One of the several interesting moments in Joanna Hanink's piece 'A New Path for Classics' (which originally appeared under the title 'If Classics Doesn't Change, Let it Burn') comes when the Brown University Classics professor shifts from her critique of the field to 'a new generation of classicists' who, she says, are turning away from the triumphalist “Western civ” model' and 'becoming better in tune with the world’s shifting realities.' 'The nation of Greece,' she goes on
has recently been looking to allies beyond Europe. It is forging new economic and cultural links with China in a partnership based, at least rhetorically, on the idea that nations with ancient pedigrees understand each other. The same general premise also underpins the Ancient Civilizations Forum, a cultural initiative with nine member countries in regions that were “cradles of ancient civilizations.” The forum casts the antiquity as a potential source of soft power for modern nations.
There are a few points that might be raised here, from the wisdom of democratic nations cozying up to a communist dictatorship, to 'the idea that nations with ancient pedigrees understand each other.' What I want to highlight in this post, though, is the strangeness of Hanink appealing to 'nations with ancient pedigrees' at all. After all, in the rest of her article she several times casts doubt on 'the claim that ancient Greece and Rome were the “foundation of Western civilization," a 'fairytale Western origin story' that, she declares, she has 'no more patience for.' She also links approvingly to Kwame Anthony Appiah's essay 'There is no Such Thing as Western Civilization.'
Now, admittedly, it could be the case that the narratives of continuity in Chinese history are correct (though the role of the Chinese state in constructing such narratives should give us pause), and every possible story about Western Civilization is simply false. But there is, I would submit, something quite strange, even less than perfectly consistent, about the position that some narratives of cultural continuity have to be insistently deconstructed while others can be routinely greenlighted.
Appiah's idea that the Western tradition doesn't really exist is really only one step on from a general scepticism towards tradition that has had a place in the academy for quite some time now. The work that, as far as I can tell, planted the seed for this particular intellectual sub-tradition was Hobsbawm and Ranger's 1983 volume The Invention of Tradition, which discussed examples of traditions being more or less made up out of whole cloth, or at least reified to an extent that the actual historical facts didn't quite support.
Hobsbawm and Ranger were no fools, and the phenomenon they pointed to was a real one. Traditions, from the Christmas Day address of the British monarch (inaugurated in in 1932) to the Superbowl (1966) are often more recent than we think. There's no doubt that some claims about tradition are more or less (sometimes entirely) mendacious, and that they often serve present-day interests and structures of power.
But there's a risk of going too far the other way - a risk that, it seems to me, is especially perilous in contexts where the idea we're reacting to is associated with a political Other. Though some traditions - even many - may be invented, or at least patched up, we probably shouldn't conclude from this that all traditions are just made up, and there's no such thing as long-term cultural continuity at all.
One problem with arriving at this kind of conclusion is that talking about traditions and cultural lineages - even ones that reach back into ancient times - can often turn out to be very useful. Unsurprisingly, progressive historians and classicists sometimes find them useful too, as Hanink seems to in her talk of 'nations with ancient pedigrees.' And there are other examples.
Classicists who are in favour of transferring the Elgin Marbles to Greece, for example, usually do so partly on the basis that contemporary Greeks are, in some sense, the heirs (even the compatriots) of Pericles and of the classical city-states. Feminist classicists like Mary Beard are often partial to tracing a 'long tradition' of misogyny back to Greece and Rome. Somewhat further afield, Christianity is seen as having imposed repressive norms to do with gender and sexuality on cultures - in Polynesia, for example - that, it's claimed, had a tradition of more openness and flexibility in these areas of life.
My purpose here, again, isn't to contest any of these claims, or even to discuss them in any depth. At first glance, they all seem to have some plausibility. My purpose here is just to point out that strangeness. If it's true - or even plausible - that there's a tradition of misogyny that can be traced back to ancient Greece, isn't it equally plausible that we can trace a tradition of democracy back to ancient Greece as well? And yet my sense is that the idea of Athens as the cradle of democracy is less popular among American classicists than it used be.
I noted above that it could be that narratives of Chinese (or Greek) cultural continuity are simply more accurate than notions of 'Western Civilization.' It could be argued, for a start, that 'Western Civilisation' is a more amorphous concept than Chinese Civilization, or Greece. In fact, something along these lines often is argued; although usually this is done by simply stressing the unhandlable multi-facetedness of Western Civilization, not by bolstering a sense of the continuities in national histories. (That, in itself, somewhat gives the game away.)
My own sense is that while we shouldn't uncritically accept stories about tradition (especially ones that stretch over huge spans of time - stories about apostolic succession and dharma transmission both come to mind), we also can't simply assume that all claims about tradition are false. Most of us recognize, I think, that some sort of long-term handing down of ideas and life ways is possible. (Indeed, I would go so far as to describe it as a fairly obvious feature of human society.)
Whether particular claims about particular traditions are true is something that is best worked out on a case-by-case basis; and I would be the first to admit that there are, for example, simplistic narratives of Western Civilization and the transmission of democracy that don't stack up when set against the messy nuances of historical fact.
My plea here, I suppose, is simply that we engage each other on a level playing field when it comes to teasing out which aspects of which narratives are sanctioned by the evidence, and which ones aren't. We can't, I think, make sweeping deconstructionist critiques of some narratives ( 'all narratives are constructed,' 'We must take care not to reify notions of "tradition,"' and so on) while exempting others from that style of skepticism. At least, we can't if we don't want those listening into our debates concluding that we're conducting ourselves in a less than perfectly consistent, and even-handed, manner.
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