Map of the Western world, based on Samuel P. Huntington's 1996 Clash of Civilizations.[27] In turquoise are the Orthodox World and Latin America, which are either a part of the West or distinct civilizations intimately related to the West.[28][29][30]The World of Civilizations: Post-1990", map from Huntington's Clash of Civilizations (1996) indicating the world's postulated nine major "civilizations": Western, Orthodox, Latin American, Islamic, Sinic, Japanese, Buddhist, Hindu, and African.
"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 (anachronistically/controversially referred to as the Byzantine Empire), or those countries heavily influenced by its legacy, should be counted as "Western" is an example of the possible ambiguity of the term. These questions[which?] can be traced back to the affiliatory nature of Roman culture to the culture of Classical Greece, a persistent Greek East and Latin West language-split within the Roman Empire, and an eventual permanent splitting of the Roman Empire in 395 into Western and Eastern halves. And perhaps, at its worst,[citation needed] culminating in 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. Conversely, traditions of scholarship around Plato, Aristotle, and Euclid had been forgotten in the Catholic west and were rediscovered by Italians from scholars fleeing the 1453 fall of the Eastern Roman Empire.[16] The subsequent Renaissance, a conscious effort by Europeans to revive and surpass the ideas and achievements of the Greco-Roman world, eventually encouraged the Age of Discovery, the Scientific Revolution, Age of Enlightenment, and the subsequent Industrial Revolution. Similarly, complicated relationships between virtually all the countries and regions within a broadly defined "West" can be discussed in the light of a persistently fragmented political landscape resulting in a lack of uniformity and significant diversity between the various cultures affiliating with this shared socio-cultural heritage. Thus, those cultures identifying with the West and with what it means to be "western" change over time as the geopolitical circumstances of a place changes and what is meant by the terminology changes.
It is difficult to determine which individuals or places or trends fit into which category, and the East–West contrast is sometimes criticized as relativistic and arbitrary.[31][32][33][page needed] Globalization has spread Western ideas so widely that almost all modern cultures are, to some extent, influenced by aspects of Western culture. Stereotypical views of "the West" have been labeled "Occidentalism", paralleling "Orientalism"—the term for the 19th-century stereotyped views of "the East".
Some philosophers have questioned whether Western culture can be considered a historically sound, unified body of thought.[34] For example, Kwame Anthony Appiah pointed out in 2016 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.[34][need quotation to verify] Appiah argues that the origin of the Western and European identity can be traced back to the 8th-century Muslim invasion of Europe via Iberia, when Christians would start to form a common Christian or European identity.[34][need quotation to verify] 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.[35]
A former, now less-acceptable synonym for "Western civilisation" was "the white race".[36]
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 the interests of the European powers interfered with Meiji Japan and Qing China for the first time in the 19th century.[37]
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.[a] 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.
Phoenician mercantilism and the introduction of the Alphabetic script boosted state formation in the Aegean and current-day Italy and current-day Spain, spawning civilizations in the Mediterranean such as Ancient Carthage, Ancient Greece, Etruria, and Ancient Rome.[40]
While the concept of a "West" did not exist until the emergence of 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.[42] 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.[42]
Following the Roman conquest of the Hellenistic world, the concept of a "West" arose, as there was a cultural divide between the Greek East and Latin West. 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.[citation needed] 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.[45][46] Nevertheless, the Celts in the West created some significant literature in the ancient world whenever they were given the opportunity (an example being the poet Caecilius Statius), and they developed a large amount of scientific knowledge themselves (as seen in their Coligny Calendar).
The Maison Carrée in Nîmes, one of the best-preserved Roman templesThe Roman Empire (red) and its client states (pink) at its greatest extent in 117 AD under emperor TrajanThe Roman Empire in 330. The area in red shows the zone of influence of the Latin West, while the area in blue shows the eastern Greek part.
For about five hundred years, the Roman Empire maintained the Greek East and consolidated a Latin West, but an east–west division remained, reflected in many cultural norms of the two areas, including language. Eventually, the empire became increasingly split into a Western and Eastern part, reviving old ideas of a contrast between an advanced East, and a rugged West.
From the time of Alexander the Great (the Hellenistic period), Greek civilization came in contact with Jewish civilization. Christianity would eventually emerge from the syncretism of Hellenic culture, Roman culture, and Second Temple Judaism, gradually spreading across the Roman Empire and eclipsing its antecedents and influences.[47]
The Greek and Roman paganism was gradually replaced by Christianity, first with its legalisation with the Edict of Milan and then the Edict of Thessalonica which made it the State church of the Roman Empire. Catholic Christianity, served as a unifying force in Christian parts of Europe, and in some respects replaced or competed with the secular authorities. The Jewish Christian tradition out of which it had emerged was all but extinguished, and antisemitism became increasingly entrenched or even integral to Christendom.[48][49] Much of art and literature, law, education, and politics were preserved in the teachings of the Church.
In a broader sense, the Middle Ages, with its fertile encounter between Greek philosophical reasoning and Levantine monotheism was not confined to the West but also stretched into the old East. The philosophy and science of Classical Greece were largely forgotten in Europe after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, other than in isolated monastic enclaves (notably in Ireland, which had become Christian but was never conquered by Rome).[50] The learning of Classical Antiquity was better preserved in the Eastern Roman Empire. Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis Roman civil law code was created in the East in his capital of Constantinople,[51] and that city maintained trade and intermittent political control over outposts such as Venice in the West for centuries. Classical Greek learning was also subsumed, preserved, and elaborated in the rising Eastern world, which gradually supplanted Roman-Byzantine control as a dominant cultural-political force. Thus, much of the learning of classical antiquity was slowly reintroduced to European civilization in the centuries following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
The Medieval West referred specifically to the Catholic "Latin" West, also called "Frankish" during Charlemagne's reign, in contrast to the Orthodox East, where Greek remained the language of the Byzantine Empire.
