Preface
This past Christmas season of commerce must stand out as the most bland, blatantly boring Yuletide in memory. Actually, for balance, one's recall need not go back more than a decade or so-- before the more radical of our multi-cultural advocates succeeded in their demolition of most of the cultural underpinnings of our once most joyous of holidays. Here, as in other wreckings, their fickle agenda failed to fill the resulting vacuum with anything more substantial than a parochial palliative, or two, or three, with an appeal to at most a small fraction of the entire popu- lation. Mercifully, where the sympathetic element may, indeed, be far greater, as in the advocacy (mostly youthful) of the primitive, frenetic noise that now substitutes for traditional Christmas music in our malls and other public places, such support could prove short lived. There have been other historic periods of disorder, accompanied by conspicuously bad popular taste, in the long story of the West. Qualifying readily would be post-Socratic Athens, early Imperial Rome, Restoration England, France under the Directory, America in the bawdy, disorderly "lost generation" Prohibition era. At least up to now, some form of reaction and recovery occurred (exception Rome) within a generation.

Today the root of the problem appears to be an excess of permissiveness, born of a collective sense of guilt over our treatment of formerly defenseless minorities. Should our acknowledgment of earlier insensitivity, and, far worse, in some local instances seeming genocidal intent, cancel out the genuine warmth and good in a much larger slice of our national tradition? And need our concern for EVERYBODY's perceived freedom, liberty, and spiritual fulfillment so corrupt a time honored, calming, traditional spirituality, let alone compromise our public safety?

All this from a benevolently neutral agnostic, comfortable, nonetheless, with most of his Western heritage. Yea, even if not personally persuaded by Judeo-Christian dogma and belief, he does regret, inter alia, the near total removal of Christ, and, therefore, the quality of sublimity, from the once lovely music of this season.

Greco-Judeo-Christian Civilization
Until very recently, the major religion of a geographic area was the historic handle used to designate its culture. Thus, "Christendom," "Islam," the "Hindu World," were catchalls re- spectively for the cultures of the West, the Arabs, and most sub-Continent Indians. To assist in understanding the following catchall, let us cling to the fading tradition.

The historically recent, essentially ethical redefinition of "Christendom" as "Judeo-Christian" culture has come under scrutiny. The ecumenical impulse among mainline Protestants and Reformed Jews is now, undeniably, being weakened by orthodox theological probing. But is the theological justification the whole ball of wax?

In an increasingly secular society beset by multi-cultural advocates who have placed this durable nation state under siege, some of us value the philosophical validity, the mainstream homogeneity of the concept. It clearly transcends the Old and the New Testaments, whatever the interpretation, and need not give either, per se, more than a passing salute. This is largely because of the 17th-18th century Enlightenment that so tempered theology in the Occident, at first exclusively in Western Europe and its North American colonies. The Enlightenment was considered a largely French and Dutch intellectual and artistic movement because its key tenets, belief in the power of human reason and tolerance of others' beliefs, were more systematically developed in France and Holland than elsewhere in Europe, notwithstanding important debts to other cultures, notably the English. The "golden rule" of biblical origin came to be reinforced by the rational thought of the "Age of Reason," an alternate appellation for the Enlightenment. This new "Christian Humanism,"if you will, was ultimately to find political expression in the American and French Revolutions, particularly in the American Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, the abolition of slavery by England throughout its far flung empire, and, indeed, in the "I have a dream" speech by M. L. King.

The ethic rests on principles enunciated by, Plato, and Voltaire as well as those proclaimed by Moses and Jesus Christ. The resulting liberation of mind and spirit would lead to growth across the spectrum of a hopefully advancing civilization. Our particularly Western blueprint calls for and nurtures an open society, democratic governance, human rights, enlightened law; a market economy, the efficacy of reason, a broadly humane education, the scientific method, a genius with mechanics and engineering, a yen to explore, discover, and conquer the unknown. And all of this has been surrounded for a very long time by an artistic and literary output second to none. Some elements of this expression, including that of classical musical composition and performance, are unique, and by broad extra-Occidental civilized consensus, peerless.

Western culture numbers among its exponents not only such as Socrates, Plato, St. Thomas, Erasmus, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Montaigne, Diderot, Kant, and Goethe, but as Locke, Montesquieu, Jefferson, and Franklin, as Grotius, Douglass, and King, as Smith and Keynes. In the scientific and cultural spheres such paradigms as Aristotle, Archimedes, Gutenberg, Leonardo, Bacon, Galileo, Copernicus, Leeuenhoek, Newton, Darwin, Nobel, Pasteur, Curie, Koch, Einstein, Salk; as Wren, Watt, Stevens, Brunel, Daimler, Edison, Ford, the Wright Brothers, Eiffel, Sullivan, Gropius, F.L Wright, Le Corbusier; as Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Wagner, Brahms, Verdi, Mahler; as Shakespeare, Moliere, Lessing, Ibsen, Shaw, O'Neal, even Gilbert & Sullivan and Lerner & Loewe; as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Turner, Renoir, Picasso, Pissarro. Yea here, as in their too numerous unmentioned Western coattainers, are your "thousand points of light."

No culture, let alone vast and far reaching civilization, can evolve in isolation. If ancient Greece was, indeed, the cradle of the West, some of its basic contributions to what may be regarded as progress--in governance, science, architecture, navigation--had had input from neighboring Persian and Semitic cultures, notably Canaanite and Egyptian. But long before the Christian era these "barbarian," i.e. foreign stimuli had been absorbed in the advancing Hellenic ethos and culture.

Similarly, a millennium or so later, while Europe languished well behind China and the developing Arab world, from roughly the collapse of Rome to the Age of Discovery (c. 500 to 1500 A.D.), some influences from both cultures markedly affected evolving "Christendom." Arabic numerals, for example, shunted aside the more cumbersome Roman ones, making advanced mathematics, itself a partly Arab input, more manageable. Gun powder from China changed the "art" of warfare in Europe and was a necessary precursor to the Western voyages of discovery and conquest.

From the Renaissance forward--through the Reformation, Counter Reformation, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution, into the Nuclear Age, information revolution, and space travel--the West's evolution, while internally turbulent, was largely indigenous and self contained. The ongoing information revolution is having a vaulting global impact analogous to that, proportionately, of Gutenberg's printing press on tiny Medieval Europe, the blossoming Renaissance, and all that flowed therefrom. By the present tumultuous century, some 500 years later, Western Civilization has become the most intricately developed and functional culture the world has yet seen, the one to which--notwithstanding its all too human history of waste and internecine turmoil--nearly all others are adapting for what just may pass, in balance, as universal progress.

Chester Low
Middleburg, Virginia
January 30, 1997
Telephone: 540 687-6175