Does Western Civilisation Exist? James Kierstead on Ancient Greece, Christianity, and the West | Quillette Cetera Ep. 63
Does “the West” actually exist — or is it merely a modern political myth?
In this episode of the Quillette Cetera Podcast, Zoe Booth speaks with classicist James Kierstead about a question that has become increasingly controversial in academia: does “the West” actually exist?
While many postmodern scholars argue that Western civilisation is little more than an imperial myth invented to justify colonialism and white supremacy, Kierstead argues that the West is a real historical tradition stretching from ancient Greece and Rome through Christianity and into the modern liberal democratic world.
The conversation explores the “Greek miracle,” monogamy and social stability, honour cultures versus dignity cultures, and whether the West can survive the decline of Christianity.
Kierstead holds a BA in Classics from Oxford and a PhD in Political Science from Stanford. Until the end of 2023, he was a Senior Lecturer in Classics at Victoria University of Wellington, where his role was disestablished shortly after he published reports critical of New Zealand universities. Documents later obtained through Official Information Act requests suggested he was criticised for failing to sufficiently incorporate Māori and Pasifika perspectives into courses on ancient Greece — something Kierstead argues represents a serious erosion of academic freedom and scholarly independence in contemporary universities.
He has written about the case on his Substack, Owl of Athena: Owl of Athena
Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript and has been lightly edited for readibility.
Zoe Booth: James, thank you so much for joining me this morning.
James Kierstead: Thank you for having me.
ZB: A lot of postmodern thinkers and academics today say that the West doesn’t exist. It’s all a big myth. It was created to promote all these terrible ideas of white supremacy and misogyny, et cetera. What do you think about that? Does the West exist?
JK: Yes, the West exists. I think the particular theory nowadays is that it was created to help out imperialism. That’s what Naoíse Mac Sweeney says in her book: that the concept of Western civilisation is something that emerges in the early modern period, or the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, just as European colonialism is getting going.
I think that’s really hard to support because, if we look at the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, you can see that these cultures in Europe are intimately bound up with the cultures of Greek and Roman antiquity. They’re drawing on the poetry, the philosophy, the architecture—the influence is there in so many ways. I think it’s pretty obvious that we can see various strands of a recognisably distinct culture already before the European colonial period.
So yes, I think it is a thing. I think we can describe it, maybe vaguely, but it is obviously a recognisable current in global cultural history, alongside other cultural traditions like Chinese and Japanese civilisation, because their literatures influenced one another, or Islamic civilisation.
