The Current West and its Origins

Yesterday, I was having a conversation with @Polydectes and others and the discussion drifted to when the “birth of the current West” happened and why it happened at that time. I mentioned that since there are a variety of different views on the subject I thought it would make for an interesting discussion thread, so here we are.

Certainly, we could take a look at how historians have typically broken up the timeline of history into its component pieces for convenience's sake, but as any of them could tell you such distinctions aren’t so clear cut. Thus, we could make quick work of this question and say “At the beginning of the Early Modern Era!”, which is somewhere around the beginning of the 16th Century. However, the Early Modern Era was an extension of the periods that occurred before it, most notably the Renaissance, which to make matters more complicated, is considered by many to be the culmination of the Middle Ages.

Of course, many of us might argue that the origins of the "current West" began very recently during the Postmodern Era or that we are actually living during the birth of an entirely new Era that many have referred to as the Information Age, amongst other things.

And while I find this question interesting, I think the broader philosophical questions are even more interesting. How do we define the “current West”, and where do we trace its origins? Furthermore, by what metric do we define the “current West” - by its technologies and legal, governmental and social systems and institutions? Or perhaps we need to look deeper, for what is the “current West” but current Westerners? Thus, how do we current Westerners see and define ourselves, and on a human/personal level where can we trace the origins of things such as our contemporary philosophical and religious beliefs and culture?

Personally, when considering the questions of “the birth of the current West”, I’m interested not so much in the when but the what and the how and why, and perhaps most of all, how we view ourselves. Who and what are we?

This is obviously a very broad and complex subject and I’m perfectly content to turn the discussion loose and let it take itself in whatever direction it goes. Obviously, there are no right or wrong answers to these questions, just our own thoughts, observations and opinions.

I’ll weigh-in with my own specific views on this range of subjects later, but in the meantime I yield the floor.

What do you think?

 

It's hard to say anything definitive because it seem to spread out through a lot of different countries

So I would say something unifying among all the different cultures that are considered Western is what to go by.

It seems there is an overarching philosophy but it is hard to pin down.

 

Feel free to just think out loud, if you like.

One thing I found writing the OP is that my thoughts wandered and evolved in various directions while I was writing it, which is why I was kinda thinking aloud myself.

I'm intrigued by the idea that we are in the midst of the birth of a new era ourselves, and I'll explain why this came to me after I return.

 

That "overarching philosophy" was probably Christianity.

 

I'm pondering at the moment what unites the western world currently. And I think it started at the Renaissance but I'm having difficulty mailing it down.

 

I'm not sure that's it. As in the seventh century was largely Christian in Europe. But that was before the Renaissance.

And there were the dark ages.

 

Well I guess that depends on what your definition of "current West" is. I do think Christianity is the building blocks of the West, but if you are trying to find a more recent unifying version, I'm not sure what that would be. The Enlightenment generated tons of new ideas and ways of thinking, but I wouldn't exactly call them a unifying creed or ethos.

 

It certainly is the over-arching philosophy of Western Civilization, with a helping of Classical Greco-Roman on the side.

 

Individualism and Liberalism (in the Classical sense)?

Of course, those were largely products of Christian philosophy, as well. That also happens to be the central theme/argument in Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (the book I recommended to you yesterday).

 

British colonies...

 

I think you're on to something here because I would define one of the major Revelations during the Renaissance was the idea that killing or enacting some gruesome punishment on someone for not obeying Christian was wrong. And that began with the philosophy that I may disagree with you but that's okay and I view that as the fundamental bedrock of liberalism.

I think this moved away from the contemporary Christian view at the time. An anachronistic Christian society was the Puritans and they believe that sin was communal that's why they had to punish people for witchcraft because that meant they were allowing and thus sinning themselves. I'm glad Christianity eventually adopted this idea that your sins are your own. But in the West that started at the Renaissance or just before it.

 

No I don't think British colonies are the overarching continuity. Spain for instance was an empire of its own and was never a colony of Britain. But that is still Western culture same with Germany same with Italy same with Austria and the Nordic regions.

 

What about continental Europe and their colonies in the West?

 

I believe The Enlightenment was the beginning of what we see as "The Modern West". The two major ideas to come from that philosophy are that of individual liberty and reason. Up until this point individuals were not seen as possessing any kind of rights. Your "rights" came from the Monarch who got his authority directly from a divine being. These things could not be questioned. Tied closely to the movement away from the "Divine Right" of Kings was reason. The idea that all that is knowable can be discovered by reason instead of divine edict. No more need for a dogmatic religion to tell you how the world work, all that was needed was the human mind and the freedom of that mind to ask any questions without fear of reprisal.

 

I could be wrong about this......
I am often wrong about lots of things as my third wife can easily verify..... but......

I believe that this verse in the Jewish bible has relevance to this topic.......

https://lifehopeandtruth.com/prophecy/12-tribes-of-israel/israel-and-judah/

YES.... I am guilty......
I suspect that I am partly descended from King Jereboam of Samaria........

and yes..... I feel that because I can see something DAVIDIC within the very flawed and human President Donald J. Trump..... this prepares me for an interesting role as world events take place from 2022 to 2032!


WHO would be the best King David type for Israel? Trump or Harper or other?


?
Who would you choose as Israel's new Moshiach ben Ephrayim?

