To be blunt, when conservatives appeal to “Western civilization,” they are referring to everything they like to ever come out of Europe and nothing they don’t like, with the line drawn by working backwards from predetermined ideological conclusions.
To prove this point, we can observe the difficulty of selecting a representative group of Western thinkers and delineating between those we value for the sake of intellectual growth and those whose ideas we actually want to inform the moral and political conscience of our nation. This is to say, whom do we read for pedagogical purposes versus whom do we read but also lionize as integral to our civilizational self-understanding?
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