How the West was wrought

Who would we be without Greek reason, Hebrew spirit and Roman ashes?

In 2012, economic historian Niall Ferguson wrote The West and the Rest. This was the tail end of the decade-long “war on terror,” when the “clash of civilizations” between the West and Islamic radicalism dominated our view of global geopolitics. An overview of the book on Amazon asserts that “Western civilization’s rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five centuries.” This is a defensible claim, and Ferguson’s narrative was only the latest in a well-established genre exemplified by William H. McNeill’s 1963 The Rise of the West. The dominance of the West today, and its earlier explosion across the world after 1600, demand explanation.‌

But let’s make sure we’re all on the same page: what even is the West in the first place? From the vantage point of 2025, most would agree that France and Britain are part of the West. Germany and the Nordic countries, certainly. And Spain and Italy as well. But beyond that, toward points east and south, we enter disputed territory.

Cultural critic Rod Dreher, who lives in Budapest, Hungary, recently wrote a blog post: Janos Hunyadi: What We In The West Don’t Appreciate About Eastern Europeans. His entry hinged on the enduring relevance of the Hungarian nobleman who defeated the Ottomans and was for a generation his nation’s preeminent statesman. As the subtitle makes plain, Dreher implicitly files Hungary as part of the East, as in Eastern Europe, or the Eastern Bloc. The latter term arose in the second half of the 20th century, when Hungary was part of the Warsaw Pact, an appendage of the Soviet Union’s empire-in-all-but-name. For a Gen-X American like Dreher, it remains hard to think of Hungary as anything but Eastern European, and therefore not entirely of the West. But 50 years of Soviet hegemony, already over three decades in the past, shouldn’t blind us to the entire previous millennium of history.

Today, most Hungarians are Roman Catholic. But President Viktor Orban is a Protestant, and more precisely, a Calvinist. This deep-rooted religious connection to Reformed Protestant Christianity explains Hungarian students’ presence as seminarians at Oxford in the 17th century; and harkens back to a time 400 years ago when Hungary was a predominantly Reformed domain. It was centuries of Austrian Habsburg royal patronage and encouragement of Roman Catholicism that brought most Hungarians back into the fold, though in the Ottoman-ruled eastern provinces, Protestants remained beyond the reach of the Counter-Reformation, allowing them to maintain their religious traditions down to the present. But whether Catholic or Calvinist, modern Hungarians’ Christianity goes back to the conversion just before 1000 AD of the pagan Magyar warlord Vajk, known to hagiographers as St. Stephen. His Bavarian German wife likely influenced his decision to embrace the new faith. But perhaps more compelling was that conversion would allow him to enter the good graces of a budding European commonwealth of princes and kings united under a shared religious identity; Christian monarchs who looked to the Roman Pope as their spiritual leader. In 1000 AD, Pope Sylvester II recognized Hungary as a Christian kingdom, making Stephen’s belonging official with a crown. Despite the Soviet interlude from after World War II into the early 1990s, Hungary and the Hungarians were for a millennium the eastern beachhead of the West, not the western face of the East.

The lineaments of Europe’s religious divisions today are key to understanding this reality of what the West is, even without making recourse to the esoterica of medieval Central European history. Before the West, there was Christendom, and more precisely, Latin Christendom. After the Western Empire ended in 476 AD, the Roman Church slowly diverged into two variants, one eastern, one western, each rooted in the dominant language of that half of the Empire, Greek or Latin. Western Christianity, the Latin Church, became what we call the Roman Catholic Church. Protestantism, a religious revolution triggered by an obstinate Augustinian friar, Martin Luther, was purely a phenomenon of the Western Church. No Protestants rebelled against the Orthodox Church; the East recorded no Reformation. The Christians who looked to Byzantium and Greek Christianity had a history that had long since forked off onto a different path from the West’s.

