What Sets the West Apart

Spencer Klavan’s cover essay “The Renegade Academy” (Spring 2026) states eloquently much that I believe about the Western tradition—and the recent attacks upon it. I will certainly now read the book under review, Allen Guelzo and James Hankins’s The Golden Thread. But I didn’t see in Klavan, or in his summary of Guelzo and Hankins, a clear definition of the psychology involved—what separates the West from the non-West—a question I took up in my own Burdens of Freedom: Cultural Difference and American Power (2019).

The difference has nothing to do with race per se. Western culture is not “white.” Rather, it is moral and individualist: most people decide personally what they think is true and right, in light of their own values. In the non-West, people mostly conform to external direction or necessity. The famed creators of Western culture are not honored simply out of piety and tradition. They are those thinkers and artists who most deeply express the issues individualists must face. Non-Western traditions like Islam primarily teach conformity to top-down authority.

One reason why fashionable criticisms of Western culture, such as critical race theory, carry little weight outside the academy is that they ignore cultural differences. These ideologies treat the victims of slavery or colonialism as if they were the same as mainstream Westerners today who never faced oppression. But almost all the victim groups come from the non-West, where cultures are much more passive than in the West. Japan is the only non-Western country that ever became formidable enough to threaten the West. Clearly, Western culture is far more assertive than non-Western—that is why it continues to dominate higher education and most other modern institutions. The irony is that ideologues who vilify the West continue to think in Western terms.

Lawrence M. Mead
New York University
New York, NY

Spencer A. Klavan replies:

Professor Mead makes some claims about the West that I can agree with up to a point. Certainly, the moral weight of the lone individual is a distinctive feature of Western history and Western thought. It is expressed in Martin Luther’s “here I stand; I can do no other,” as much as it is by Socrates in the Gorgias: “I would rather the whole world should be against me and opposed to me, than that I myself should be at odds with myself, and contradict myself.”

At the same time, though, the West is not only defined by individualism—or, if it is today, that is a pathology of late modernity rather than a throughline of our best traditions. A statement like “most people decide personally what they think is true and right, in light of their own values” might have alarmed Aristotle, who wrote that the city comes before the individual in priority, and that the man who needs no political community “must be either a beast or a god.”

I’m not sure it’s true as a matter of actual practice, either, that most people in the West are quite as independent in their thought as Luther or Socrates. Most people trust their personal convictions somewhat less, and lean more on the accepted teachings handed down by their families, churches, and communities. On balance, I’d say that’s a good thing—you can’t preserve a culture on the basis of unfettered liberation alone. You also need continuity and tradition—another point I borrow from Aristotle’s Politics (Book 2, chapter 8).

As Guelzo and Hankins show beautifully, and as I tried to summarize in my review, the full story of the West is one of vigorous negotiation between both “order and liberty, the irreplaceable individual and the legitimate claims of ancestral civilization.”

I would be more inclined to say, then, that what makes the West distinctive is our tradition of ordered liberty. It’s never been more essential to revive and preserve that tradition, since I fear it’s also not the case that “Japan is the only non-Western country that ever became formidable enough to threaten the West.” The Chinese would like a word, and their ways are not our ways. Of course I would much rather our future be defined by the classical Western approach to individualism than by Xi Jinping’s. I expect Professor Mead and I agree about that and much else. I’m honored to think that in the clash of civilizations, he and I are on the same team.

Almost Chosen People

I enjoyed Christopher Flannery’s essay on “John Quincy Adams and the Fourth of July” (Spring 2026) and was especially impressed by this portion of Adams’s 1839 oration on the principles of the Declaration of Independence and how to remember them:

Lay up these principles, then, in your hearts, and in your souls—bind them for signs upon your hands, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes—teach them to your children, speaking of them when sitting in your houses, when walking by the way, when lying down and when rising up—write them upon the doorplates of your houses, and upon your gates.

This portion of the speech is drawn from Deuteronomy 6:6-9, commonly known as the V’ahavta, which follows directly after the Shema recited in every Jewish prayer service.

It is a tribute to Adams, and to his overwhelmingly non-Jewish audience, to have been so conversant with this more obscure Biblical passage.

Jonathan P. Blucher
San Antonio, TX

Principled Anti-Slavery

My thanks to Randy Barnett for his thoughtful reply to my letter on progressive icon and guru Senator Charles Sumner (Correspondence, Spring 2026). Although I agree with major elements of his letter and his review, I must object to Barnett’s portrayal of this stumbling block to Abraham Lincoln as a friend of the Declaration of Independence. Like all progressives, Sumner disputed its principles, however much he praised the document. (Even Declaration-despiser Woodrow Wilson enjoyed Fourth of July fireworks.) The last sentence of Zaakir Tameez’s massive, over-600-page biography, Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation, quotes Sumner: “Liberty has been won. The battle for Equality is still pending.” For Sumner and progressivism, the battle will always be “pending”—unfinished and ever-evolving.

Unmoored by the discipline enforced by natural rights with citizen duties, Senator (and former professor) Sumner set the stage for President (and former professor) Wilson. Sumner undermined Lincoln’s statesmanship of equality and liberty, obsessed over race-conscious policies in place of Lincoln’s focus on slavery, and disdained President Ulysses S. Grant (or “Grawnt,” as Tameez notes Sumner pronounced his name). Sumner insisted on understanding equality fundamentally in racial terms, and disregarded republicanism’s limits on government power. Subsequently, as Justice Clarence Thomas recently reminded us in his address to the University of Texas at Austin in April, progressivism glories in racial differences, even mocking “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” by embracing evolutionary biology and rejecting the truths of the Declaration.

Ken Masugi
Rockville, MD