The Best Definition Of Western Civilization You'll Ever Hear - David Butterfield

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]I've always wanted to ask someone with your knowledge and expertise this question. What is civilization?

[00:00:06]>> It's a big question. Uh it's not a simple matter and indeed it's a controversial question but I think unduly controversial.

[00:00:15]Civilization is a useful word and it's one we should use. But what is and what is not a civilization?

[00:00:22]The best we can do is to point to certain things which seem to be necessary to a civilization and see how far that takes us. So to be a civilization, a group of people need to have stability. That means geographical stability. They are sedentary in one place and that typically means having an agricultural and economic base which allows them to be rooted in that place.

[00:00:47]But more than that, they need stability politically and socially. Often that means a fixed law code. Often it means some kind of social hierarchy that gives a sense of place within the society. And often, but not necessarily, it means a standing military to defend that civilization from e external encroachments.

[00:01:07]But there's more than that that's required. And I would point to a a self-awareness, a self-conscious realization of the shared civilization of that group of people. And what that means in practice is the desire somehow to memorialize and to monumentalize what that civilization stands for. And what that means in practice is a desire to somehow communicate across time and space. The civilization may want to make monuments for the gods transcendent beyond our human world or more likely they may want to leave monuments for their future selves. So I personally would say that writing or something akin to writing is a necessary technology that a civilization must have. Why?

[00:01:56]Because if you're not able to express your thoughts, ideas, and achievements in language through writing, all you can do is preserve an oral tradition.

[00:02:07]So although it's not often seen as a technology, it should be seen as one.

[00:02:10]Writing uh is a necessary part. That sort of mixture and having the stability to last for let's say centuries at at a minimum seems to me to to lead us towards a rough definition of uh a civilization.

[00:02:27]As for western civilization that's even more uh contested a claim. Uh it is a phrase that I use but it's not the most apt way of describing what I think we mean. I I much prefer the term western tradition. Uh the reason is is is twofold. Civilization as a word like any word that ends in shun t io n all such words are processes in origin. They come from Latin words which are about a process. So even a word like nation which sounds like a static thing actually in origin means birth coming into being. So civilization when it was used was conceived of as a progression a civilizing movement from not having the characteristics I mentioned following some sort of linear progress and then reaching the goal. What was the goal when the term was used? It was mostly something looking like western democratic society. But I perhaps you too um I'm extremely pessimistic about the notion of linear progress about the fact that there's a clear t- loss or end point in our society. So I think that's the wrong way of conceiving of of what a civilization is. We're not necessarily heading somewhere better tomorrow.

[00:03:46]Tradition's better because as another word ending in shun it's about the act of handing on. Latin trader, traditionio is the handing over. And the reason why that's such a good metaphor to think of the history of the west is that it involves two kinds of people. And you need both. One is someone in a position actually to pass on actively to stretch the arm out and give to another the thing deemed worth preserving. But crucially that baton's going to be dropped if there isn't also the second person who is willing to receive it and sees the value in picking it up. And that is really the metaphor we should use when we think of the west. If you read modern books, modern op-eds criticizing the term western civilization, generally the arguments seduced are a series of of childish and really not very logically powerful um counter claims. So someone will say well how can it be the west because some of the countries that are part of the western civilization movement are in the east or how can it be truly west and if some parts of the west don't have these features or how can it be a meaningful civilization if I can point to you periods in the last 3,000 years where these ideals have not obtained in a given place or time in the west. All of that's just noise. It's just it's just not meaningful to understand the world we're in as we are. Fundamentally, the West would look nothing like it does and there is no way we would be having this conversation without the intertwined threads of the Greco Roman intellectual philosophical artistic tradition and the core thread of Christianity which itself emerges from Judaism but it's Christianity intertwined with the Greco Roman um leg legacy that leads us to where we are now and that's just indisputable That so that being indisputable fact let's talk about the Greco Roman intellectual and philosophical tradition what is it where how is it different from what people in in other places believed around the same time and to this day >> that's a very big topic we'll ask all the big questions >> you do and then there there are a few bigger questions than that so if I can set out some sort of core elements in in my answer before we get to to particulars. So Rome is extremely important and also not important in in this tale. It's extremely important because most of the Greek ideas that matter to the tradition of the west end up surviving and being catalyzed and being and being refined through Roman conquest of Greece. Without the Romans, it's a really open question what the fate of the Greek world and what the fate of the west would have been. So the Romans preserve and propagate a lot of the Greek uh ideas, but it's also unimportant because you know if we had a weighing scale of the intellectual contribution of the Greeks versus the intellectual contribution of the Romans, the scale would break on in the Greeks favor. There there is comparatively very very little innovative intellectual thought among the Romans compared to the Greeks. And that is not because the Romans weren't innovative or original.

