On Being Civilized: A Few Lines Amid the Breakage
By Tracy Lee Simmons.
Memoria College Press, 2023.
Paperback, 281 pages, $15.45.
Reviewed by Darrell Falconburg.
“What is civilization?”
When confronted with what appears to be civilizational disintegration, many writers and scholars have attempted to answer this question. For instance, Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation” mini-series, which aired in 1969, celebrated the outstanding achievements of Western art, philosophy, and literature since the Middle Ages. William James Durant and his wife, Ariel, completed a famous 11-volume work, The Story of Civilization. This series, written over four decades (1935-1975), was an extensive and detailed history of Western civilization and aimed at a popular audience. Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (2001) was a thoughtful exploration of Western civilization from the Renaissance to the present. In our age of modern decadence, the idea of civilization and the possibility of transmitting it to the next generation has been on many minds. What, indeed, is this treasure that we call “civilization?” And for that matter, how can this treasure be conserved and passed down to the next generation?
Best-selling author Tracy Lee Simmons has answers to these questions. His new book, On Being Civilized: A Few Lines Amid the Breakage, is a helpful meditation on the definition and features of civilization. Unlike writers such as Clark, Durant, and Barzun, Simmons does not provide a detailed or comprehensive history of Western civilization. Nor does he offer a lengthy or systematic book aimed at celebrating the tremendous cultural achievements of the Western world. Instead, he gives us three decades of articles, essays, and book reviews on the idea of civilization and what it means to be a civilized human being. He gives us, in his words, “a meditation on an idea.”
Many of the pieces found in On Being Civilized were first published in the pages of National Review, the journal where Simmons served as an associate editor under his friend and mentor, William F. Buckley Jr. Other pieces were published in outlets like Crisis Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, and The Sewanee Review. Although these pieces were published in numerous periodicals over the course of three decades, there is still a high degree of cohesion to the book. This is because each piece explores the nature of civilization and the civilized life. In addition, the importance of learning as much as possible about our heritage and passing it down to one’s children and students also emerges in many of these pieces. Taken as a whole, this book is a meditation on the idea of civilization and the role of education in transmitting a civilized life to future generations.
Readers of On Being Civilized should be familiar with the author’s background and prior accomplishments. Tracy Lee Simmons graduated from the University of Oxford, where he earned a master of arts in the classics. He also taught as a college professor for many years and spent over a decade as the founding chair of the Dow Program in American Journalism at Hillsdale College. Today, he teaches at the newly established Memoria College, where adult students and classical educators receive a broad encounter with the great books and great thinkers of the Western tradition. Although educated at Oxford, Simmons has spent most of his career writing for a broader audience. His most influential book, Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin (2002), was penned at Buckley’s suggestion and soon earned Simmons the reputation as a leader of the emerging classical education movement. He also received the 2005 Russell Kirk Paideia Prize from the CiRCE Institute for his lifelong contributions to the renewal of education. In this way, Simmons is not simply another writer who has republished a collection of his older pieces. More than that, he is a laborer in the vineyards of belles lettres, someone to whom readers can look for civilized inspiration.
A strength of this new book is its foreword and introduction, written by two fellow defenders of civilization and the civilized life: author Joseph Pearce and educational leader Martin Cothran. In his foreword, Pearce first explains the importance of the “traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of civilization” rather than the problematic progressive or Rousseauean understandings. “In the pages of this book,” he writes, “Tracy Lee Simmons proves to be a reliable guide to a sound and historically informed understanding of civilization.” Then, in his introduction, Cothran skillfully leads readers to the topic of the book and to the author who wrote it. “We are a forgetful people, and one thing needful in the project of saving civilization is people who can remind us what civilization is,” writes Cothran. “We need someone who can help us put back together the pieces of our fragmented civilization through an incantation of elegant words spoken straightforwardly, and Tracy Lee Simmons is the perfect man for the job.” Indeed, Joseph Pearce and Martin Cothran are correct. Simmons is an eloquent defender of civilization and the kind of education that transmits it. If we could learn from him and apply his wisdom in our own lives and homes, then our civilization would be all the better for it.
Following the foreword and introduction, the main text is divided into seven chapters: “prologue,” “biography,” “history,” “language,” “literature,” “culture,” and “epilogue.” In addition to the helpful foreword and introduction, Simmons’s own introduction gives cohesion to the rest of the text. This prologue is the most compelling and interesting essay in the entire volume. It sets the stage for the rest of the text and is an essay worthy of serious reading and reflection. The list of “signposts” of civilization will interest many readers, who may find themselves meditating on whether or not they seriously embody such signposts in their own lives and homes. Here are a few of them taken at random:
When we realize both consciously and instinctively that human beings are improvable but not perfectible.”
“When we take children’s education seriously enough not to assume that the state is necessarily the most reliable educator.”
“When people read good books and talk about them avidly as they do the latest TV or internet series.”
“When households ensure some quiet time and eschew the tyranny of electronic noise during their few non-harassed hours together.”
