BROOKS WESTERN CIV CRISIS CONTINUED

Brooks points out that many academicians began teaching, only a few short decades ago, that Western civ is really a history of oppression.

 

I would augment the account he criticizes as follows: the West started out oppressing Western lower classes, then eventually, with the age of discovery and colonization on into the 20th Century, oppressing all of mankind, a story of ever gathering oppression which the US, as the heir of Western straight white male hegemony, perpetuates to the present day.

 

It is the opposite of  the history of progressive improvement for all mankind to which the Whiggish Brooks, and most of his readers, including perhaps Professor Kaiser, subscribe.

The Whiggish interpretation sees Protestantism as the progressive Reformation movement, the only proper heir to the Renaissance, that threw off the regressive medieval Catholic yoke, followed by the Enlightenment as a protestant inspired movement that then finally threw off Monarchic despotic Popish and aristocratic yokes in the 16th and 17th Centuries, and then by the Democratic Revolution of the 18th, but was thrown back somewhat in the 19th when a retrograde restoration temporarily permitted the imperialism and slavery run by white men since the Renaissance to continue, but then ultimately triumphed in the wars of the 20th Century, making the world finally safe for a colorless, antireligious, and race blind single democratic market capitalist world civilization.

 

Let's put it this way, then: the story of Western civ as an oppressive political civilization, either way, goes much farther back than a few decades of American academic history ago.