Michael Kimmage

This is mainly a history of American foreign policy, but it also covers the way in which Anglophone humanities university departments once transmitted the tradition of Western civilisation to their students, and now do not. In the first few decades of the twentieth century universities built antiquity museums, cultivated great-books programs in English, and generally tried to make our classical and Western heritage, from Greece, to Roman to the Middle Ages, to the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Victorians, and so on, more accessible. Charles Eliot Norton wrote that: "With the Greeks our life begins". There was a sense that in inducting students into this tradition they were coming to understand their civilisational selves. Now the humanities are dying. As the author writes: 'With a few exceptions, twenty-first-century American universities cannot agree on what their students should love, or if they should love anything at all, which grants students a real freedom. ... Without being inducted into a tradition, however, students will pose pragmatic and punishing questions about the humanities. What are they good for? ... Students were [once] told to love the West because it was their civilisation. To remove this love and this self-love (Western-themed or not) may be to remove the very foundation of the humanities, which are expensive and time-consuming to study, and without the humanities there can be no West. There can be a NATO and there can be transatlantic commerce; there can be mutual interests, but without the humanities, it will all be without historical and cultural purpose. Among young people on both sides of the Atlantic, such purpose may already be gone' (p.307). What is more the culture of the book is mostly gone, displaced by social media. As Kimmage writes 'the Euro-American textual community is no more because the because the relationship of even the most educated American readers to expository prose, to literature, history and philosophy, has melted into the blinking textual communities of the internet' (p.309). I completed a PhD in English the year before Facebook was made available to the world. I was lucky. I was not distracted by the flotsam and dross of the internet. In 2000 I bought a first edition of Saul Bellow's last book Ravelstein, and admired the eponymous protagonist of that book. He is a Chicago University professor whose apartment is full of fine linen, art, books and he wanders around in a silk dressing gown listening to baroque music. He talks and communicates constantly with a rich fabric of long dead writers and thinkers, from Plato to Rousseau. I wonder if someone like the fictional Ravelstein could exist as easily in 2020 as he was able to, at least imaginatively, in 2000?… (lisätietoja)

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The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy by Michael Kimmage is a book which examines what “the West” really means in terms of policy over decades, and how that concept drove 20th Century policy in the United States. Mr. Kimmage is a college history professor, and served as a member of the secretary’s policy planning staff at the US Department of State from 2014 to 2016.

Books about policy, they don’t sound that exciting, do they?

In order to enjoy these type of books you have to be either a history nerd, a policy hound, political junky, or have some sort of personal stake in the matter. The sad part is that all of us have a personal stake in the matter, but only very few people realize it.
After all, it is “foreign” policy.

The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy by Michael Kimmage is about “the West” and Western civilization as ideas which have driven foreign policy in the 20th Century. I was a bit hesitant to read it because I thought it would be a “rah-rah” type of book which would exalt the virtues which the United States implements (and there are many, despite the bad publicity).
But I decided to give it a shot, and I’m glad I did.

This is a very thoughtful book exploring the contradictions which “the West” is implied and implemented. In this book, “the West” is not a geographic location, but a concept. That concept has been abandoned by both the left, which saw it as white and imperial, and the right, which saw it as too multidimensional.

This ideology was the driving force behind the US intervening in World War II to fight the Nazi menace across Europe, as well as standing steadfast against Communist Russia during the Cold War, as well as many other policies.

The author goes through what this idea meant and how it shaped our nation, and others. He goes to write about what the abandonment of this idea cost the United States in terms of principals, good will, influence, blood, and treasure.

With the current politic situation currently in the United States, I don’t know if this book will convince anyone that we should pick up the ideal of “the West” again, unless one was already pre-disposed to think so. Many people hold steadfast to the idea that America’s involvement in European affairs have ran its course and that standing up to Russia and China no longer merit the ideology.… (lisätietoja)