After the fall of Rome, much of Greco-Roman art, literature, science and even technology were all but lost in the western part of the old empire. However, this would become the center of a new West. Europe fell into political anarchy, with many warring kingdoms and principalities. Under the Frankish kings, it eventually, and partially, reunified, and the anarchy evolved into feudalism.
Much of the basis of the post-Roman cultural world had been set before the fall of the Western Roman Empire, mainly through the integration and reshaping of Roman ideas through Christian thought. The Eastern Orthodox Church founded many cathedrals, monasteries and seminaries, some of which continue to exist today.
Medieval Christianity is credited with creating the first modern universities.[17][18] The Catholic Church established a hospital system in Medieval Europe that vastly improved upon the Roman valetudinaria[54] and Greek healing temples.[55] These hospitals were established to cater to "particular social groups marginalized by poverty, sickness, and age," according to the historian of hospitals, Guenter Risse.[19] Christianity played a role in ending practices common among pagan societies, such as human sacrifice, slavery,[56] infanticide and polygamy.[57]Francisco de Vitoria, a disciple of Thomas Aquinas and a Catholic thinker who studied the issue regarding the human rights of colonized natives, is recognized by the United Nations as a father of international law, and now also by historians of economics and democracy as a leading light for the West's democracy and rapid economic development.[58]Joseph Schumpeter, an economist of the twentieth century, referring to the Scholastics, wrote, "it is they who come nearer than does any other group to having been the 'founders' of scientific economics."[20]
Later Middle Ages (Rome and Reformation)
The rediscovery of the Justinian Code in Western Europe early in the 10th century rekindled a passion for the discipline of law, which crossed many of the re-forming boundaries between East and West. In the Catholic or Frankish west, Roman law became the foundation on which all legal concepts and systems were based. Its influence is found in all Western legal systems, although in different manners and to different extents. The study of canon law, the legal system of the Catholic Church, fused with that of Roman law to form the basis of the refounding of Western legal scholarship. During the Reformation and Enlightenment, the ideas of civil rights, equality before the law, procedural justice, and democracy as the ideal form of society began to be institutionalized as principles forming the basis of modern Western culture, particularly in Protestant regions.
In the 14th century, starting from Italy and then spreading throughout Europe,[59] there was a massive artistic, architectural, scientific and philosophical revival, as a result of the Christian revival of Greek philosophy, and the long Christian medieval tradition that established the use of reason as one of the most important of human activities.[60] This period is commonly referred to as the Renaissance. In the following century, this process was further enhanced by an exodus of Greek Christian priests and scholars to Italian cities such as Florence and Venice after the end of the Byzantine Empire with the fall of Constantinople.
From Late Antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and onwards, while Eastern Europe was shaped by the Eastern Orthodox Church, Southern and Central Europe were increasingly stabilized by the Catholic Church which, as Roman imperial governance faded from view, was the only consistent force in Western Europe.[61] In 1054 came the Great Schism that, following the Greek East and Latin West divide, separated Europe into religious and cultural regions present to this day. Until the Age of Enlightenment,[62]Christian culture took over as the predominant force in Western civilization, guiding the course of philosophy, art, and science for many years.[61][63] Movements in art and philosophy, such as the Humanist movement of the Renaissance and the Scholastic movement of the High Middle Ages, were motivated by a drive to connect Catholicism with Greek and Arab thought imported by Christian pilgrims.[64][65][66] However, due to the division in Western Christianity caused by the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, religious influence—especially the temporal power of the Pope—began to wane.[67][68]
Expansion of the West: the Era of Colonialism (15th–20th centuries)
From the late 15th century to the 17th century, Western culture began to spread to other parts of the world through explorers and missionaries during the Age of Discovery, and by imperialists from the 17th century to the early 20th century. During the Great Divergence, a term coined by Samuel Huntington[69] the Western world overcame pre-modern growth constraints and emerged during the 19th century as the most powerful and wealthy world civilization of the time, eclipsing Qing China, Mughal India, Tokugawa Japan, and the Ottoman Empire. The process was accompanied and reinforced by the Age of Discovery and continued into the modern period. Scholars have proposed a wide variety of theories to explain why the Great Divergence happened, including lack of government intervention, geography, colonialism, and customary traditions.
The Age of Discovery faded into the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century, during which cultural and intellectual forces in European society emphasized reason, analysis, and individualism rather than traditional lines of authority. It challenged the authority of institutions that were deeply rooted in society, such as the Catholic Church; there was much talk of ways to reform society with toleration, science and skepticism.
The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. This included going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, improved efficiency of water power, the increasing use of steam power, and the development of machine tools.[77] These transitions began in Great Britain and spread to Western Europe and North America within a few decades.[78]
A Watt steam engine. The steam engine, made of iron and fueled primarily by coal, propelled the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain and the world.[79]
The Industrial Revolution marks a major turning point in history; almost every aspect of daily life was influenced in some way. In particular, average income and population began to exhibit unprecedented sustained growth. Some economists say that the major impact of the Industrial Revolution was that the standard of living for the general population began to increase consistently for the first time in history, although others have said that it did not begin to meaningfully improve until the late 19th and 20th centuries.[80][81][82] The precise start and end of the Industrial Revolution is still debated among historians, as is the pace of economic and social changes.[83][84][85][86] GDP per capita was broadly stable before the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the modern capitalist economy,[87] while the Industrial Revolution began an era of per-capita economic growth in capitalist economies.[88] Economic historians are in agreement that the onset of the Industrial Revolution is the most important event in the history of humanity since the domestication of animals, plants[89] and fire.
