Talk:Western culture

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Wikipedia elevating Huntington's dated and lowly-regarded map

Why is Samuel Huntington's map being given such prominence by Wikipedia at the top of this page ? He's generally not well-regarded by international relations experts, either in his conclusions or in his methodology. Not only that, but his supposedly 'epochal' map is rooted in and dated by a very specific historical time and place. Writing almost thirty years ago, he saw the Yugoslavian war as being the barometer of allegiances in Europe, for instance. He probably expected that ex-communist South Eastern European countries would not join the EU, as they did. This is highly dated and very specifically of its time, and should not be at the top of the page.

Jeremiad469 (talk) 01:44, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

It also very clearly contradicts the first sentence of the section. I have removed it, just for the moment, pending any convincing refutation of these points, or particular reason to keep.

Jeremiad469 (talk) 01:53, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

The map of Huntington and his ideas on which it is based, although not politically correct from modern-day point of view, are not only one of the most cited political prognoses ever written by an international politics researcher, but also one of the most discussed. Jingiby (talk) 05:02, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

I don't mind the map. As the user above said, it may not be "politically correct" from a modern point of view, but it is heavily discussed and cited. And it's not like the map has been free of criticism (this has been discussed in other talk pages). Plus, I think the map accurately depicts just how complex and arbitrary the definition of the "Western world" can be.

Look at the Philippines. The country sticks like out like a sore thumb in contrast to their neighbours, and Samuel Huntington's map labels much of the country as being "Western". They're about 92% Christian (sources vary, but I found one which claimed that about 86% was Catholic and the other 6% were other Christian followings),[1], and they have a lot of European and later American influence due to colonization/occupation. Such as many in the Philippines having European surnames, English is one of the official languages, and they're seemingly one of the few Asian countries who primarily use the Month-Day-Year format as opposed to mainly using the Day-Month-Year or Year-Month-Day format found in many neighbouring countries. Presumably because of the United States. They seem pretty "Western" to me. Though there are other people who would argue otherwise. Just like people who would argue that Latin America should be part of the "Western world" as well and others who feel differently. Clear Looking Glass (talk) 04:45, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Fuller explanation of removal

While I still have a little time, and the topics are still fresh, some thoughts to put some flesh on the bones of the points above.

The most fundamental and simple point, that Huntington has gone from being a lowly regarded thinker many of whose predictions were uncertain, to being simultaneously an academically lowly regarded thinker many of whose predictions have specifically been proven wrong, still stands as a double reason for removing the map, but there are several more detailed points to be made.

The map should be understood in its context. As a scion of the US Cold War foreign policy establishment, Huntington and the institutions he was associated with were very worried by two particular developments at the moment of writing in 1993.

At the end of the Cold War, and the turn of the 1990s, the US, and George Bush Sr's administration in particular, had assumed, roughly, a unipolar liberal democratic order with the US as the head and exemplar - pace Fukuyama.

Instead, the US foreign policy establishment was suddenly faced with two very nasty surprises, for a group of people for whom great-power and balance-of-power theories were lifeblood ; Yugoslavia had suddenly descended into war, apparently entirely on religious-historical grounds , and simultaneously the US was suddenly becoming more aware of strategic errors it had made in the Middle East during the Cold War. At the time Huntington first started the article, in 1993 , the Serbo-Croat conflict, dating in reality as much to European strategic realpolitik of pre-World War I as to religious differences it capitalised on, had just spiralled further out of control, to take in a disastrous Christian-Muslim clash in Bosnia, which would go on to spread out further to Kosovo. American officials and policymakers, as well a broad mass of more radical post-modern thinkers at the time generally, believed they had underestimated the power of religion after the fall of communist ideology in Europe. Considering Russia's position in this, the most urgent strategic corollary and lesson, for the US in Europe at least, seemed to be that Russia may have been at the start of a process of pulling the Orthodox world back into its orbit , *despite* the end of communism.

At exactly the same time, in the wake of the defeat of the Communist government in Afghanistan partly by US-backed islamists, the Peshawar cross-community accords had just failed, and Islamists had just emerged as a distinct force in what had been previously been considered mainly a central theatre of the Cold War since the Russian invasion. The US foreign policy establishment was shocked by its errors in failing to predict the long-term consequences of supporting islamist forces against communism, as well as at other times against various secular-left and republican forces in other parts of the Middle East. This was relevant to the US position not only in Afghanistan, but crucially with Saudi Arabia, both as a monarchy and a conduit to Islamist influence all over the Sunni world at least. In the period Huntington was finishing the book three years later, thousands of people had been killed in Bosnia and the Taliban were about to take Kabul.

