Once during a post-seminar conversation with a grad school classmate, I expressed my frustration at the hermeneutic of suspicion that defines academia today. “You can’t just deconstruct everything,” I said.

 

“You have to affirm something.” My interlocutor disagreed. When you affirm things, she told me, people get hurt. This is the “thought that stops all thought.” Disagreements about what to affirm are minor by comparison.

...

... If human civilization is a mere accident resulting from an evolutionary lark, then there’s no reason to treat the big brains that make civilization possible with any more honor than the gills our ancient ancestors discarded. If our minds and our drive to build and create didn’t come from God, their pros and cons can be weighed dispassionately. Do Chartres Cathedral and Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa suffice to balance out the Inquisition and the Catholic sex abuse scandal? Does the Pax Romana make up for the carnage of the gladiator games? Does the injustice of Jim Crow invalidate the achievements of the mighty American middle class? Charles Williams dismisses such questions in his novel Descent into Hell, writing that life is “either good or evil…and you can’t decide that by counting incidents on your fingers. The decision is of another kind.” Such questions must be dismissed. The moment we begin to ask ourselves whether civilization is worth it is the moment civilization dies.

Every other ideological extreme distorts the qualities that make humanity great; the anti-humanism of Galápagos negates them. Or as Walter in The Big Lebowski puts it, “say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, dude; at least it’s an ethos.”

Grayson Quay is a freelance writer and M.A. at Georgetown University. Read more:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/when-academics-hate-civ...
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Well... Grayson Quay is skating on very thin ice when mentioning "Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa". It is a master works, sure, but one from a master of illusions where sexual inferences are not far from the demanded sacred... Civilisation is not god given, but a relative construct of humans saving (protecting) themselves from nature.

From European civilisation that started in the cradle of the Middle-East, around Babylon, via Greek and Roman dust piles, to the Aboriginal Civilisation, there are many ways to express how humans react to their natural environment. Affirming civilisation is a relative notion at which level you are in the social fabric, or on the human world scale.

Before Charles Williams, there was Dante... To say "...the moment we begin to ask ourselves whether civilization is worth it is the moment civilization dies..."  is a bit infantile apart from being the wrong question containing the wrong answer — and yes when you affirm things, such as "civilisation's godly origin", people get hurt. Civilisation is a stylistic construct that is imperfect. It hurts some people while others benefit. The point here is to understand the various civilisations, present, past and future, without destroying the planet, nor killing nature and making sure that as many people as possible can benefit from a social structure that is at the core of our relationships. Are civilisations, cathedrals and palaces — or are they human relationships? The cathedrals tend to last beyond our ephemeral individual life but so does our encoded relationship tenets. And for some civilisations, cathedrals will be mosques — and will be rocky overhangs in Arnhem Land for example, where the stylistic images are the continuum of relationships, with the land and with people.  


Thus there are many ways to affirm civilisation...  

Western civilisation is a chickenhawk soup with dollars added... We can enjoy it in small doses, visit Italy's forum (when the virus has been tamed), boil the planet (by burning fossil fuels) or understand the relative value of our purpose without meaning...