Europe, North Africa and West Asia by religion

The geographical outline of the West, the civilization that gave us the modern world, is fundamentally delimited by the frontiers between Latin Christianity, progenitor of both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, and the world of Islam and Eastern Orthodoxy. This fault-line was clear by the late medieval period. In 1386 Jogaila, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, underwent baptism in Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, took the name Wladyslaw, and became the King of Poland. Jogaila’s entrance into the Latin Church resulted in the mass influx of the Lithuanian nobility into the Western Church, ending two centuries of the pagan Duchy’s equipoise between the Roman-aligned kingdoms to the west and the Byzantine-rite Christian principalities to the east. Though he was raised pagan, Jogaila’s own mother was a Russian princess who practiced the Orthodox faith. And Lithuanian nobles who ruled over peasants practicing Eastern Christianity in the Duchy’s territories to the south and east had already largely adopted their subjects’ religion by the time Jogaila converted to Roman Catholicism. Jogaila’s new confession, and his new crown as Poland’s ruler, established that the Lithuanians would embrace a Western identity. His embrace of the western Roman rite was a massive geopolitical event that would drive the borders of the medieval Occident much further eastward, grinding it against the vast northern flank of Eastern Christianity.

But even though the boundaries are clear, the two-dimensional rendering that displays frontiers between Catholicism and Orthodoxy is just the most recent act in a much longer saga begun millennia ago. The West did not emerge fully formed from the ashes of the Roman Empire. It evolved in an ongoing process of self-conception, and the West’s roots reach far deeper back into history than even Roman times, stretching back into the most ancient genealogy of the human race itself. You can draw lines on a map, or generate plots that visualize survey data into alternative clusters, but there is no hope of grasping our current moment without rolling the narrative all the way back to the West’s roots, back to its germination.

Athens and Jerusalem

One irony of the West’s foundations is that even while a broad consensus holds that the West began with the Greeks and the Jews, with Athens and Jerusalem, later history of these two peoples left both outside of the ambit of the West. The historical headwaters of Western civilization diverged into separate branches, with radically different histories shaping unique and disparate worldviews. After the Greeks and Jews were absorbed into a unified Rome 2,000 years ago, that world shattered into disparate fragments. The East Roman world became Byzantium, a related civilization, but distinct from the Western Roman world. It is from the latter that the West, the Occident in its mature form, evolved. While the nation-states of Western Europe were coalescing after 1500, before their independence in the 19th century, the Greeks lived as dhimmis, second-class citizens, under Turco-Muslim domination, a sad denouement for the heirs of Byzantium. Meanwhile, though the Jews of Europe are indisputably Western today, until the Jewish Enlightenment of the 19th century, Jews and Jewish culture were in the West, but distinctly not of it. Their cultural and religious traditions were tolerated, but for centuries they moved on a parallel and separate track. Only the cultural innovation of European secularism in the centuries after the 17th-century Wars of Religion allowed European Jews to integrate as Jews into Western society, and thus begin making the outsized contributions that loom so large in modern life.

And yet it is also true that we cannot understand, or even conceive of the West without looking to the ancient Greeks and Jews. Beowulf, an Anglo-Saxon poem set in 500s Scandinavia, whose composition seems to date to a liminal Christian society of 7th-century England, opens by noting that the monster Grendel and his mother are descendants of Cain, an explicit reference to the Hebrew Bible. Meanwhile, the Historia Brittonum, a 9th-century work by a Welsh monk, traces the origins of the native British people to the Trojans, illustrating how fully a newly Christianized Northern Europe still took such classical history for granted. If the West is an organic development out of the Latin Christian society that arose amid the Roman Empire’s western provinces, which were destined to next be ruled by barbarian tribes, at the most fundamental level of its self-conception, it is the traditions, history and thought of the Greeks and Jews that enduringly shaped that world.

