"No culture in history contributed more to human well-being than Western civilisation, nor even as much."

 

Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his 

wife and collaborator Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, 

Jacques-Louis David (1788)

"The charges against Western civilisation involve slavery, imperialism, and genocide. No doubt, some Westerners and Western regimes have committed such atrocities.
    "The transatlantic slave trade conducted by some Westerners between Africa and the New World was a horror. ... Regarding European imperialism, the cruelty toward indigenous peoples is best illustrated by ... King Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo ... [who] hired an army of mercenaries to enslave the native population, demanded that the enslaved meet high quotas for rubber production and ivory harvesting, had his mercenaries chop off the hands of those who fell short, and had them kill recalcitrant natives and burn their villages. ...
    "All these injustices occurred, and objectivity requires acknowledgment of this fact. But we should identify the full truth—which raises several questions about the anti-Western narrative. ...
    "The claim that European and American powers attempted genocide in the New World is worse than either a severe exaggeration or a gross distortion of facts: It is an outright lie. ... To the extent that slavery has been abolished, the credit lies with the abolitionism developed in the West, ending slavery in its own territories and then applying pressure on non-Western nations to shut down the evil practice. ...
    "Even ... a brief survey of history ... is more than enough to raise the question: Why single out white Westerners for the most virulent moral abuse? But we still have not mentioned the major truth overlooked by ... fallacious arguments against the West. .. We refer, of course, to the enormous life-giving achievements of Western civilisation—life-giving for human beings all over the world. ... I’ll merely provide a few examples of these achievements.

• Growing sufficient food is and has long been a terrible problem throughout the non-industrialised world. .... The Green Revolution helped people grow vastly increased supplies of food ... saving upwards of one billion lives ...
• Disease prevention and cure is another critical field for human life in which Western researchers have excelled. [Antoine Lavoisier's pioneering chemistry; Maurice Hillman's and Salk & Sabin's vaccines; Louis Pasteur's germ theory of disease; Joseph Lister's call for antiseptic surgery; Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin ... ] How many human lives around the world did these giants of medicine save? An incalculable number. 
• And Aristotle... the first great biologist of whom we know. His pathbreaking work in the life sciences laid the foundation for subsequent medical advances. Above all, Aristotle married his revolutionary work in logic to his commitment to painstaking empirical research, emphasising that knowledge is gained by logical, noncontradictory thinking about observed facts. He, more than anyone, taught humanity how to think, making progress possible in every field of cognition.
• And no discussion of Western science, no matter how brief, could omit mention of several of the greatest minds of history—Galileo, Newton, and Darwin ...
• In literature, from Homer and Sappho through Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Hugo, Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and the Bronte sisters to Ayn Rand in the 20th century ... In music, the West has produced such giants as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Verdi, Dvořák, and Puccini. Michelangelo was a towering sculptor, Rembrandt and Vermeer superlative painters, and Leonardo an all-round genius. Film ... has seen such brilliant directors ... as Fritz Lang, Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, Billy Wilder, David Lean, Steven Spielberg, and Clint Eastwood, as well as a host of talented actors and actresses.

"Even a brief recounting of Western genius must cite John Locke and the birth of the moral principle of individual rights in Great Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries, leading to ... an Industrial Revolution, and stupendous wealth creation and prosperity across vast swathes of the globe ... Starting in Britain, the principle of individual rights led, for the first time in history, to an abolitionist movement that succeeded, to a significant degree, in wiping out the age-old, worldwide scourge of human slavery. Slavery was ubiquitous. Abolitionism was Western.
    "Western civilisation is and often has been profoundly supportive of human life, not because its progenitors have largely been white but because of its fundamental, driving force: reason and all its fruits—freedom, philosophy, science, technology, business, the arts, and other such life-serving values. Skin colour is irrelevant to moral judgment, but reason, individual rights, political-economic liberty, technology and industrialisation—these are vitally important. Western nations export many intellectual and material values to non-Western countries. But its greatest export is a culture of reason and a politics of individual rights; for, to the extent they are adopted, these facilitate immensely life-giving advances in every field of rational endeavour, as they have done in the Asian Tigers.
    "No culture in history contributed more to human well-being than Western civilisation, nor even as much.
    "Why then, do critics single it out for special moral abuse?"

