Have you ever given much thought to civilization? It is one of the most important words in the cultural lexicon, but what does the concept actually bring to mind – that’s of course if it brings anything to mind at all? It is one of those concepts that you are expected to recognize instantly, along with others with which you are probably more familiar, such as the nation-state. Let’s imagine that you are a reader from the West. If so, you might identify with ‘Western civilization’. But, when you hear that term, what image does it conjure up, if any? Perhaps the great cathedrals of Europe, such as York Minster and Chartres? Or such intense expressions of beauty as the pictures of Raphael (1483–1520) or Rembrandt (1606–1669)? Or, as you are making the effort to read this book, perhaps you are better acquainted with a unique literary canon that dates back to the epic poems of Homer?

Possibly you may be more interested in ideas. Is Christianity, for you, still a bedrock of Western civilization, as it was for the poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) when in 1948 he wrote Notes on the Definition of Culture? Or perhaps you are more enthused by secular ideas such as freedom and individualism, which you will find celebrated by Hollywood in films such as 300, Zack Snyder’s over-the-top account of the battle of Thermopylae. If you believe the historian Herodotus (484–425 BCE), claims Victor Davis Hanson (who acted as the historical adviser for the movie), the battle was the centrepiece of a ‘clash of civilizations’ that set Eastern ‘centralism’ against a Western belief in individualism (Hanson 2010: 55). Hanson’s views are not shared by all, and you may fault Snyder’s film for continuing to propagate an ancient myth that has shaped Western thoughts and feelings over the centuries. Such myths, however, are real enough even if they tend to blur the difference between truth and fantasy in ways that suggest that the boundaries between them may not be as fixed as we would like.

Anyway, you may feel disinclined to regard your own civilization as a Hollywood blockbuster with a fast-moving plot and many leading players, some of them from central casting. You may even be relieved that the Western Civilization 101 courses that used to be part of the standard academic syllabus in the United States were largely abandoned in the 1960s, although on some campuses they are now making a comeback. Perhaps you look at your own civilization through more jaundiced eyes. Back in the 1960s you might have been particularly scornful of those Dead White European Males (DWEM) who are still considered in the popular press to be the ‘founders’ of your own civilization. The acronym was not, of course, intended to be a mark of approbation. These days it has been superseded by the term WEIRD – Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic – i.e., the people who still tend to form the bulk of the database in the experimental branches of psychology, the cognitive sciences and economics. For a long time researchers in these fields made the mistake of supposing a species-level generality in their findings. But this is now under challenge. As a Westerner, you may indeed be different from everyone else thanks to cultural and social conditioning. If that is indeed the case, then it can no longer be taken that you speak for the rest of humanity; you may count yourself among the weirdest people in the world.

Of course, whether you identify with Western civilization or not, you will be seen by others to come from a distinctive family, and all families, as we know, tend to exclude others. Other people’s families cut us out of the conversation, sometimes even when we marry into them. Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), the author of Brave New World (1932), put it rather well in an essay he wrote in the 1920s:

‘Do you remember Aunt Agatha’s ear trumpet? And how Willie made the parrot drunk with sops in wine? And that picnic on Loch Etive, when the boat upset and Uncle Bob was nearly drowned? Do you remember?’ And we all do; and we laugh delightedly; and the unfortunate stranger, who happens to have called, feels utterly out of it. Well, that (in its social aspect) is Culture. When we of the great Culture Family meet, we exchange reminiscences about Grandfather Homer, and that awful old Dr. Johnson, and Aunt Sappho, and poor Johnny Keats. ‘And do you remember that absolutely priceless thing Uncle Virgil said? You know. Timeo Danaos . . . Priceless; I shall never forget it.’ No, we shall never forget it; and what’s more, we shall take good care that those horrid people who have had the impertinence to call on us, those wretched outsiders who never knew dear mellow old Uncle V., shall never forget it either. (Huxley 1994: 91)

You may not have read ‘Uncle Virgil’ (70–19 BCE) at school (certainly not as, three generations ago, you might have been expected to in the original language, Latin), but if you visit Ground Zero in New York you will find a wall at the lowest level displaying a phrase from Virgil’s great epic poem The Aeneid: ‘No day shall erase you from the memory of time.’ And if you visit the wall that contains the remains of the fallen, you will find another quotation from the original poem about two warriors, Nisus and Euryalus, who gladly embraced death for a greater political cause. It’s a noble enough sentiment, isn’t it? But, if truth be told, it is also a rather ironic one. Doesn’t it, asks one writer, fit the hijackers of September 11 more closely than their victims? (Crawford 2015: 515–16).