The early 20th-century English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead asserted that “the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Or, perhaps more precisely Western philosophy has been a conversation between Plato and his critics, including the tradition emanating from his pupil, Aristotle. It is difficult to deny that the Greeks laid the foundations for much of later Western thought, and therefore the modern world. Those of us who grew up on Carl Sagan’s Cosmos television series cannot forget that these early Iron-Age people produced the world’s first systematic proto-science, constructing mechanistic models for the universe including heliocentrism, the spherical earth, and celestial models for the movement of stars and planets that served as handmaids to ancient astrologers and astronomers alike. Many of the Greeks’ specific speculations proved wrong, but their method of inquiry remains familiar to the modern mind. Greek mathematical knowledge was advanced enough that even today some tradition-minded universities continue to use Euclid’s Elements as a textbook for university-level mathematical instruction, 2,300 years after its initial compilation. The broad thematic outlines of plays by Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, which come down to us via Byzantine-era copyists, feel entirely familiar 2,500 years after their writing. The Greek moral-philosophical systems, from the virtue ethics Aristotle promulgated and Stoics like the emperor Marcus Aurelius practiced, to the proto-utilitarianism of Epicurean materialists like Lucretius, also continue to affect the modern world, and were critically in dialogue with early Christianity, both as influences and foils.

But where did the Greeks come from? The earliest Greek writing dates to the 8th century BC, and the Greeks composed poems like the Iliad and Odyssey early enough to give a sense of the Bronze-Age period that preceded Classical Greece. One common myth, turned into a play by Euripides, is that Artemis demanded a human sacrifice in exchange for the winds favoring the Greeks on their journey to Troy. The wrathful goddess demands the life of Iphigenia, the high-king Agamemnon’s eldest daughter. The king wavers, torn between his love for his daughter, and his duty to avenge his brother, Menleaus against Paris of Troy. Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra pleads on behalf of their daughter, but in vain. Though Iphigenia agrees to her fate, willingly offering herself as a sacrifice, her mother’s rage at her father sows the seeds for a later cycle of vengeance triggered by Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband upon his triumphant return from Troy. In the Classical period, beginning in the 5th century, one version of the story has Artemis taking pity on Iphigenia, and replacing the girl with a deer at the last moment. But it is almost certainly the case that the more brutal ending was the myth’s original form, and that its cultural presuppositions are those of the Greeks’ Bronze-Age ancestors. Archeologists have discovered tombs with apparent human sacrifice victims dating to the Bronze Age in the ancient city of Pylos, in southwestern Greece, along with ancient texts that seem to allude to females being given as a gift to the god Poseidon.

When intellectual historians trace the lineage of Western civilization to the Greeks, they mean the Greeks of 5th and 4th-century BC Athens, a cosmopolitan city that drew intellectuals and entrepreneurs from the entire Greek-speaking world of that day. They do not mean the Greeks of 1200 BC, who constructed vast fortified citadels, raided their neighbors across the Near East and employed literacy primarily as an accounting tool. Something special occurred with the Iron-Age Greeks that connected them to a tradition destined to endure another 2,500 years and counting; they were different, but not entirely alien. You have only to read the Athenian historian Thucydides recalling the conflict between Melos and Athens, where the latter issue the former an ultimatum that includes the phrase “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” to appreciate that while this people may lack a modern sense of justice, they were fully in possession of a modern sense of tragedy. The critical-rationalist perspective, an analytic frame of mind tinged with skepticism but confident in reason’s ability to see to the heart of things, is at the core of the West’s modern self-conception, the germ that would blossom into the Enlightenment. This may not reflect the preponderance of who the Classical Greeks were, but it is nevertheless the fertile seed of what would come to define the West’s unique self-conception millennia later.

If the Greeks, Indo-European-speakers on Europe’s southeastern fringe, and during the Bronze Age at best bit-players in the Near-Eastern geopolitical system, are in hindsight a surprising cultural foundation for the West, the Jews are arguably even more improbable. While the Greeks, or Achaeans as Bronze-Age observers knew them at the time, were a marginal people in the firmament of the Late Bronze Age world, the Jews, known then as Hebrews or Israelites, were entirely beneath notice, one of the many Levantine tribes under the aegis of imperial New-Kingdom Egypt. Though scholars hotly debate the historicity of the Bible’s early books, and in particular the Book of Genesis, we can see clearly that an ethnic and political entity whom we would define as Hebrews, and that was organized into two states, the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah, existed in the 9th century BC.