The First Industrial Revolution evolved into the Second Industrial Revolution in the transition years between 1840 and 1870, when technological and economic progress continued with the increasing adoption of steam transport (steam-powered railways, boats, and ships), the large-scale manufacture of machine tools and the increasing use of machinery in steam-powered factories.[90][91][92]
In the 20th century, Christianity declined in influence in many Western countries, mostly in the European Union where some member states have experienced falling church attendance and membership in recent years,[95] and also elsewhere. Secularism (separating religion from politics and science) increased. Christianity remains the dominant religion in the Western world, where 70% are Christians.[96]
The West went through a series of great cultural and social changes between 1945 and 1980. The emergent mass media (film, radio, television and recorded music) created a global culture that could ignore national frontiers. Literacy became almost universal, encouraging the growth of books, magazines and newspapers. The influence of cinema and radio remained, while televisions became near essentials in every home.
By the mid-20th century, Western culture was exported worldwide, and the development and growth of international transport and telecommunication (such as transatlantic cable and the radiotelephone) played a decisive role in modern globalization. The West has contributed a great many technological, political, philosophical, artistic and religious aspects to modern international culture: having been a crucible of Catholicism, Protestantism, democracy, industrialisation; the first major civilisation to seek to abolish slavery during the 19th century, the first to enfranchise women (beginning in Australasia at the end of the 19th century) and the first to put to use such technologies as steam, electric and nuclear power. The West invented cinema, television, the personal computer, the Internet and video games; developed sports such as soccer, cricket, golf, tennis, rugby, basketball, and volleyball; and transported humans to an astronomical object for the first time with the 1969 Apollo 11Moon Landing.
While dance, music, visual art, story-telling, and architecture are human universals, they are expressed in the West in certain characteristic ways.[97]
In Western dance, music, plays and other arts, the performers are only very infrequently masked. There are essentially no taboos against depicting a god, or other religious figures, in a representational fashion.
Music
In music, Catholic monks developed the first forms of modern Western musical notation to standardize liturgy throughout the worldwide Church,[98] and an enormous body of religious music has been composed for it through the ages. This led directly to the emergence and development of European classical music and its many derivatives. The Baroque style, which encompassed music, art, and architecture, was particularly encouraged by the post-Reformation Catholic Church as such forms offered a means of religious expression that was stirring and emotional, intended to stimulate religious fervor.[99]
Jan van Eyck, among other renaissance painters, made great advances in oil painting, and perspective drawings and paintings had their earliest practitioners in Florence.[101] In art, the Celtic knot is a very distinctive Western repeated motif. Depictions of the nude human male and female in photography, painting, and sculpture are frequently considered to have special artistic merit. Realistic portraiture is especially valued.
Photography and the motion picture as both a technology and basis for entirely new art forms were also developed in the West.
Restoration of a fresco from an Ancient Roman villa bedroom, circa 50-40 BC, dimensions of the room: 265.4 × 334 × 583.9 cm, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City)
Mona Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1503 – 1506, perhaps continuing until circa 1517, oil on poplar panel, 77 cm × 53 cm, Louvre (Paris)
Photo of the interior of the apartment of Eugène Atget, taken in 1910 in Paris
Rêverie, by Alphonse Mucha, poster for the publishing house Champenois (1897)
Dance and performing arts
Classical music, opera and ballet: Swan Lake pictured
The ballet is a distinctively Western form of performance dance.[102] The ballroom dance is an important Western variety of dance for the elite. The polka, the square dance, the flamenco, and the Irish step dance are very well known Western forms of folk dance.
The soap opera, a popular culture dramatic form, originated in the United States first on radio in the 1930s, then a couple of decades later on television. The music video was also developed in the West in the middle of the 20th century. Musical theatre was developed in the West in the 19th and 20th Centuries, from music hall, comic opera, and Vaudeville; with significant contributions from the Jewish diaspora, African-Americans, and other marginalized peoples.[103][104][105]
Western literature encompasses the literary traditions of Europe, as well as North America, Oceania and Latin America.[106]
While epic literary works in verse such as the Mahabharata and Homer's Iliad are ancient and occurred worldwide, the prose novel as a distinct form of storytelling, with developed, consistent human characters and, typically, some connected overall plot (although both of these characteristics have sometimes been modified and played with in later times), was popularized by the West[107] in the 17th and 18th centuries. Of course, extended prose fiction had existed much earlier; both novels of adventure and romance in the Hellenistic world and in Heian Japan. Both Petronius' Satyricon (c. 60 CE) and the Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (c. 1000 CE) have been cited as the world's first major novel but they had a very limited long-term impact on literary writing beyond their own day until much more recent times.
The novel, which made its appearance in the 18th century, is an essentially European creation. Chinese and Japanese literature contain some works that may be thought of as novels, but only the European novel is couched in terms of a personal analysis of personal dilemmas.[97]
As in its artistic tradition, European literature pays deep tribute to human suffering.[97]Tragedy, from its ritually and mythologically inspired Greek origins to modern forms where struggle and downfall are often rooted in psychological or social, rather than mythical, motives, is also widely considered a specifically European creation and can be seen as a forerunner of some aspects of both the novel and of classical opera.
