The Rise and Fall of Western Civilisation- Professor James Hankins

James Hankins spent four decades teaching history at Harvard, but he left in 2020 because the university had, in his view, quietly decided to stop teaching Western civilization. The department last hired someone to teach Western European history in 2008, and by the time he retired, eight historians had been lost from that area. "You could teach the French Empire and all its evils in the nineteenth century," he says, "but you couldn't teach the French Revolution." He now plans to launch an MA in Western Civilization at Florida's Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education, where the approval process took twenty minutes rather than five years of committee work.

What civilization is and what the West is

Hankins distinguishes two senses of civilization. First, it is a treasury — a collection of histories, poetry, philosophy, art, and literature that people have judged too valuable to let go. Second, it is a process of being civilized: learning to communicate at high levels, to understand subtle feelings and poetic insights, to appreciate Michelangelo or Beethoven or Dante. "It's not automatic that people will understand classical music," he notes. "My wife is from Thailand. Doesn't really like classical music very much because she wasn't brought up to understand it."