Clamorous defences of "Western Civilization" make it harder, not easier, to get students interested in studying European history. The more "history" becomes the veneration of a caricature, the less appeal it can have to careful readers or critical thinkers.
Speaking as a historian of Europe (and of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment), there is no group of people whose efforts are less helpful to me than those who go around crowing about the superiority of European achievements or the unmixed blessings of the Enlightenment.
Chauvinist boosterism dressed up as expertise does nothing to facilitate actual acquaintance with the period in question. Those motivated by it have to unlearn it to learn anything, and those put off by it have no reason to come back.
Besides being counterproductive in this way, it also badly misrepresents the historian's job as one of guarding and propagating a particular view of the past as a kind of present-tense moral necessity -- one that overawes such lesser considerations as the analysis of evidence.
By the same token, ironically, it precludes the serious consideration of whole classes of evidence and sets of questions that threaten this rosy view -- by stigmatizing them as attempts to impose present-day morals on the past.
In this sense it creates a quasi-moral "duty" to maintain a specific, dubious interpretation of the past (which it calls professional, objective, etc) and a corresponding "duty" to avoid asking hard questions (decried as "politicization" or "moralizing", forgetful of "context").
This is a loss the way the triumph of any kind of ignorance is a loss. From my professional perspective, it is especially sad because asking hard questions is what keeps disciplines vital. It is what produces the best and the most "relevant" work.
That is to say, the things that make my field of history most relevant right now -- the uncomfortable topics, the new questions, and the connections to other, long-neglected fields -- are the very things its self-appointed public saviours would most like to ignore or suppress.