~ Andrew Bernstein, from his article 'The Case for Western Civilisation' [emphases in the original]

Art Mini-Tutorial: ‘Zoom!’

The Punishment of Haman (detail) - Michelangelo

How does an artist create a three-dimensional figure on a two-dimensional canvas?  And a related question: how does an artist create movement in what is essentially a static medium?

    The key [says artist Michael Newberry] is to re-create the physiological visual sense of movement by atmospheric spatial depth. In other words, give the viewer a sense of zooming through space.”

Check out his mini-tutorial on how artists use the technique of  ‘zoom’ to bring their two-dimensional works alive in the third dimension.

 

Sketch: ‘Olivia’ – Michael Newberry

“… in his own image.”

It's said in one of the great religious books that “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.”

But isn't it truer to say that man created his gods in his own image? In the image of man created he his gods?

From Yahweh to Wotan and from Zeus to Zoroaster, the virtues, vices and behaviour of the gods man has written about -- written about in stories from Genesis to The Lay of Alviss --- are those of man himself.  But they're of man himself writ large. His gods have super-human jealousies; super-human anger; super-human lusts. They’re not just powerful, they’re all-powerful; they’re not just knowing, they’re all-knowing; they’re not just present, they’re present everywhere and at once – they’re omniscient, omnipotent and omni-present you see, and they’re all these three things (usually) because the men and women who’ve written the stories about their gods have simply taken human qualities and made them more so.

Fact is, the reason man “knows” his gods and their attributes is not because his gods have revealed themselves or because his gods have a specific nature, but because man himself has revealed them in the stories and songs and poems he’s created about them in order to help explain his primitive world, and to have stories to tell at night around his fire. He’s created them in his own image, with his own strengths and weaknesses, just more so.

Fact is, the stories man tells about his gods tell more about man than they do about the gods, since the gods they talk about never have existed. The great religious books and stories of history are a pre-philosophic, pre-scientific way by which primitive men attempted “to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values” – to give his world meaning in stories entertaining enough to be told and retold.

On the first day man discovered his world.

On the second day he created his gods to explain it.

And on the third day, he came to understood he needed better explanations, and better understanding of his world if he was to truly explain it.  It was not enough to say that God created the world, since if that were true then who created God?

But the answer to that one is simple. 

Who created God? We did. That should been always clear.

Who “created” existence? No one; existence was always there. Our gods were just our first primitive way of explaining that to ourselves.

Which means the Divine Spark in Michelangelo’s famous painting goes precisely the opposite way it’s normally understood.

Study for the Libyan Sibyl – Michelangelo

The completed figure, from the Sistine Chapel, is one of my favourite Michelangelo figures – and this sketch is absolutely masterful.  Click to enlarge (I hope), and just look at his linework.

How Michelangelo Translates Touch to Sight - Michael Newberry

Another Newberry Mini Tutorial on art offers you another tip to help you understand how great artists express their genius.

In this month's tutorial, Michael Newberry discusses how Michelangelo draws not on what you would see but what you would touch. These Mini-Tutorials focus on one creative problem - whether it is about how to communicate a sense of touch or how to use rhythm to organize chaos. Michael will guide you to see the resolution. "To experience this tutorial fully," says Michael, "I need to ask you to humor me and get physically involved in it. In the privacy of your own home it should be fun."

The picture at right is a sketch in red chalk by Michelangelo -- a study of the figure of Haman for the Sistine Chapel, 1511 -- that Newberry uses in his Tut. Join him, and have some enlightening fun.

LINK: Mini-Tutorial: Michelangelo's Drawings: The Conceptual Transformation from Touch to Sight - Michael Newberry, Newberry Workshop

TAGS: Art, History