Looks like you are currently in Russia but have requested a page in the United States site. Would you like to change to the United States site? The Transformation of Pair-Bonding in the 20th Century: Gottman University of Washington and Clifford I. The History of Couple Therapy: Marriage in the 20th Century: Cheryl Rampage Northwestern University. All of these thrive when people lack an outside standard by which to judge their actions. The victims live inside a bubble maintained by the strip-miners and cannot see outside of it.
While Western civilization in the overall has no valid purpose, there are islands of purpose springing up in it. Beyond the value of cryptocurrency technologies, there are scores of thousands of people who have become devoted to the principle of decentralization through them. These people have gained a purpose: Likewise homeschoolers, whose goal is not only to escape centralized schooling, but to populate the earth with better children. This also is a worthy purpose. And there are others. It will take time to see what comes of this. If these islands grow and eventually converge, Western civilization will renew itself.
As the status quo culture is seen as purposeless and barren — and as the new islands are seen as dynamic — emotionally healthy people will leave the moribund way and join the life-embracing way. The status quo and its profiteers remain as obstacles of course, but their deceptions and distractions are starting to fade. Their ability to call forth violence remains, but even that rests upon the automated compliance of the masses, which may not endure. So, please find a deep, meaningful purpose for your life. To live without it is to waste a precious gift. A book that generates comments like these, from actual readers, might be worth your time: We respect your privacy, plain and simple.
These are things that every Westerner, and certainly every American, should see. See the world as it really is and find freedom. The Bitcoin House Previous Post: Time to Have Fun Again. Login Status You are not currently logged in. Terms of Use Privacy Policy. 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. By the midth century worldwide export of western culture went through the new mass media: In modern usage, Western world sometimes [9] refers to Europe and to areas whose populations largely originate from Europe , through the Age of Discovery.
Western culture was influenced by many older great civilizations of the ancient Near East , [5] such as Phoenicia , Ancient Israel , [12] [13] [4] Minoan Crete , Sumer , Babylonia , and also Ancient Egypt. It originated in the Mediterranean basin and its vicinity; Ancient Greece and Rome are often cited as its birthplaces. Over time, their associated empires grew first to the east and west to include the rest of Mediterranean and Black Sea coastal areas, conquering and absorbing. Christianization of Ireland 5th century , Christianization of Bulgaria 9th century , Christianization of Kievan Rus' Russia , Ukraine , Belarus ; 10th century , Christianization of Scandinavia Denmark , Norway , Sweden ; 12th century and Christianization of Lithuania 14th century brought the rest of present-day European territory into Western civilization.
Historians, such as Carroll Quigley in "The Evolution of Civilizations" , [14] contend that Western civilization was born around AD , after the total collapse of the Western Roman Empire , leaving a vacuum for new ideas to flourish that were impossible in Classical societies. In either view, between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance, the West or those regions that would later become the heartland of the culturally "western sphere" experienced a period of first, considerable decline, [15] and then readaptation, reorientation and considerable renewed material, technological and political development.
This whole period of roughly a millennium is known as the Middle Ages , its early part forming the " Dark Ages ", designations that were created during the Renaissance and reflect the perspective on history, and the self-image, of the latter period. The knowledge of the ancient Western world was partly preserved during this period due to the survival of the Eastern Roman Empire and the introduction of the Catholic Church ; it was also greatly expanded by the Arab importation [16] [17] of both the Ancient Greco-Roman and new technology through the Arabs from India and China to Europe.
Since the Renaissance, the West evolved beyond the influence of the ancient Greeks and Romans and the Islamic world, due to the successful Second Agricultural , Commercial , [20] Scientific , [21] and Industrial [22] revolutions propellers of modern banking concepts peaked with the 18th century's Age of enlightenment , through the Age of exploration 's expansion of peoples of Western and Central European empires, particularly the globe-spanning colonial empires of 18th and 19th centuries. There is debate among some as to whether Latin America as a whole is in a category of its own.
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.
Does Western Civilization Still Have a Purpose?
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. 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.
Some tendencies that define modern Western societies are the existence of political pluralism , laicism , 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. The geopolitical divisions in Europe that created a concept of East and West originated in the ancient tyrannical and imperialistic Graeco-Roman times.
