Grim Old Days: Fernand Braudel’s Structures of Everyday Life

“The poor in the towns and countryside of the West lived in a state of almost complete deprivation."

Chelsea Follett — Aug 23, 2024

Summary: Fernand Braudel’s book offers a vivid exploration of the harsh realities of pre-industrial life, from deadly wildlife encounters and frequent famines to the widespread use of primitive table manners. Braudel delves into the grim aspects of daily existence, highlighting the pervasive dangers and struggles that defined life before modern advancements. His work paints a stark picture of a world where survival was precarious, and comfort was a rare and costly luxury.

The French historian Fernand Braudel’s ambitious book, The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, paints a sweeping and vivid picture of many aspects of life in the past, from the shocking frequency of deadly wildlife encounters and famines to plagues and violence.

“There is a drawing which shows Maximilian of Austria at a table, in about 1513: he is putting his hand into a dish. Two centuries or so later, the Princess Palatine tells how Louis XIV, when he allowed his children to sit up to table for the first time, forbade them to eat differently from him, and in particular to eat with a fork as an over-zealous tutor had taught them.” Even the Queen of France from 1615 to 1643, “Anne of Austria ate her meat with her fingers all her life. And so did the Court of Vienna until at least 1651.”

“The individual fork dates from about the sixteenth century. . . . We know that Montaigne did not use a fork, since he accuses himself of eating too quickly so that ‘I sometimes bite my fingers in my haste.’”

How the table settings in various artists’ depictions of The Last Supper (a frequent subject in Western art) changed over time is revealing: “no fork appears before 1600 and almost no spoons either.”

“The use of a spoon did not become widespread until the sixteenth century, and the custom of providing knives dates from the same time—before that the guests brought along their own. Individual glasses for each guest also appeared at about this time. Courtesy formerly dictated that one emptied the glass and passed it on to one’s neighbour, who did the same.” Even individual plates are relatively recent; previously, a single dish was brought out on a wooden board and “each selected the morsel he wanted and picked it up with his fingers.”

The state of table manners is hinted at in an Austrian ordinance from 1624 instructing young officers on how to behave when dining with an archduke, which specifies: “not to arrive half drunk, not to drink after every mouthful, … not to lick the fingers, not to spit in the plate, not to wipe the nose on the tablecloth, not to gulp drink like animals.” Separate dining rooms were rare until the 16th century, and then only among the rich.

Pepper was a rare luxury. Among 15th-century explorers, “as dear as pepper” was a common expression (“dear” being used in the sense meaning “expensive”).

Salt was consumed in unhealthily large quantities in a desperate attempt to improve the taste of the masses’ monotonous and unappetizing diets. “In the Europe of insipid farinaceous gruels consumption of salt was large . . . twenty grams daily per person,” far exceeding the present-day figure.” To put that into perspective, the US Food and Drug Administration’s nutritional guidelines currently recommend limiting salt consumption to 2.3 grams per person per day; on average, Americans eat about 3.4 grams of salt per day, overshooting recommendations but still lagging far behind what was typical in the preindustrial world. Outside of Europe, too, the impoverished majority turned to salt out of desperation to enliven their similarly bland, unvaried staple foods. As an Indian writer put it, “When the palate revolts against the insipidness of rice boiled with no other ingredients, we dream of fat, salt and spices.”

“Famine recurred so insistently for centuries on end that it became incorporated into man’s biological regime and built into his daily life. Dearth and penury were continual, and familiar. . . . Two consecutive bad harvests spelt disaster.”

“Any national calculation shows a sad story. France, by any standards a privileged country, is reckoned to have experienced 10 general famines during the tenth century: 26 in the eleventh; 2 in the twelfth; 4 in the fourteenth; 7 in the fifteenth; 13 in the sixteenth; 11 in the seventeenth and 16 in the eighteenth. . . . [Much] the same could be said of any country in Europe.” Braudel relates that a third of Finland’s population is estimated to have died of starvation during a famine from 1696 to 1697. “Florence . . . experienced 111 years when people went hungry, and only sixteen ‘very good’ harvests between 1371 and 1791.” “Near Blois in 1662, a witness reported that [due to famine] the poor were on a diet of ‘cabbage stumps with bran soaked in cod broth.’” A decade earlier, in 1652, a chronicler noted, “the people of Lorraine and other surrounding lands are reduced to such extremities that, like animals, they eat the grass in the meadows.” In 1694 near Meulan, famine again made it so that “large numbers of people lived on grass like animals.” In 1674–76, in southeastern France, people were reportedly reduced to eating “acorns and roots.”

