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Western Civ

The Concept of Western Civilization

The idea of a distinct separation between two consuming world cultures which are demarcated first along geographical lines, and thereafter across ethnic, racial and religious lines, is one very much tied to the historical power structure that has tended to dominate the globe. This is an informal power structure pursuant of the imperial aspirations of Western European nations during the middle centuries. When the influences of Christianity, feudalism and modernist academic thought began to denote a self-proclaimed centrality of progressive civilized thought in such contexts as post-Roman Empire France, England and Spain, a concurrence of exploration into the so-called Orient initiated a new point of distinction. To the Europeans, the Asian cultures newly encountered in modern China, Japan and Indonesia would show a fully developed culture that was racial and religiously separate from that which had been perceived theretofore as the world culture. By no coincidence, these cultures would also present a vastness of ideas and resources which suggested beneficial exploitation opportunities to imperialist European instinct. It was herein that a conception of Western Civilization as being characteristically superior and therefore inherently entitled to dominate the therefore inherently inferior cultures of the East.

There is an importance to the implied correlation between ethnic or cultural superiority and the conception of entitlement and, indeed, it may be said that this is the persistent and surviving aspect of the concept of 'Western Civilization.' In drawing a contrast between West and East, there is at present no necessarily singular definition for that which categorizes one as being in the former or latter category. This is not to say that characteristics are ambiguous. Quite to the contrary, ideas such as modernization, scholastic superiority, enlightened morality and governmental sophistication have been projected as those qualities which denote Western Civilization. Again, by no coincidence, sharp geographical parameters which relate inherently to religious differences and racial differences would find direct parallel to these projected qualities, with European whites of Judeo-Christian disposition universally occupying Western culture's population. Asian, African and other non-white cultures were to be subjected to military, governmental, economic and missionary domination in order to help raise the world's positive reflection of the implied benefits of Western Civilization.

The absence of truly formal correlation between Western Culture and any one culture has become more apparent in the last century especially. During the Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, the idea of West vs. East became inextricably linked to a new conception of nation-building. Here, imperialist models were adapted which saw the two forms of government and lifestyle (i.e. capitalism and communism) engage in an effort at global domination of ideology and economic framework. The premise which drove forward the United States and its allies was this adopted notion of Western Civilization as reflecting modernity, moral progressivism and an inherent dispensation of Enlightenment principles.