Western culture, also known as Western civilization, European civilization, Occidental culture, Western society or simply the West, is the externally cohesive yet internally diverse culture and cultural heritage of the Western world. The term "Western" encompasses the social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, belief systems, political systems, artifacts and technologies primarily rooted in European and Mediterranean histories. A broad concept, "Western culture" does not relate to a region with fixed members or geographical confines. It generally refers to the classical era cultures of ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and their Christian successors that expanded across the Mediterranean basin and Europe, and later circulated around the world predominantly through colonization and globalization.
The phrase “Western civilization” appears to have become common by the late 1800s. One study notes that it was being used without special explanation by at least 1890, while earlier 19th century English-language writers generally talked about “European civilization”. Previously, "Christendom" was the only widely used umbrella concept for centuries. Historically, scholars have closely associated the idea of Western culture with the classical era of Greco-Roman antiquity. However, scholars also acknowledge that other cultures, like ancient Egypt, the Phoenician city-states, and several Near-Eastern cultures stimulated and influenced it. The Hellenistic period also promoted syncretism, blending Greek, Roman, and Near-Eastern cultures. Major advances in literature, engineering, and science shaped the Hellenistic Jewish culture, from which the earliest Christians and the Greek New Testament emerged. The eventual Christianization of Europe in late antiquity would ensure that Christianity, particularly the Catholic Church, remained a dominant force in Western culture for many centuries to follow.
The Early Middle Ages, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, were characterized by depopulation, deurbanization, and the collapse of long-distance trade, as Europe suffered hundreds of years of raids and invasions from Vikings, Muslims, and Magyars from the north, south and east. Following that long period of war and instability, however, medieval Europe experienced gradual improvements, including several medieval renaissances. 12th-century Latin translations brought ancient Greek and Roman texts back to central and western Europe from the Islamic world and helped medieval scholasticism to grow and thrive. Medieval Christianity is credited with creating the modern university,Rüegg, Walter: "Foreword. The University as a European Institution", in: A History of the University in Europe. Vol. 1: Universities in the Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, 1992, , pp. xix–xx.. the modern hospital system, scientific economics, and natural law (which would later influence the creation of international law).Cf. Jeremy Waldron (2002), God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (UK), , pp. 189, 208. During the Renaissance, the rise of humanism, the spread of the movable type printing press, the encounter with the Americas and the advance of the Reformation each transformed European culture.The Protestant Heritage , Britannica.Karl Heussi, Kompendium der Kirchengeschichte, 11. Auflage (1956), Tübingen (Germany), pp. 317–319, 325–326.
The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries advanced ideals of empirical inquiry, political pluralism and individual rights. These ideas influenced revolutions across Europe and the Americas, spurred the development of modern democratic institutions and, together with the Industrial Revolution, transformed Western society. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the influence of Enlightenment rationalism continued with the rise of secularism and liberal democracy, while the Industrial Revolution fueled economic and technological growth. The expansion of civil rights and the decline of religious authority marked significant cultural shifts. Tendencies that have come to define modern Western societies include the concept of political pluralism, individualism, prominent subcultures or countercultures, and increasing cultural syncretism resulting from globalization and immigration.
Terminology
The West as a geographical area is unclear and undefined. There is some disagreement about which nations should or should not be included in the category, when, and why. Certainly related conceptual terminology has changed over time in scope, meaning, and use. The term "western" draws on an affiliation with, or a perception of, a shared philosophy, worldview, political, and religious heritage grounded in the Greco-Roman world, the legacy of the Roman Empire, and medieval concepts of Christendom. For example, whether the Eastern Roman Empire or countries influenced by its legacy, should be counted as "Western" is an example of the term's ambiguity. This can be traced to the affiliation between the culture of ancient Rome and that of Classical Greece, a persistent Greek East and Latin West language-split within the Roman Empire, and the permanent split of the Roman Empire in 395 into Western and Eastern halves.
Some philosophers have questioned whether Western culture can be considered a historically sound, unified body of thought. For example, Kwame Anthony Appiah pointed out in 2016 that many fundamental influences on Western culture – such as Greek philosophy – are shared by the Islamic world. Appiah argues that the origin of the Western and European identity can be traced to the 8th-century Muslim invasion of Europe via Iberia, causing Christians to form a common Christian or European identity. Contemporary Latin chronicles from Spain referred to the victors in the Frankish victory over the Umayyads at the 732 Battle of Tours as "Europeans" according to Appiah, denoting a shared sense of identity.