Part of the point so far is that there's no reason his thesis should not be understood as much, if not more, as an urgent manual for how a disorientated superpower should think in the world, at a particular time and place, and by a particular foreign policy functionary of 30 years - than any disinterested external academic analysis.

The framework was widely challenged and even mocked outside state-sponsored academic circles in the US in the mid-1990s, until one event revived it - September 11. Afghanistan, and the general rise of Islamism, had been major US foreign policy worries in 1993 when Huntington wrote his first article, and suddenly a Saudi islamist had launched a catastrophically destructive attack on US soil, from Afghanistan. There were plenty of US officials and policymakers who believed that not only the central concept of Huntington's prediction of a civilisational clash, but also the delineations of it, had been proven right. This also went on to inform George Bush Jr's actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. A number of neoconservatives believed that they were first bowing to the inevitable in his clash of civilisations, but then could also overcome this process by re-imposing the unipolar liberal democratic order, which transcended cultural boundaries, as a result of the conflict. This might have been a type of Hegelian thinking you could expect from previously Marxist thinkers.

To move back to Huntington, what has happened since then is the story of the gradual unravelling of various parts of his thesis.

For instance and to begin with, in his hierarchy of existential conflict, Huntington said that Muslim-Christian conflict would be a dominant organising principle, not intra-religious conflict. Because of the US invading Iraq and deposing a Sunni dictator, by the 2010s Iran had developed a sphere of influence stretching from the border with Afghanistan to Irag and Syria, through to Lebanon on the Mediterranean coast. This bloc then formed one half of the supply network for the catastrophic conflict in Syria and Yemen against the Sunni Muslim world, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people, with Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and also Turkey going on to champion the other side. The conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran in particular is genuinely perceived by both sides as an existential fight for civilisational survival, which explains the ferocity of the conflict still going on in Yemen. In this conflict, Saudi Arabia not only cleaves closer to the West, but even Israel, than fellow Muslims, and Iran not only cleaves closer, but actually depends for its survival on the supposedly civilisationally and axiomatically opposed, according to Huntington's thesis, powers of Orthodox Russia and "Sinic" China.

If you move over to Europe, you're immediately struck again at how much Huntington's thesis has gone wrong. Because he was writing at the peak of the Yugoslav war for instance, he clearly imagined that Russia was at the start of exerting an ever-greater pull-factor in South-Eastern Europe by virtue of religion. Instead, not only have Bulgaria and Romania joined Nato and the EU, but now North Macedonia, Albania and even Montenegro are NATO members, too. Looking further afield, instead of feeling the inexorable pull of Russia, as in Huntington's model, Greece, as the only non ex-communist country Huntington characterised as part of the Eastern-Orthodox bloc, has clearly opted to bind itself into the Eurozone and the core of the mediterranean and north-west european EU, actually at any cost. In the process, during the Eurozone crisis, it also became even more obvious that the political economy and political culture of Greece, as by way of example a country with a strong grassroots and anarchist left, high regulation and a large public sector, had more in common, in a number of key respects, with Spain and Portugal, than its immediate neighbours. Without this, the Left mediterranean ( or Euro-atlantic, in the case of Portugal) parties of those countries would not have made, or been able to make, common cause against the EU north-western centre during the height of the Eurozone crisis, in the way they did. Cultural patterns related to this were already so obvious before the crisis, that Nicolas Sarkozy, with France itself in the conflicted position at the EU north-western centre but also as a Mediterranean nation sharing some of the characteristics, had attempted to found a "Mediterranean Union" around 2007-8, running along Spain, France, Italy and Greece, with Turkey and countries in North Africa on the balance of probability to be made next-tier members, on the strength of differences in their political and institutional set-up. This was actually an embryonic EU on a different geo-cultural basis, to be helped into being by French administrators once again. Instead, the real EU paid the ultimate tribute to it, and to how threateningly plausible the cultural substance of it actually was, by being extremely careful to knock it entirely on the head, and carefully broadened it into the essentially meaningless advisory talking shop of the "Union for the Mediterranean" , which has ended up having little influence, by including all of the EU and large parts of North Africa and the middle east.

