Western values

An article about ideas relating to "Western values", "Western civilisation", "Western culture", "the Western world" and "the West" (contra The East).

To be ignored, as much as possible, are the aesthetic domains: architecture, fine art, music, literature (excepting its philosophical content).

Harvesting
 * Wiki: Western world
 * Wiki: East-West dichotomy

= Ideas =

The Cultural West

 * [wiki] The term "Western culture" is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and technologies
 * [wiki] The concept of Western culture is generally linked to the classical definition of the Western world. In this definition, Western culture is the set of literary, scientific, political, artistic, and philosophical principles that set it apart from other civilizations. Much of this set of traditions and knowledge is collected in the Western canon.[34]
 * [wiki] Some tendencies that define modern Western societies are the existence of political pluralism, secularism, generalization of middle class, prominent subcultures or countercultures (such as New Age movements), increasing cultural syncretism resulting from globalization and human migration. The modern shape of these societies is strongly based upon the Industrial Revolution and the societies' associated social and environmental problems, such as class and pollution, as well as reactions to them, such as syndicalism and environmentalism.

History

 * [wiki] The Roman Empire is where the idea of "the West" began to emerge. The Eastern Roman Empire, governed from Constantinople, is usually referred to as the Byzantine Empire after AD 476, the traditional date for the fall of the Roman Empire and beginning of the Early Middle Ages. The Eastern Roman Empire surviving the fall of the Western protected Roman legal and cultural traditions, combining them with Greek and Christian elements, for another thousand years more. The name Byzantine Empire was first used centuries later, after the Byzantine Empire ended. The dissolution of the Western half, nominally ended in AD 476, but in truth a long process that ended by the rise of Catholic Gaul (modern-day France) ruling from around the year AD 800, left only the Eastern Roman Empire alive. The Eastern half continued to think of itself as the Eastern Roman Empire for a while until AD 610–800, when Latin ceased to be the official language of the empire. The inhabitants calling themselves Romans was because the term “Roman” was meant to signify all Christians. The Pope crowned Charlemagne as Emperor of the Romans of the newly established Holy Roman Empire and the West began thinking in terms of Western Latins living in the old Western Empire, and Eastern Greeks (those inside the Roman remnant of the old Eastern Empire)
 * [Appiah] For example, Kwame Anthony Appiah points out that many of the fundamental influences on Western culture, such as those of Greek philosophy are also shared by the Islamic world to a certain extent.[44] Appiah argues that the origin of the Western and European identity can be traced back to the Muslim invasion of Iberia where Christians would form a common Christian or European identity.
 * [Appiah] If the notion of Christendom was an artefact of a prolonged military struggle against Muslim forces, our modern concept of western culture largely took its present shape during the cold war. In the chill of battle, we forged a grand narrative about Athenian democracy, the Magna Carta, Copernican revolution, and so on. Plato to Nato. Western culture was, at its core, individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific. Never mind that pre-modern Europe was none of these things, and that until the past century democracy was the exception in Europe – something that few stalwarts of western thought had anything good to say about. The idea that tolerance was constitutive of something called western culture would have surprised Edward Burnett Tylor, who, as a Quaker, had been barred from attending England’s great universities. To be blunt: if western culture were real, we wouldn’t spend so much time talking it up.

Criticism

 * [Appiah] "Of course, once western culture could be a term of praise, it was bound to become a term of dispraise, too. Critics of western culture, producing a photonegative emphasising slavery, subjugation, racism, militarism, and genocide, were committed to the very same essentialism, even if they see a nugget not of gold but of arsenic."

The Origin of the West

 * The geopolitical divisions in Europe that created a concept of East and West originated in the ancient tyrannical and imperialistic Graeco-Roman times.[8] The Eastern Mediterranean was home to the highly urbanized cultures that had Greek as their common language (owing to the older empire of Alexander the Great and of the Hellenistic successors.), whereas the West was much more rural in its character and more readily adopted Latin as its common language. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the beginning of the Medieval times (or Middle Ages), Western and Central Europe were substantially cut off from the East where Byzantine Greek culture and Eastern Christianity became founding influences in the Eastern European world such as the East and South Slavic peoples.[citation needed]
 * [wiki] The concept of the Western part of the earth has its roots in the theological, methodological and emphatical division between the Western Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.[8] The West was originally Western Christendom, opposing Catholic and Protestant Europe with the cultures and civilizations of Orthodox Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia, which medieval and early modern Western Europeans saw as the East.

