In recent days, I’ve written that our civilization is astonishingly young. If it truly collapsed—and its lands were Islamized—it would amount to little more than a brief flash: something magnificent flaring into existence and then vanishing almost as quickly. Critics object that the Western (or Christian, or Judeo-Christian) world cannot be reduced to the last two hundred years. They insist we stand on two millennia of heritage, built and defended by our ancestors in Christendom.
But the West has not always been a realm of reason, liberty, and humane living. There were long centuries when, despite lofty cathedrals and the intellectual brilliance of a cultivated minority, Europe was as brutal and primitive as any other civilizational zone. As late as the first half of the seventeenth century, residents of Prague walked daily past human heads mounted on spikes, or other mutilated remains of tortured men. Cruelty was omnipresent. So were famine, plague, chaos, and backwardness. And when modern commentators condemn Europeans of that era for occasionally allying with the Turks, they forget that the Turks were no more savage than their European counterparts. Ottoman plunder was no worse than the plundering done by the Swedes or by mercenaries in the service of Catholic princes.
The West’s eventual advantage over Islam—and over every other civilizational orbit—lay in something else: Europe had already begun to germinate the seeds of modernity. Seeds of rational inquiry, of what would later become science, and of emerging ideals of liberty, equality, and solidarity. Nothing comparable was sprouting in the Islamic world, or in India, or in China. Medieval “Christian civilization,” for all its darkness, gave birth to the modern age. Perhaps this was a historical accident, as Professor Budil argues; perhaps it flowed from the internal logic of medieval Europe itself, as Rodney Stark suggests. Either way, every other modernity was shaped only later, and only under the influence of the European one.
But the central truth remains: without the modern age, the West would have been little more than another forgotten civilization.