It's too exhaustive to outline every area, but now let's have a look at South-East Asia. There are again clearly either major methodological errors, outdated research on the ground, or more probably both. When Huntington began writing in 1993, China was still an emergent middle-ranking power, not a superpower, and India was only recently emerging from a politically non-aligned status with the West - as well as negligible spheres of economic and political influence. India has now entirely moved away from a non-aligned position, but is also in simultaneous increasing conflict with China. Looking further around again, the idea that Myanmar is not now more heavily in the 'Sinic' sphere of influence than the "Buddhist Bloc" Huntington instinctively puts it in would be considered odd by many analysts today. This is because China has outgrown the political, economic and cultural role Huntington put it in.

Finally, let's have a look at Latin America. Huntington's thesis, that the entirety of Latin America is non "Western", is strikingly less nuanced, more broadbrush, and immediately more odd than for any other continent. This is probably why it was one of the most immediately questioned, contested and even ridiculed when it first came out. Chomsky's thoughts on it are useful, because they relate to points made earlier. Taking into account Huntington's personal and historical background, his account could easily be described as reflecting the history and justifications of US foreign policy, and a mandate for more in the future ; or a mandate "for the US to interfere or invade as often, or over as large an area as possible", as I think Chomsky more straightforwardly put it.

It's mentioned above, but it bears repeating : Huntington was not some random disinterested academic observer. He was an absolute stalwart of US Cold War total-realpolitik, who had been so obsessive about winning against Vietnam in 1968 for geo-strategic reasons, for instance, that he suggested deporting the entire Vietnamese population to the countryside if it was necessary to win the conflict, but without any of the underlying moral or cultural anger of later conservative strategists. He influenced ultra-realpolitik in the region throughout the '70s, which by the turn of the 1980s had culminated in one of the most astonishing moves in the history of US foreign policy, with both Reagan ( and Thatcher) ending up covertly supporting the genocidal Marxist-Leninist party of Pol Pot in exile purely on the grounds of Vietnamese policy. The point here, is that Huntington was almost as pragmatically opportunistic, rather than culturally driven, a thinker as you could possibly imagine, but here was giving a cultural analysis simply because it seemed contingent at the particular time, and was also influenced by post-modern trends of that time .

If you work from this starting-point, it's quite hard to discount anyone saying that there are good personal, professional-historical or bureaucratic reasons to be most suspicious of all of Huntington's Latin American continental characterisation, which is also the most immediately unorthodox and blanket continental characterisation of all of them. Purely because of geographical proximity, the US intervened more directly, widely and almost uniformly, and over a longer period of time, across the whole of the Latin American continent than anywhere else in the world.

An objection to all this might run : "OK, there a few errors here and there, but aren't the rough contours of the characterisation "roughly about right" ? Doesn't someone in Scotland still have more in common with someone in Germany than in Saudi Arabia ? Haven't we seen Christian-Muslim conflict" ?

The problem is that Huntington's analysis is *not* a quantitative analysis of trends, charting the balance of historical and cultural push-and-pull factors in certain places, a spectrum of more-or-less : it's qualitative and deterministic. All countries are fundamentally bound by the same equivalent historical forces, to organise themselves into the same equivalent historical groups, to fight their most existential and defining conflicts. If some of this doesn't work, none of it works. Jeremiad469 (talk) 15:45, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Latin American inclusion

There are at least 4 references stating that Latin America, and Mexico as an extension (which is a NORTH AMERICAN country), are part of the West and Western culture. Why are they being deleted? This isn’t about what you like or dislike, this is about FACTS. The references build on each other these facts 1) Mexico is in North America, 2) North America is part of the Western world, and according to Webster’s dictionary, “Noun 1. Western civilization - the modern culture of western Europe and North America.” 3) Mexico is in Latin America 4) Latin America’s literature is stated by the Encyclopedia Britannica to be a Western Literature and listed as such along with others, including “European literature” and “Scandinavian literature”, etc. 4) Latin America is indeed part of the Western world: redirected from Western World is the definition for ‘Occident’, which means “The countries of Europe and the Western Hemisphere”. ll CMD007 (talk) 01:54, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

I thought this debate had been settled a long time - just like it did on the Western world article. Latin America can be considered part of the Western world and culture, and it can also be considered closely related/intertwined yet distinct. Both views are valid. That's why the map in the Western world got so much support: because it translates this inclusivity and complexity well. Morgengave (talk) 06:03, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

