The "Western Civilization" crowd is so many clowns stuffed in a too-small buggy. I'd like to tip the thing over and reflect as the clowns who survive scramble out. So a "Western Civilization" series of musings will appear on "The Vapors." As I’ll be taking on heroes, which include anonymous social media trolls who post blurry-faced selfies that show their torsos (“civilization” seems to require beach muscles and body shaving), I’ll take it slowly. Small steps. I think it good to start from today. Let me pick a representative of “Western Civilization,” then, to get things started. I do mean to approach serious things in the “civilization” series and make a whisper to such things with a few remarks on Leo Strauss at the end of this entry. But an obstacle pulsing with the ridiculous but sadly influential stands in the way of the serious things. Might take a few goes.
Let’s See What Comes Out: Saadness and Civilization
Alright, lean in, let’s tip this thing. Squeak, squeak, squeak, HONK!
There’s one! It’s Gad Saad. Intellectually, he runs slowly. It’s the giant clown shoes. This specimen is as good as any on what you might think to be an august theme, “Western Civilization.”
It’s not. It might’ve been serious and useful, at least as an orienting device, but even there I have my doubts. That’s the past. Let’s start with the present where, philosophically, historically, and let’s just throw in “scientifically,” the notion of “Western Civilization” is bullshit. It’s culture war stuff. That means a survey of the cesspool formerly called “Twitter” is a perfectly legitimate starting point. That’s how I come to Saad. I’ve seen him too much. I think “Western Civilization,” I think “Saad.” And then I think, “sad.”
Who is Gad Saad? I’ll tell you. And, patience, please, I think it’s important to engage what seems to be self-evidently flaming nonsense. Trolls can be ignored, and should be, but some rise to prominence and enter a hall of unfortunately influential others who have a regime’s ear. That’s Gad Saad.
This won’t be a biography, or Wikipedia-style entry. I’ll pick and choose, but I’ll do it in good faith and stand by the suggestions. I’d be happy to engage if pushed.
So. Saad is a business professor at a business school, the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University. Marketing appears to be his thing. From 2008 to 2018, he was the Concordia University “Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioural Sciences and Darwinian Consumption.” There it is. He’s an evolutionary psychology type.
What to do here? I more or less abide by “The Vapors’s” Declaration of Independence, which contains maybe one self-evident truth: “Evolutionary psychology is some corny nonsense that serious folk don’t tend to engage.”
“Evolutionary psychology” functions something like a flame for moths, but the stupid things just gather and breed around “evolutionary psychology.” Who is its great champion, exponent, philosopher, or intellectual? Blech. Be serious.
So back to Saad. He’s a business professor who thinks a moron’s science is not only real but useful to the world. I normally say leave little weirdos to toil in their workshops. His goofy abuse of Darwin would’ve harmed no one, maybe, as I assume his mind was addled at the start. But Saad socially broke out beyond the bounds of the workshop and into influence. He is today a popular internet troll with a variously tasteless mass of some 1.1 million followers over at former-Twitter. That includes such bright lights as Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson. He writes books put out by dubious presses and claims to speak on behalf of common sense, which is too often a tell that one has no access what’s common or sensible.
I know about the guy, then, because I muck around in the MAGA goo most days, even in spite of myself. Maybe to spite myself? Let’s not get distracted. I’ll save self-loathing for another entry.
Where “Western Civilization” is concerned, then, well-honed research habits and training take me to a search bar, where I enter: "@GadSaad: civilization.” A good enough return, a recent entry. It’ll be our first step into Saadness and “civilization.”
March, 17, 2025, call it Dispatches from Inside a Scrotum, Saad writes: “What is it going to take for the West to wake up? When will the West reclaim its heritage, culture, values, freedoms, and liberties? When will the West rediscover its spine and testicles?”
Do you start to see? Saad truly has it all. All kinds of imaginary stuff intersecting to produce an idiot’s view of the world. Then he asserts it and sells it to dupes. It’s a remarkable age. Maybe it’s a moment? Anyway.
It’s “Western Civilization,” “The West,” as umbrella and call to arms. It all shows Gad Saad in his deeply sad simplicity.
So we have: “heritage,” “culture,” “values,” “freedoms,” “liberties,” “spines,” “testicles.” These are the ingredients. Particular organs, belonging only to half of us, a nervous system belonging to each of us, and then, POOF!, a cloud of abstractions. Saad and the “Western Civilization” posse breathe it all in. What they breathe out is neither oxygen nor reason. It’s an expression of testosterone that learned to type. Embarrassing stuff in a world of ideas, you’d think or hope. But here we fucking go.
What heritage? Aren’t there more than a few since we got this civilization show on the road? Which culture, too? And besides, what is “culture”? When did we start saying that about people and peoples? And values? They used to be called “virtues,” are you sure you mean to be using this term, Mr. Saad? You’d think a marketing guy could think through what “value” might imply in matters of morality of virtue. Freedoms and liberties! Amazing! Which ones? You reckon they were always there? Might some of these “liberties” get in the way of other principles said to make “civilization” stand and shine?