bmj Summary

 * Cradle of civilisation in middle East, and including Mycenaean civilisation -> Greeks
 * Greeks -> Romans (146BC, 31BC)
 * Romans -> Western Roman Empire (& Eastern Roman Empire) (285 & 395 & theologically by the schism of 1054)
 * Western Roman Empire -> Collapse of the Western Roman Empire (476)
 * Kingdoms of the former Western Roman Empire -> Carolingian Restoration (800)
 * Carolingian Empire -> Medieval Christian European Kingdoms (888)
 * Medieval Christendom -> Modern Europe (~1500)
 * Modern Europe -> Western world (1914-1950, end of Colonialism, beginning of Cold War)

bmj Chronology

 * Cradle of civilisation in middle East -> Greeks
 * Greeks -> Romans
 * Romans -> West Roman Empire (Roman/Latin/Catholic) & East Roman Empire (Byzantine/Greek/Orthodox) (285AD)
 * 293, tetrarchy
 * In 330AD, Constatine moved the capital from Rome to Byzantium (Constantinople)
 * 395, division again into West & East, due to attacks from Goths (Visigoths, Ostrogoths)
 * 406, Crossing of the Rhine by Barbarian tribes
 * 410 Sacked by Visigoths, 455 Sacked by Vandals
 * West Roman Empire falls to Odoacer (476) -> West crumbles into a over a dozen autonomous (mostly Germanic, mostly Christian) territories, most acknowledging some subordination to the Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantium
 * Initially 4 main kingdoms which all became Christian (Ostrogoths in Italy, Visigoths in Iberia, Franks North-central Europe, Burgundians South-central Europe)
 * Later Franks gobble up the Burgundians, Lombards replace the Ostrogoths
 * Then Islam arrives (700s) with the Umayyad Dynasty, which got a foothold in Iberia defeating the Visigoths
 * West starts to rebuild by the "papal pivot" (500s up to 741)
 * The Roman Papacy was to become the instrument of the Imperial idea's revival in the West. The position of the Popes had been strengthened by the reconquest of Rome by Justinian, as the Emperors periodically reaffirmed the traditional primacy of the Bishop of Rome to check the potential political influence of the Patriarch of Constantinople. Furthermore, for various reasons, Catholicism finally triumphed over Arianism in the Western kingdoms: in the Visigothic Iberian Peninsula with the conversion of Reccared I in 587, and in Lombard-held Italy, after some back-and-forth, following the death of King Rothari in 652.
 * The promotion of iconoclasm by Emperor Leo III the Isaurian from 726 led to a deepening rupture between the Eastern Empire and the Papacy. Pope Gregory II saw iconoclasm as the latest in a series of imperial heresies. In 731, his successor Pope Gregory III organized a synod in Rome which declared iconoclasm punishable by excommunication. Leo III responded in 732/33 by confiscating all papal patrimonies in south Italy and Sicily, and further removed the bishoprics of Thessalonica, Corinth, Syracuse, Reggio, Nicopolis, Athens, and Patras from papal jurisdiction,[citation needed] instead subjecting them to the Patriarch of Constantinople. This was in effect an act of triage: it strengthened the imperial grip in Southern Italy, but all but guaranteed the eventual destruction of the exarchate of Ravenna, which soon occurred at Lombard hands. In effect, the papacy had been "cast out of the empire".[35] Pope Zachary, in 741, was the last pope to announce his election to a Byzantine ruler or seek their approval.[36]
 * The papacy gains power via the Carolingian Empire (741-888)
 * From 741, the Popes, cut off from the East, were scared of the (Christian but hostile) Lombards. The gained secular authority by endorsing Carolingian dynasty (the Frankish family descended from Charles Martel) who ultimately gained control of Francia (France and West Germany), before Charlemagne conquered the Lombard Kingdom of Italy (i.e. all the way down to Rome) in 773. He also conquered Bavaria, Carinthia and Saxony, converting them to Christianity, as well as incorporating dependent tribes just to the East of the later Iron curtain. Then On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Imperator Romanorum ("Emperor of the Romans") in Saint Peter's Basilica, in so doing rejecting the legitimacy of Empress Irene of Constantinople. Apparently he wanted to marry her to organise a merger, but this didn't happen and we were left with "the two Emperor problem". Negotiations called "Pax Nicephori" attempted to address the conflict, but tensions persisted. Charlemagne died, age 66 in 814AD. After his son Louis the Pious's death in 841, the empire started to be partitioned.
 * However, the Empire came to an end in 888AD, when Charles the Fat (who had flukeily managed to reconstitute the empire in 884) ran away in the face of insurrection, terminating a now-permanently dismembered Carolingian Empire.
 * The Carolingian period is followed by a mash of Christian kingdoms in Western Europe. While these kingdoms are loosely tied together
 * The title of "Emperor" did pass on (first to Guy of Spoletto, crowned by Pope Stephen V in 889) so that the Holy Roman Empire (as it later became known traces its roots to 800).
 * The East–West Schism (also known as the Great Schism or Schism of 1054) was the break of communion which occurred in the 11th century between the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church.[1] Immediately following the schism, it is estimated that Eastern Christianity comprised a slim majority of Christians worldwide, with the majority of remaining Christians being Catholic. The schism was the culmination of theological and political differences which had developed during the preceding centuries between Eastern and Western Christianity. A succession of ecclesiastical differences and theological disputes between the Greek East and Latin West preceded the formal split that occurred in 1054. Prominent among these were: the procession of the Holy Spirit (Filioque), whether leavened or unleavened bread should be used in the Eucharist,[a] the bishop of Rome's claim to universal jurisdiction, and the place of the See of Constantinople in relation to the pentarchy.[8]
 * The Holy Roman Empire continued to fracture and reform various kingdoms in modern-day France, Germany, Austria/Switzerland, Northern Italy, however the Christian heritage of the Charlemagne's unified Empire becomes irrelevant as the alternative Kingdoms are all Kingdoms are Christian, and the nominal "Holy Roman Emperor" claims "universal rule".
 * Roughly 1500 -- Emergence of Modern Christian Europe with 4 big events 1453, 1492, 1517, 1519
 * 1453 -- Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire
 * 1492 -- Muslims finally expelled from Spain (had been there since 711)
 * Now we see Modern Europe: Spain is Christian, Turkey is Muslim, there is a Catholic/Orthodox split occurring somewhere in Eastern Europe and and Orthodox/Muslim split somewhere in the Balkans
 * 1519 -- Charles V, House of Hapsburg, Holy Roman Emperor, becomes the first big-time ruler since Charlemagne
 * His relevance is the end of a universal Christian Empire, as the Holy Roman Empire simply becomes the Hapsburg Monarchy (i.e. Austria)
 * In 1530, he became the last monarch crowned by a Pope
 * He rules Spain, "Bohemia", Austria, Netherlands, Southern Italy/Siciliy/Sardinia -- it's a messy looking map
 * Before he died (1554-1558) he splits the Empire into Spain (which merged with Portugal), Germany-Austria and Southern Italy (Kingdom of Naples, Kingdom of Sicily)
 * From then on the Holy Roman Emperor is just the (Catholic) Hapsburg ruler. It ended when defeat for Francis II by Napoleon seemed imminent, so in preparation he gave himself the Title "Emperor of Austria" (mirroring Napoleon's Emperor of France), and then dissolved the Empire and title Holy Roman Emperor in 1806 so that Napoleon couldn't get his hands on it.
 * 1517 - Reformation (beginning of the end for the religious state)
 * 1618 - Thirty Years War
 * 1648 - Peace of Westphalia, birth of Westphalian sovereignty
 * 1792 - French Revolution, secularisation of France, Napoleonic Wars until 1815
 * 1815 - Congress of Vienna. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the European powers came together reorganize the political map of Europe and develop a system of conflict resolution aiming at preserving peace and balance of power, termed the Concert of Europe. From this point until the outbreak of World War I, there was relative peace and a lack of major conflict between the major powers, with wars generally localized and short-lived. The British and Russian empires expanded significantly and became the world’s leading powers. Britain’s navy had supremacy for most of the century, leading to the period often called the Pax Britannica (British Peace).
 * 1870s-1914 - End of Franco-Prussian Wars, Belle Époque / Gilded Age
 * 1914 - WWI, beginning of the Very Modern Era -- beginning of decolonisation, secularisation of Europe