I'd also add the Philippines as another example of being in a "unique position" as well. If I'm not mistaken, the map, (I assume you're talking about Samuel Huntington's map) mostly labels the Philippines as being "Western", though I'm sure you can make a case for them being Western or not. In a stark contrast to the other neighbouring countries they're overwhelmingly Christian at about 92% and you can see the influence from European colonization and later American colonization/occupation throughout the country. Such as many Filipinos possessing European surnames and English being one of the official languages there. But as I mentioned, there are other reasons one can make for them not being "Western". As the above user said, the map shows the complexity behind the meaning of the "Western world". I think its fine the way it is. Clear Looking Glass (talk) 04:57, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

User talk:Clear Looking Glass, The Philippines is not in the same position as Latin American countries, as most of its people are not racially/ethnically European-descended. It fits in more with places that have been European territories such as Equatorial Guinea. European names were given to Filipinos for tax reasons, while the overwhelming majority of Latin Americans bear surnames from their European ancestors. CMD007 (talk) 03:12, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

Actually, Latin America is culturally more related to Europe than the US has ever been, so it is weird to see the creators of the article talking about Football, music, cuisine and Catholicism and, at the same time, considering the US being part of it instead of Latin America. --†_JuanPa_† (talk) 20:13, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

References

"Latin civilisation" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Latin civilisation. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 October 10#Latin civilisation until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 16:03, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Dubious

I have issue with the terminology section. Not only can it be written better but the statements are questionable. I removed one of the sources because when I read it it was to an entire chapter being referenced about the Corpus Juris Civilis and nothing to do with the Byzantine empire being considered "not west" due to Iran and Arab influences, so I tagged it as a dubious claim. I also added a citation needed tag for an earlier part of the sentence on the claim that most scholars consider the Byzantine Empire not western. Apologies if I should have discussed here first but it's just so badly written that I feel the entire section needs a review. Elias (talk) 07:32, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

Terminology

This article does not have information concerning the use of the term 'western civilization'.

There needs to be information on the widespread usage of the term western civilization that is understood separately form the concept of western civilization. For example, the article on Christendom states in its Terminology section 'The Anglo-Saxon term crīstendōm appears to have been invented in the 9th century by a scribe somewhere in southern England'.

If information is available there should be text explaining whether the ancient Romans and Greeks commonly used the term 'western civilization' in ancient times.

Was there gradual or intermittent usage of the term 'western civilization' or was this term absent during dark ages, middle ages and medieval times?

Does the term western civilization only originate as a modern analytical term and then became a common term in modern times?

Information on all of these matters should be sought. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.13.17.237 (talk) 10:21, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Requested move 13 March 2022

Western culture → Western civilization – More WP:PRECISE and WP:CONCISE. Probably the same applies for Eastern Culture, but there is already an open move request and I can not open a second one while the first isn't closed. Schleiz (talk) 15:11, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose. While often used interchangeably, the term "civilization" is not exactly value-free but has additional Non-neutral POV connotations (e.g. civilization vs. barbarism). Given that ambiguity, I'd opt to retain the article at the current title. Walrasiad (talk) 15:38, 13 March 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose "Western civilization" evolved from Graeco-Roman roots, while "Western culture" evolved from Sumerian/Babylonian and Egyptian roots (see astrology, constellations, 360-degree circle, base-60 time, etc) This article covers in the lede, that base in Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean world. While "Western society" is what evolved in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, that gradually included the Christian Orthodox and Slavic world. -- 65.92.246.142 (talk) 21:43, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose per Walrasiad's comment. When I think of the word "civilisation", I think of people who mean to talk about "urbanised societies", albeit with additional connotations (think of urbanised "civilised" countries like the ones in Western Europe versus the supposedly "uncivilised" or non-urban societies present in most of the post-colonial world).

‍ ‍ elias. 🧣 ‍ ‍ ^{💬reach out to me}
_{📝see my work} 00:28, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

Egypt?

No mention of Egypt’s contribution to Western civilization or Greece to begin with? What about Mesopotamia? India? Aztec? China? Christianity itself begun in Bronze Aged Palestine yet no mention of that? Nlivataye (talk) 16:55, 13 March 2022 (UTC)