The validity of reason was postulated in both Christian philosophy and the Greco-Roman classics.[97] Christianity laid a stress on the inward aspects of actions and on motives, notions that were foreign to the ancient world. This subjectivity, which grew out of the Christian belief that man could achieve a personal union with God, resisted all challenges and made itself the fulcrum on which all literary exposition turned, including the 20th–21st century novels.[97]
Important Western architectural motifs include the Doric, Corinthian, and Ionic orders of Greek architecture,[108] and the Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and Victorian styles, which are still widely recognized and used in contemporary Western architecture. Much of Western architecture emphasizes repetition of simple motifs, straight lines and expansive, undecorated planes. A modern ubiquitous architectural form that emphasizes this characteristic is the skyscraper, their modern equivalent first developed in New York and Chicago. The predecessor of the skyscraper can be found in the medieval towers erected in Bologna.
The Parthenon under restoration in 2008, the most iconic Classical building, built from 447 BC to 432 BC, located in Athens
Western foodways were, until recently, considered to have their roots in the cuisines of Classical Rome and Greece, but the influence of Arab and Near Eastern cuisine on the West has become a topic of research in recent decades. The Crusaders, known mostly for fighting over holy land, settled in the Levant and acclimated to the local culture and cuisine. Fulcher of Chartres said "For we who were occidentals have now become orientals." These cultural experiences, carried back to France by notables like Eleanor of Aquitaine influenced Western European foodways. Many Oriental ingredients were relatively new to the Western lands. Sugar, almonds, pistachios, rosewater, and dried citrus fruits were all novelties to the Crusaders who encountered them in Saracen lands. Pepper, ginger and cinnamon were the most widely used spices of the European courts and noble households. By the end of the Middle Ages, cloves, nutmeg, mastic, galingale, and other imported spices had become part of the Western cuisine.[109]
Saracen influence can be seen in medieval cookbooks. Some recipes retain their Arabic names in Italian translations of the Liber de Coquina. Known as bruet Sarassinois in the cuisine of North France, the concept of sweet and sour sauce is attested to in Greek tradition when Anthimus finishes his stew with vinegar and honey. Saracens combined sweet ingredients like date-juice and honey with pomegranate, lemons and citrus juices, or other sour ingredients. The technique of browning pieces of meat and simmering in liquid with vegetables is used in many recipes from the Baghdad cookery book. The same technique appears in the late-13th century Viandier. Fried pieces of beef simmered in wine with sugar and cloves was called bruet of Sarcynesse in English.[109]
Scientific and technological inventions and discoveries
Medieval Christians believed that to seek the geometric, physical and mathematical principles that govern the world was to seek and worship God. Detail of a scene in the bowl of the letter 'P' with a woman with a set-square and dividers; using a compass to measure distances on a diagram. In her left hand she holds a square, an implement for testing or drawing right angles. She is watched by a group of students. In the Middle Ages, it is unusual to see women represented as teachers, in particular when the students appear to be monks. She is most likely the personification of Geometry, based on Martianus Capella's famous book De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii [5th c.], a standard source for allegorical imagery of the seven liberal arts. Illustration at the beginning of Euclid's Elementa, in the translation attributed to Adelard of Bath.A doctor of philosophy of the University of Oxford, in full academic dress. The typical dress for graduation are gowns and hoods or hats adapted from the daily dress of university staff in the Middle Ages, which was in turn based on the attire worn by medieval clergy.[110]The Greek Antikythera mechanism is generally referred to as the first known analogue computer.Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Apollo Lunar Module pilot of the first crewed mission to land on the Moon, poses for a photograph beside the deployed United States flag during his Extravehicular Activity (EVA) on the lunar surface.
A notable feature of Western culture is its strong emphasis and focus on innovation and invention through science and technology, and its ability to generate new processes, materials and material artifacts with its roots dating back to the Ancient Greeks. The scientific method as "a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses" was fashioned by the 17th-century Italian Galileo Galilei,[111][112] with roots in the work of medieval scholars such as the 11th-century Iraqi physicistIbn al-Haytham[113][114] and the 13th-century English friar Roger Bacon.[115]
The world's most widely adopted system of measurement, the International System of Units, derived from the metric system, was first developed in France and evolved through contributions from various Westerners.[154][155]
The roots of modern-day Western mass media can be traced back to the late 15th century, when printing presses began to operate throughout wealthy European cities. The emergence of news media in the 17th century has to be seen in close connection with the spread of the printing press, from which the publishing press derives its name.[165]
In the 16th century, a decrease in the preeminence of Latin in its literary use, along with the impact of economic change, the discoveries arising from trade and travel, navigation to the New World, science and arts and the development of increasingly rapid communications through print led to a rising corpus of vernacular media content in European society.[166]
After the launch of the satellite Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union in 1957, satellite transmission technology was dramatically realised, with the United States launching Telstar in 1962 linking live media broadcasts from the UK to the US. The first digital broadcast satellite (DBS) system began transmitting in US in 1975.[167]
Beginning in the 1990s, the Internet has contributed to a tremendous increase in the accessibility of Western media content. Departing from media offered in bundled content packages (magazines, CDs, television and radio slots), the Internet has primarily offered unbundled content items (articles, audio and video files).[168]
The native religions of Europe were polytheistic but not homogenous – however, they were similar insofar as they were predominantly Indo-European in origin. Roman religion was similar to but not the same as Hellenic religion – likewise for indigenous Germanic polytheism, Celtic polytheism and Slavic polytheism. Before this time many Europeans from the north, especially Scandinavians, remained polytheistic, though southern Europe was predominantly Christian from the 5th century onwards.
