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PARTISAN REVIEW
some, to be sure, who are still in a state of denial, arguing that the rising
statistics of crime are only a reflection of the improved reporting of crime,
or that the increase of illegitimacy and single-parent families is an innocu–
ous "alternative life-style," or that our society is so fatally racist that black
racism is an appropriate response to white racism. But such arguments are
less frequently heard today - except, perhaps, in those academic cloisters
where ideology still prevails over reality.
It is a great achievement that we have come so far, that we are now
able to take a proper measure of our problems and to seek remedies for
them - to redefine, as Mr. Crouch enjoins us to do, our aspirations and
our discontents. That is indeed cause for tragic optimism - or cheerful
peSSInllsm.
John Silber:
Thank you. Our first panelist is David Fromkin, Professor of
International Relations, History, and the Law at Boston University.
David Fromkin:
Stanley Crouch and Gertrude Himmelfarb are hard acts to
follow.
It is no news to anyone in this audience that the concept of the West
versus the East as two contrasting sets of values is one that we owe to
fifth-century Greece. Under modern critical scrutiny, however, it is clear
that in one way, part of that concept does not hold up. The East is too
various to be placed under one heading. There is no one Asia. But the
concept of the West is one that remains cogent, coherent, and meaning–
ful.
It
also is broader in its origins than was once thought. If this meeting
had been taking place a hundred years ago, we would have thought that
the ideals of the West were those that we owed not just principally but
perhaps almost exclusively to Greece and Rome. The politics of the West
are indeed those that we take from Herodotus, and from the funeral ora–
tion of Pericles as reported to us by Thucydides. But in the course of the
last hundred years, the West also has discovered and acknowledged the
strong Middle Eastern roots of Western civilization. Modernism, a prod–
uct ofWestern thought, rests on the verifiable and therefore is of unversal
validity. However, amongst the opponents of Western thought - rational
thought, secular thought, scientific thought - there are many who now
maintain, wrongly, that the scientific outlook typical of Western civiliza–
tion is a mere myth, no better than anybody else's myth. I take this
comment from the zoologist Richard Dawkins: whenever anyone of us
allows Delta Airlines or American Airlines or British Airways to take us
35,000 feet up in the sky, we had better hope that Western science is not
a mere myth.
