Book 1,019: The West – Naoíse Mac Sweeney

This was a fascinating read. Mac Sweeney takes what you think you know about “Western Civilization” and attempts to flip it on its head via fourteen mini-biographies about historical figures, only a few of which I knew immediately.

I feel horrible it’s taken me this long to push my response out. The publisher reached out in January 2023. I blew past the publication date in May 2023, and finally read it in December 2023. So, I’m hanging my head, because it’s now taken me another month and a half to actually publish my response.

Where this book soars is in highlighting just how limited our public education is in the United States. I vaguely had ideas about some of these facts and people, but I mean like the fuzziest foggiest of ideas. What I could follow along with was the rote learning we were forced to memorize that provided the counter-narrative to so much of this book.

In our modern times, this image of the non-Western ‘other’ is set up in the mirror image of the idealized Westerner through a series of patriarchally informed conceptual oppositions—West versus East, masculine versus feminine, strong versus weak, brave versus cowardly, light-skinned versus dark-skinned. In the West today, it is a rhetoric that sits uncomfortably beneath the surface of acceptable political discourse, occasionally bubbling to the surface. In fifth-century BCE Athens, this racism was mainstream. (Chapter 1, The Rejection of Purity)

The framework of the novel was a bit forced, statues in the Library of Congress, I think, and how those were chosen and how she chose the fourteen narratives for her book, but hey it acts as a hook and a connection to the idea that all history is constructed in the moment of the writer, not before. If there was one fact that struck me more than any other, that I knew, but hadn’t seen it connected so explicitly to the history of what I was taught it was in Chapter 5, “The Illusion of Christendom”, in which she broke down explicitly so many things that mostly white Western Christians forget or ignore. Christianity has never been a monolith; it has never been solely the property of the west and it is so much more diverse in belief than we were ever truly taught.

Cultural products including academic writing both are shaped by the historical and political contexts in which they are produced, and also, at the same time, go on to shape those contexts as well. This is the feedback loop of culture and identity. (Chapter 13, The West and Its Critics)

This book is therefore necessarily my own subjective interpretation of Western history, focused not on ‘great men,’ like those of Spofford and Bacon, but rather on individuals whose lives I feel encapsulated something the Zeitgeist or something else important of their age. (Conclusion, The Shape of History)

There were a couple of quotes that just made me laugh and or I was like OMG I forget how historical Boston is (since I didn’t grow up here). I mean don’t get me wrong I know the big things and every time someone visits, we go do a new touristy historical thing more often than not, but the second quote below was like WHOA, we walk the dog there 😀

Al-Mamūn’s vision for knowledge acquisition was nothing short of global—it is said that when he defeated foreign kings in battle, he often demanded tribute from them not in gold, enslaved people, or treasure, but rather in the form of books from their royal libraries. (Chapter 3, The Global Heirs of Antiquity)

The winter of 1763–64 saw Boston in the grip of a deadly smallpox pandemic. While most wealthy Bostonians fled, Warren and his colleagues set up an emergency field hospital at Castle William, a fortified peninsula in the south of the city. As well as providing free care for the sick and the dying, they also embarked on a controversial campaign of inoculations, saving hundreds more lives in the process. When the epidemic waned, the city council decreed that ‘the Thanks of the Town be and are hereby given [to] those Gentleman Physicians, who in this Season of difficulty and distress have generously Inoculated and carried through the Small-Pox Gratis so considerable a Number of the poor inhabitants.’ The doctors of Castle William became overnight celebrities. (Chapter 10, The West and Politics)

I mean come on right? If I were ever going to take over other countries/powers I would pull an Al-Mamūn and demand their libraries and knowledge over most anything else. And legit, we live about a mile and a half from what is now known as Castle Island (it’s no longer an island) and just reading this was like WHOA. I think the guides mention it on the tour that it was used as a hospital, but it’s been a few years since I last did the tour. Most people just go to hang out on the beautiful peninsula to see boats coming into and out of the inner harbor and the planes taking off from Logan Airport just over the water.

The writing was super approachable, and I enjoyed that each chapter could be read as almost an encapsulated biography. They overlapped via theme and Mac Sweeney tied them together, but there was no direct lineage between the chapters. I believe Mac Sweeney did this to show just how disjoined and discombobulated history is and that the idea of a direct lineage for anyone from ancient times is impossible and there are always complications and offshoots. I also really appreciated her bringing in at the end how Russia and China are rewriting or redefining their own histories as well as those of the west within their borders. I think there could’ve been a bit more about the unwritten histories and oral histories of native peoples, but for such a dense book and for how much Mac Sweeney does break down in it, I’m not surprised it was more of a nod than any actual ability to dig into those.

Recommendation: This was a fascinating read. I’m sad I waited as long as I did to read it, but it was well worth the read. Mac Sweeney writes engaging prose while dropping in dates and details that build to a comprehensive retelling of how the idea of Western Civilization should be deconstructed and rewritten. It was a little disappointing not to see any direct references of queer theory, especially Michel Foucault and his theories around power, but they could’ve been in the footnotes and endnotes. I am also struggling to remember if there were any queer historical figures written or included and none pop to mind immediately, but there may have been allusions them and there may have been some. If there are, that’s on me for not remembering and for not writing this earlier. If there aren’t queer individuals that just shows there are still more versions of the story to be written.

Opening Line: “Origins matter. When we pose the question, ‘Where do you come from?’ what we are really asking is often, ‘Who are you?’ This is true for individuals, families, and entire countries. It is also true of an entity as large and as complex as the West.”