Western culture at a fundamental level is influenced by the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions.[169] These cultures had a number of similarities, such as a common emphasis on the individual, but they also embody fundamentally conflicting worldviews. For example, in Judaism and Christianity, God is the ultimate authority, while Greco-Roman tradition considers the ultimate authority to be reason. Christian attempts to reconcile these frameworks were responsible for the preservation of Greek philosophy.[169] Historically, Europe has been the center and cradle of Christian civilization.[170][171][172][173]
According to a survey by Pew Research Center from 2011, Christianity remains the dominant religion in the Western world where 70–84% are Christians,[96] According to this survey, 76% of Europeans described themselves as Christians,[96][174][175] and about 86% of the Americas' population identified themselves as Christians,[176] (90% in Latin America and 77% in North America).[177] 73% in Oceania self-identify as Christian, and 76% in South Africa are Christian.[96]
At the same there has been an increase in the share of agnostic or atheist residents in Europe; these made up about 18% of the European population in 2012.[182] In particular, over half of the populations of the Czech Republic (79% of the population was agnostic, atheist or irreligious), the United Kingdom (52%), Germany (25–33%),[183]France (30–35%)[184][185][186] and the Netherlands (39–44%) are agnostic or atheist.
As in other areas, the Jewish diaspora and Judaism exist in the Western world.
There are also small but increasing numbers of people across the Western world who seek to revive the indigenous religions of their European ancestors; such groups include Germanic, Roman, Hellenic, Celtic, Slavic, and polytheistic reconstructionist movements. Likewise, Wicca, New Age spirituality and other neo-pagan belief systems enjoy notable minority support in Western states.
A wide range of sports was already established by the time of Ancient Greece and the military culture and the development of sports in Greece influenced one another considerably. Sports became such a prominent part of their culture that the Greeks created the Olympic Games, which in ancient times were held every four years in a small village in the Peloponnesus called Olympia. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a Frenchman, instigated the modern revival of the Olympic movement. The first modern Olympic games were held at Athens in 1896.
The Romans built immense structures such as the amphitheatres to house their festivals of sport. The Romans exhibited a passion for blood sports, such as the infamous Gladiatorial battles that pitted contestants against one another in a fight to the death. The Olympic Games revived many of the sports of classical antiquity—such as Greco-Roman wrestling, discus and javelin.
The sport of bullfighting is a traditional spectacle of Spain, Portugal, southern France, and some Latin American countries. It traces its roots to prehistoric bull worship and sacrifice and is often linked to Rome, where many human-versus-animal events were held. Bullfighting spread from Spain to its American colonies, and in the 19th century to France, where it developed into a distinctive form in its own right.[189]
Jousting and hunting were popular sports in the European Middle Ages, and the aristocratic classes developed passions for leisure activities. A great number of popular global sports were first developed or codified in Europe. The modern game of golf originated in Scotland, where the first written record of golf is James II's banning of the game in 1457, as an unwelcome distraction to learning archery.[190]
The Industrial Revolution that began in Great Britain in the 18th century brought increased leisure time, leading to more opportunities for citizens to participate in athletic activities and also follow spectator sports. These trends continued with the advent of mass media and global communication. The bat and ball sport of cricket was first played in England during the 16th century and was exported around the globe via the British Empire. A number of popular modern sports were devised or codified in the United Kingdom during the 19th century and obtained global prominence; these include ping pong, modern tennis, association football, netball and rugby.[191]
Football (or soccer) remains hugely popular in Europe, but has grown from its origins to be known as the world game. Similarly, sports such as cricket, rugby, and netball were exported around the world, particularly among countries in the Commonwealth of Nations, thus India and Australia are among the strongest cricketing states, while victory in the Rugby World Cup has been shared among New Zealand, Australia, England, and South Africa.
Australian Rules Football, an Australian variation of football with similarities to Gaelic football and rugby, evolved in the British colony of Victoria in the mid-19th century. The United States also developed unique variations of English sports. English migrants took antecedents of baseball to America during the colonial period. The history of American football can be traced to early versions of rugby football and association football. Many games are known as "football" were being played at colleges and universities in the United States in the first half of the 19th century. American football resulted from several major divergences from rugby, most notably the rule changes instituted by Walter Camp, the "Father of American football". Basketball was invented in 1891 by James Naismith, a Canadian physical education instructor working in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the United States. Volleyball was created in Holyoke, Massachusetts, a city directly north of Springfield, in 1895.
Themes and traditions
A Madonna and Child painting by an anonymous Italian from the first half of the 19th century, oil on canvas
Western culture has developed many themes and traditions, the most significant of which are:[citation needed]
Greco-Roman classic letters, arts, architecture, philosophical and cultural tradition, which include the influence of preeminent authors and philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Virgil, and Cicero, as well as a long mythologic tradition.
Secular humanism, rationalism and Enlightenment thought. This set the basis for a new critical attitude and open questioning of religion, favouring freethinking and questioning of the church as an authority, which resulted in open-minded and reformist ideals inside, such as liberation theology, which partly adopted these currents, and secular and political tendencies such as separation of church and state (sometimes termed laicism), agnosticism and atheism.
Generalized usage of some form of the Latin or Greek alphabet, and derived forms, such as Cyrillic, used by those southern and eastern Slavic countries of Christian Orthodox tradition, historically under the Byzantine Empire and later within the Russian czarist or the Soviet area of influence. Other variants of the Latin or Greek alphabets are found in the Gothic and Coptic alphabets, which historically superseded older scripts, such as runes, and the Egyptian Demotic and Hieroglyphic systems.