In 722 BC, the Assyrian Empire conquered the much larger and wealthier kingdom of Israel, which comprised ten of the twelve Hebrew tribes, scattering and assimilating its populace. These ten tribes were “lost” to history, their fate a mystery, though no doubt they simply melted into the other peoples of Assyria. In contrast, Judah maintained a tenuous existence on the margin of the larger Near Eastern empires until 586 BC, when the Neo-Babylonian Empire defeated the small kingdom and drove its people into exile, resettling them in Babylon. But whereas the Israelites had dissolved into broader Assyria, the Judaeans maintained, refined and even expanded their identity in Mesopotamia. When the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great conquered the Babylonians, he freed the Jews to return to their homeland, where they could reestablish themselves in the Levant. For nearly 400 years, the Jews existed as a subject people there, under the rule of the Persians, and later under Alexander and his heirs, the Ptolemies and Seleucids. But between 167 and 160 BC they became independent again after a successful revolt led by the Hasmonean family against their Greek overlords, and remained so for another century, ruling over a territory now called Judea. After Pompey the Great conquered the Jews, the process of Hellenization that the Hasmoneans had halted in the 160s resumed apace, but despite two rebellions against the Romans, Jews were never again under threat of cultural extinction in antiquity; their traditions were part of the great discourse of the ancient world.

A vast body of scholarship attempts to understand the Jews’ origins, the development of their monotheistic religion and the historicity of their scriptures. But their persistence and survival is perhaps even more intriguing. Something transformative must have occurred between 722 BC, when the Israelite tribes passed from history, and 586 BC, when a similar exile of the two southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin resulted not in their extinction, but a revived flourishing in Babylon and a wholesale reconstruction of their religious tradition. The Jewish God had been a tribal god, jealous and fierce. Some even interpret his title, the “lord of hosts,” as the “god of battles.” The exiles could have turned their backs on their god, for he had failed them on the battlefield. They were a conquered and scattered people. But the early Jews refused to accept this; instead they interpreted their defeat by the armies of Babylon as punishment from their god. God had not failed them, they had failed him. In Babylon, the Jews reinvented their god, transforming him from a tribal deity haunting the uplands of the southern Levant, to the god of all gods, watching over them in their journeys. The Jewish attachment to their particular cult was strong enough that the Greek attempt to syncretize it with their own traditions in the 2nd century BC prompted a violent Jewish rebellion against Seleucid rule. The newly radicalized Jews then undertook their own program of cultural imperialism, forcibly converting to Judaism neighboring peoples like the Edomites from whom Herod the Great descended.

The idea of a transcendent supernatural force, beyond time and place, was not entirely original to the Jews. The ancient Greeks’ religion was operationally polytheistic, but philosophers like Plato believed that undergirding the universe was an ultimate divine entity or creative principle. Likewise, in India and China, the early Iron-Age civilizations suggested that the mind of Brahma or the will of Heaven respectively formed the basis of order and the universe. Jewish uniqueness lies in the way their god transcended his old parochial limitations, he continued to exhibit a personal nature. The Jewish god worked through history, not myth, revealing himself to prophets, and continuing to reiterate his special relationship to the Jewish people.

Although people often see Roman Christianity as the true revolution, fusing Greek and Jewish thought into a universalist religion, it’s worth noting that the Jews were already quite notable and distinctive before Rome’s rise. The Hebrew Bible, known to the Christians as the Old Testament, runs to over 1,000 pages in English. During the time of Persian rule, the Jews assembled and organized the oldest books, while the latest books to be written document historical events occurring in the 2nd century BC. Though intellectual and physical conflict between Greeks and Jews are recurrent themes in antiquity, the two peoples genuinely admired one another. The first book of the Maccabees records diplomatic exchanges between the Judaean high priest and the Spartan king Areus, and it mentions that commentators of the period supposed kinship between them for the way both adhered to laws handed down by their respective founding figures, Moses and Lycurgus.