Closing Line: “This book is not, as some might argue, an attack on the West. Instead, I would argue that it is a celebration of the West and its foundational principles. What could be more Western than questioning, critiquing, and disputing received wisdom? What could be more Western than engaging in dialogue? And what could be more Western than reimagining the shape of history?” (Not whited out as this is nonfiction.)

Additional Quotes from The West
“It was fifth-century BCE Athens that pioneered the ‘clash of civilizations’ rhetoric, and it did so as a tool of Greek-on-Greek imperialism.” (Chapter 1, The Rejection of Purity)

“But while Herodotus did not invent history, he did do a good job of reinventing it. He focused less on the telling of sequential events and more on patterns of historical causality, shifting the emphasis from the ‘what’ to the ‘why.'” (Chapter 1, The Rejection of Purity)

“Herodotus conceived of a much more fluid and changeable world, where the distinctions that divided people along lines of culture, ethnicity, principles, and geography were all blurred.” (Chapter 1, The Rejection of Purity)

“Yet despite the overwhelming evidence for the diversity—both ideal and actual—of the Roman Empire, many modern inhabitants of the West still cling to an inaccurate vision of ancient Rome. In particular, those seeking to cast the Romans as the ancestors of the modern West often characterize the Romans as racially white, applying ethnic and physiognomic terms to people who would have categorized themselves in completely different ways.” (Chapter 2, The Asian Europeans)

“While the continuation of ancient Greek intellectual traditions and the absorption of ancient Greek intellectual influences were widely accepted in ninth-century Baghdad, the claim that Greek and Islamic culture was fundamentally the same evidently raised some eyebrows, and al-Kindī devoted an entire section of On Philosophy to arguing his case.” (Chapter 3, The Global Heirs of Antiquity)

“In the medieval world of the twelfth century, the Greeks belonged neither to Europa nor to any embryonic concept of the West. For the peoples of Godfrey’s Europa, there was relatively little interest in the cultural legacy of ancient Greece.” (Chapter 4, The Asian Europeans Again)

“One of the biggest misconceptions that people can have about medieval Christendom is that it existed as a coherent entity. There were certainly many peoples and realms that identified themselves as Christian during the thousand or so years that we tend to call the ‘medieval period,’ but there was precious little unity between them.” (Chapter 5, The Illusion of Christendom)

“The Christians of Africa and Asia deserve their place in the history of medieval Christianity, which is too often Eurocentric in its focus.” (Chapter 5, The Illusion of Christendom)

“For some Christians, it was not even clear whether the faith of the Muslims was entirely different from their own. After all, Muslims worshiped the same god, acknowledged Jesus as a prophet, and shared many of their religious principles. In a world where divergent visions of Christianity were multiplying and there was no shared sense of a unitary Christian faith, the differences within and between the religions could be subjective.” (Chapter 7, The Path Not Trodden)

“Race-making is the process through which one group of people defines another as a coherent population; imagines that this population can be identified by characteristics deemed to be natural and embodied; and thinks that these characteristics justify that population’s position on the social scale.” (Chapter 9, The West and Empire)

“Instead, he sold them an idea. North America, he told them, was not the colonial outpost of a greater and more illustrious Europe, but rather Europe’s ascendant successor. (Central and South America were not part of Warren’s vision—we will discuss them later in the chapter.) According to Warren, North America remained unblemished by the decadence of the Old World, and was therefore the rightful heir to millennia of European culture. The newly independent United States of America was to be the final and perfect culmination of Western Civilization.” (Chapter 10, The West and Politics)

“Although he [Joseph Warren] was a gifted academic (his political opponents would later describe him as ‘possessed of a Genuis that promised Distinction’), the university ranked tis students not according to academic performance, but on the wealth and social standing of their parents.” (Chapter 10, The West and Politics)

“What this new historicizing impulse lent to the ascendent West was the sense that its own Western history—the grand narrative of Western Civilization—was of universal and global significance. Just as Western people were assumed to be better, more elevated, and more important than others, dominating non-Western people in the present; so too were Western origins assumed to be better, more elevated, and important than non-Western antiquity, eclipsing non-Western people also in the past. After all, only Western origins were imaged to be ‘classical.’ These various threads—the imperial, the political, the racial, and of course the historiographical—can be seen coming together in the life of one man, William Ewart Gladstone.” (Chapter 12, The West and Modernity)

“By highlighting this interplay between politics and culture, Said laid the foundations for a reassessment of Western Civilization, allowing us to see it for what it  really is—an invented social construct, one that is extremely powerful and has far-reaching consequences in the real world, but a construct nonetheless.” (Chapter 13, The West and Its Critics)

“Where Daesh embraced a mirror image of the grand narrative of Western Civilizations, and Russia seeks to rewrite it, China has opted to ignore it entirely, creating an entirely independent and qualitatively different model of civilizational history. Rather than seeing a world where civilization is transferred, inherited, or passed down through a cultural lineage, China sees a world where civilizations are parallel, pristine, and unchanging. This is not only a very different global conception of the present from that imagined in the West, but also a very different model for the shape of history. ” (Chapter 14, The West and Its Rivals)

“These are people who would prefer to turn back the clock on the West, to undo the last century of change, and to restore the West to its supposed glory days of world domination. Those self-styled defenders of the West are, in reality, its attackers. As pointed out in recent studies on the rise of illiberalism in the West, these people actually stand against the principles at the heart of the contemporary West, promoting instead the outdated principles of a West that belongs firmly in the past. And when they call in shrill tones for us to mount a defense of Western Civilization, they are, in reality, calling for us to rally to the defense of a morally bankrupt fiction.” (Conclusion, The Shape of History)