The Preeminence of the West

 * "Why do the Christian nations, which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies?"..."Because they have laws and rules invented by reason." -- Ibrahim Muteferrika, Rational basis for the Politics of Nations (1731)

Important articles/books

 * The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages is a 1994 book about western literature by the critic Harold Bloom
 * Bloom defends the concept of the Western canon by discussing 26 mostly English language (literary) writers whom he sees as central to the canon.
 * Bloom argues against what he calls the "school of resentment", which includes feminist literary criticism, Marxist literary criticism, Lacanians, New Historicism, Deconstructionists, and semioticians. Marxist critical theory, including African-American studies, Marxist literary criticism, New Historicist criticism, feminist criticism and post-structuralism—specifically as promoted by Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.
 * Philosopher Richard Rorty[2] agreed that Bloom is at least partly accurate in describing the "school of resentment", writing that those identified by Bloom do in fact routinely use "subversive, oppositional discourse" to attack the canon specifically and Western culture in general. Yet "this school deserves to be taken seriously—more seriously than Bloom's trivialization of it as mere resentment".[3]
 * Classicist Bernard Knox made direct reference to this topic when he delivered his 1992 Jefferson Lecture (the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities).[12] Knox used the intentionally "provocative" title "The Oldest Dead White European Males"[13] as the title of his lecture and his subsequent book of the same name, in both of which Knox defended the continuing relevance of classical culture to modern society.[14][15]

