Yes, we should study western civilisation in warts and all review!

If only to understand where it went wrong? e.g. The phenomena of the fascists/Nazis and communism?

And the part greed and trickle down economics and extreme exploitive capitalism has been so demonstrably damaging on the social cooperative compact, we call, western civilisation. As the cause of the Great Depression or the other opposite example worthy of note. The unprecedented post-war prosperity!

Always providing we look at it minus the blinkers and the ideological imperatives that seek other self-gratifying outcomes and bias confirmation.
Alan B.

How can you study Western Civilisation when truth is out and moral relativism is in? Watch the drum, q&a or even Waleed and you can see the kool aid of one very sick narrative of Western Civilisation has been swallowed. Just ask the tax payer funded Yasmin who has uni qualifications how good Islam is for women. It seems the vast majority of Indigenous doing really well from Western Civilisation were rescued ones. Yeah no hope of our lying deceitful or cowardly lecturers teaching what is true. In fact few if any would be employed within the swamp.

Runner,

You put your finger on something: how could such a course involve studying the development of women's rights without making comparisons with other societies' neglect of them ? Including traditional societies everywhere, Aboriginal, Maori, Scottish, etc. And by extension, the study of the development of any of the rights that we take for granted now ? Almost inadvertently, students would have to draw comparisons with what has gone or (or not) in other civilisations when they examine any aspect whatsoever of Western civilisation.

For example, the development of the printing press: initiated in China, and advanced (moveable type, etc.) in Europe in the fifteenth century, by 1600, a billion books had been published there (according to Prof. Jack Goody, the foremost historian of literacy). When was the first printing press set up in the Muslim world ? 1824, in Constantinople, primarily to print the Koran.

Any study of any civilisation would inevitably be comparative and, to be of any use, critical, warts and all. It would be impossible to teach an uncritical study of Western civilisation in any Australian university and, since it should be a cornerstone of our education system, that's how it should be. So please, no red herrings about how it would be nothing but conservative and celebratory. Hardly.

Joe

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Yeah Joe

imagine some of the law, the giving of young girls to old uncles, the racism between skin colours, pay back etc was exposed for what is was and still is in some cases. Oh that's right Windshuttle reported accurately on this and look at how they treated him.

I noticed Waleed Aly's name above. Apparently he was disgusted by De Niro's foul-mouthed attack on Trump. Wonders will never cease.

The various essays on this site provide a comprehensive assessment of the state of Western "civilization" in the "21st century".

http://www.beezone.com/news.html

Plus this essay on the Western Omega strategy:

"Actions in the mode of Omega (or effective physical, emotional, and intellectual "creativity", can achieve many individual and collective goals, but, on its own bereft of True Wisdom, the Omega strategy eventually leads to the exploitation, degradation, and suppression of the individual and Humankind altogether".

Which is exactly the situation we are now in.

In another essay he points out that humankind and human culture has been reduced to rubble, and that we are collectively treating the Divine Gift as mud.