And then the stupid, stupid troglodyte emerges from his shelter, scratches his nether regions, and belts out “testicles” when he talks “civilization.” He can’t help it.
Truly. Here, two of my passions in what is exceedingly ridiculous intersect and pulse in a way that makes me manic. Both “Western Civilization” and “manliness” (and culture war cognates) depend on each other and turn just about anyone who touches them, even the learned and experienced, into a bit of a caricature. Just ask Harvey C. Mansfield–a feather-ruffler of a high order (that’s praise)–about Manliness. I don’t want to go chasing–let’s not say “testicles;” I wish Saad hadn’t, and now I’m doing it…
What I want to say is that I mean to speak of “Western Civilization” as it is held up today. That means I’ll have to speak to the “manliness” question, but I’d like not to focus on it for this series. So what I wanted to say: I don’t want to go chasing squirrels; I don’t want to get distracted and digress beyond what is psychologically impossible for me.
The Saad post (I’ll resist more puns), then, quite nicely brings that musty and platitudinal mess of “Western Civilization” together in short order. Credit where credit is due. In entries that follow, I’ll do a more proper inspection of the thing. Maybe for now a quick set-up, a kind of basis to build on.
Is Civilization a Thing? Dude, Maybe You DO Have a Problem with Leo Strauss.
I don’t, man. Truly. Strauss taught me to read a text (which is to say not a moment) in a thousand ways. Something like that. I take that seriously. If you’re a fan of Strauss, take my musings just about always as from a (somewhat deformed) place of admiration. In matters of “Western Civilization,” I take him as a higher example of things. He’s useful here because his thinking and his devices are (unintentionally, or not) easily shown, say, genealogically, to be at the source of much that is foul, but high-sounding, in “Western Civilization” as a rallying cry right now. But first “civilization.” I’ll close with a very few thoughts on that notion and a Strauss connection.
“Civilization,” then, the word, has a history. Like Jean Starobinski, you can trace it out. You’ll find it comes to be understood as both the process and endpoint of history. Antitheses now emerge: a primitive state, savagery, barbarism. Meanings will vary with time and place.
So if you take this quick and dirty conceptual map, you easily see what such bright lights as Gad Saad, Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, Matt Walsh, Jordan Peterson, et al. (essentially a UATX dream faculty) are on about when they get excited and capitalize “Civilization” and put a big-‘W’ “Western” in front of it.
“We aren’t barbarians! We’re not savages!” Other troglodytes have emerged from their shelters and speak in unison. “But we’re grateful for the vocabulary! Let’s grind our enemies with it and call ourselves civilized.”
You might expect them to ask, “But who are we?” But not just yet.
One can go far defining an other. Let’s focus on them who are antithetical (savages, barbarians, apparently Haitians, college students with scary words in favor of Palestine, etc.). It’s pure absurdity that I’ll unpack over the “civilization” series.
But to frame the thing up here, and to close, I want to note that this corny bullshit has a nobler origin in a thinker like Strauss, who invented a “West” for his students and readers. It was a “West” that produced high things, perhaps because of a tension at its twin and dueling origins in Jerusalem and Athens, which Strauss noticed and made his own. So there’s the “West,” with a tension built in and products. The products are now, says Strauss, in danger because of the dread specter of historians doing history the wrong way.
That specter was historicism. It’s an -ism that destroys the possibility of universal hierarchies rooted in a philosophically-discovered nature. The deadly -isms multiply, as historicism issues in moral relativism. This line, I’m told, takes me to Heidegger, with whom Strauss really quarrels on this historicism business. It does, and it doesn’t. I’m lingering where it doesn’t, in the popular result of Strauss’s high-end and exclusive philosophizing.
So it’s bunch of yucky (history) against a backdrop of what’s good and true (my narrative). When you’ve abandoned history (I promise I’m still on the “civilization” point), you’re freed up to craft other devices to help you conceive the sweep of the human experience. I started to touch on one such device here.
“Western Civilization” is a hazy concept. It’s proponents, if they know it are not, are much clearer on the enemies they mange to conjure up than they are on any meaningful and timeless principles that could make sense to the serious.
Alright. So I’ll stop for now. If I make any sense, you’ll notice that it takes no sleight of hand to show that a noble concept like “civilization” might in fact simply be a foul device whose contents we make up and change as we go and craft new needs, new enemies, and as always, new stories.
Next Time on “WTF is ‘Western Civilization’?”
I think, but can’t be sure, that we’ll stay in the present. I’d like to consider, within my wee limits, more popular discourse around “civilization.”
I’m much obliged that you stuck around. We might be able to shape this mess into something.