In earlier reflections, I argued that civilization is essentially nothing more than a set of customs—most of them governing the ordinary routines of everyday life—along with the practical means that allow us to live according to those customs. This is hardly a novel insight. Such a definition of civilization, or culture, is commonplace in cultural anthropology and, naturally, in the many fields of inquiry that lie at the intersection of sociology and anthropology.
Compared with the various definitions favored by political science, this understanding has one enormous advantage: it allows us to distinguish civilization from the structure of political and economic power. Would Western civilization cease to be Western civilization if every bank were nationalized? Of course not. Those of us who actually lived through such a system know this firsthand. The daily life of an ordinary citizen in communist Czechoslovakia differed little from that of a working-class Frenchman at the same time. The same family life, the same factory work, the same friendships, the same evenings spent in front of the television.
Yet many people fail to make this distinction, and that leads to two recurring errors.
Some liberals and some conservatives cannot separate ordinary life in the West from the prevailing power structure. Those who defend the modern Western way of life as the greatest achievement in human history often come to believe that they are therefore obliged to defend virtually every military intervention and, in practice, even the excesses of large-scale speculative finance.
The same pattern appears on the other side. Those who reject military campaigns often develop a hostility toward the everyday lives of ordinary Western people, viewing them as products of the very same forces that shape and manipulate the existing order. This is not merely a legacy of the Frankfurt School; it can be found throughout a wide range of left-wing groups and organizations. One example is Petr Drulák’s earlier book Art, Mysticism, and Political Action. It is written with remarkable sophistication, and many of its individual analyses are exceptionally strong. Even so, this underlying assumption is clearly present. To be fair, it is not certain whether Petr Drulák still holds that view today. When the opportunity arises, I intend to ask him about it at length.
This second perspective is often accompanied by the belief that ordinary people in the West have a duty to overthrow the existing economic and political order. When they prove unable—or unwilling—to do so, it is frequently followed by a kind of malicious satisfaction at the prospect of civilizational collapse.
If we hope to preserve our own civilization in any meaningful sense, we must avoid both of these errors. And as I have already suggested, the experience of those who lived in the West without capitalism may well prove indispensable in that effort.