How old is western culture

Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization, Western lifestyle or European civilization, is a term used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, belief systems, political systems, and specific artifacts and technologies that have some origin or association with Europe.

The term has come to apply to countries whose history is strongly marked by European immigration, such as the countries of the Americas and Australasia, and is not restricted to the continent of Europe.

Western culture is characterized by a host of artistic, philosophic, literary, and legal themes and traditions; the heritage of Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Jewish, Slavic, Latin, and other ethnic and linguistic groups, as well as Christianity, which played an important part in the shaping of Western civilization since at least the 4th century.

Also contributing to Western thought, in ancient times and then in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance onwards, a tradition of rationalism in various spheres of life, developed by Hellenistic philosophy, Scholasticism, humanism, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.

Values of Western culture have, throughout history, been derived from political thought, widespread employment of rational argument favouring freethought, assimilation of human rights, the need for equality, and democracy.

Western culture continued to develop with Christianization during the Middle Ages, the reform and modernization triggered by the Renaissance, and with globalization by successive European empires, that spread European ways of life and European educational methods around the world between the 16th and 20th centuries. European culture developed with a complex range of philosophy, medieval scholasticism and mysticism, and Christian and secular humanism.

Rational thinking developed through a long age of change and formation, with the experiments of the Enlightenment, and breakthroughs in the sciences. With its global connection, European culture grew with an all-inclusive urge to adopt, adapt, and ultimately influence other cultural trends around the world.

He noticed that while, in nature, some prey always survive to keep the cycle going, some societies that collapsed, such as the Maya, the Minoans and the Hittites, never recovered. To find out why, he first modelled human populations as if they were predators and natural resources were prey. This showed that either extreme inequality or resource depletion could push a society to collapse, but collapse is irreversible only when the two coincide.

The West might already be living on borrowed time. The gap between rich and poor is growing, seeding unrest. He sees the worst-case scenario as a rupture in fossil fuel availability, causing food and water supplies to fail and millions to die within a few weeks. That sounds disastrous.

But not everyone agrees that the boom-and-bust model applies to modern society. It might have worked when societies were smaller and more isolated, critics say, but now?

Can we really imagine the US dissolving in an internal war that would leave no one standing? Plus, globalisation makes us robust, right? This comes back to what we mean by collapse. By this criterion, even very advanced societies have collapsed irreversibly and the West could too. For that reason, many researchers avoid the word collapse, and talk instead about a rapid loss of complexity. When the Roman Empire broke up, new societies emerged, but their hierarchies, cultures and economies were less sophisticated, and people lived shorter, unhealthier lives.

On the other hand, some people, such as Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Massachusetts, see this kind of global change as a shift up in complexity, with highly centralised structures such as national governments giving way to less centralised, overarching networks of control.

Some scientists, Bar-Yam included, are even predicting a future where the nation state gives way to fuzzy borders and global networks of interlocking organisations, with our cultural identity split between our immediate locality and global regulatory bodies. However things pan out, almost nobody thinks the outlook for the West is good. So, can we do anything to soften the blow? Turchin says that by manipulating the forces that fuel the cycles, by, for example, introducing more progressive taxes to address income equality and the exploding public debt, it might be possible to avert disaster.

And Motesharrei thinks we should rein in population growth to levels his model indicates are sustainable. These exact levels vary over time, depending on how many resources are left and how sustainably — or otherwise — we use them. New psychology research may help to explain why that is the case.

Cognitive scientists recognise two broad modes of thought — a fast, automatic, relatively inflexible mode, and a slower, more analytical, flexible one.

Each has its uses, depending on the context, and their relative frequency in a population has long been assumed to be stable. It is also during this period that the Scientific Revolution began and observation replaced religious doctrine as the source of our understanding of the universe and our place in it. Copernicus up-ended the ancient Greek model of the heavens by suggesting that the sun was at the center of the solar system and that the planets orbited in circles around it.

However, there were still problems with getting this theory to match observation. At the beginning of the 17th century, Kepler theorized correctly! So much for the ideal geometries of the Greeks! Art historians study the Baroque style of the seventeenth century. It was a time when nations grew in size, wealth and autonomy and when national boundaries were hardened, prefiguring the countries we know today France, Spain and England for example.

The s is often called the Enlightenment. In many ways, it furthers the interest in the individual seen in the Italian Renaissance and more widely during the Protestant Reformation. Thinkers such as Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot asserted our ability to reason for ourselves instead of relying on the teachings of established institutions, such as the Church.

In art history we study the Rococo and Neoclassical styles. The American and French Revolutions date to this period. The emerging middle classes and later the working-classes began a centuries-long campaign to gain political power, challenging the control of the aristocracy and monarchy. Successive reform movements in this period and the nineteenth century and revolutions gradually extended the franchise the right to vote. Previously suffrage had been limited to males who owned land or who paid a certain amount in taxes.

It was only in the second half of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries that universal suffrage became the norm in Europe and North America. Capitalism became the dominant economic system during this period though it had its roots in the Renaissance.

Individuals risked capital to produce goods in a currency-based market which depended on inexpensive, waged labor. Labor eventually organized into unions latter-day guilds and in this way, asserted considerable influence. More broadly shared political power was bolstered by overall increases in the standard of living and the first experiments in public education.

Steam-powered machines and unskilled laborers in factories began to replace skilled artisans. London, Paris, and New York led the unprecedented population growth of cities during this period, as people moved from the countryside or emigrated to find a higher standard of living. The twentieth century was the most violent in history. It included two world wars, the Cold War, the dismantling of colonialism and the invention of the Totalitarian state. At the same time, the twentieth century was marked by the struggle for human rights and the rise of global capitalism.

Where artists had previously worked under the instructions of wealthy patrons associated with the church or state, in this period, art became part of the market economy, and art itself came to be seen as personal self-expression.

The high value placed on the individual, which emerged in ancient Greece and Rome and then again in the Renaissance, became the primary value of Western culture. Where artistic styles for example, Baroque had once covered numerous artists working over broad regions and periods of time, in the late nineteenth and through the twentieth century, successive styles of art change with increasing speed and fracture into a kaleidoscope of individual artistic practices.

We are immersed in our own time and it can be difficult to see the world around us objectively. One of the modern definitions of an artist, in fact, is someone who is particularly insightful about their own cultural moment. Thanks to global capitalism, social media and the internet, we are more interconnected and interdependent than at any other time in history.

Some see this as a utopian moment. With internet access, we can all contribute to and benefit from what is being called the Information Revolution.