I think it’s pretty rare anymore to be explicitly taught that Western civilization is superior. What’s more common is to be taught history in such a way so that anything outside of Western civilization only enters history when it interacts with the Western world. It is rare (and would probably mean real trouble) for a teacher to actually say that Western civilization is superior. It’s more common to implicitly ignore the Nonwestern world.
There yea go many tanks.
I think there’s two types of ‘West’ everyone’s talking about: the first is geographical, and it stems from the fact that European nations, particularly the British empire, had hegemony over the world when a lot of concepts like world maps and meridians were drawn up. So the Americas were in ‘the West’ and India was in ‘the East’ because for someone in London… well, that’s where they were. That historical usage has carried forward today, to a large extent because we still use maps with the UK at the center.
Now if you’re talking about the “Western World” or “Western culture”, that’s different: they’re much more modern and they’re terms of culture. They refer to the types of social customs and shared beliefs (eg. Christianity) typified by the US and Western Europe, as opposed to the ‘Eastern’ culture typified by Japan and China. But these cultural terms sprang up long after, and are based on, the original geographical division of West and East as relative to the European empires centuries ago. That’s why Australia nowadays is said to have a ‘Western’ culture, even though geographically and historically the British considered it part of the East.
No it isn’t: the prime meridian was drawn up in the 1800s, long after the Americas were referred to as ‘the West’ and Asia as ‘the East’. The physical basis of referring to ‘the West’ and ‘the East’ is in their position relative to the British empire and the other empires of Western Europe from centuries ago.
Many thanks that really was a great historical lesson. I am a little concerned about how so many people referenced Wikipedia as there source. I trust the people here at SD way more than Wiki. After all anyone can change anything at anytime on Wiki.
Great answers…
I trust Wikipedia more than I trust the SDMB. Wikipedia has settled down quite well now, and it’s rare to find utter nonsense on it. At best it’s a brilliant introduction to a subject. It’s obvious when a real expert has written the entry. An awful lot of SDMB threads consist of people making bad guesses at an answer before someone who actually understands the subject finally answers the question. Sometimes the answer that a SDMB thread agrees on is more thorough than the Wikipedia entry. That’s because no one with the right knowledge worked on the entry, while someone with some real expertise has contributed to the SDMB thread.
I think using Wikipedia as an initial source for non-contentious issues is fine. If there’s further query or disagreement then you can find better cites.
I’m interested in the idea that Australia and New Zealand were initially thought of as part of the East, it makes sense geographically but can someone point me to some writing where it was used in this context?
It may be rare to find utter nonsense in major articles, but in obscurities I’m not so sure. In articles about small towns and individual schools I’ve still found a lot of petty vandalism. Stuff like, in an awards section for a school, some person “was elected Dumbass of the Century in 1987.”
Was the year wrong or what? 
Slight anachronism aside, this is also part of the reason for the development of the “Western” and “Eastern” concepts. 
Just curious. Why are you singling out a response with the wrong answer to thank?
I always understood the West or Occident, the East or Orient, the Near East and Far East, and so forth, were so referred to relative to the Center of the Earth, usually known by its Latin name of “Mediterranean”.
Nevermind…
To documented English language history, history is told from a European centered perception.
China, long known about but formally opened to direct Europen trade in the 13th century with Marco Polo’s ventures, is EAST. So china/india and even Turkey became “The East”. This can be broken down into Near East (Turkey and even the Balkan States), Middle East (Persia) and Far East (China/India)
Logically - Anything that is not “The East” Became “The West”. When America was “discovered” it was discovered from Europe and was further west of europe so it became part of the “The West”.
Of course we know that in truth America was first discovered by people from Asia, but since their culture didn’t take good notes or win the wars against the people from Europe, we still see the world from a Euro-centric point of view. The dominance of the Dutch East India Company, etc, helped the rest of the world adopt the Euro Centric nomenclature.
In the study of International Relations it’s becoming more and more common to refer to the “Global North” and “Global South”, rather than East and West.
Bolivia, Peru, Chile etc are all on the same longitude as the USA but are not not considered part of the “West”.
Of course Australia, Argentina and South Africa are all southern, and are also “western”.
Even more to the point, during the initial age of European exploration, the “West” was composed of Catholic nations – pretty much everything from Spain to Poland – and the “East” started with the Eastern Orthodox regions of Ukraine moving into Russia. Religion was a big unifier and, prior to the exploration of the New World (and before the Protestant Reformation split up the mono-religious nature), everything noteworthy in the world for trade purposes was east of Catholic Europe.
Colibri:
Well, the reason for that is that the dominant culture of those countries comes from the West, i.e., the United Kingdom. As opposed to, say, India or Indonesia, which were for a time ruled by Western powers, but the culture never completely dominated.
Wallenstein:
Since when? The dominant culture of these countries derives from that of the Spanish, i.e., Western, conquerors. Both geographically and culturally, Latin America has been considered Western, albeit less industrially developed.
I certainly can’t prove this but I suspect that the perspective of East and West, as least as Europeans and their descendant nations see it, goes back to the fall of Rome (West) and the rise of Constantinople (East). Perhaps that is only relevant, if at all, from the viewpoint of the history of Christianity. The ‘dividing line’ would be somewhere between them. From that perspective China would be the ‘Far East’, and later the Americas would be the ‘Far West’.
The prime meridian would be independent of this, selected for other reasons.