The Moral and Intellectual Value of Western Civilization

Propositions:

1. With 2500 years’ hindsight, the most distinctive aspect of Socratic dialogue, implicit in much of the Platonic corpus and to some extent in other Greek texts (e.g. Antigone), is the Socratic expectation that we should engage in a dialectic in which we all work towards consistency and coherence of our beliefs regardless of the possibly corrosive effects of such a process on existing standards of epistemological and social authority.

2. The most distinctive net positive contribution of western civilization is the Socratic norm of mutual rationality as described above:

A. When combined with the empiricism of Bacon and Galileo, the rational development of science is the result.

B. When combined with the assumption that every human being is equally deserving of dignity or possesses a soul of equal worth, a rational commitment to universal human rights (e.g. the notion that slavery is immoral, or that human dignity should not be contingent on gender) is the result.

C. When directed towards an analysis of human institutions, an evolving understanding of political governance designed to protect the rights of the governed is a result (the U.S. Constitution being one such attempt, however flawed).

D. When the logical consistency driving Socratic inquiry is formalized in Aristotelian logic or the axiomatic mathematics of Euclid, and the logical consistency of non-Euclidean geometries are acknowledged 2000 years later, the foundations were laid for the formalization of logic that led to all of modern computing.

E. This is not to claim in any sense that science, human rights, humane political governance or logic are in any sense distinctively or necessarily Western or that Western versions of these institutions are in any sense distinctively superior to those that have evolved in cultures around the world for millennia. The only claim is that a common set of dialectic norms (which may have arisen sporadically elsewhere) has served as an engine of progress in a distinctive manner within Western civilization. This engine of progress has produced stunning outcomes over the centuries which have (mostly) benefitted most of humanity.

In conclusion, Socratic norms of consistency and coherence regardless of their impact on authority have played a distinctive role in the development of Western institutions and thought that has been, on balance, remarkably positive.

Corollaries:

1. As we reduce the ethnocentrism of existing curricula we should nonetheless preserve the core standards of Socratic rationality.

2. One of the most enduringly valuable characteristics of university life should be a communal norm of Socratic rationality in and out of the classroom.

More casually, “How can you believe x if you believe y?” should always be a socially acceptable question, at least when not asked with aggressive intent. This is by no means the case universally in the world at large.