A couple of days ago the algorithms of Twitter churned up this little gem and brought it before my weary eyes:  A professor at a small-town college wrote, “Few things are bolder than praising Western Civilization in a Sociology department.”  When one commenter responded that the notion of “a single uniform ‘Western Civilization’ is absurd historical revisionism,” the original poster replied, “Nope.  It was created by Thales and passed from him to Plato to Aristotle to Augustine to Machiavelli to Descartes to Beethoven to The Beatles to Ronald Reagan.”  That’s…quite the genealogy.  As it turns out, the author of the Read more