“When history is not rewritten for the manifest purpose of inviting our contemporaries to feel superior to all people who lived before them.”
Of course, the list that Simmons provides is much longer than this. Readers who want the entire list—the heart of his prologue—will have to purchase the text.
Why did Simmons publish On Being Civilized? For Simmons, Western civilization is under threat and needs new defenders in the educational and cultural arenas. Ideologies bound up in resentment and ingratitude used to be points of view that were more underground and fringe than they were mainstream. As the decades have passed, however, Simmons has noticed these points of view becoming increasingly prominent. As Simmons puts it:
[w]e are living in an age when civilization itself is under attack, or at least Western civilization, which has made the fruitful lives we lead today possible. That attack upon Western civilization, which was once an underground operation of sabotage and creeping corruption and quiet, persistent miseducation, has become a full-on frontal assault.”
The fact that these anti-civilizational ideologies have become more common in recent decades is deeply concerning. The survival of a civilization, according to this view, should not be taken for granted. One of the most important things that we can say about the nature of civilization, Simmons believes, is that it is “fragile” and that it is not simply handed down as though it were a biological inheritance. No civilization can long survive if enough generations blow the intellectual and cultural capital accumulated by their ancestors. “But this is, in substance, what we see happen every day in newspaper and website headlines.”
Now is the time for writers, teachers, and parents to learn from the wisdom of the past and to keep that wisdom alive for future generations. “That is why the re-civilizing effort to redirect education back to the home, as well as to those schools that still support the higher and permanent things, is so gravely critical,” he adds. “Whereas at one time homeschooling could reasonably be viewed merely as a quaint matter of protecting a household’s children from certain more-or-less-specified-but toxic bacilli of public schools, now the stakes have risen.” Civilization, Simmons knows, has to be learned again by each generation; it has to be conserved and transmitted to the next generation by a sufficient body of parents and teachers. In a time when the treasures of civilization are under attack, the necessity of education for the flourishing of the human person and the broader culture grows even greater.
At one point in time, Simmons was cautious of homeschooling. But after seeing the fruits of such an education over the years, he is a critic no more. “Full confession: I myself was once a skeptic, if not a vocal one, of homeschooling. The whole effort seemed to me too long a row to hoe for ordinary, and ordinarily equipped, people. But I have since changed my mind.” In addition to seeing the fruits, Simmons seems to recognize that new measures must be taken to reclaim an education that can once again promote authentic human flourishing. “Now I believe that upon homeschoolers—and upon those better schools educating classically—might well depend the very survival of our country and, yes, of our civilization too. Upon it the survival of our children most certainly depends.” Today, Simmons is not only a proponent of classical education and homeschooling. He is also one of its more ardent and eloquent defenders. Along these lines, Simmons has therefore penned a new introduction to Richard Winn Livingstone’s A Defence of Classical Education (2024, Memoria College Press).
On Being Civilized demonstrates that Simmons is a writer who stands firmly within what G.K. Chesterton calls the “democracy of the dead.” Tradition, he knows, means giving voice not only to those who are currently alive but also to our ancestors. To grow wise, we must drink deeply from the wellspring of old wisdom. We must look back to the great men and women who went before us in time, especially those from classical and Christian antiquity, so that we may seriously consider what they thought and how they acted. We moderns, after all, are like dwarves on the shoulders of giants. If we can see further than our ancestors, then it is because we have their shoulders to stand on. And if we grow arrogant and desire to leap off our ancestors’ shoulders, then the consequence will not be freedom and enlightenment. On the contrary, we will tumble downward into the servitude of provincialism and the darkness of ignorance. We need the wisdom of giants like Homer, Plato, Cicero, Virgil, Aurelius, Augustine, Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart, Burke, Austen, Eliot, and so many others (Simmons would undoubtedly add Winston Churchill to this list). These figures are among those whose lives and writings can “elevate and ennoble” our minds. They are the great men and women of the past who, even today, can help civilize us.
We should thank Tracy Lee Simmons for creating this readable and insightful volume. It is a book not primarily for scholars but for the general public to whom Simmons has spent much of his life writing. Above all, On Being Civilized will interest teachers and homeschool parents who are curious about the current renaissance of classical and liberal arts education. Among this audience, Simmons already has a reputation as an ardent defender of civilization and of a classical education that teaches Greek and Latin authors in their own language. This new book will only earn him further admiration among these readers.
On Being Civilized can be read in a single day or in numerous shorter readings. The brevity and clarity of the text are clear benefits, especially since it is written for a public that never lacks new things to read. Readers will be reminded in this book that the man or woman who absorbs as much as possible about our heritage and who passes it down to his or her children can be said to have had a well-lived, civilized life. We have been given an inexhaustible inheritance, Simmons knows, and it is a privilege to be called to join those happy few who are saving it from being lost.
Darrell Falconburg is the Academic Program Officer of the Russell Kirk Center and the Humanities Editor of The University Bookman.
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