Roman Catholic Western and Central Europe, as such, maintained a distinct identity particularly as it began to redevelop during the Renaissance. Even following the Protestant Reformation, Protestant Europe continued to see itself as more tied to Roman Catholic Europe than other parts of the perceived civilized world.
Use of the term West as a specific cultural and geopolitical term developed over the course of the Age of Exploration as Europe spread its culture to other parts of the world.
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Roman Catholics were the first major religious group to immigrate to the New World , as settlers in the colonies of Portugal and Spain and later, France belonged to that faith. English and Dutch colonies, on the other hand, tended to be more religiously diverse. Ancient Greek civilization had been growing in 1st millennium BC into wealthy poleis , so-called city-states geographically loose political entities which in time, inevitably end giving way to larger organisations of society, including the empire and the nation-state [27] such as Athens , Sparta , Thebes , and Corinth , by Middle and Near Eastern ones Sumerian cities such as Uruk and Ur ; Ancient Egyptian city-states, such as Thebes and Memphis ; the Phoenician Tyre and Sidon ; the five Philistine city-states; the Berber city-states of the Garamantes.
The then Hellenic division between the barbarians term used by Ancient Greeks for all non-Greek-speaking people and the Greeks contrasted in many societies the Greek-speaking culture of the Greek settlements around the Mediterranean to the surrounding non-Greek cultures.
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Herodotus considered the Persian Wars of the early 5th century BC a conflict of Europa versus Asia which he considered all land north and east of the Sea of Marmara , respectively. The terms "West" and "East" were not used by any Greek author to describe that conflict.
The anachronistic application of those terms to that division entails a stark logical contradiction, given that, when the term "West" appeared, it was used by Hellenistic Roman Catholic of Greek heritage but also of Latin-speaking culture, in opposition to the Greek Orthodox and their Greek-speaking culture. Greek culture , is said to have influenced Roman civilization in all aspects of society, from architecture to philosophy , art and war. According to a few writers, the future conquest of parts of the Roman Empire by Germanic peoples and the subsequent dominance by the Western Christian Papacy which held combined political and spiritual authority, a state of affairs absent from Greek civilization in all its stages , resulted in a rupture of the previously existing ties between the Latin West and Greek thought, [29] including Christian Greek thought.
It came to dominate Western, Central and Southeastern Europe and the entire area surrounding the Mediterranean Sea through conquest using the Roman legions and then through cultural assimilation by eventually giving Roman citizenship privileges to the whole population.
Nonetheless, despite its great legacy, a number of factors led to the eventual decline and fall of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire succeeded the approximately year-old Roman Republic c. During these struggles hundreds of senators were killed, and the Roman Senate had been refilled with loyalists [ vague ] of the First Triumvirate and later those of the Second Triumvirate. The same time passed before its fall in AD Rome had expanded long before the empire reached its zenith with the conquest of Dacia in AD , under Emperor Trajan. Ancient Rome has contributed greatly to the development of law, war, art, literature, architecture, technology and language in the Western world , and its history continues to have a major influence on the world today.
Latin language has been the base from which Romance languages evolved and it has been the official language of the Catholic Church and all Catholic religious ceremonies all over Europe until , as well as an or the official language of countries such as Poland 9th—18th centuries. In AD , a few decades before its Western collapse, the Roman Empire formally split into a Western and an Eastern one, each with their own emperors, capitals, and governments, although ostensibly they still belonged to one formal Empire.
The Western Roman Empire provinces eventually were replaced by Northern European Germanic ruled kingdoms in the 5th century due to civil wars, corruption, and devastating Germanic invasions from such tribes as the Goths , the Franks and the Vandals by their late expansion throughout Europe. The three-day Visigoths's AD sack of Rome who had been raiding Greece not long before, a shocking time for Graeco-Romans , was the first time after almost years that Rome had fallen to a foreign enemy, and St. Jerome , living in Bethlehem at the time, wrote that "The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken.
The Roman Empire is where the idea of "the West" began to emerge. By Rome's central location at the heart of the Empire, "West" and "East" were terms used to denote provinces west and east of the capital itself.
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Italy itself was considered central, until the reforms of Diocletian , with the idea of formally dividing the Empire into true two halves: The East continued to call themselves Eastern Romans even after AD — when Greek had become official language of the empire was Latin and the Pope's crowning of Charlemagne as Emperor of the Romans , while the West began thinking in terms of Western Latins those living in the old Western Empire and Eastern Greeks those inside the Roman remnant to the east. 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.