A large influence, in modern times, of many of the ideals and values developed and inherited from Romanticism.
An emphasis on, and use of, science as a means of understanding the natural world and humanity's place in it.
More pronounced use and application of innovation and scientific developments, as well as a more rational approach to scientific progress (what has been known as the scientific method).
^Hanson, Victor Davis (18 December 2007). Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN978-0-307-42518-8. the term "Western" — refer to the culture of classical antiquity that arose in Greece and Rome; survived the collapse of the Roman Empire; spread to western and northern Europe; then during the great periods of exploration and colonization of the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries expanded to the Americas, Australia and areas of Asia and Africa; and now exercises global political, economic, cultural, and military power far greater than the size of its territory or population might otherwise suggest.
Freeman, Charles (September 2000). The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World. Penguin Publishing Group. ISBN978-0-14-029323-4. The Greeks provided the chromosomes of Western civilization. One does not have to idealize the Greeks to sustain that point. Greek ways of exploring the cosmos, defining the problems of knowledge (and what is meant by knowledge itself), creating the language in which such problems are explored, representing the physical world and human society in the arts, defining the nature of value, describing the past, still underlie the Western cultural tradition
Cartledge, Paul (10 October 2002). The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others. OUP Oxford. ISBN978-0-19-157783-3. Greekness was identified with freedom-spiritual and social as well as political-and slavery was equated with being barbarian, [...] 'democracy' was a Greek invention (celebrating its 2,500th anniversary in 1993/4) [...] an ancient culture, that of the Greeks — is both a foundation stone of our own (Western) civilization and at the same time in key respects a deeply alien phenomenon.
Pagden, Anthony (13 March 2008). Worlds at War: The 2,500 - Year Struggle Between East and West. OUP Oxford. ISBN978-0-19-923743-2. Had the Persians overrun all of mainland Greece, had they then transformed the Greek city-states into satrapies of the Persian Empire, had Greek democracy been snuffed out, there would have been no Greek theater, no Greek science, no Plato, no Aristotle, no Sophocles, no Aeschylus. The incredible burst of creative energy that took place during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. and that laid the foundation for all of later Western civilization would never have happened. [...] in the years between 490 and 479 B.C.E., the entire future of the Western world hung precariously in the balance
Richard, Carl J. (16 April 2010). Why We're All Romans: The Roman Contribution to the Western World. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. ISBN978-0-7425-6780-1. In 1,200 years the tiny village of Rome established a republic, conquered all of the Mediterranean basin and western Europe, lost its republic, and finally, surrendered its empire. In the process the Romans laid the foundation of Western civilization. [...] The pragmatic Romans brought Greek and Hebrew ideas down to earth, modified them, and transmitted them throughout western Europe. [...] Roman law remains the basis for the legal codes of most western European and Latin American countries — Even in English-speaking countries, where common law prevails, Roman law has exerted substantial influence
Sharon, Moshe (1 January 2004). Studies in Modern Religions, Religious Movements and the Båabåi-Bahåa'åi Faiths. BRILL. ISBN978-90-04-13904-6. Side by side with Christianity, the classical Greco-Roman world forms the sound foundation of Western civilization. Greek philosophy is also the origin for the methods and contents of the philosophical thought and theological investigation in Islam and Judaism
^Nightingale, Andrea (2007). "The Philosophers in Archaic Greek Culture". In Shapiro, H. A.; Antonaccio, Carla M. (eds.). The Cambridge companion to archaic Greece. Cambridge companions to the ancient world (1. publ ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. p. 171. ISBN978-0-521-52929-7. We have ample evidence that the Greek thinkers encountered and responded to many different cultures and ideologies. Consider, for example, the city of Miletus, which was the center of intellectual activity in sixth-century Ionia. Miletus bordered on the Lydian and, later, the Persian empires and had extensive dealings with these cultures.In addition, it had trading relations all over the Mediterranean and sent out numerous colonies to Egypt and Thrace. The Milesian thinkers thus encountered ideas and practices from all over the "known" world. In the Archaic period, the interaction of different peoples from Greece, Italy, Egypt, and the Near East created a cultural ferment that had a profound impact on Greek life and thought.
^Boardman, John (1982), Boardman, John; Hammond, N. G. L. (eds.), "The material culture of Archaic Greece", The Cambridge Ancient History, The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 3 (2 ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 450, doi:10.1017/chol9780521234474.018, ISBN978-0-521-23447-4, retrieved 20 October 2024, Knowledge of Egyptian art after the mid century led to Greek exploitation of the harder stone, their white island marble, for the first time, and the creation of figures at life size or more. We know these best—the kouroi and korai—as dedications and grave markers, but a prime use for monumental statuary must have been as cult images and it is at about this time that the temple-houses, oikoi, for these images begin to receive a monumental form and, again probably through inspiration from Egypt are decorated with architectural orders: first the Doric in homeland Greece, then the orientalizing Ionic in the East Greek world.
^Green, P (2008). Alexander The Great and the Hellenistic Age. Phoenix. p. xiii. ISBN978-0-7538-2413-9.
^Porter, Stanley E. (2013). Early Christianity in its Hellenistic context. Volume 2, Christian origins and Hellenistic Judaism : social and literary contexts for the New Testament. Leiden: Brill. ISBN978-9004234765. OCLC851653645.
^Hengel, Martin (2003). Judaism and Hellenism : studies in their encounter in Palestine during the early Hellenistic period. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers. ISBN978-1-59244-186-0. OCLC52605048.
^Spielvogel, Jackson J. (2016). Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume I: To 1715 (Cengage Learning ed.). Cengage Learning. p. 156. ISBN978-1-305-63347-6.
