Western Dissent

By James S. Panero | Wednesday, May 15, 1996

The West gave us dissent. The history of the West is a history of dissension. From Socrates to Jesus to Lincoln, the West has been shaped by the genius of individuals and the freedom of individual resolve, and they died for it.

For me, freedom of dissent is the West's greatest legacy. In the human experience, it has never come naturally to society. It had been earned, and built up over thousands of years, to where we now see it today.

Many take this freedom for granted. Those who fight against the legacy of the West, they do so with the very freedom the West has given them. They bite the hand that feeds them.

Indeed, opposition to the West may be a perversion of Western freedom. Only in the West did intellectual thought reach such a high and objective level, that we could learn from other cultures without destroying them. The call for world studies and ethnic studies is an amalgamation of this Western tradition. Other cultures can be studied, they should be studied, but not at the expense of Western study. We can and should study other subjects, but it's the Western tradition that gave us the freedom and a common intellectual language to do it. Few other cultures have reached such a high point of freedom. When we ignore the books that teach us about the West, we forget that legacy.

Western Dissent

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