Beyond Europe, famine was also frequent and severe. “In 1555, and again in 1596, violent famine throughout north-west India, resulted in scenes of cannibalism, according to contemporary chroniclers. There was another terrible famine, almost everywhere in India, in 1630–31. A Dutch merchant has left us an appalling description of it: ‘Men abandoned towns and villages and wandered helplessly: It was easy to recognize their condition: eyes sunk deep in the head, lips pale and covered with slime, the skin hard, with the bones showing through, the belly nothing but a pouch hanging down empty. . . . One would cry and howl for hunger, while another lay stretched on the ground dying in misery.’” The famine caused “collective suicides. . . . Then came the stage when the starving split open the stomachs of the dead or dying and ‘drew at the entrails to fill their own bellies’. ‘Many hundred thousands of men died of hunger, so that the whole country was covered with corpses lying unburied, which caused such a stench that the whole air was filled and infected with it . . . in the village of Susuntra . . . human flesh was sold in open market.”

Some Europeans also resorted to cannibalism in times of famine; in 1662 in Burgundy, contemporary accounts say that “famine this year has put an end to over ten thousand families . . . and forced a third of the inhabitants, even in the good towns, to eat wild plants. . . . Some people ate human flesh.”

Even in good times, peasants often subsisted on “gruels, sops and bread” that barely provided any nutritional value. “Bread was almost always hard and mouldy.” “Bread was sometimes bread in name alone.” By some estimates, “no more than 4% of the European population ate white bread. Even at the beginning of the eighteenth century, half the rural population fed on non-bread-making cereals and rye, and a lot of bran was left in the mixture of grains that went to make bread for the poor. Wheaten bread and white bread . . . remained a luxury for a long time.” It was only between 1750 and 1850 that white bread became more widely available.

In some societies, meat was so scarce as to be the preserve of the wealthy. “‘One has to be a very great lord in Sumatra,’ said one seventeenth-century traveller, ‘to have a boiled or roast chicken, which moreover has to last for the whole day.’” Today, meanwhile, one can purchase a whole rotisserie chicken from Costco for $4.99 and casually gorge on what was once a delicacy.

Nutritional deficiencies harmed human health and may have even prevented children from reaching their intellectual potential. “The Dictionnaire de Trévoux (1771) says quite bluntly: ‘The peasants are usually so stupid because they only live on coarse foods.’”

Water was also often scarce. “Whole towns—and very wealthy ones at that—were poorly supplied with water.” One example was Venice. “When no rain fell for weeks on end, the cisterns ran dry; this happened when [the 19th-century French writer] Stendhal was staying in the city. If there was a storm they were tainted with salt water.” “In 1770, Thames water ‘which is not good’ was carried to all the houses in London … but this was not what we would usually think of as running water: it was ‘distributed regularly three times a week, according to the amount consumed per household.”

Even when water was supplied, it was often tainted. The use of lead, a powerful toxin, in piping “is recorded in England in 1236.” Exposure to lead in drinking water is now known to cause many negative health effects, including debilitating lifelong brain damage and stunted growth in children, anemia and cardiovascular problems in adults, and in pregnant women, a heightened risk of miscarriage. In Paris, the main water source was the thick sludge of the Seine: “It was supposed to bear boats well, being muddy and therefore heavy, as a Portuguese envoy reported in 1641—not that this quality would recommend itself to drinkers.” Indeed, the water source doubled as a dumping site for toxic waste. “‘A number of dyers pour their dye three times a week into the branch of the river which washes the Pelletier quay and between the two bridges,’ said an eye witness (1771). ‘The arch which forms the Gêvres quai is a seat of pestilence. All that part of the town drinks infected waters.’”

Such poor diets and tainted water made people more vulnerable to every illness. “The undernourished, unprotected population could offer little resistance to [epidemics, hence] the Tuscan proverb [says] ‘The best remedy against malaria is a well filled pot.’ Undernourishment, on all the evidence, is a ‘multiplying’ factor in the spread of diseases.”

