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To be honest, though many historians today might disagree, I still think there is something we can call “Western Civilization,” even if it is a vague family of

• rayiner 2mo ago
  > I still think there is something we can call “Western Civilization" This is perhaps the least controversial statement in history. It's obviously true. Western Civilization is: 1) Greece 2) Rome, borrowing from the Greeks 3) Christianity taking over Rome 4) Germanic tribes adopting Roman law + the Christian religion 5) Protestantism 6) The Renaissance 7) The Enlightenment You can read Plato, and it all makes sense to you, but a lot of contemporaneous Asian sources would be quite alien. Its a weird kind of ethnocentrism to deny such a thing exists, because it leads to thinking that western civilization is in fact universal.
  • chrisco255 2mo ago
    Sun Tzu is quite popular even in the west today. Agree with your general points. It is hard to know the boundaries of your culture if you've never been intimate with another, as in really getting to know the memes and patterns of thought that make up cultures outside of your own.
  • GolfPopper 2mo ago
    And yet, Rome borrowed from far more than the Greeks. Norse deities are popular, and seemingly more recognizable than classical Greek myth to those in North America with whom I've spoke about such things. Rome was taken over by a particular flavor of Christianity, which was changed by the Empire at least as much as it changed the Empire, and changed more by those who claimed it. (Christmas and Easter are not originally Christian holidays.) "Protestant" now, means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The Renaissance was significantly tied to the Muslim world's own traditions of Civilization, and a major thrust of contemporary politics is that the Enlightenment was not a positive thing. And hardly anyone is a farmer anymore, even though that's what 90% of Western Civilization was until the last century or so. So yes, all of those influence any definition of Western Civilization, but they're neither some direct line of succession, nor a list of the most massive influences - they're a selection of popular nodes in a vast web of connections.
    • lstodd 2mo ago
      > and a major thrust of contemporary politics is that the Enlightenment was not a positive thing. whoa, that's news to me. can you elaborate?
      • toyg 2mo ago
        In a neo-oligarchic world, beheading rich aristocrats is a big no-no. Also, glorifying reason has become very unpopular in a cultural context increasingly built around fairy tales (from Lord of the Rings to superheroes). And of course, the neo-racist movements see egalité as a terrible, terrible thing.
        • hollerith 2mo ago
          Today I learned that some historians include the French Revolution in the Enlightenment. Here is the intro to the Wikipedia article: >European historians traditionally dated its beginning with the death of Louis XIV of France in 1715 and its end with the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Many historians now date the end of the Enlightenment as the start of the 19th century, with the latest proposed year being the death of Immanuel Kant in 1804.
  • ElFitz 2mo ago
    Medieval Europe absorbed a great deal of philosophy, mathematics, medicine and science through the Islamic world. Including from Arabic translations of and comments on Ancient Greek texts. Meaning even some of that Greek lineage was mediated and influenced by the Islamic world. And all of which had a significant influence on the Renaissance. Similarly, the Greeks are thought to have borrowed more than a little from Ancient Egypt and other neighboring civilizations.
    • rayiner 2mo ago
      I think “great deal” is an overstatement. The US has borrowed a lot of work done by Chinese mathematicians and scientists. But would you say we have “absorbed a great deal” of Chinese culture? Japanese video games and anime are immensely popular in the US. But would you say we have “absorbed a great deal” of Japanese culture?
      • TheCoelacanth 2mo ago
        It's absurd to claim that there wasn't a enormous Arabic influence on European science. There's a reason that algebra, alchemy, algorithm, alcohol and alkaline all start with "al" because "al" is Arabic for "the" and all of those words are borrowed from Arabic. There are many others that don't have that prefix but are nonetheless derived from Arabic like zero, cipher, azimuth, nadir, zenith and many others. Our numerals are "Arabic numerals" because we got them from Arabic. European science barely existed until Europeans started reading Arabic writings and ancient writings that were preserved in Arab libraries.
