Nicholas Jose
Quarantine can make islands in time as well as in space. Discourse can construct borderlines and periods can be ringfenced as much as places. That’s what I observe as I look back on remarks I made at a conference in Chengdu in November 2018 on my last trip to China. Since then, for personal reasons and then the pandemic and the freeze in relations between Australia and China, I have not been back, after being a regular visitor for many years. As I consider what I said in response to the debates that were forming in Australia at the time, I see the intellectual barriers and blinds of ‘containment’ being set up in a discussion that became stranded.
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You can learn a lot when a foreign word and its English translation don’t quite match. Chinese 所谓 suŏwèi, usually translated ‘so-called’, is a good example. In Chinese it’s neutral, where the English has negative connotations that need a warning: “so-called” can require ‘sarcastic air quotation marks’.[1] When ‘Western Civilisation’ is discussed, as it was in those years in Australia, does that not invite a ‘so-called’, especially from a Chinese perspective, across a range of sceptical meanings?
Chinese scholars readily adopt an East-West binary, enunciating a desire to learn from the West while remaining confident of their own Chinese culture. Our host at Sichuan Normal University observed, from his position of academic knowledge, that ancient Greek and Chinese thinkers have much in common. I remembered the way the Benedictine Swami, Bede Griffiths, used the fingers of one hand to explain the relationship between the world’s major religions—each converging on the same centre, developing from a common root. Yet, when I consider any Chinese discussion of Australian advocacy of Western civilisation, I can’t help hearing it back translated as ‘so-called’.
The Australian debate generally lacked the informing critical inquiry into basic concepts and first principles that you would expect. The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, for example, expressed its mission confidently without defining (or even consistently punctuating) its title term, ‘w/Western civilisation’. The objective was ‘to advance education by promoting studies … associated with the establishment and development of western civilisation … in order to foster and promote an interest in and awareness of Western civilization and … [educating] young Australians … to value their own civilisational heritage.[2]
It is surely an open question what that is, requiring at least some clarification. One Ramsay Centre board member, former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, had an answer: ‘The key to understanding the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation is that it’s not merely about Western civilisation but in favour of it.’ For him that civilisational heritage includes:
the rule of law, representative democracy, freedom of speech, of conscience and religion, liberal pluralism, the prosperity born of market capitalism, the capability born of scientific rigour, and the cultivation born of endless intellectual and artistic curiosity.
Quite a package.
Abbott laments the lack of ‘a deep focus on the Christian faith’ in current curricula, adding that ‘almost entirely absent from the contemporary educational mindset was any sense that cultures might not all be equal and that truth might not be entirely relative.’ For him there appears to be a superior civilisation or culture which Australia can lay claim to, not Asian, not Indigenous, and with a Christian foundation.
The Chicago Manual of Style tells us that the term ‘Western’ should be capitalised when it does not refer to geography. Jerusalem, home of Christianity as well as Judaism and Islam, is not particularly part of western Europe, geographically defined. Parts of geographical western Europe—France, Germany, Britain—have indeed been world leaders in various fields in recent centuries, contributing importantly to modernity.
Equally, there’s no denying that those western European cultures at home and abroad have benefited from other cultures over time, and that civilisation, wherever it exists today, is not the property of any one. How western or Western is Australia? It would be a lost opportunity for a Great Books course in contemporary Australia not to include, for example, the Bhagavad Gita, the Chinese Four Classics (Confucius, Laozi et al.), the Koran, The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki, and the songs and stories of Aboriginal Australia.
