{"id":37451,"date":"2018-09-07T07:06:16","date_gmt":"2018-09-07T12:06:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=37451"},"modified":"2018-09-07T07:06:16","modified_gmt":"2018-09-07T12:06:16","slug":"western-civilization-101","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=37451","title":{"rendered":"Western Civilization 101"},"content":{"rendered":"

Western Civilization 101<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

Notwithstanding the fears of Samuel Huntington and the more overtly violent demonstrations of self-described Western chauvinists such as the Proud Boys, the term \u201cWestern Civilization\u201d is of only relatively recent creation. Advanced following the First World War, the concept, along with other inventions such as \u201cGreat Books\u201d series, was designed to uphold the merit of a project that had just culminated in an unprecedented industrial bloodbath. That the idea was promulgated merely decades before an even larger industrial bloodbath suggests that its promoters ought to have taken a humbler approach in their attempt to salvage, in fact construct, Western European history. After all, insofar as it even constitutes a coherent and quantifiable entity, Western Civilization advanced not because of any intrinsic superiority but because of fortuitous geographic circumstances and no small portion of simple freak luck.<\/p>\n

It has been noted that if an informed observer had been standing atop the world in 1500 CE and was asked to predict which power \u2013 among Western Europe, the Ottoman Empire, China, Japan, India, or Russia \u2014 would become dominant over the following centuries, it would have been unlikely that he or she would have chosen what had until recently been the Western European backwater. It would have been far more sensible to instead opt for, say, Ming China or the Ottoman Empire, which was in possession of Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Greece, and Hungary and continually menaced, and periodically invaded, lands further west.<\/p>\n

Yet, as we know, Western Europe did become dominant over the next four centuries \u2014 though not necessarily evenly or without setbacks; the so-called Sick Man of Europe defeated Britain in battle as late as 1916. Nevertheless, by WWI, Europe directly or indirectly controlled a full eighty percent of the world\u2019s landmass, an unprecedented degree of global domination. So how do we explain this extraordinary growth?<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Western Civilization 101 Notwithstanding the fears of Samuel Huntington and the more overtly violent demonstrations of self-described Western chauvinists such as the Proud Boys, the term \u201cWestern Civilization\u201d is of only relatively recent creation. Advanced following the First World War, the concept, along with other inventions such as \u201cGreat Books\u201d series, was designed to uphold […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[139,5493,21554,10643,4756,4392],"class_list":["post-37451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-civilization","tag-counterpunch","tag-joshua-sperber","tag-samuel-huntington","tag-western-civilization","tag-western-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37451"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37452,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37451\/revisions\/37452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}