#283: Why the West Wont Die
The idea of \u201cWestern civilization\u201d looms large in the popular imagination, but it\u2019s no longer taken seriously in academia. In her new book, The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives, historian Nao\xedse Mac Sweeney examines why the West won\u2019t die and, in the process, dismantles ahistorical concepts like the \u201cclash of civilizations\u201d and the notion of a linear progression from Greek and Roman ideals to those of our present day\u2014\u201cfrom Plato to NATO.\u201d Through biographical portraits of figures both well-known and forgotten\u2014Herodotus and Francis Bacon, Livilla and Phyllis Wheatley, Tullia d\u2019Aragona and Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi\u2014Mac Sweeney assembles a history that resembles less of a grand narrative than a spiderweb of influence. Successive empires (whether Ottoman, Holy Roman, British, or American) built up self-mythologies in the service of their expansionist, patriarchal, or, later, racist ideologies. Mac Sweeney joins the podcast to talk about why the West has been such a dominant idea and on what values we might base a new vision of contemporary \u201cwestern\u201d identity.
Go beyond the episode:
- Nao\xedse Mac Sweeney\u2019s The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives
- We have covered Greece and Rome in previous episodes, as well as Njinga of Angola
- In our Summer 2023 issue, Sarah Ruden considers how modern biographers distort Vergil
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