“To mention only smallpox: in 1775, when inoculation was beginning to be discussed, a medical book considered it ‘the most general of all diseases’; ninety-five in every hundred people were affected; one in seven died.” In 1780, a mysterious illness dubbed “purple fever” is said to have killed so many hundreds of Parisians that “the gravediggers’ arms were falling off.” Influenza struck often as well. “In 1588, it laid low (but did not kill) the entire population of Venice, to the point where the Grand Council was empty.” A mysterious “sweating sickness” plagued England from 1486 to 1551, with five major outbreaks, also striking Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland: “The victims had fits of shivering and sweated profusely and were often dead within hours.” Even the rich could not escape the ravages of disease. “Tuberculosis was also an old scourge of Europe: Francis II (tubercular meningitis), Charles IX (pulmonary tuberculosis) and Louis XIII (intestinal tuberculosis) all fell victim to it (1560, 1574, 1643).”

Even royalty received atrociously ineffective and occasionally deadly medical care. The itinerant physician Arnaud de Villeneuve (c. 1240–c. 1313) claimed, “brandy, aqua vitae, accomplished the miracle of preserving youth, dissipated superfluous body fluids, revived the heart, cured colic, drops: paralysis, quartan ague, calmed toothache and gave protection against plague. But his miracle cure brought Charles the Bad, of execrable memory, to a terrible end (1387); doctors had enveloped him in a brandy-soaked sheet sewn up with large stitches for greater efficiency so that it fitted rightly round the patient. A servant held a candle up close to try to break one of the threads, and sheet and invalid went up in flames.”

Outbreaks of deadly disease caused not only deaths but social discord among survivors. Braduel quotes the English diarist Samuel Pepys in 1665 calling the bubonic plague “the plague making us cruel, as doggs, one to another.” Braudel quotes Daniel Defoe’s account of the 1664 plague of London, saying that the dead were thrown “for the most part on to a cart like common dung.” The outbreaks were frequent. “Plague occurred in Amsterdam every year from 1622 to 1628 (the toll: 35,000 dead). It struck Paris in 1612, 1619, 1631, 1638, 1662, 1668 (the last).” Those who did survive the poverty, famines, and plagues of the past were often prematurely aged. In 1754, Braudel quotes one author as noting that “the peasants in France . . . begin to decline before they are forty.”

“The poor in the towns and countryside of the West lived in a state of almost complete deprivation. Their furniture consisted of next to nothing, at least before the eighteenth century, when a rudimentary luxury began to spread (chairs, where before people had been content with benches, woollen mattresses, feather beds) … But before the eighteenth century, … inventories mention only a few old clothes, a stool, a table, a bench, the planks of a bed, sacks filled with straw. Official reports for Burgundy between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries are full of references to people [sleeping] on straw with no bed or furniture’ who were only separated ‘from the pigs by a with a screen.’”

“Travellers’ tales are full of savage beasts. One seventeenth-century account describes tigers prowling round Asian villages and towns, and swimming out into the Ganges delta to surprise fisherman asleep in their boats.”

“No one feels safe after nightfall, not even inside a house. One man went out of his hut in a small town near [Guangzhou], where the Jesuit father [Adriano] de Las Cortes and his fellow sufferers were imprisoned (1626), and was carried off by a tiger.”

“The whole of Europe, from the Urals to the Straits of Gibraltar, was the domain of wolves, and bears roamed in all its mountains. The omnipresence of wolves and the attention they aroused make wolf-hunting an index of the health of the countryside, and even of the towns, and of the character of the year gone by. A lapse in vigilance, an economic setback, a rough winter, and they multiplied. In 1420, packs entered Paris through a breach in the ramparts or unguarded gates. They were there again in September 1438, attacking people this time outside the town, between Montmartre and the Saint-Antoine gate. In 1640, wolves entered Besançon by crossing the Doubs near the mills of the town and ‘ate children along the roads.’”

“There was an example of this in Gevaudan ‘where the ravages of the wolves made people believe in the existence of an unnatural monster.’” A creature so lethal that it has become the stuff of legends, nicknamed the Beast of Gévaudan, terrorized France between 1764 and 1767, allegedly killing over 100 victims and maiming many more. The tragic loss of life even prompted King Louis XV to send troops to hunt the predator. Some scholars think the infamous maneater may have been a hyena or lion escaped from a menagerie based on conflicting descriptions of its appearance from the period, but details from the autopsy report after the animal was finally slain by a hunter suggest it was a canine, probably an unusually large wolf or wolf-dog hybrid that developed a marked taste for human flesh.