      • ElFitz 2mo ago
        As another commenter said, I wouldn’t compare the Islamic world’s influence on Europe to China’s or Japan’s on the US. One invaded what became a major power, stayed there for centuries, and up to nearly a third of a second one, staying there for decades. The others are on the other side of an ocean. There’s a reason we study it in junior high school, at least in some Western European countries.
      • argentier 2mo ago
  • wahern 2mo ago
    I'm partially sympathetic to bashmelek's point of view. So much of the history and culture of Western civilization is actually rooted in the eastern Mediterranean. In the old world all writing can be traced back to Mesopotamia/Egypt and China. A surprising number of areas still use "ABCs" to refer to their alphabet. Much more than half of the old world by geography has a deeply connected written scholarly history. During Antiquity Greek culture itself extended much further east than west. Iconic Hindu and Buddhist art, particularly statuary, is Greek in origin. The center of Christianity was still east of Europe, or at least much further east than Rome, into the Middle Ages. There's a fascinating account by a circa 12th century papal emissary sent to the capital of the Khan Empire in Mongolia on a diplomatic and proselytizing mission. When reaching the Khan's court he found an entire native Christian contingent, and rather than listen to the emissary's preaching (Christianity wasn't new to him, and he wasn't inclined to take it up, though a sizable fraction of others had), Güyük Khan had him debate Christian theology with the existing Christian council in his court, partly for his own entertainment. The existence of these Christians caught the emissary by surprise, because the history of Christianity in the East had been forgotten by the Europeans. A few decades later, the Mongol Christian wife of Hulagu Khan was instrumental in securing the safety of Christians during the Sack of Baghdad (and IIRC she even had commissioned, or tried to have commissioned, the construction of a new Christian cathedral in Baghdad. But I might be thinking of another, much later Mongol Christian empress in China.) All of which is to say, a huge portion of the old world can claim "western civilization" as an inheritance, unless we narrowly define "western civilization" as being rooted sometime in the past millennia (and then ignore the the effect of European colonialism in bringing many other areas into the fold, some for the second time). And that's before delving into pre-history and the influence of Central Asian steppe culture, from which we get Western civilization's shared Indo-European linguistic and, arguably, even religious history (see, e.g., links between Judeo-Christian and Dharmic religions via Zoroastrianism). Which isn't to say modern European culture has the same relationship as everywhere else touched by Mediterranean culture, or that Renaissance and Enlightenment ideals aren't important, pivotal contributions to modern "western" culture. History has attenuated, obscured, and partially erased the historical interconnectedness. But relative to, e.g., East Asian or Mesomerican culture, there's a strong argument that everybody from the Hindu Kush to Portugal, from Ethiopia to Moscow, have a deeply shared cultural history and inheritance and are rightly called "Western" in a meaningful sense. I don't object to the existence of a western civilization, I just object to Europeans claiming it as a unique, or even uniquely formative, inheritance. When I read about Hindu nationalist claims to a third emergence of writing in the Old World, it seems they're so passionate only because there's the tacit belief that they don't have the same stake in western civilization as Europeans; that they're not otherwise equal heirs to a rich western culture. But they are, IMO.
  • argentier 2mo ago
    That's more of a statement of the 'Plato to NATO' Western civilization meme than anything real.
• NoboruWataya 2mo ago
  > the Celts I'm biased because I am Irish and the Celts are "our" ancient people (though not only ours, of course), but I wish they got more focus in popular culture. Newgrange predates the Egyptian Pyramids by a few hundred years. I wonder is it just that less remains of their society and so there is less to talk about? AIUI the insular Celts at least mostly built with wood, as opposed to the Romans and Greeks who built with stone. Still, part of me would love to see a Hollywood blockbuster made out of the Táin Bó Cúailnge.
  • laylower 2mo ago
    You are right. There has undoubtedly been a large a varied Celtic cultural element. The problem is the medium as you say. If it was not written and if it was not built in stone or metal, it cannot stand the test of time and historians, however willing, wouldn't be able to research fully.
  • argentier 2mo ago
    Newgrange has nothing to do with the Celts: it predates their arrival by several thousand years.