Pope Leo III's transfer of the Roman Empire from the Eastern Roman Empire to the Frankish King Charlemagne in the form of the Holy Roman Empire in 800, the Great Schism of 1054, and the devastating Fourth Crusade of 1204 also influenced what is considered the West.
As Europeans discovered the extra-European world, old concepts adapted. The area that had formerly been considered the Orient ("the East") became the Near East as European countries began to interact with Meiji Japan and Qing China in the 19th century. Thus the Sino-Japanese War in 1894–1895 occurred in the "Far East" while troubles surrounding the decline of the Ottoman Empire occurred simultaneously in the Near East. The term "Middle East" in the mid-19th century included the territory east of the Ottoman Empire but west of China—Greater Persia and Greater India—but is now used synonymously with "Near East" in most languages. Stereotypical views of "the West" have been labeled "Occidentalism", paralleling "Orientalism"—the term for the 19th-century stereotypes of "the East".
Globalization has spread Western ideas so widely that almost all modern cultures are, to some extent, influenced by aspects of Western culture.
History
The earliest civilizations which influenced the development of Western culture were those of Mesopotamia; the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system. The area largely corresponds to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran, known as the cradle of civilization.Jacobus Bronowski; The Ascent of Man; Angus & Robertson, 1973 .Geoffrey Blainey; A Very Short History of the World; Penguin Books, 2004. Ancient Egypt similarly had a strong influence on Western culture.
Phoenician mercantilism and the introduction of the alphabetical script boosted state formation in the Aegean and current-day Italy and Spain, spawning civilizations in the Mediterranean such as ancient Carthage, ancient Greece, Etruria, and ancient Rome.
The Greeks contrasted themselves with both their Eastern neighbors (such as the Trojans) as well as their Northern neighbors (who they considered barbarians). Concepts of what is the West arose from the legacies of the Western and the Eastern Roman Empire. Later, ideas of the West were formed by the concepts of Latin Christendom and the Holy Roman Empire. Modern Western thought originates primarily from Greco-Roman and Christian traditions, with influence from the Germanic, Celtic and Slavic peoples, and includes the ideals of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.
The West of the Mediterranean Region during Antiquity
While the concept of a "West" did not exist until the Roman Republic, the roots of the concept can be traced back to ancient Greece. Since Homeric literature (the Trojan Wars), through the accounts of the Persian Wars of Greeks against Persians by Herodotus, and right up until the time of Alexander the Great, there was a paradigm of a contrast between Greeks and other civilizations. Greeks felt they were the most civilized and saw themselves (in the formulation of Aristotle) as something between the advanced civilizations of the Near East (who they viewed as soft and slavish) and the wild barbarians of most of Europe to the north. During this period writers like Herodotus and Xenophon would highlight the importance of freedom in the Ancient Greek world, as opposed to the perceived slavery of the so-called barbaric world.
Alexander's conquests led to the emergence of a Hellenistic civilization, representing a synthesis of Greek and Near-Eastern cultures in the Eastern Mediterranean region.Green, Peter. Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. The Near-Eastern civilizations of ancient Egypt and the Levant, which came under Greek rule, became part of the Hellenistic world. The most important Hellenistic centre of learning was Ptolemaic Egypt, which attracted Greek, Egyptian, Jewish, Persian, Phoenician and even Indian scholars.George G. Joseph (2000). The Crest of the Peacock, pp. 7–8. Princeton University Press. .
Hellenistic science, philosophy, architecture, literature and art later provided a foundation embraced and built upon by the Roman Empire as it swept up Europe and the Mediterranean world, including the Hellenistic world, in its conquests in the 1st century BCE in which the whole Mediterranean became essentially a Roman inland sea. The influence of Hellenism coexisted in the Empire with a cultural divide between a predominantly Latin-speaking West and Greek-speaking East. For about five hundred years, the Latin-speaking Western Roman Empire consisted of Western Europe and Northwest Africa, while the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire consisted of the Balkans, Asia Minor, Egypt and Levant. The "Greek" East was generally wealthier and more advanced than the "Latin" West. With the exception of Italia, the wealthiest provinces of the Roman Empire were in the East, particularly Roman Egypt which was the wealthiest Roman province outside of Italia.Maddison, Angus (2007), Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History, p. 55, table 1.14, Oxford University Press, .