Knowing firsthand how deadly wolves could be, the French even considered using wolves as a form of biological warfare against the English. “In fact the Députés du Commerce were discussing in 1783 a proposal made several years earlier, to ‘introduce into England a sufficient number of wolves to destroy the greater part of the population.’”

And that is only a small taste of the past from Braudel’s lengthy tome.

Bloomberg | Science & Technology

The Robot Sculptors of Italy

Jul 11, 2025

“As a segment of the marble business, sculpture is dwarfed by the industrial side, which slices slabs by the millions of tons each year. Robots help these companies mill countertops and shower stalls for markets around the world. But fine art sculpture is big business too, worth billions of dollars a year.

The first robot sculptor appeared in Carrara in 2005. Now there are about 30, and the total worldwide is around 100. Two men play outsize roles in this rapidly evolving business. One is Massari, the more evangelistic of the two. His corporate mothership, publicly traded Litix SpA, trumpets Massari’s vision of the future on the first page of a slick marketing brochure. ‘We Don’t Need Another Michelangelo: In Italy, It’s Robots’ Turn to Sculpt,’ proclaims the newspaper headline he reproduced from a New York Times piece on his company.

The other man is a bluff Midwesterner named Jim Durham… He was the biggest producer of fine art stone sculpture in America, and now, with his Franco Cervietti purchase, the world.”

From Bloomberg.

The Guardian | Leisure

Paris Reopens Seine River After Century-Long Swimming Ban

Jul 10, 2025

“Parisians and tourists flocked to take a dip in the Seine River this weekend after city authorities gave the green light for it to be used for public swimming for the first time in more than a century.

The opening followed a comprehensive clean-up programme sped up by its use as a venue in last year’s Paris Olympics after people who regularly swam in it illegally, lobbied for its transformation.

The outgoing mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, also helped to champion the plans, jumping in the river herself before the Olympics.

About 1,000 swimmers a day will be allowed access to three bathing sites on the banks of the Seine for free, until the end of August.”

From The Guardian.

Times of Central Asia | Human Freedom

Reactions to Provocative Social Posts Decriminalized in Tajikistan

Jul 10, 2025

“Tajik citizens need no longer fear that they will be imprisoned for clicking ‘like’ on social media posts that the Tajik authorities do not like.

Among several laws that Tajik President Emomali Rahmon signed on May 14 was one that decriminalized liking posts on social networks that originate from individuals or organizations the Tajik government considers extremist.”

From Times of Central Asia.

Blog Post | Culture & Tolerance

The Ancient Roots of Western Self-Criticism

The West’s enduring success is rooted in its awareness of its own faults and constant striving to be better. Far from being a modern phenomenon, the tradition of Western self-criticism began with Homer.

Marian L. Tupy — Jul 9, 2025

Summary: Western civilization is now often criticized from within for its imperialism, decadence, and moral failings. But the tradition of Western self-criticism is not a modern weakness; it is an ancient strength. The Greeks and Romans consistently questioned their own actions, empathized with their enemies, and questioned their societal norms. This deep-rooted capacity for introspection helped build the resilient, self-correcting culture whose contributions to human flourishing have shaped the world of today.

At a time when Western histories and societies face relentless internal scrutiny—accused of imperialism, cultural arrogance, decadence, and other failings—it is tempting to view this self-criticism as a modern malaise, a sign of weakness. Yet even a cursory look at the literature of ancient Greece and Rome reveals a different story: the West’s tendency to question itself, empathise with its enemies, and confront its own imperfections is not a recent phenomenon. It is age-old and unique. It may even be one of the main sources of Western strength. Far from undermining Western civilisation, this introspective tradition—evident in the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, Tacitus, and others—has catalysed its resilience and moral progress. By holding a mirror to their own flaws and extending sympathy to adversaries, the ancients laid the groundwork for a culture built on self-correction and the pursuit of betterment—traits that continue to define the West’s success.