The Greeks have been part of the script of the War on Terror since the beginning, and that is important because terrorism is now woven into the fabric of American life: its imagery is omnipresent on the news, in TV series such as Homeland, in the political rhetoric of politicians (of all parties), and even in the collective subconscious of the American people. As for the classics, since 2007 Homer’s Iliad has been translated into English at least seven times. (And why not? Given the state of the world, a poem about rage and the need to defend honour resonates even more on each re-reading.) At West Point, Robert Fagles (1933–2008), the late awardwinning translator of Homer, was invited to the college to read out the first lines of his latest translation of the Iliad to hundreds of students, some of whom were being sent off to battle (Higgins 2010). When American soldiers went on campaign in Afghanistan in 2010, they found themselves taking part in an operation called ‘Operation Achilles’. And when they return from the battlefield, broken in mind if not in body, they are now offered something called Theater of War, a $3.7 million funded programme set up by the Pentagon in 2009 which helps them to deal with their psychic wounds by exposing them to the healing powers of two plays by Sophocles (497/6–406/5 BCE).

Some years later the programme was introduced into Guantánamo Bay, the military prison in Cuba which remains in operation despite the closure order which President Obama signed on his first day in office. The play performed there is Prometheus Bound, by the earliest Greek playwright Aeschylus (525/524–456/455 BCE). It is based on the myth of the Titan who defies the gods and gives mankind fire and technology, an act of insubordination for which he is condemned to perpetual punishment. It is interesting that for the most part the guards tend to identify with the victim, Prometheus, not with his judge, Zeus (Doerries 2016). The prisoners, of course, don’t get to see the play – they hail from a different culture. And, while all prisoners may dream of freedom, in this case, a Greek tragedy is unlikely to offer much possibility of spiritual escape.

So, although you may not have given much thought to the concept of civilization, there is really no escaping it, is there? Indeed, whenever there is a terrorist attack in Brussels or Paris or London, the newspapers are quick to invoke the Western values that are being attacked. In an article following the Paris attacks of 2015, the journalist Gideon Rachman regretted the fact that cultural reassertion was ‘narrowing the space for those who want to push back against the narrative of a “clash of civilizations”’, a reference to the famous thesis put forward by the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington (Rachman 2015). I will return to Huntington in a later chapter, but there is no gainsaying the fact that Rachman had a point. In Malaysia, for example, there has been a significant narrowing of the space for non-Muslims. In Bangladesh, Hindu and other non-Muslim intellectuals and journalists have been murdered by religious fundamentalists. In Indonesia, the Muslim scholar Syafi’i Anwar talks with alarm of the ‘creeping Shariaization’ of Indonesian society (Sen 2006). And religious minorities around the world now find themselves in trouble. The persecution of Christians in the Middle East is even seen by some as a religious version of ethnic cleansing. Before 1914 they made up 14 per cent of the population; today they have been reduced to 4 per cent as a result of emigration and religious repression, not to mention falling birth rates (usually a sure sign of cultural demoralization).

Even the very concept of civilization is being challenged. ‘This is the world’s fight . . . This is civilization’s fight . . . Either you’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists.’ It is undoubtedly George W. Bush’s most famous saying, and it is fashionable these days to make fun both of the man and of the sentiment, but what then of ‘cultural vandalism’, an instrument of war which is being employed to erase the collective memory of an entire people? Even the most revolutionary regimes in history have chosen to honour the past: the Islamic Republic of Iran has never considered blowing up Persepolis (the damage of course was done by Alexander the Great), and even the Bolshevik revolutionaries decided the past should be preserved in museums rather than reduced to rubble. That is what made ISIS (Islamic State) so different. A few years ago it made a defiantly proud seven-minute video of its organized destruction by bulldozer and dynamite of the buildings of Nimrud, a civilization that dates back to 879 BCE. In Palmyra, the old caravan city at the end of the Silk Road which once brought China’s silk to Europe, one of its greatest monuments, the Temple of Bel, was destroyed in August 2015.