The Geographical West

 * [wiki] The term has come to apply to countries whose history is strongly marked by European immigration or settlement, such as the Americas, and Oceania, and is not restricted to Europe
 * [wiki] In modern usage, Western world refers to Europe and to areas whose populations largely originate from Europe, through the Age of Discovery's imperialism.
 * [wiki] The Western world is also known as the Occident (from the Latin word occidens, "sunset, West"), in contrast to the Orient (from the Latin word oriens, "rise, East") or Eastern world. It might mean the Northern half of the North–South divide, the countries of the Global North (often equated with developed countries).[4]
 * [wiki] Conceptually, the boundaries are cultural, rather than geographical, as a result of which Australia is typically grouped in the West (despite being geographically in the east), while Islamic nations are, regardless of location, grouped in the East.[2] However, there are a few Muslim-majority regions in Europe which do not fit this dichotomy.[citation needed] The culture line can be particularly difficult to place in regions of cultural diversity such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose citizens may themselves identify as East or West depending on ethnic or religious background.[2] Further, residents of different parts of the world perceive the boundaries differently; for example, some European scholars define Russia as East, but most agree that it is the West's second complementary part,[3] and Islamic nations regard it and other predominantly Christian nations as the West.[2] Another unanswered question is whether Siberia (North Asia) is "Eastern" or "Western."

History

 * In the 1700s, the Eastern world comprised the continents of Asia and Australia (New Holland).

The East-West Dichotomy

 * In sociology, the East–West dichotomy is the perceived difference between the Eastern and the Western worlds.
 * [wiki] More recently, the divide has also been posited as an Islamic "East" and an American and European "West."[10][11] Critics note that an Islamic/non-Islamic East–West dichotomy is complicated by the global dissemination of Islamic fundamentalism and by cultural diversity within Islamic nations, moving the argument "beyond that of an East-West dichotomy and into a tripartite situation
 * Inglehart Map

History

 * [wiki] Japanese sinologist Tachibana Shiraki, in the 1920s, wrote of the need to unify Asia—East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia but excluding Central Asia and the Middle East—and form a "New East" that might combine culturally in balancing against the West.[4] Japan continued to make much of the concept, known as Pan-Asianism, throughout World War II, in propaganda.[5]
 * [wiki] In China, it was encapsulated during the Cold War in a 1957 speech by Mao Zedong,[6] who launched a slogan when he said, "This is a war between two worlds. The West Wind cannot prevail over the East Wind; the East Wind is bound to prevail over the West Wind."[7]

Criticism

 * Stereotypical views of "the West" have been labeled Occidentalism, paralleling Orientalism—the term for the 19th-century stereotyped views of "the East".
 * In 2020 Fred Dervin, Robyn Moloney and Ashley Simpson criticized the map for "cultural essentialism and potential racism" due to generalizations and simplifications which stigmatize developing countries and label them as being inferior to predominantly white, European, Christian countries.[29]

= Relevant articles/books =
 * The 1978 book Orientalism, by Edward Said, was highly influential in further establishing concepts of the East–West dichotomy in the Western world, bringing into college lectures a notion of the East as "characterized by religious sensibilities, familial social orders, and ageless traditions" in contrast to Western "rationality, material and technical dynamism, and individualism."[9]
 * Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power is a book of political theory and comparative history by Karl August Wittfogel (1896–1988) published by Yale University Press in 1957. The book offers an explanation for the despotic governments in "Oriental" societies, where control of water was necessary for irrigation and flood-control. Managing these projects required large-scale bureaucracies, which dominated the economy, society, and religious life. This despotism differed from the Western experience, where power was distributed among contending groups. The book argues that this form of "hydraulic despotism" characterized ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, Hellenistic Greece and imperial Rome, the Abbasid Caliphate, imperial China, the Moghul empire, and Incan Peru. Wittfogel further argues that 20th century Marxist-Leninist regimes, such as the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China, though they were not themselves hydraulic societies, did not break away from their historical condition and remained systems of "total power" and "total terror".