The ancient Greeks, whose city-states birthed and gave name to democracy, logic, ethics, geography, biology, aesthetics, economics, mathematics, astronomy, physics, history, politics, and philosophy, were no strangers to self-examination, even in times of war. Homer’s Iliad—a foundational text of the Western literary canon, composed in the late eighth century BC—is a masterclass in humanising the enemy. While celebrating Greek heroism, Homer does not vilify the Trojans. Instead, he paints Hector, Troy’s greatest but ultimately doomed warrior, as a devoted husband and father whose heartbreaking farewell to his wife, Andromache, moves readers nearly 3,000 years later. Later, Achilles, the Greek champion, shares a moment of profound empathy with Priam, the Trojan king, as they weep together over their respective losses. This is not mere storytelling; it is a moral stance, urging Greeks to see their enemies as mirrors of themselves, subject to the same cruel fate. Such understanding reflects a culture unafraid to question the glorification of conquest and to seek understanding across battle lines.

This introspective spirit shines even brighter in Greek tragedy. Its best-known playwrights—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—are generally rated, along with Shakespeare, as the greatest tragedians of all time; they used the stage to probe their society’s values. In fifth-century BC Athens, tragedies were performed before a mass audience in an open-air theatre at the annual festival of Dionysus, god of wine and fertility. When people today think of plays, they imagine small theatres with audiences whose average level of education and intelligence is much higher than that of the general population. Given the composition of Greek audiences, therefore, the adversarial nature of Attic tragedies—built around the agōn, a formal clash of characters and ideals that let spectators see moral and political questions tested through direct confrontation—is even more remarkable. Let us look at a few examples.

In 472 BC, just eight years after the Greeks repulsed the Persian invasion at Salamis, Aeschylus, reportedly a veteran of the Battle of Marathon, presided over the performance of his play The Persians. It is an extraordinary example of cultural humility. Rather than gloating over a defeated foe, Aeschylus sets his drama in the Persian court, giving voice to Queen Atossa’s grief and Xerxes’ humiliation. The chorus of Persian elders laments the loss of their youth—a universal cry that would resonate with any Athenian who had lost a son in battle. Aeschylus could have written a jingoistic paean to Greek superiority; instead, he penned a tragedy that invited his audience to mourn with their enemies, acknowledging the hubris that threatens all nations.

Sophocles, too, contributes to this tradition in Antigone (c. 441 BC), where the adolescent heroine’s defiance of King Creon’s edict to leave her brother Polynices unburied pits individual conscience against state authority. Polynices, branded a traitor, is the “enemy,” yet Antigone’s loyalty to him is portrayed as noble, and Creon’s eventual regret reveals the folly of his rigid rule. The play’s sympathy for those who challenge the state reflects a Greek willingness to question authority and empathise with outcasts—a precursor to modern debates about justice and dissent.

Finally, we come to the truly remarkable case of Euripides. In Hecuba (424 BC), Trojan Women (415 BC), and Andromache (date disputed), the playwright portrays the savage cruelty inflicted by victorious Greeks on the Trojan women they enslaved. In front of a mass audience—a significant share of which consisted of highly patriarchal Greek men—Euripides bemoans the horrific fate of enemy slave women at the hands of Greek men. By giving voice to the defeated, he challenges the moral certainty of conquest, urging his audience to see their enemies as victims of the same forces that could one day destroy Athens. These plays are not just art; they are acts of cultural self-criticism, exposing the flaws of Greek society—xenophobia, misogyny, hubris, cruelty—while affirming the humanity of those it deemed enemies. How modern.

The Romans were great innovators in jurisprudence, administration, engineering, logistics, urban planning, and politics, bequeathing to the world such words as republic, liberty, and legal—concepts they valued highly. Culturally, however, they were greatly beholden to the Greeks. Virgil’s Aeneid (19 BC) is both a national epic and, by consensus, the greatest work of Latin literature. It narrates how, after the Trojan War, the Trojan prince Aeneas led the remnants of his people to Latium, where they intermarried with the native Italians to become the ancestors of the Romans. The epic’s high point is Aeneas’ interaction with Dido, queen of Rome’s archenemy Carthage. They have an affair, he leaves, and she commits suicide. Her curse on the departing Aeneas foreshadows Carthage’s enmity, yet Virgil portrays her as a noble, broken figure—not a villain. In fact, Virgil focused readers’ attention on Dido so completely that she became the heroine of the Aeneid. In the early fifth century AD, Macrobius, a Roman provincial author, observed, “The story of Dido in love … flies through the attention of everyone to such an extent that painters, sculptors, and embroiderers use this subject as if there were no other … that she committed suicide in order not to endure dishonour.” Virgil’s Carthaginian queen remained the heroine of poetry (Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women), tragedy (Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage), and opera (Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas).