Let me importune you one more time. You may not have given civilization a great deal of thought, but others certainly have. In fact you are already living in a world in which civilization is fast becoming the currency of international politics. Take Putin’s Russia. As the sociologist Lev Gudkov writes, the great epic of the Soviet period, the Great Patriotic War (1941–5), is now regarded by many Russians as ‘a victory not only over Germany but also over the West’. And that reading of history is important because the war is considered by many Russians to be the most important event in their history (which is why, by the way, Stalin, not Peter the Great, regularly tops the list of the ten greatest Russians) (Prus 2015: 3). Academics like me may well find all of this regrettable, a cheapening of the debate, but the language of civilization has allowed politicians such as Putin to prioritize the battles to be fought in the future. My interest in writing this book indeed first took shape in 2013, when for the first time Putin declared Russia to be a ‘civilizational state’. Today Russia is busy refabricating its own past to reflect ancient truths and ancestral verities in a bid to inoculate itself against the contagion of liberal ideas and Western norms.

As the book took shape, my aims evolved too. I wanted to include China and, later still, ISIS, with its dream of restoring the Islamic caliphate. China has often been defined as a civilization ‘pretending to be a state’ (Tsygankov 2016: 146). The present Chinese leadership has chosen to embrace some of the old Confucian verities, repackaging them as part of the rejuvenation of China itself. At the nineteenth party congress in 2017, the regime offered the world a unique example, a Confucian–Leninist model, ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ – an idea that encouraged universities and research institutes across the country to launch ‘Xi Jinping Thought Study Centres’ by the dozen. The Americans may still hold universal values, but the days when American presidents could lecture the regime on human rights or chastise it for its campaign of ethnocide in Tibet have long since passed. Instead there has been a reaction to what one Chinese writer calls the ‘excesses of ideological “globalism” (as opposed to economic globalization) in the past few decades’. The Chinese leadership, he adds, does not believe that the world is moving towards the adoption of a unified set of rules and standards in economics, politics, international relations and even morality. Cultural distinctions will remain; they will not give way to universal values (Li 2017). Xi Jinping’s China has even begun to advance cogent reasons for ignoring ‘Western’ international law in the South China Sea by reference to a ‘geo-cultural birthmark’. Geopolitics, it would seem, is no longer purely geographical or political; it is also socio-cultural or civilizational.

And finally there is Islamic fundamentalism in its most extreme incarnation, ISIS. The movement may have lost most of its territory, but its aspiration to re-establish an Islamic caliphate is unlikely to lose its appeal. What makes the dream so radical is its explicit rejection of the nation-state. People can change nationalities or enjoy more than one, but they cannot do without passports. Countries are as old as history; nation-states are a recent Western invention. And their capacity for self-invention makes them still a chief reference point for a people’s identity, whether in Russia or in China. The caliphate, however, offers Muslims a sacrament with God as well as an escape from a Godless secular international order.

Uncertain as we are about what the future may hold, is it so surprising that we are forced back on the landmark institutions and concepts which  still define our lives? Neither civilizational identities nor national loyalties can be written off as the delusions of those who cannot make the most of globalization. They exist even if the historical conditions which gave rise to them have changed, and they are likely to be exploited by politicians, even if this means ironing out many of the other complexities of political life.

This book is concerned with the way in which non-Western governments and movements are using the currency of civilization for their own political ends. But it is also about why the Western world is facing its own moment of crisis, as students are taught at increasingly left-wing universities, obsessed with identity politics and no-platforming speakers they dislike, that there are no civilizational values, and as the push back against liberal civilization reveals that there is no widely accepted universal value-system to which everyone subscribes. On the right, on the other hand, there is a despairing denial of the obvious: that the West is not quite as exceptional as it once liked to think. Lurking below the level of consciousness in the rest of the world, the old civilizational values continue to retain their appeal. At the level of consciousness, political regimes are quite cynically tapping into more primal identities. Global citizenship, the great dream of liberal internationalists, is losing traction, as is the dream of liberal civilization itself.