how his views deviated from that of his neoconservative associates Paul Wolfowitz, Albert Wohlstetter, Allan Bloom and William Kristol.

The effects of the neoconservatives with its rewriting of history and the humanities finds its source in Strauss’ critique of radical historicism and his statement of the ‘theological-political problem’, a synthetic blending of Enlightenment reason and Jewish faith that Struass developed as a model to guide modern Judaism and politics through Nietzsche’s problem of nihilism and the relativity of all values (Peters & York, 2011). Shadia Drury’s (1999) Leo Strauss and the American Right exposed the links between the American neocons and Strauss, and the efforts of Straussians in Washington to stop the cultural and social disintegration of America caused by liberal values and the move away from the wisdom of the ancients even if it meant the adoption of Plato’s ‘noble lie’. What was required to halt the moral slide was a return to the ancients and to the Great Books of the Western tradition that would help us to return to the good life, to a philosophical way of life and to Plato’s political philosophy.

It is on the basis of this reading of Strass and his influence on those who sought to established the absolute values of American civilization anchored in Plato’s philosophy and Strauss’s esoteric pedagogical reading of strategic texts that it is possible to understand Allan Bloom (1987) and the culture wars that ensued during the 1980s. In short as I argued some time ago: ‘Bloom, a protégé of Leo Strauss, friend and colleague of Lynne Cheney, chair of the US National Endowment for the Humanities, pictured themselves as seekers of truth against the cultural ravages of postmodern relativism’ (Peters, 2008, p. 13) and, ultimately, an engagement and rejection of Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s historicism. As Neil Robertson (1998) points out:

Like Nietzsche and Heidegger, Strauss sees that the West is in the grip of a profound spiritual crisis. And following Nietzsche and Heidegger, Strauss sees that this crisis itself opens up the possibility of a release from modernity. This release both brings to light a principle that is beyond, but forgotten by, modernity, and points to a return to origins, free from and prior to the sources of modernity (cited in Peters, 2008).

Kurtz’s (2020) The Lost History of Western Civilization clearly indicates that the contest over the notion of western civ as both a pedagogical concept but also a reading of western philosophy is far from over. By contrast, to Kurtz I want to anchor western civilization in the Enlightenment tradition and its critique, and in the tradition of modern western philosophy that is best expressed in the evolution of civitas and civilité as the development of civil society. To my mind even with all its problems this holds a critical contribution to the emergence of global civil society where the original concepts are extended and developed to include an ethics of the other.

The unseemly and tragic end of the Afghan War after twenty long years, when Afghan-trained forces were overrun in a week, a war reputedly costing $2.3 trillion and over 240,000 deaths, has been interpreted by some scholars in the discourse of ‘declinism’, as the end of the American Empire.

Michael A. Peters
Beijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China
[email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1482-2975

Notes

1 Type V (Multiverse) civilization and Type IV, capable of controlling space/time, in the realms of pure speculation have also been suggested, e.g. https://medium.com/swlh/comparing-different-civilizational-scales-35e98ee30c93

2 ‘The scale starts at 10⁶ bits and assigns this the letter A. At every increase of order of magnitude this letter is increased: 10⁷:B, 10⁸:C, … ,10³¹:Z.’ Simon Håkansson suggests we might reach R by 2020. ‘According to an analysis conducted by the International Data Corporation (IDC) in 2013 humanity will have generated 44 Zettabytes of data by 2020^[2] . 44 Zettabytes is equal to 3.52 × 10²³ bits. This leaves us at R in the Information Mastery scale—ten paces away from the H we were at in 1973’, https://www.quora.com/Where-are-we-on-Carl-Sagans-Information-Mastery-scale

3 See also https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2021/05/4-april-1979-foucault-on-civil-society-ep-xxxix.html

4 https://www.resetdoc.org/intercultural-lexicon/culture-civilisation/AlessandroFerrara; see also

https://rfkclassics.blogspot.com/2019/03/classics-culture-civilization-oh-my.html, Rebecca Futo Kennedy.

5 http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/thecollege/civilizationstudies/. This course offered Introduction to the Civilizations of East Asia I, II & III; Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations I–II; Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization; Introduction to African Civilization I–II–III; History of European Civilization I–II–III; America in World Civilization I–II–III; Introduction to Russian Civilization I–II–III; Ancient Mediterranean World I–II–III; Human Rights in World Civilizations I–II; Jewish Civilization I–II–III; Introduction to Latin American Civilization I–II–III; Music in Western Civilization I–II; Ancient Near Eastern History and Society I–II–III; Ancient Near Eastern Thought and Literature I–II–III; Ancient Empires I–II–III; Semitic Languages, Cultures, and Civilizations I–II–III; Islamic History and Society I–II–III; Islamic Thought and Literature I–II–III; Introduction to the Civilizations of South Asia I–II.

6 https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/18/tensions-grow-australia-over-courses-western-civilization

7 https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/19/us/in-dispute-on-bias-stanford-is-likely-to-alter-western-culture-program.html

8 https://www.nas.org/about-us