^Neill, Thomas Patrick (1957). Readings in the History of Western Civilization, Volume 2 (Newman Press ed.). p. 224.
^O'Collins, Gerald; Farrugia, Maria (2003). Catholicism: The Story of Catholic Christianity. Oxford University Press. p. v (preface). ISBN978-0-19-925995-3.
^ abBurnett, Charles. "The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Program in Toledo in the Twelfth Century", Science in Context, 14 (2001): 249–288.
^ abRüegg, 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, ISBN0-521-36105-2, pp. xix–xx
^Cf. Jeremy Waldron (2002), God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (UK), ISBN978-0-521-89057-1, pp. 189, 208
^McNeill, William H. (2010). History of Western Civilization: A Handbook (University of Chicago Press ed.). University of Chicago Press. p. 204. ISBN978-0-226-56162-2.
^Huntington, Samuel P. (1991). Clash of Civilizations (6th ed.). Washington, DC. pp. 38–39. ISBN978-0-684-84441-1. The origin of western civilization is usually dated to 700 or 800 AD. In general, researchers consider that it has three main components, in Europe, North America and Latin America. [...] However, Latin America has followed a quite different development path from Europe and North America. Although it is a scion of European civilization, it also incorporates more elements of indigenous American civilizations compared to those of North America and Europe. It also currently has had a more corporatist and authoritarian culture. Both Europe and North America felt the effects of Reformation and combination of Catholic and Protestant cultures. Historically, Latin America has been only Catholic, although this may be changing. [...] Latin America could be considered, or a sub-set, within Western civilization, or can also be considered a separate civilization, intimately related to the West, but divided as to whether it belongs with it.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^Huntington, Samuel P. (2011). The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Simon & Schuster. pp. 151–154. ISBN978-1451628975.
^Kwame Anthony Appiah (9 November 2016). "There Is No Such Thing As Western Civilization". [...] the first recorded use of a word for Europeans as a kind of person, so far as I know, comes out of this history of conflict. In a Latin chronicle, written in 754 in Spain, the author refers to the victors of the Battle of Tours as Europenses, Europeans. So, simply put, the very idea of a 'European' was first used to contrast Christians and Muslims.
^Graeber, David; Wengrow, David (9 November 2021). "Farewell to Humanity's Childhood". The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN9780374721107. Retrieved 28 February 2023. [...] that one group of humans who used to refer to themselves as 'the white race' (and now, generally, call themselves by its more accepted synonym, 'Western civilization') [...].
^Hero (1899). "Pneumatika, Book ΙΙ, Chapter XI". Herons von Alexandria Druckwerke und Automatentheater (in Greek and German). Translated by Wilhelm Schmidt. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner. pp. 228–232.
^Gordon, Cyrus H., The Common Background of the Greek and Hebrew Civilizations, W. W. Norton and Company, New York 1965
^Nicholls, William (1995). Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate (1st Jason Aronson softcover ed.). Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson. ISBN978-1-56821-519-8. OCLC34892303.
^Gager, John G. (1983). The origins of anti-semitism : attitudes toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-503607-7. OCLC9112202.
^"How The Irish Saved Civilisation", by Thomas Cahill, 1995[page needed]
^Kaiser, Wolfgang (2015). The Cambridge Companion to Roman Law. pp. 119–148.
^Sootin, Harry. "Isaac Newton." New York, Messner (1955)
^Galileo Galilei, Two New Sciences, trans. Stillman Drake, (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Pr., 1974), pp. 217, 225, 296–97.
^Ernest A. Moody (1951). "Galileo and Avempace: The Dynamics of the Leaning Tower Experiment (I)". Journal of the History of Ideas. 12 (2): 163–93. doi:10.2307/2707514. JSTOR2707514.
^Marshall Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages, (Madison, Univ. of Wisconsin Pr., 1961), pp. 218–19, 252–55, 346, 409–16, 547, 576–78, 673–82; Anneliese Maier, "Galileo and the Scholastic Theory of Impetus", pp. 103–23 in On the Threshold of Exact Science: Selected Writings of Anneliese Maier on Late Medieval Natural Philosophy, (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Pr., 1982).
^E. Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1996), pp. 29–30, 42–47.
^Feinstein, Charles (September 1998). "Pessimism Perpetuated: Real Wages and the Standard of Living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution". Journal of Economic History. 58 (3): 625–58. doi:10.1017/s0022050700021100. S2CID54816980.
^Szreter, Simon; Mooney, Graham (February 1998). "Urbanization, Mortality, and the Standard of Living Debate: New Estimates of the Expectation of Life at Birth in Nineteenth-Century British Cities". The Economic History Review. 51 (1): 104. doi:10.1111/1468-0289.00084. hdl:10.1111/1468-0289.00084.
^Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., p. 27 ISBN0-349-10484-0
^Robert Lucas Jr. (2003). "The Industrial Revolution". Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Archived from the original on 27 November 2007. Retrieved 14 November 2007. it is fairly clear that up to 1800 or maybe 1750, no society had experienced sustained growth in per capita income. (Eighteenth century population growth also averaged one-third of 1 percent, the same as production growth.) That is, up to about two centuries ago, per capita incomes in all societies were stagnated at around $400 to $800 per year.
^Lucas, Robert (2003). "The Industrial Revolution Past and Future". Archived from the original on 27 November 2007. Retrieved 10 July 2016. [consider] annual growth rates of 2.4 percent for the first 60 years of the 20th century, of 1 percent for the entire 19th century, of one-third of 1 percent for the 18th century
^Taylor, George Rogers (1951). The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860. M.E. Sharpe. ISBN978-0-87332-101-3. No name is given to the transition years. The "Transportation Revolution" began with improved roads in the late 18th century.
