Actually neither mass culture nor "high" (literary/artistic) culture is really defining Western civilization, their equivalents were/are shared by anything that

Actually neither mass culture nor "high" (literary/artistic) culture is really defining Western civilization, their equivalents were/are shared by anything that could remotely be called a civilization. The defining characteristics of Western civ are individual liberty, capitalism (economic liberty), and especially science. Science itself could be called intellectual liberty, intellectualism bound not by class or bureaucracy, but controlled only by the reality it seeks to understand.