Western values

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

To be ignored are:

= 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

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".

= The Cultural West =
 * 
 * [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."

History

 * [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

 * 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]

= The Geographical West =
 * [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).

= 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".