If in the Greeks the West discerns the germ of the Enlightenment, an early surge of the scientific spirit, it is from the Jews that the West receives an unshakable belief in its uniqueness and special faith under the watch of divine providence, a humanitarian spirit that today we see as normative. Notably, among the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean, only the Jews and Egyptians did not condone infanticide, with the earliest books of the Bible explicitly warning against the practice. The idea of a divine spark within all humans was not unique to the Jews, but they articulated it with a vigor that sped their faith’s viral spread from a core of fervent believers in Judea to transplanted communities across the Empire in Rome’s early centuries, resulting in widespread Jewish presence across the Mediterranean. The singular Jewish god nevertheless sanctioned ethnic and political particularity in the ancient world, and this template served the pluralistic West of the medieval period, with each king ruling in his own domain but sanctioned by a common divine authority.

Of the ancient peoples who flourished in and around the Mediterranean 3,000 years ago, only the Greeks and the Jews remain with us today. Their particular genius was fundamentally in the realm of ideas; and unlike the Yamnaya pastoralists or European colonialists, their enduring legacy can be measured in memes more than in genes. We cannot understand the ideological superstructure that has always defined the West without a knowledge of the Greeks and Jews. But the West does not run on ideas alone; a particular history fatefully shaped it long after the Greeks and Jews had left their decisive mark

Fall and Rise

Bryan Ward-Perkins in The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization relates that pollution in British pond samples seems not to have returned to 3rd-century AD levels again until the 1700s To economists, pollution is a canonical “negative externality;” the unfortunate side effect of intensive industry. One model of economic history runs that until massive gains to productivity in the last few centuries, humans have always been poor, with any increase in efficiency that increased individual wealth‌ being almost instantly gobbled up by population growth (excepting the tiny aristocratic minority, who skimmed surplus from their vassals by force). This is the condition of human existence that Thomas Malthus described in the early 19th century. Unfortunately for Malthus’ reputation, his theorizing occurred on the precipice of a revolution in human living standards driven by epochal increases in the rate of technological innovation, boosting productivity, and occurring simultaneously with a demographic transition that dampened population growth. The number of humans had always grown unchecked, until it didn’t. Today the poor remain with us, but they are fat and fecund.

Ward-Perkins’ narrative, and those of other historians like Kyle Harper in The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire, add a nuanced twist: it seems that the Pax Romana wrought an increase in economic coordination and activity on a scale to generate qualitative change in the lives of the wide swath of the citizenry. Mining and industry sullied Britain’s pristine ponds, but bore testament to an imperial economy by then mass-producing pottery, tools and jewelry for even the urban proletariat. The citizens of the Empire were not wealthy in our terms, but their lives were relatively tranquil and filled with amenities that would have been the envy of their recent ancestors. Rome’s desertion of Britain in the 5th century ushered in an era of greater want and poverty. The 5th century AD was the beginning of a “dark age” on the island, as the economic world shrank, and for most, the horizons of life and bare subsistence requirements collapsed down to only what was found within their villages or manor.

But some dissent from this stark narrative of decline and fall. Classicist Peter Brown, beginning in 1971’s The World of Late Antiquity, has for decades marshalled evidence that the 6th century was a time of transitions, and that the Roman world developed into something new, and quite creative; more continuation than ending. Brown’s argument, though, has to be conditioned on two debatable choices: he focuses often on the cultural creativity of the elites, especially in the realm of religion, and smuggles the vast domains of the East Roman Empire into his story in a way that mitigates overall narratives of collapse. If you agree to take the Arab Caliphates as a post-Roman state, then nobody could truly see the co-dominion of Byzantium and Islam in the east to have marked a collapse. But in terms of the history of the West, curtains for the Pax Romana meant a cultural rupture that correlated with the breakdown of trade and economic production.

