By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, April 26, 2016
This month Stanford University students voted on a campus
resolution that would have had their college require a course on Western
civilization — as it did until the 1980s.
Stanford students rejected the proposal 1,992 to 347. A
columnist in the Stanford Daily
explained why: Teaching Western civilization means “upholding white supremacy,
capitalism, and colonialism, and all other oppressive systems that flow from
Western civilizations.”
The vote and the column encapsulated the Left’s view of
Western civilization: In Europe, Latin America, and America, the Left loathes
Western civilization.
Wherever there is conflict between the West — identified
as white, capitalist, or of European roots — and the non-West, the Left
portrays the West as the villain.
I am referring to the Left, not to liberals. The latter
generally venerated Western civilization. President Franklin Roosevelt, for
example, frequently spoke of defending “Christian civilization.” Today, the
Left would revile any Westerner who used such language as xenophobic, racist,
and Fascist.
The Left similarly describes any suggestion that anything
Western is superior to anything non-Western. Likewise, the Left dismisses
virtually all Western achievements, but regards criticism of anything
non-Western as racist, chauvinistic, imperialist, colonialist, xenophobic, etc.
That is why the Left is so protective of Islam. America’s
first left-wing president, Barack Obama, will not use, or allow the government
to use, the words “Islamic terrorism”; and all criticism of Islam is labeled
“Islamophobic,” thereby morally equating any such criticism with racism. It is
not that the Left is sympathetic to Islam; the Left has contempt for all
religions. It is that many Muslims loathe the West, and the enemies of my enemy
(the West) must be protected.
That is why the Left loathes Israel. If the Left actually
cared about human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, or freedom of speech,
religion, and the press, it would be wildly pro-Israel. But Israel, in the
Left’s view, is white, European, and colonialist; in other words, Western. And
the Palestinians are non-Western.
So, then, the Big Question is, Why? Why is the Left
hostile to Western civilization?
After decades of considering this question, the answer, I
have concluded, is: standards.
The Left hates standards – moral standards, artistic
standards, cultural standards. The West is built on all three, and has excelled
in all three.
Why does the Left hate standards?
It hates standards because when there are standards,
there is judgment. And Leftists don’t want to be judged.
Thus Michelangelo is no better than any contemporary
artist, and Rembrandt is no greater than any non-Western artist. So, too,
street graffiti, which are essentially the defacing of public and private
property — and thus serve to undermine civilization — are “art.”
Melody-free, harmony-free, atonal sounds are just as good
as Beethoven’s music. And Western classical music is no better than the music
of any non-Western civilization.
Guatemalan poets are every bit as worthy of study as
Shakespeare.
When the Nobel Prize–winning American novelist Saul
Bellow was quoted as saying, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of
the Papuans?” all hell broke loose on the cultural Left. Bellow had implied
that the greatest writers of fiction were Western.
Why such antagonism? Because if some art is really better
than other art, your art may be judged inferior. The narcissism of left-wing
thought does not allow for anyone to be better than you artistically or in any
other way. Therefore, all art and artists must be equal.
In the moral realm, the same rejection of standards
exists. Thus, the Left loathed Ronald Reagan for labeling the Soviet Union an
“evil empire.” That would mean that America was morally superior to the Soviet
Union. And such a judgment was unacceptable. The whole left-wing moral
vocabulary is a rejection of Western moral standards: “tolerance,” “inclusion,”
“anti-discrimination” (by definition, standards discriminate),
“non-judgmental,” and even “income inequality,” which deems some people’s work
more valuable than that of others.
Every civilization had slavery. But only thanks to
Judeo-Christian civilization was slavery abolished there and eventually
elsewhere. Nevertheless, to speak about any moral superiority of Western or
Judeo-Christian civilization is completely unacceptable thanks to the Left’s
stranglehold on education and most media.
In this regard, the protection of Islam on the Left is so
thorough that one cannot even say such obvious truths as that the status of
women has been far superior in the Judeo-Christian West than in the Islamic
world. The veil, for example, is dehumanizing; yet, in a speech at the annual
convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a rabbi, at the time
the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said that the veil “deserves our
respect.”
And finally, we come to the Left’s loathing of the
religions of Western civilization — the Judeo-Christian religions, with their
clear standards of right and wrong.
Bible-based religions affirm a morally judging God. For
the Left, that is anathema. For the Left, the only judging allowed is Leftist
judging of others. No one judges the Left. Neither man nor God.
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