As a historian of medicine, Warwick Anderson makes the point that students need to include whatever is accessible of the history and philosophy of science, especially medical science, if they are to understand the abiding concerns of civilisation in which all human minds and bodies participate. He wants students of medicine and other STEM to read great books that are traditionally in the Humanities domain, harking back to a time when the Arts and Sciences were not split into two exclusive cultures. An expanded definition of the Humanities with an Australian dimension would help here. ‘If only the Ramsay Centre could expand its horizons and become more ambitious in its promotion of our civilisation in all its forms and expressions,’ Anderson writes.[3]
Andrew Hamilton looks at it in another way in Eureka Street: ‘What is Western civilisation anyway?’ Noting that neither term is self-explanatory, he suggests that ‘we … expect civilisations to be civilised in their institutions and relationships,’ which requires a selective view, whatever the civilisation. ‘There is something to be said,’ he suggests, ‘for making the test of any civilisation its inclusion of the different and compassion for the weakest. A centre that assessed civilisations by these criteria might have something going for it.’[4] Civilisation for him is an ethical question.
In the US, Great Books courses run parallel to and overlap with courses on American Civilisation. The latter concept evolved as the US was preparing to join the war against Nazi Germany, to give young Americans an ideal for which to fight. The late Daniel Aaron (1912-2016) was the first person to get a Harvard PhD in ‘American Civilisation’. That was in 1943. He said that it was ‘as important to understand American civilization as to preserve it.’[5] ‘Australian Civilisation’, by contrast, tends to be avoided, having very different origins and connotations. If you google it, the first thing you get is a computer game, Australian (CIV 6). There’s not much more.
Anthropologists have sometimes used the term to describe the civilisation of Aboriginal Australians, arguably the oldest and most enduring civilisation in the world. Around the same time Daniel Aaron was developing his ideas for American civilisation at Harvard, an American anthropologist from Harvard was doing research in Australia. In 1937 Lloyd Warner (1898-1970) published a book with the striking title, A Black Civilisation: A social study of an Australian tribe, based on his time with the Murngin (Yolŋu) people of Arnhem Land in northern Australia. He uses the terms ‘Murngin civilisation’ or ‘native civilisation’ in contrast to ‘western civilisation’ or ‘white civilisation’, which he calls ‘melancholy and profitless’ by comparison with the ‘complete and well-organized society’ of the Yolŋu. How the civilisation of contemporary Australia combines those alternative lineages would be a good topic for the first week of a new course called Australian Civilisation.
I am agnostic as to whether it is better to speak of civilisation singular or civilisations plural. The BBC remake of Kenneth Clark’s famous television history of art, Civilisation (1969), had a pluralised title, Civilisations, and plural historian-presenters—Mary Beard, David Olasugo and Simon Schama—who attempt a new global reach. The first program begins with ISIS iconoclasm at Mosul and includes Sanxingdui masks from Sichuan, dated to the Shang dynasty (twelfth-eleventh century BCE). The final program gets to the contemporary Chinese artist, Cai Guo-qiang, whose works made with exploding gunpowder reflect civilisation’s creative and destructive faces, while Ai Weiwei’s giant inflatable refugee boat reminds us that the displacement of people is the seemingly inevitable obverse of the settled society that we think of as the site of civilisation. The presenters refer to different civilisations in the plural, inclusively, while also using civilisation more abstractly in the singular, as a moveable but defining achievement of humanity, the opposite of barbarism, a light in the dark.
Discussion of civilisation is rapidly caught in such binaries and too often the dichotomy of East and West is overlaid on it. Here, the East is used as another opposite of the civilisation that the West claims for itself supremely. Opposing forms of life come into play, nomadic versus settled, superstitious versus faithful, despotic versus democratic, where despotism is Eastern, posed against enlightened Western alternatives.
This intellectual opportunism is part of our heritage as Australians, too. It served British imperialism and American exceptionalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is only slowly being revised. An important contribution comes from the work of German historian, Jürgen Osterhammel, in a book called Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia. First published in German in 1998, it has been successively revised since and superbly translated by Robert Savage for its English publication in 2018. Osterhammel surveys a vast array of the European writing about Asia from the mid-1600s to mid-1800s: the period of European colonisation and empire. He includes the theoretical and world-historical writing of figures such as Leibniz, the Scottish enlightenment philosophers, Voltaire, Gibbon and Hegel, as well as works by travellers, diplomats, and scholars who experienced the various countries of Asia more directly.