^Lane, Stewart F. (2011). Jews on Broadway : an historical survey of performers, playwrights, composers, lyricists and producers. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN978-0-7864-5917-9. OCLC668182929.
^Jones, John Bush (2003). Our musicals, ourselves : a social history of the American musical theater. Hanover: Brandeis University Press, published by University Press of New England. ISBN978-1-61168-223-6. OCLC654535012.
^Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa (2010). Mind, Brain, and Education Science: A Comprehensive Guide to the New Brain-Based Teaching. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 39. ISBN978-0-393-70607-9. Alhazen (or Al-Haytham; 965–1039 CE) was perhaps one of the greatest physicists of all times and a product of the Islamic Golden Age or Islamic Renaissance (7th–13th centuries). He made significant contributions to anatomy, astronomy, engineering, mathematics, medicine, ophthalmology, philosophy, physics, psychology, and visual perception and is primarily attributed as the inventor of the scientific method, for which author Bradley Steffens (2006) describes him as the "first scientist".
^Tom McInally, The Sixth Scottish University. The Scots Colleges Abroad: 1575 to 1799 (Brill, Leiden, 2012) p. 115
^Bedell, Frederick (1942). "History of A-C Wave Form, Its Determination and Standardization". Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. 61 (12): 864. doi:10.1109/T-AIEE.1942.5058456. S2CID51658522.
^Freebert, Ernest (2014). The age of Edison : electric light and the invention of modern America. Penguin Books. ISBN978-0-14-312444-3.
^Ralph Stein (1967). The Automobile Book. Paul Hamlyn Ltd
^Fermi, Enrico (December 1982). The First Reactor. Oak Ridge, Tennessee: United States Atomic Energy Commission, Division of Technical Information. pp. 22–26.
^Losev, O.V. (1928). "CII. Luminous carborundum detector and detection effect and oscillations with crystals". The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science. 6 (39): 1024–1044. doi:10.1080/14786441108564683.
^Gernsheim, Helmut (1986). A Concise History of Photography (3rd ed.). Dover Publications, Inc. pp. 9–11. ISBN978-0-486-25128-8.
^Weber, Johannes (2006). "Strassburg, 1605: The Origins of the Newspaper in Europe". German History. 24 (3): 387–412 (387). doi:10.1191/0266355406gh380oa.:
At the same time, then as the printing press in the physical technological sense was invented, 'the press' in the extended sense of the word also entered the historical stage. The phenomenon of publishing was now born.
^A. J. Richards, David (2010). Fundamentalism in American Religion and Law: Obama's Challenge to Patriarchy's Threat to Democracy. University of Philadelphia Press. p. 177. ISBN9781139484138. ..for the Jews in twentieth-century Europe, the cradle of Christian civilization.
^D'Anieri, Paul (2019). Ukraine and Russia: From Civilied Divorce to Uncivil War. Cambridge University Press. p. 94. ISBN9781108486095. ..for the Jews in twentieth-century Europe, the cradle of Christian civilization.
^L. Allen, John (2005). The Rise of Benedict XVI: The Inside story of How the Pope Was Elected and What it Means for the World. Penguin UK. ISBN9780141954714. Europe is historically the cradle of Christian culture, it is still the primary center of institutional and pastoral energy in the Catholic Church...
^Rietbergen, Peter (2014). Europe: A Cultural History. Routledge. p. 170. ISBN9781317606307. Europe is historically the cradle of Christian culture, it is still the primary center of institutional and pastoral energy in the Catholic Church...
^"Europe". Pewforum.org. 19 December 2011. Retrieved 31 January 2014.
^"Christians". Pewforum.org. 18 December 2012. Retrieved 31 January 2014.
^ANALYSIS (19 December 2011). "Americas". Pewforum.org. Retrieved 17 August 2012.
^ abcd"Discrimination in the EU in 2012"(PDF), Special Eurobarometer, 393, European Union: European Commission, p. 233, 2012, retrieved 14 August 2013 The question asked was "Do you consider yourself to be...?" With a card showing: Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Other Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Hindu, Atheist, and Non-believer/Agnostic. Space was given for Other (SPONTANEOUS) and DK. Jewish, Sikh, Buddhist, Hindu did not reach the 1% threshold.
^William Joseph Baker, Sports in the western world (University of Illinois Press, 1988).
^David G. McComb, Sports in world history (Routledge, 2004).
^Barbara Schrodt, "Sports of the Byzantine empire." Journal of Sport History 8.3 (1981): 40-59.
^Sall E. D. Wilkins, Sports and games of medieval cultures (Greenwood, 2002).
^Tranter, N. L. "Popular sports and the industrial revolution in Scotland: the evidence of the statistical accounts." International Journal of the History of Sport 4.1 (1987): 21-38.
^G. Koenig, Harold (2009). Religion and Spirituality in Psychiatry. Cambridge University Press. p. 31. ISBN9780521889520. The Bible is the most globally influential and widely read book ever written. ... it has been a major influence on the behavior, laws, customs, education, art, literature, and morality of Western civilization.
^Burnside, Jonathan (2011). God, Justice, and Society: Aspects of Law and Legality in the Bible. Oxford University Press. p. XXVI. ISBN9780199759217.
^V. Reid, Patrick (1987). Readings in Western Religious Thought: The ancient world. Paulist Press. p. 43. ISBN9780809128501.
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