Land of Lime

From the many reviews that I looked at, Roger Osborne’s new book Civilization: A New History of the Western World
seems to be a necessary reading.

Here are the links to reviews in New York Times, The Guardian and The Telegraph.

Some relevant paragraphs from these reviews.

Tim Gardam writes in The Guardian:

Osborne argues that we inherit a long intellectual tradition that has invoked civilisation as some unchallengeable virtue, the golden thread in Western history that weaves together, art, science, architecture, literature and philosophy. It allows us to keep faith in our values without their being tarnished by all the horrors of injustice and suffering that we have inflicted on our ourselves and other cultures. It allows us a false, optimistic narrative of our past so that we believe we can construct a similar story for our future; yet in reality that future is quite uncertain.

The reviewers seem to be somewhat uneasy about Osborne’s skepticism about the self proclaimed superiority of the Post-Enlightenment western civilization and his project to write a popular history from such a skeptical premise. Willam Grimes writes in the New York Times:

As he speeds through the history of the past 20 years, Mr. Osborne goes on something of a rant, teeing off against elitist art, abstract philosophy, the injection of moral categories into foreign policy, privatization of public industries and virtually everything else in sight, including and especially Western rationalism, a guiding light for 2,500 years.

“The fundamental western belief that there are rational ways of organizing the world which will bring benefit to all has been at the root of every human-made catastrophe that has overtaken us,” he writes, “yet many of us still believe that we have a bounden duty to bring our simplistic, universalizing, ‘progressive’ systems of government, economics, education, policing, judiciary and morals to every part of every society on the planet.”

Whew. Only at the end of the book does it become clear that Mr. Osborne has been engaged in a very strange project. While painstakingly reconstructing the imposing, intricate edifice of Western civilization, he has planted a series of explosive charges. And then, when the job is done, he lights the fuses and watches as the entire thing collapses into dust.

OK. Civilization is officially on our reading list.