The Empire’s end saw an entire way of life disappear in Western Europe. Opulent public baths, gracious villas and large cities crumbled, replaced by primitive fortifications. Even Rome, which at its imperial height boasted a population one million strong, became a large town squatting inside the shell of a vanished metropole, its citizenry down to a few tens of thousands by AD 700, their humble dwellings clustered around the pontiff’s offices. Central authority fell apart and was shattered in the Western world between AD 410, when the legions left Britain, and AD 554, when the Byzantines reconquered a war-devastated Italy from ‌the Ostrogoths. Britain, Gaul, Iberia and Italy all reverted to a more primitive state of political and social organization. Historian Chris Wickham in Framing the Early Middle Ages argues that a key differentiator between the Roman state, and the kingdoms of the medieval period, is that the former had an efficient money-based taxation system, while the latter relied on tribute in kind or service. The military levies Charlemagne scared up in the 700s to assail his enemies and accumulate a vast imperial domain stretching from the Ebro in Spain to the Danube in Hungary totaled barely 10% of the numbers of the Roman legions five centuries prior. Charlemagne’s world was one of flimsier states resting upon taxation of poorer peasants than Rome four centuries earlier had had, when a single strong state was underwritten by a wealthier citizenry.

Though Christian theologians may have viewed their faith’s spread in Europe in the wake of Rome’s fall as part of God’s plan, paving the way to better things and the promise of salvation, it is impossible to deny that in the post-Roman West material living standards plummeted, cultural complexity was sharply reduced and state capacity diminished. But for historians like Jared Rubin in Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not, evolutionary anthropologists like Joe Henrich in The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous and classicists like Walter Sheidel in Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity, Western Europe’s fragmented cultural, political and social landscape between 500 and 1000 AD was an essential precondition for shaping of the West as a unique, distinctive and preeminently dynamic civilization.

Rubin, in Rulers, Religion, and Riches, argues that the Roman Catholic Church’s weaker role in legitimizing the rule of post-Roman warlords who became kings allowed for more flexible evolution of economic institutions. These would go on to serve as the foundation for Western dynamism, leading to the legal and corporate frameworks that leverage capital more efficiently and at greater scale. At first blush, Henrich’s thesis seems to be somewhat in tension with Rubin’s; Heinrich argues that the Church played a necessary and seminal role in breaking apart the power of elite kindreds and extended noble lineages in Western Europe, replacing them with the nuclear family unit. This societal structure stands in contrast to the Roman Empire or other Eurasian civilizations, and was essential to the emergence of powerful non-kin institutions that could serve as the basis for a revolution in psychological orientation that would in turn lead to greater economic cooperation.

How these two narratives can dovetail is that the church in Western Europe was fundamentally different in its power base than those in Byzantium or the Near Eastern Islamic ulema, in that it was an institution independent from the political order with deeper roots than the arriviste dynasts. In the early medieval period, the Christian Church was actually essential in legitimating the barbarian rulers who lacked their Roman predecessors’ pedigree. Instead of co-evolving with the Christian religion as in Byzantium, or emerging out of a new political order as with Islam, Christianity was for the Germanic peoples a preexistent institution with which they had to reckon. But as a holdover institution from the Roman Empire, the Church also remained at a distance from the new political regimes, with a healthy tension that would be structurally impossible in Byzantium and the Arab Caliphates, where the smoother transition from antiquity ensured a tight and seamless integration between religious and temporal power.

In the near term, the Western Roman Church’s unique position as the only institution with direct continuity to antiquity meant its negotiating position with the new kings had no equivalent in the Islamic or Eastern Christian worlds. The reordering of marriage patterns in the West, by banning marital alliances between cousins that might fortify a family lineage, could only occur when church and state remained at some tension. Western Christianity’s separation from political power, which initially allowed the Church to rein in temporal rulers, would come back to haunt both Catholics and Protestants. When the state became powerful once more in the West, it had both the will and power to drive faith out of public life. In Byzantium or Islam, religion was not fundamentally ever seen as separate, and driving it from the public domain would be more akin to amputating a limb of the state.