[00:07:14]No, they were re really sharp, curious, clever people, broadly speaking. Um, it's it's that the Greeks were operating at a level of originality, ingenuity, energy, and joy in discovery that to my knowledge is utterly unparalleled uh in in the world. So that's one important part of the story. Uh, another is that a lot of the things that in the modern west really matter to us in our values have retrospectively been picked up again. So we talk about democracy being a natural good even though it's a very complex thing. For most of the history of the west democracy was not obviously a good thing. In fact, through the Roman period, through the early late medieval period, even after the Renaissance in the early modern period, no one is celebrating democracy. It's it's not a continuous uh virtue in that western tradition I'm talking about. However, come the 18th century, come the enlightenment, come the growth of the nation state and various revolutions which try to put the people ahead of the vested interests of monarchs and despots, then suddenly democracy is the thing to investigate. And at that point, thanks to the preservation of these ideals in both Greek and Latin literature, there's a conscious look back to the very specific period of fifth century Athens.

[00:08:45]And it's it's beyond doubt the innovations made in this very experimental mode of government in classical Athens were not only unlike anything the world had ever seen, but they've never been tried again at anything like the degree they they were.

[00:09:03]the ultra direct democracy that the Athenians pioneered and thrived with before ultimately having a tragic downfall much like the Traigians would depict on stage uh is is a unique phenomenon. So democracy is a major part uh of the answer to your question but also philosophy we assume that philosophy is asking the big questions and humans the world over presumably have always been asking the big questions but it's not so there are genuinely turns intellectual turns that happen in the sixth and fifth centuries BC in Greece not just in Athens but in various Greek city states which as far as we can tell and we have a lot of cross-cultural evidence are entirely new.

[00:09:53]So the word philosopher is invented uh actually by Pythagoras on the island we met in in Samos. But a few generations before him in a place called Myitus which is just across the water now in western Turkey someone called Thales starts to ask questions which break from the tradition of seeing the world around us as divinely controlled and ultimately intertwined with myth.

[00:10:20]He starts to ask what we would now call scientific questions, cosmological questions, questions about physics and biology. And he is able to use inherited mathematics and astronomical knowledge to predict a solar eclipse in 585. And that day is regarded by some as the day science began. Not because a calculation could be made of that kind, but because the very fact an eclipse could be predicted show that there were rational principles underpinning these amazing cosmic events which hitherto have been seen as as divine. And within 100 years of Thales, half a dozen, 10 very individual philosophers emerge around the Greekeaking world. Each tackling problems not just of cosmology, but of how we know things, epistemology, uh, of what existence is, ontology. And when it comes to fifth century Athens, questions about how we should live, ethics. And that's when we get to Socrates and and his his legacy. So another major part is that the the sense of self and our place in the world is suddenly rationalized in the sixth and fifth centuries by this series of of philosophical uh developments.

[00:11:45]One more thing worth mentioning uh before we take up any of these particular threads is on the artistic and and literary side.

[00:11:54]There is almost no kind no genre of artistic production that we could think of now in 2026 which was not live and thriving in classical Greece. And again they didn't inherit that from other parts of the world be it tragedy, comedy, historioggraphy.

[00:12:16]Instead they innovated these these ways of of inact enacting with the world around them in poetry uh in in drama in written texts now that they had the technology of writing. And it's it's unparalleled both in its innovation and in its enduring legacy. Everything of that kind goes back to the Greeks.

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