The barbarians are laughing at us Culture warriors are losing the battle for civilisation

So what, if anything, does Western civilisation have to say in its own defence? Until recently, discussions about such broad ideological questions have been rather introverted. If people argued over the usefulness, or the virtue, of “the West” as a cultural signifier, it was often in the context of narrow debates over the curriculum — or how the past should be presented through museums and monuments. Douglas Murray’s bestselling The War on the West refers more to domestic culture wars than to any global ideological contest — though he does elaborate the argument that the transgressions of the West, including colonialism and racism, have never been Western monopolies.

Given the hitherto confined nature of this debate, perhaps we should welcome an astonishing new contribution — How the World made the West — by Josephine Quinn, who has just been appointed to an ancient history chair at Cambridge. Amid an ocean of fascinating detail about little-known trading links and technological breakthroughs, she makes the impertinent argument that there is really no such thing as a civilisation, or even a distinct culture, and so there cannot be such a thing as a Western one. In her view of history, all the categories by which people have tried to organise the past melt away; there are no transmissions between cultures, but rather endless micro-transactions between individual traders, raiders and people struggling randomly to survive.

Paradoxically, her argument would be read in Beijing, Tehran or Moscow as an expression of a characteristically Western, capitalist pathology. It would be denounced as a typically arrogant effort to steamroller all difference, all the religions, traditions, proud collective memories that give sense to human communities, and to reduce humanity to an amorphous mass of pliant consumers. (To those of us who lived in Russia in the Nineties, it now feels as though the wackiest forms of anti-Western nativism and Russian Messianism — incubated, ironically, by the rollicking free speech of the Yeltsin years — have become the Muscovite mainstream.)

The author’s keenest interest is in material culture and trade, as evidenced by archaeology. She is interested in the written word not as an expression of the human spirit but as evidence for what crops were grown, what metals were smelted and what goods were traded. In the final third of the book, the emphasis switches to the transmission of ideas and inventions — stressing the contribution of brainy Muslim and Asian thinkers and mathematicians to Western Europe’s development. All good stuff.

She reserves, however, a disproportionate opprobrium for romantic British philhellenism, for example the claim of John Stuart Mill that the battle of Marathon, in which democratic Athens triumphed over the Persians, mattered more to the story of England than did the clash at Hastings. In truth, she provocatively argues, that Greek battle could be regarded as a minor skirmish in a punitive expedition by the Persians in which many Greeks took the Persian side. And modern readers, she suggests, should find as much to admire in Persian society as among the slave-owning, sexist Athenians.

The book is presented, in part, as a critique of the “reception” of Hellenism by the post-enlightenment world. It argues that the facts of east Mediterranean history were cynically distorted by imperial Britain. Part of the distortion, she insists, lay in isolating Greece and its golden age from all the cultures with which the Greeks interacted, like the Egyptians and the Phoenicians. Or indeed from the Persians, with whom the Greek relationship — as she notes — was ambivalent not unremittingly hostile.

She is right to say that Western ideologues of the imperial and Cold-War eras reread Greek history and literature in ways that suited them. So did every other consumer of that brilliant canon. Yet over and above her provocative generalisations, there is a real question. Once you remove the liberal-imperialist lens through which Victorian Britain, and indeed Cold-War America, viewed ancient Athens, what remains of the idea of a Greek-influenced West?

Perhaps the first point to make is that golden-age Hellenism is not a monolithic phenomenon. It is a vast range of superbly expressed feelings and opinions. The elitist idealism of Plato differs from the empirical rationalism of Aristotle. The formal Athenian patriotism of Aeschylus (which does not exclude a human empathy for the Persian dead) is different from the mischievous scepticism of fellow dramatist Euripides. The variety of worldviews is enormous.

Professor Quinn writes with compelling passion about the way in which coastal communities — for example on Crete — “picked and chose” from the products and technology, and the religious and cultural practices, offered by trading partners across the sea. It is equally the case that modern Westerners — like everybody else — have picked and chosen from the cultural and metaphysical resources offered by the classical world, and Greece in particular. But the availability of that treasure-chest mattered; it was not trivial.

Nor, it should be said, did the Anglo-Saxon reception of Greek history begin or end with Mill. It was in 1628 that Thomas Hobbes translated Thucydides, delivering a landmark in English prose and political thought. In the 20th century, the Irish-born leftist E.R. Dodds offered a counterblast to conservative philhellenism in The Greeks and the Irrational. Elsewhere in Western Europe, leading interpreters of ancient Athens have included French Marxists who adored Plato.

Distilling all this, there is surely one feature of ancient Athens whose influence on the modern West remains palpable and worth defending against its many enemies, including those who counter-propose one or other form of authoritarianism. That feature is the ability of a highly sophisticated society to question and laugh at itself; to subject powerful individuals to public scrutiny, accountability and ridicule; to engage in robust public debate in the hope that good information will drive out bad. The British Victorians only partly understood this; they read the comedies of Aristophanes with the naughtier bits excised.

The collective West is of course guilty of many historic sins, but it differs from totalitarian societies and resembles democratic Athens in the way it still (just about) retains the capacity for self-scrutiny, self-correction and no-holds-barred discussion. It is unlikely that a history professor in Russia, China or Iran would remain in place long after publishing a book arguing that their country’s civilisation was actually an illusion. Perhaps there is something magnificent about the fact that a book so wildly iconoclastic as Quinn’s can be published, and taken seriously: a perverse proof that the Periclean West is alive, so much so that people can deny its existence with cheerful impunity.

Still, the book’s relatively uncritical reception, hailing its boldest claims as well as its incontestable virtues, risks persuading some of the world’s authoritarians that the defence of liberal democracy is now a spent force. The Guardian’s reviewer, for example, hails the book as a “brilliant and learned challenge to modern western chauvinism”. Brilliant and learned some of its insights assuredly are, but is “western chauvinism” still such a terrible, untamed beast that it needs to be attacked in long and learned polemics? That need was more evident in 1969, when Kenneth Clark launched his purring televised perorations on art history from the banks of the Seine. Or even in 1990, when the Cold War’s outcome triggered an unhealthy hubris, as the Greeks would have said. Now, maybe not so much.

So what then will be the reaction to the book and its reception from the geopolitical enemies of Western civilisation, who think it exists and want to destroy it — not just intellectually but physically?

To them, it may now seem as though today’s Western commentariat resembles the late Roman community so vividly described by the poet Cavafy: people jaded with cultural and political sophistication who are waiting, rather eagerly, for barbarians who offer “some kind of a solution” to life’s tedium.