While Rubin and Henrich focus on civilization-wide changes that leave a mark on individual, family and small-scale institutions, Sheidel in Escape from Rome argues that cultural innovation and flexibility could only reach its full potential as a civilizationally creative force under conditions of political diversity. Whereas Han China, contemporaneous with the Roman Empire, was the first of many equivalent dynasties, Rome never truly reconstituted itself for any appreciable period. Sheidel’s thesis is that China stranded itself up on a local optimum, perfecting a precise system that arose during the Han dynasty. In contrast, the West was free to eventually transcend the restrictions of the Roman model because that model never truly rose again. The shattering of the political order, the collapse of the interlocking economic system and the social disorder that was unleashed with the Pax Romana’s end, disaggregated a finely tuned machine, but step by step, cultural evolution via competition and interaction in the post-Roman landscape created a set of societies that prized innovation and dynamism in a way the Empire never would have. Though they differ on the details, Rubin and Henrich would seem to agree that without Rome’s fall, the West was unlikely to have taken the path it did. Rome’s fall was indeed the end of one civilization, but it was the birth of another. If Athens and Jerusalem were the starting point, Rome and its aftermath was a requisite way station. The true birth of the West only occurred when the Mediterranean’s southern and eastern shores went their own way, evolving into Eastern Christendom and Islam; meantime, the Roman West melted down, the better, as it turned out, to be reconstituted as something entirely new

The Ship of Theseus

The American diplomat Michael McFaul recounts that in a 2011 meeting between then Vice President Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader said ““You look at us and you see our skin and then assume we think like you. But we don’t.” Save for those with substantial Tatar ancestry, it is entirely correct that biologically, Russians are indisputably European. In fact, the genetic distance between ethnic Russians and the English is significantly smaller than that between the English and either Spaniards or Italians. And yet, it is the Italians and Spaniards, not the Russians who are part of the same broad cultural tradition as the English, that of the West. This is the outcome of history, some of it constructive, but much of it destructive. The West as we understand it is incomprehensible without Greek logos and Jewish thumos, reason and spirit. But it was also shaped by the collective historical trauma of the fall of Rome, the eternal city, whose 410 sack prompted St. Augustine of Hippo to write his apologia for Christianity, City of God.

All civilizations are dynamic on some level, evolving and shifting with the times, adapting and mutating. But the modern West in particular has put transformation, innovation and the grasping for a brighter future, at the heart of its identity over the last few centuries, since the end of the Wars of Religion in the 17th century and the rise of science. The “quarrel of the ancients vs. the moderns” that troubled the European republic of letters around 1700 was decided in favor of the moderns. Unlike the Greeks and Jews, modern Westerners see a potential golden age in the future, an Eden of technological plenty and promise. Putin’s fixation on 1,000-year-old disputes in many ways reflects a common non-Western mentality (e.g., Hindus angry over the 13th-century Islamic conquest of the subcontinent or Muslims bemoaning the Spanish Reconquista), preoccupied with the past and its glories, rather than tantalized by the possibilities of the future. Instead of questing to recapture the glories of a lost world, Western society tends to fantasize about a future to outshine the glories of the past, a shining city of the future rather than a golden utopia of the past.

To know “who we are” it pays to know where we came from. To predict where we might yet go, likewise. History’s finer details deliver no final answers, but the arc of the narrative illustrates essential events, choices and arbitrary traumas via which the particular character of our civilization emerged. Rome’s ashes and the attendant birth of the West were the ultimate act of creative destruction. It may be that the present age, of smartphones and artificial intelligence, will spell the death of much that we still hold to be dear and true, but if any of the world’s civilizations can prove a match for the rising tides that threaten to engulf us, my money is on the West, ever protean, ever innovating and ever adaptable.