“A shared history of colonialism” really only applies to the big Western European nations.
I actually happen to agree with you here, but again, I was refering to “Western Civilization” in a narrower sense, i.e. based mainly around countries of Western Europe. Remember that our discussion started in a thread about Brexit, and I took your reference to “multiple different and incompatible civilizations” to mean that countries of Western Europe had irreconcilable worldviews, which struck me as highly controversial, to say the least. Do you really think that England, France, Germany and Italy have mutually exclusive civilizations ? If so, I’d really like to know how. I’d be interested in knowing which particular characteristics trump the profound, long-lasting common features that I listed above.
Sharing a religion doesn’t really make two people, or countries, part of the same civilization.
True, but that’s not what I claimed. With regard to religion, I say that the mixing of Christianity and the Greco-Roman legacy is one of the key characteristic of Western Civilization. Both your counter-examples (Ethiopia being Christian and Islam building “on the Greek intellectual heritage”) adress only one part of it and so, actually reinforce my claim.
Again, I think the real thing that convinces me is to look at, e.g., the Inglehart-Welzel map of cultural attitudes.
Thanks for that link. If it had only been a chart based on values (survival versus self-expression + traditional versus secular-rational), I’d have found it very convincing, especially since it also agrees with my position : note for instance how close Great-Britain, Belgium, Italy and France are.
But then, they had to superimpose some sort of meta-categories which don’t make sense to me. They have one for “English-Speaking” countries but Spain and Portugal are not included in the same one as other Spanish (or Portugese)-speaking countries. Would that be another example of the “but-we-are-different !” Anglo-Saxon petulance ? They lump “African” and “Islamic” together (Zibabwe and Morocco, totally the same thing). And Turkey, Indonesia and Jordan are all “South Asian” :dubious:.
So, for the purpose of this thread, is there such a thing as “Western Civilization” ?
Like so many terms of this type, its validity derives from the context in which it is used, the audience to whom it is spoken, and the ideological motives of the speaker.
Yeah. Now, does every instance of “Western (Civilization)” mean the same thing, or every country and culture and person in it have the same values? No, but the first is partly because of lazy language, partly because language is inherently blurry; the second applies to any human group where N >1. And it can even apply to groups with N = 1 depending on time of day and phase of the moon…
Heck, the arsehole who came up with that “Clash of Civilizations” piece of jewelry didn’t consider Hispanoportuguese countries as Western; we do see ourselves as very much Western. Other people say “Western” to mean “the USA”, others “English-speaking, white-majority countries”. But I can find similar examples for, say, “Spaniard”: some of the extreme examples were in the news a lot last month.
I answered “Western European countries have many common characteristics but many major differences, too” which I guess is a “No”.
By this I don’t mean “every country is different” or some trite crap like that, but more broadly, I think Western Europe doesn’t qualify as one civilisation, it is at minimum 2, one Nordic/Germanic, one Romantic/Celtic. There are places where there’s an admixture, like Britain and France, but I think the two strands are different enough to preclude boxing them into one Civ.
Note that I’m not peddling some racist Mediterranean vs Nordic types thing here, I’m just saying history (especially where the Romans did or didn’t conquer, and where the Reformation did or didn’t take hold, etc) has led to a difference. Obviously there are no absolutes - after the Empire, Germanic tribes happily conquered down to the Med and beyond, Catholicism and Protestantism sit side by side in Germany and Switzerland, where do the Celts really fit, etc but there’s still, to me, a divide.
I’ve always been facinated by the fact that, very broadly speaking, the Catholicism/Protestantism divide fits nicely over the Latin/Germanic cultural areas. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, though I can’t come up with an explanation.
Still, I agree that dividing European peoples into Mediterranean and Nordic strands makes sense. The real question is : are these different worldviews fundamental (civilizational, so to speak) or mere variations on a deeper common background ? I suppose that, given your answer, you’d pick the former. I’d lean towards the latter.
Back in the 19th Century, it wasn’t even a question: Western Civilization was the Christian civilization, the one founded on Classical Civilization with a very strong admixture of Christian philosophy (as filtered through Neoplatonism) in the Late Roman Empire. It had produced Democracy, the Rights of Man, and Scientific Progress, which it was proceeding to spread across the world.
That mindset was important then and it’s important now. Whether or not you agree with it, it’s still important to understand.
Of course it exists. And it’s not just about Europe, not for a long while now, though our brethren and sistren across the big pond don’t seem to realize the world doesn’t revolve around them so much anymore.
The Canadians and Aussies already think we’ve forgotten they are carrying the torch as well, and many of my fellow Americans think we are the center of Western Civilization™. We are all wrong, of course…there is no center, and the nebulous term extends into many countries you’d never consider ‘western’.
At my university students are required to take courses in a number of “general education” categories, one of which is Western Civilization. I often teach a course on Dostoevsky which is listed under this heading. It makes me smile to think of Dostoevsky’s probable apoplectic reaction to being named a representative of Western civilization.
Yeah, I don’t know what to make of Slavic countries. My instinctive feeling would be to consider them as part of, but at the periphery of, Western Civilization. On the other hand, I can see how others’d think that the differences are sufficiently substantial to warrant a separate category.
Going back to the charcateristics I listed above :
A double cultural heritage (Greco-Roman + Christian).
Undoubtedly.
A common linguistic origin (Indo-European, except for Finnish, Hugarian, Estonian and Basque).
That, too.
A series of caracteristic artistic trends (Gothic, Romanticism, Modernism), genres (the Tragedy, the Novel, the Symphony) and techniques (polyphony and counterpoint, realistic portraits - including nudes)
Less clear. Some major novels and symphonies were written by Slavic artists. Romanticism and Modernism are trends that have some important exponents there but on the whole, Slavic countries seem peripheral, especially Russia, which only started looking West in the 18th century.
An emphasis on the scientific method, rationalism and secular humanism.
Yes, for the former two - the latter, not so much.
A rather unique experience with colonialism on a global scale.
No.
You’re going very broad here. I don’t think that divide is particularly neat myself, especially considering southern Germany/Austria, let alone discrete chunks like Luxembourg. I don’t think there is any inherent cultural reason for it, merely historical geography.
No? Russia doesn’t have experience with colonialism on a global scale? Russia, one of the participants in the Great Game?
Russia, like Manchu China, expanded over land rather than over sea. But they expanded enormously and colonialism is colonialism :).
You know, as soon as I posted it, I remembered Russia’s eastward expansion :o.
Still, I’m on the fence about this. There’s no doubt that it covered a vast area but it was also contained on one continent, albeit a huge one. There was no Russian presence in Africa or Oceania and only a relatively short-lived one in America. Colonialism may be colonialsim but was Russia’s as global as Spain’s, Britain’s or France’s ?
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