The author’s conclusion is that in the long eighteenth century there was a balance between East and West. With an underlying conception of history and of humanity that was ‘universal and unitary’, interchange could occur based on mutual curiosity—sometimes affinity, at other times the interest of difference. That made Enlightenment commentators relatively well-informed. ‘Asia may have been Europe’s Other,’ Osterhammel writes, ‘but it figured as a permanent intellectual challenge rather than as an entirely alien and incomprehensible world.’ That sadly changed as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth century and the balance tipped towards negativity. ‘Curiosity, openness, and respect for the people of Asia are to be found for the last time’ in the generation that straddles those years, says Osterhammel, citing one lonely voice as late as 1831 who ‘recognises the history of Asiatic civilization as an integral part of the common history of humankind without judging it by Western standards’. By then an ‘exclusiveEurocentrism’ had developed that took ‘superiority as axiomatic’. His dispiriting last chapter, ‘Into a New Age’, includes a section called ‘From the Theory of Civilisation to the Civilising Mission’.
Osterhammel’s study explains how Australia has been bequeathed a limiting and static discourse about the region in which we are located. But on a positive note his long time frame suggests an alternative that may be relevant now. China has moved fast in recent decades and the world has changed. It may be that the long view, back to the eighteenth century, the Qing dynasty, when China was previously rich and powerful, offers a better start for re-calibrating how we understand civilisation than anything that has come since.
The Australian Academy of the Humanities turned its collective mind to these questions at a symposium called ‘Clash of Civilisations? Where are we now?’. Some of the speakers, like the BBC Civilisations, like Osterhammel, found examples in history where the proof of civilisation lay in openness, curiosity and exchange rather than contempt and clash.
The great Chinese scholar and author, Qian Zhongshu (1910-98), reflected on these matters, too. He studied in England and France from 1935-38 and experienced European attitudes to China at their most condescending. He reflected wryly on the craze for things Chinese back in the eighteenth century, when the French ‘admiration for China became excessive’.[6]Osterhammel confirms that ‘towards the end of the eighteenth century, the economies of entire regions of China and India were geared towards the European export market.
Yet, despite their enthusiasm for Chinese things, the British were ambivalent when it came to Chinese language, thought, and literary production. Qian anticipates the notion of balance, seeing the anti-Chinese attitudes that were often expressed satirically in eighteenth century English literature as ‘a reaction against the popularity of the Chinese taste in the English social life of the time’. He published his compendious and highly entertaining study in 1940-41 when he was back in China, concluding ironically:
Of course, free as they are from racial prejudices in their quest of wisdom and beauty, these writers do not see us as we in ourselves really are…. To be so intelligently misunderstood is yet to be paid the compliment of being worth understanding.
We are heirs to all this now. Perhaps it is time to talk again about a course in Australian civilisation that includes the Chinese contribution and much more besides.
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That was the discussion in 2018. It became stranded as times changed. Looking back, the terms of the debate seem to have been designed to instigate a more adversarial world, leaving peace-making prospects as so many islands in the stream. Are the times conducive for considering what we can learn from each other, as elsewhere so-called civilisation wreaks havoc and destruction across grievous territorial lines in what look like acts of barbarism? Once again in 2024 the moment has passed.
[1] https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/Expressing_%22so-called%22_with_%22suowei%22
[2] http://www.ramsaycentre.org/about-us/
[3] https://www.smh.com.au/national/science-a-strange-omission-from-ramsay-centre-s-study-of-the-west-20180625-p4znix.html
[4] file:///C:/Users/user/Documents/China/FASIC/Australian%20Humanities/What%20is%20Western%20Civilisation%20anyway_.html
[5] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/05/daniel-aaron-pioneer-in-american-studies-dead-at-103/
[6]Ch’ien Chung-shu (Qian Zhongshu), ‘China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth Century’, pp.351-384; ‘China in the English Literature of the Eighteenth Century’ (I), pp.7-48, ‘China in the English Literature of the Eighteenth Century’ (II), pp.113-152, Quarterly Bulletin of Chinese Bibliography [New Series] Vol. II, Nos 3-4, December 1941. (p.8)