This division into Eastern and Western Roman Empires was reflected in the administration of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Greek Orthodox churches, with Rome and Constantinople debating over whether either city was the capital of Western religion. As the Eastern Orthodox and Western firstly Catholic, then Protestant as well churches spread their influence, the line between Eastern and Western Christianity was moving. Its movement was affected by the influence of the Byzantine empire and the fluctuating power and influence of the Catholic church in Rome. Beginning in the Middle Ages religious cultural hegemony slowly waned in Europe generally.
This process may have prompted the geographic line of religious division to approximately follow a line of cultural divide. The influential American conservative political scientist , adviser and academic Samuel P. Huntington argued that this cultural division still existed during the Cold War as the approximate Western boundary of those countries that were allied with the Soviet Union. The crowning of the Emperor by the Pope led to the assumption that the highest power was the papal hierarchy , quintessential Roman Empire's spiritual heritage authority, establishing then, until the Protestant Reformation , the civilization of West Christendom.
Augustine wrote in On True Religion: This was in note of the fact that both Catholic and Orthodox were in use as ecclesiastical adjectives as early as the 2nd and 4th centuries respectively. The situation was a serious threat to the future of the Eastern Orthodox Byzantine Empire. The Emperor sent a plea to the Pope in Rome to send military aid to restore the lost territories to Christian rule.
The result was a series of western European military campaigns into the eastern Mediterranean, known as the Crusades. Unfortunately for the Byzantines, the crusaders belonging to the members of high aristocracy from France, western Germany, the Low countries, and Italy had no allegiance to the Byzantine Emperor and established their own states in the conquered regions, including the heart of the Byzantine Empire.
It had evolved from an anti-Western riot in broke out in Constantinople and targeting Latins, the extremely wealthy after previous Crusades Venetians in particular, into a successful attempt to maintain control over the coast of Catholic present-day Croatia specifically the Dalmatia , region of interest to maritime medieval Venetian Republic moneylenders and its rivals, such as the Republic of Genoa rebelling against the Venetian economical domination.
The Papal Inquisition is established in AD on a permanent basis, run largely by clergymen in Rome, [41] and abolished six centuries later; before AD , the Catholic Church suppressed what they believed to be heresy, usually through a system of ecclesiastical proscription or imprisonment, but without using torture, [42] and seldom resorting to executions. This much profitable Central European Fourth Crusade had prompted 14th century Renaissance translated as 'Rebirth' of Italian city-states including Papal States , ushering the following Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation which established the Roman Inquisition after the Medieval Inquisition of the s by discovery of the American continent, and consequent dissolution of West Christendom as even a theoretical unitary political body, later resulting in the religious Eighty Years War and Thirty Years War between various Protestant and Catholic states of the Holy Roman Empire and emergence of religiously diverse confessions.
Perspectives from the Past
In this context, the Protestant Reformation may be viewed as a schism within the Catholic Church. German monk Martin Luther , in the wake of precursors, broke with the pope and with the emperor by the Catholic Church's abusive commercialization of indulgences in the Late Medieval Period , backed by many of the German princes and helped by the development of the printing press in an attempt to reform corruption within the church.
Both these religious wars ended by the Peace of Westphalia , which enshrined the concept of the nation-state , and the principle of absolute national sovereignty in international law. As European influence spread across the globe, these Westphalian principles , especially the concept of sovereign states, became central to international law and to the prevailing world order.
Later concepts of a world of nation-states born by the Peace of Westphalia in , coupled with the ideologies of the Enlightenment, the coming of modernity , the Scientific Revolution [51] and the Industrial Revolution , [52] would produce powerful social transformations, political and economic institutions that have come to influence or been imposed upon most nations of the world today.
Historians agree that the Industrial Revolution has been one of the most important events in history. This process of influence and imposition began with the voyages of discovery , colonization, conquest, and exploitation of Portugal enforced as well by papal bulls in s by the fall of the Byzantine Empire , granting Portugal navigation, war and trade monopoly for any newly discovered lands, [54] and competing Spanish navigators.
