The first thing that struck me about The Foundations of Western Civilization was how abnormally fast it moved before it got to Greek history. The biggest Bronze Age civilizations got a lecture, and in five lectures or so we were in Greece and things slowed down. For Egypt in particular, it felt like they summed up the entirety of Egyptian history with a sentence or two each about the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom, then talked a little about Egyptian life and were done.
The lecturer’s background in religious history really shows in his topics. Religion got a lot of time, and not that it wasn’t big in history, but the course especially got bogged down comparing the Reformation and Counter-Reformation over three lectures. I would much rather have had more detail on Egypt than three lectures on the differences between Luther and Calvin and the specifics of how the Catholics chose to counter them. But then again, I’m an atheist, and every time the course touched on religion it reminded me how long religion has held us back and distracted us with imaginary concerns. It also spent a whole lecture each on the Hebrews, Jesus and the New Testament, the Christian Church in Late Antiquity, Scholasticism in Monasteries, and Mohammed and Islam. To think that theology was once the Queen of the Sciences, the highest subject taught in universities. It also felt like he downplayed the Inquisition, just mentioning as an aside that it was a thing while telling us so much else about the Catholic Church.
The lecturer also had a bone to pick with the way history is commonly taught. His claim was that the Roman Empire never really had a Fall, except in Edward Gibbon’s imagination looking back from the 18th century. Likewise, there were no Dark Ages. What we call the Dark Ages was a great time of expansion in Europe and hundreds of years where it was happily not held back by plagues. By my own reckoning, that holds up only for the later part of the period. The Plague of Justinian struck in 541 and recurred for about two centuries, but from around 750 until the Black Death arrived in 1347, Europe was largely plague free. So at least 750 to 1000, which falls within the traditional Dark Ages, really was a time of plenty. Indeed, Charlemagne’s kingdom was viewed as a new Rome by contemporaries, even though it unfortunately didn’t survive his grandsons. Scholars now usually call the whole period the Early Middle Ages anyway. The one era still commonly called a Dark Age and truly deserving of the term is the Greek Dark Ages, when the Greeks lost writing.
He also disagreed with the idea of the Renaissance, even though he gave a completely acceptable description of what characterized it and how it started in Florence and radiated outward. His argument was that Greek and Roman traditions never vanished during the Middle Ages, only became less prominent, so history is more continuous than the neat divisions we usually teach. I find that a tougher case to make than his Dark Ages argument, since there clearly was a resurgence of classical inspiration after the Middle Ages, even if it wasn’t the first. Indeed, some would say there was a Carolingian Renaissance in the 800s and a “Renaissance of the Twelfth Century” as well, and that the Italian Renaissance was just the best-known occurrence of a recurring theme.
This is the first of two Western Civilization courses, and it went quite a bit longer than I expected. I didn’t expect much after Rome, but it covered the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Age of Exploration and Empire, so it was a broad sweep that went all the way to the New World. It’s kind of a fun point that I didn’t know Canute was a real king when I watched Vinland Saga, but this series of lectures educated me on the Danelaw and the Danish conquest of Britain.
A few ideas stuck with me along the way. The lectures framed Sparta’s wars, Athens’ trade, and Corinth’s colonies as responses to the same land shortage, and while war and trade looked stronger at the time, I think colonization had the biggest long-term impact, since that’s what spread Greek culture. I also noticed that Sparta and Rome were both devoted to ancestral custom (Lycurgus in Sparta, the mos maiorum in Rome) and both deeply militaristic, though innovative, democratic Athens was just as violent and just as willing to embrace “might makes right,” so tradition isn’t the whole story. Rome’s conquests were often framed as defensive, since fear of Rome pushed its neighbors to aid Rome’s enemies, which gave Rome its next target, though historians debate whether “defensive imperialism” is accurate or just Roman self-justification. And it’s remarkable that so many lasting political ideas came from Greece and Rome, which were both prone to demagogues and strongmen, maybe because later thinkers learned as much from their failures as from their successes.
The best thing I came away with wasn’t in the lectures themselves but came from thinking about them. Sparta and Rome both looked to their ancestors for guidance, which got me wondering how progress happens in societies that revere the past. My conclusion is that progress often comes from holding a nation to its founders’ ideals. Abolitionists and suffragists succeeded largely by demanding the nation live up to its stated principles, which is in a sense a conservative argument in service of progress. The flip side is that people who believe in change can be too sure they know how to steer it, which is a real argument for caution, and it pairs well with Chesterton’s fence.
I’ve picked out a good follow-up course that dedicates 48 lectures just to Egypt, Bob Brier’s The History of Ancient Egypt, but I’m not sure where I’ll fit it in. Perhaps on my eclectic topics pass at the end of the wide sweep of history. If I can fit in a course on Victorian Britain, surely I have time for one on Egypt.