Western culture - Encyclopedia

For this article's equivalent regarding the East, see Eastern culture

Western culture refers to the culture that has developed in the Western world. It comprises the heritage of norms, values, customs and sometimes artifacts that the cultures of the Western world share. A Western culture refers to one of the many cultures in the Western world.

The term ‘Western’ may be used as a contrast to Communist countries, to Daoist Asian countries, to Islamic nations, or to developing Third World countries. Various uses of the concept of ‘Western’ Culture have included, rightly or wrongly, critiques of American culture, Materialism, industrialism, capitalism, commercialism, Sexual hedonism, Imperialism, Modernism, or the teaching of Western civilization.

The concept of Western culture is generally linked to the classical definition of Western world. In this definition, Western culture is the set of literary, scientific, musical, philosophical and other traditions from Western Europe and countries whose history is strongly marked by Western European immigration or settlement. Much of this set of traditions is collected in the Western canon.

One could argue about the question if South Africa is a Western or Westernised country. Focusing on people, it is clear that part of the South African population is Western and part is not. An increasing number of countries and societies with a predominant Western culture have one or more significant minorities who practice a non-Western culture, either as native people (e.g. Brazil, parts of Australia or the United States) or by immigration (e.g. the US and most of Western Europe).

The origins of Western Culture are often cited as ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, and Catholic and Protestant Christianity, and as such, some describe it as "Judeo-Christian culture." However, its source also lies prominently in the Germanic, Slavic and Celtic popular cultures that took part in the formation of the culture of medieval Europe.

Western culture has developed a plethora of literary, musical, philosophical, religious, and other traditions. Important traditions were:

• Scholasticism
• Roman Catholicism
• Protestantism
• Humanism
• Renaissance
• Age of Enlightenment
• Secularisation
• Scientific method

The ancient Greek conception of science, philosophy, democracy, architecture, literature, and art provided a foundation embraced and built upon by the Roman Empire as it swept up Greece in its conquests in the 1st century BC.

For five hundred years, the Roman Empire spread the Greek and Latin languages and Roman law across Europe, although it rejected the democratic concepts pioneered in ancient Greece. Roman culture mixed with Germanic, Slavic cultures, and Celtic culture but, after the fall of Rome, much Greco-Roman art, literature, and science were lost or displaced.

With the rise of Roman Catholic Christianity, the Bible became the central piece of Western literature, affecting to some extent all fields within Western culture: art, law, philosophy, education, and politics. The Roman Catholic Church founded many seminaries, which grew into today's universities and colleges, and actively encouraged the spreading of Christianity, which help spread early Western culture in general. Owing to the influence of Arab culture—a culture that had preserved the knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome—in Moorish Spain and in the Levant during the Crusades, Western Europe rediscovered its Greek heritage in the 1300s, and the Renaissance was born.

Renaissance Western culture was spread to the New World and beyond in the 1500s by explorers, colonists, traders, and missionaries. The Enlightenment of the 1700s, in turn, culminated in the American Revolution and the French Revolution. The ideas of civil rights, equality before the law, procedural justice, and democracy as the ideal form of society, were put into practice for the first time. Today, those principles form the basis of modern Western culture.

In the 1800s, the United States began to assert itself in Western culture and, by the early 1900s, had become the dominant influence, flooding the rest of the Western world and beyond with American fashion, entertainment, technology, and politics. Today in the Western world, Socratic philosophy mixes with Shakespeare's language, Levi Strauss fashion, Henry Ford industry, Thomas Edison innovation, and Bill Gates technology to present BBC news and Hollywood entertainment.

It can be said that elements of Western culture have had a very influential role on other cultures worldwide. People of many cultures, both Western and non-Western, equate "modernization" with "westernization," but many non-westerners object to the implication that all societies should adopt western ideas and values. Some members of more radical-thinking communities in the non-Western world have suggested that this potential link is a reason why much of "modernity" should be rejected as intrinsically Western and thus incompatible with their vision of their societies.

What is generally uncontested, is that much of the technology and social patterns which make up what is typically defined as "modernization" (e.g. steam engines, internal combustion engines, the scientific method, and others) were developed in the Western world. Whether these technological and social forms are intrinsically part of Western culture, is more difficult to answer. Many would argue that the question cannot be answered by a response from positivistic science and instead is a "value" question which must be answered from a value system (e.g. philosophy, religion, political doctrine). Nonetheless, much of anthropology today has shown the close links between the physical environment and daily activities and the formation of a culture (the findings of cultural ecology, among others). Therefore, the impact of "modernization" and "modern" technology may not merely be "scientific" (that is, physical) but may possibly be closely linked with a certain culture, that of the West, such that without such technology, Western culture today would have been dramatically different from how it is known in actual historical and contemporary times.

Because of its nature as the foundation of the culture, the art, literature, and history of Western countries have dominated school curriculums in the Americas and Europe almost exclusively. Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1990s, a new cultural awareness called multiculturalism in the U.S. and elsewhere began to encourage the study of African and Eastern culture, history, and art.

Aside from food, literature, art, music, religion, and politics, many aspects of Western culture differ from other cultures around the world.

• A strong appreciation for innovation and a belief in in progress
• A strong sense of personal privacy and civil rights
• A somewhat casual attitude toward sex and permanent monogamy
• A weak sense of personal honor or shame that rarely leads to dutiful suicide or honor killings
• A strong sense that political corruption is economically inefficient
• Tolerance of other cultures
• A focus on youth and nuclear family, as opposed to extended family
• The commode flush toilet and toilet paper instead of the squat toilet or pit toilet
• Strong building codes

• "I think it would be a good idea." - Response to "What is your opinion of Western civilisation?", a quotation popularly attributed to Mahatma Gandhi.

• Globalization
• Max Weber
• Western World
• Collectivist and individualist cultures
• Western Culture (album) (Henry Cow avante-garde rock album)

Categories: Western culture | Culture by region | Classical studies | Cultural anthropology | Sociology

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Western culture", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page