It continued with the rise of the Dutch East India Company by the destabilising Spanish discovery of the New World , and the creation and expansion of the English and French colonial empires, and others. Due to the reach of these empires, Western institutions expanded throughout the world. Even after demands for self-determination from subject peoples within Western empires were met with decolonization , these institutions persisted.
One specific example was the requirement that post-colonial societies were made to form nation-states in the Western tradition , which often created arbitrary boundaries and borders that did not necessarily represent a whole nation, people, or culture, and are often the cause of international conflicts and friction even to this day.
Although not part of Western colonization process proper, following the Middle Ages Western culture in fact entered other global-spanning cultures during the colonial 15thth centuries. With the discovery of the American continent, the New World in , the European colonial Age of Discovery and exploration was born revisiting an imperialistic view accompanied by the invention of firearms , while marking the start of the Modern Era.
During this long period the Catholic Church had inaugurated a major effort to spread Christianity in the New World and to convert the Native Americans and others, by a 'Modern West' emerging from Late Middle Ages after the Renaissance and fall of Constantinople as a new civilization greatly influenced by the interpretation of Greek thought preserved in the Byzantine Empire, and transmitted from there by Latin translations and emigration of Greek scholars through Renaissance humanism popular typefaces such as italics were inspired and designed from transcriptions during this period.
By Renaissance architectural works, revivals of Classical and Gothic styles flourished during this modern period throughout Western colonial empires , with the former embodying Roman Catholic Church and republican values while the latter having more conservative and Protestant Church connotations. In the 13th and 14th centuries, a number of European travelers, many of them Christian missionaries , had sought to cultivate trading with Asia and Africa.
By start of the Crusades and relative contraction of Orthodox Byzantine 's large silk industry in favour of Catholic Western European and rise of Western Papacy , most famous of these merchant travelers after the East-West trade was Venetian Marco Polo. But these journeys had little permanent effect on the East-West trade because of a series of political developments in Asia in the last decades of the 14th century, which put an end to further European exploration of Asia: Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turks consolidated control over the eastern Mediterranean , closing off key overland trade routes.
The Portuguese spearheaded the drive to find oceanic routes that would provide cheaper and easier access to South and East Asian goods, by advancements in maritime technology such as the caravel ship introduced in the mids. This chartering of oceanic routes between East and West began with the unprecedented voyages of Portuguese and Spanish sea captains, and would eventually expand across the globe initiating European colonialism by Hispano - Italian exploring voyage by merchant, navigator, and colonizer Christopher Columbus.
These voyages were influenced by medieval European adventurers after the European spice trade with Asia, who had journeyed overland to the Far East contributing to geographical knowledge of parts of the Asian continent upon their return, and are of enormous significance in Western history as they marked the beginning of the European exploration, colonization and exploitation of the American continents and that of their native inhabitants.
Until the abolition of its slave trade in , the British Empire alone which had started colonial efforts in , almost a century after Portuguese and Spanish empires was responsible for the transportation of 3. In earlyth century the systematic urbanisation process migration from villages in search of jobs to places where factories were set up had began, and the concentration of labour into factories led to the rise in the population of the towns particularly world population had been rising as well, it is estimated it reached one billion for the first time in , [59] while the new philosophical movement later known as Romanticism originated after the previous Reason of the s and Enlightenment of s, that enabled 19th century Western world' s sustained economic development.
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List of largest church buildings. List of Catholic basilicas. Before the urbanisation and industrialization of the s, demand for oriental goods such as porcelain , silk , spices and tea remained the driving force behind European imperialism in Asia, and with the important exception of British East India Company rule in India the European stake in Asia remained confined largely to trading stations and strategic outposts necessary to protect trade.
Between the s and so-called Beautiful Era , socioeconomically optimistic and innovative decades by the Second Industrial Revolution , the established colonial powers in Asia United Kingdom, France, Netherlands added to their empires also vast expanses of territory in the Indian Subcontinent and South East Asia.
Japan was involved primarily in the so-called Meiji period — , though earlier contact with the Portuguese, the Spaniards and the Dutch were also present in the recognition of European nations as strategically important to the Japanese Empire. The traditional Japanese society was virtually overturned into an industrial and militarist power like Western countries such as the United Kingdom , the French Third Republic , and similarly to the German Empire , the Russian Empire , and the United States , following the Spanish—American War in , quickly emerged as new imperial powers in East Asia and in the Pacific Ocean area.