We Are More Than Producers and Consumers
“If you are going to prepare for war, you must know what you are willing to fight for.”
—Robert Maynard Hutchins, World War I veteran and president of the University of Chicago, “What Shall We Defend?” (1940)
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Pete Hegseth has been the target of sharply pointed, if indirect, criticism in this column. But I’ll give him one thing: he has put his imprimatur where his mouth is on one issue.
Writing in his own book, Hegseth said of American education, “It is certainly not sustainable, merely passing the same losing hand to the next generation. . . . With this approach, we lose. We lose America — and Western Civilization.”
Under Hegseth, the Department of Defense Education Activity is offering a new, optional online course for high-school students, Western Civilization to 1500. It uses Volume I of The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition by James Hankins.
Although some academics consider the book a little too conservative (naturally), the course is a meritorious experiment, and both Hegseth, grudgingly, and DoD deserve a tip of the hat. I ordered the book two days before learning of the DoD plan.
Western Civilization is not a race or a geographical boundary, and the term does not imply that Western nations have always conducted themselves justly. It is an inherited, ongoing discussion about human dignity, reason, moral responsibility, ordered liberty and self-government under law.
Its greatness lies partly in the standards it developed for recognizing and sometimes correcting its own betrayals of those principles. The Western tradition supplied the intellectual foundations of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
To study Western Civilization is to study the origins, history and interpretations of the ideas that make us who we are as a people.
Nor is its significance confined to American life. At the 2026 Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared, “We are part of one civilization—Western civilization.”
In 2023, Governor Ron DeSantis said Florida would align its public higher-education core curriculum “to the values of liberty and the Western tradition.” Florida now requires public college general-education courses, where applicable, to teach the historical and philosophical foundations of Western civilization.
Conservative Republican Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri recently warned that Democratic primaries might be dominated by people who “want to go to war with Western civilization.” The charge was sweeping, and Schmitt identified no particular politician.
The 2024 GOP platform promised, “We will support schools that teach America’s Founding Principles and Western Civilization.” It also promised to restore classical liberal-arts education. Both are wise commitments.
In a 2017 speech in Warsaw, Poland, President Trump asked “whether the West has the will to survive” and proclaimed that “every last inch of civilization is worth defending with your life.”
World War II testifies to that.
These efforts deserve credit, but action has been modest beside the rhetoric. The Defense Department made Western Civilization and civics priorities for federal grants. Florida’s work is more substantial, and the Trump administration has revived the 1776 Commission and opened federal grants for Western Civilization and civics.
Still, a handful of programs, vulnerable to the next election, cannot preserve and transmit a civilization. Nor should the answer be patriotic propaganda or a history purged of Western crimes and failures. Students should encounter the civilization as it actually developed: Athens, Jerusalem and Rome; Christianity and natural law; the Inquisition and Enlightenment; slavery and abolition; constitutionalism and self-criticism.
They should read and grasp its arguments, not just memorize approved conclusions. We spend a lot of public money educating young people to produce and consume. A republic must also prepare them to judge, govern and inherit.
If, as President Trump declared, “every last inch of civilization is worth defending with your life,” shouldn’t we at least ensure that voters and especially those who will be called upon to defend it know what they are risking their lives for?
Andrew L. Warren practiced criminal law for 22 years before joining Western New Mexico University in 2006. He retired in 2019 as a Professor of Criminal Justice and History and returned in 2024 as an adjunct professor of Humanities, teaching Applied Liberal Arts and Sciences. His current work focuses on self-directed study with artificial intelligence, especially American constitutional thought as illuminated by the Great Books. This project will almost certainly exceed his remaining life. In his spare time, he writes occasional opinion pieces for the Silver City Daily Press.