Tacitus, the greatest Roman historian, was also a senator, praetor, suffect consul, and proconsular governor of the province of Asia. In other words, he was at the very centre of the imperial establishment. Tacitus wrote Agricola (c. AD 98) to honour his eponymous father-in-law by recounting how the latter solidified Roman control over what is now England and Wales. Nevertheless, Tacitus attributes to Agricola’s enemy, the British chieftain Calgacus, a powerful denunciation of the Roman Empire: “Plunder, slaughter, rapine they call by the false name of empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” With that almost certainly invented statement, Tacitus undermined the proudest Roman boast—that empire brought peace (see Aeneid 6.852–53; the Pax Romana; and the Emperor Augustus’ Altar of Peace). Similarly, in Germania (c. AD 98), Tacitus idealises the Germanic tribes’ simplicity and courage, contrasting them with Rome’s supposed decadence. By praising Rome’s enemies, he holds a mirror to what he sees as his own society’s moral decline.

Finally, Lucan’s Pharsalia (c. AD 61–65), an epic of Rome’s civil war, mourns Pompey Magnus, Caesar’s rival, as a tragic figure fighting for the Republic’s lost ideals. His murder in Egypt, lamented by Lucan, evokes sympathy for a defeated enemy whose loss marks Rome’s slide into autocracy. Writing under Emperor Nero, Lucan uses Pompey’s fate to critique tyranny, showing how sympathy for an enemy can serve as a veiled rebuke of one’s own rulers.

The ancient Greeks and Romans waged wars, built empires, and committed atrocities. Yet their literature reveals a unique capacity to question those actions, to see the humanity in their adversaries, and to strive for moral improvement. This mindset formed a cornerstone of Western resilience—a culture that thrives on self-criticism, not self-congratulation, a culture that is alert to its faults and resolute in correcting them. To quote Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Disuniting of America: “No doubt Europe has done terrible things, not least to itself. But what culture has not? … There remains a crucial difference between the Western tradition and the others. The crimes of the West have produced their own antibodies. They have provoked great movements to end slavery, to raise the status of women, to abolish torture, to combat racism, to defend freedom of inquiry.”

Western self-criticism, then, is not new. What is new is the apparent imbalance between recognising Western shortcomings on the one hand and appreciating the West’s magnificent bequests to humanity on the other. That should not be surprising, given that the commanding heights of Western culture—universities, museums, galleries, and theatres—have become dominated by a motley crew of Marxists, Frankfurt-schoolers, post-structuralists, deconstructionists, postcolonialists, de-colonialists and critical race theorists. Despondency over the future of the West, however, would be an over-reaction.

In 184 BC, amidst worry about Rome’s decline, Cato the Elder won the election as Censor on a platform of a “great purification,” in which he aimed to “cut and sear … the hydra-like luxury and effeminacy of the time.” At that point, Rome controlled Italy, Corsica, southern Spain, and small parts of the Dalmatian Coast. Yet, Rome proceeded to grow and would not reach its maximum territorial extent as well as the period of its greatest prosperity and tranquility until three centuries later, under the Nerva-Antonine Dynasty. It would take another three and a half centuries before the Western Empire disintegrated in AD 476.

Its eastern half survived under the leadership of rulers whose title was “Basileus ton Romaion” (King of the Romans) until the sack of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453—some 1,600 years after Cato expressed his concern over Rome’s future. Paying homage to the Byzantine custom, Sultan Mehmed II declared himself “Kayser-i Rum” (Caesar of the Romans). By that time, Western Europe was on the mend. The Renaissance was in full swing, and in 1492, Columbus sailed for the New World. The stage was set for the Scientific Revolution, followed by the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and a half-millennium-long Western preeminence that transformed the globe—largely for the better. The revolutions that originated in Europe brought to all the peoples of the world greater knowledge, prosperity, and control over nature than anyone could previously have imagined possible. Let us, by all means, continue the tradition of self-doubt and self-criticism that have characterised Western civilisation from its beginning. However, now that the West has come under sustained and vitriolic attack from without and within, perhaps we should balance that self-criticism with recognition of Western civilisation’s unmatched contributions to human wellbeing and progress.

This article was published by Quillette on 7/4/2025.