1. *
   President Donald J. Trump
   1 vote(s)
   100.0%
2. 
   Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper
   0 vote(s)
   0.0%
3. 
   Near death experiencer Rabbi Alon Anava
   0 vote(s)
   0.0%
4. 
   Near death experiencer Howard Storm
   0 vote(s)
   0.0%
5. 
   Near death experiencer Dannion Brinkley
   0 vote(s)
   0.0%
6. 
   CrazyTate / an aspiring possible Elijah / "goat for Azazel" type of role????
   0 vote(s)
   0.0%
7. 
   P. M. Benjamin Netanyahu
   0 vote(s)
   0.0%
8. 
   Rabbi Yeshayahu Julius Hollander
   0 vote(s)
   0.0%
9. 
   other... please be specific in a reply
   0 vote(s)
   0.0%
10. 
    No... .Israel needs a Queen Hadassah / Esther type of person first!!!!!!
    0 vote(s)
    0.0%

Change Your Vote

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/new...per-stands-alone-at-g8-summit/article4263322/

 

It’s interesting you mention this because it took a long time to get to that point, and getting there involved an important event in the early 14th Century that pitted Pope John XXII and the papacy against the Franciscan order (the Order of the Friars Minor). The foremost feature of the OFM, which had been founded by Francis of Assisi, was renouncing property and taking a vow of poverty that followed the example of Jesus and the Apostles (Apostolic Poverty). The popularity of Francis and the large following he attracted, along with the order he founded, created a problem for a papacy that had taken up an extremely lavish and ostentatious residence in Avignon, France. Seeing this, Pope John XXII reversed centuries of Catholic Church policy, denying that Jesus and the Apostles had in renounced property individually and collectively, and declaring the doctrine of Apostolic Poverty heretical. The Pope also renounced ownership of the properties, monasteries, etc., it held for the Franciscans in order to force them to assume and acknowledge ownership. A faction of the OFM rejected the Pope’s edict and its leader, its Minister General Michael of Cesena was summoned to Avignon to defend himself and the rebellious friars. Fortunately for the Minister General, the OFM’s most brilliant member, William of Ockham, was in Avignon to answer for what he had been preaching in England, and he was appointed to defend the Order. A debate then ensued between the Pope and William over whether or not the friars could in fact renounce property and use and consume things (clothes, food, etc.) without assuming ownership. The Pope laid out what he thought was an air-tight argument but he was up against one of the most brilliant logicians in Western History and William wound up refuting the Pope’s argument, and the Order maintained its refusal to recognize and obey the Pope’s edict. Sensing that their lives may be in danger, William of Ockham, Michael of Cesena and their colleagues fled Avignon in the middle of the night and escaped to Bavaria where they were placed under the protection of the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV, who was embroiled in his own dispute with the Pope. They were fortunate in making their escape, because John began began rounding up the friars who disobeyed his edict and burning them at the stake for heresy (if I recall correctly, at least two dozen friars were executed in this horrific and barbaric fashion). Meanwhile from the safety of Munich, William of Ockham carried on his dispute with the Pope, declaring John XXII a heretic, and developed what would become the first rights doctrine in the West. In it he asserted that power was derived from the people, individuals possessed rights such as freedom of thought and speech and that the Church had no authority over the secular State (the basis of the separation of Church and State). William died the year before the Black Death swept through Europe, so the importance of his work wasn’t fully realized till some time later. Today, he is recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the Middle Ages, not to mention one of the most important figures in the development of the individual rights doctrines that exist today. In many respects, William of Ockham was a forerunner of the Modern World, and it’s somewhat astonishing, given his contributions to the West (including the principle of parsimony that bears his name - Ockham’s Razor), that he remains such an obscure figure. He’s also considered by many, including myself, to be one of the great-great grandfathers of libertarianism.

Which is strange given that Jesus placed so much importance on individual agency.

Not only is that consistent with Jesus’ teachings, it was consistent with the Renaissance's emphasis on Man and the individual. When I think of the Renaissance, I think of how people embraced the Ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras’ statement that “Man is the measure of all things”, and this too was a product of philosophical and theological arguments that took place during the High Middle Ages. Once again, William of Ockham was at the center of this because he rejected the idea promoted by Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics that Reason could lead us to an understanding of God. William and the Nominalists rejected that idea, arguing that our faculty of Reason (or Reason alone) was incapable of reaching an understanding of God, and once people accepted this they turned their attention to Man and Nature, Art and Science, and this is what happened during the Renaissance.

 

Mostly the Greeks and Romans. A lot of Christian influence, but even that was through the lens of the former in a lot of ways. The Enlightenment got it right. Christianity got a lot of things right . . . and a lot of scripture is also incompatible with what we now consider Western values. The whole concept of freedom of religion arose despite the scriptures, not because of them.

 

World civilization is dominated by one thing: hydrocarbons.
The US for all practical purposes is the Current West and it can well be argued that it is a spoiled and hypocritical consumer of well more than it's fair share of this planet's limited reserve of these resources.
That's it.

Not a very Christian thing to do is it? Use up all the oil to sit in traffic? Wage wars to sit in traffic?

 

I find the question concerning who possessed rights and when they were recognized as possessing them an interesting one. Certainly, the biggest and/or central problem was that most monarchs viewed rights as privileges that they saw fit to grant to their subjects (it's amazing how many people today mistake rights for privileges). However, we do begin to see people asserting various rights well before the Enlightenment. In his book The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church Law 1150-1625, the late Brian Tierney traced their origins to the 12th Century Renaissance when legal scholars, civil jurists, canon lawyers and decretists at the University of Bologna began pouring over Gratian's Decretum and the Corpus Juris Civilis (the former had just been written and the latter had just been recovered in its entirety). Then in 13th Century England came the Great Charter of Liberties, aka Magna Carta, which affirmed a limited set of rights to barons and freeman. Of course, the poor were left out of this and other arrangements for hundreds of years. By the time William of Ockham wrote the first rights doctrine in the 14th Century the rights to life, self-defense and property had already been recognized, along with the rights contained in Magna Carta (ex,. due process). John Locke's social contract theory was not an original concept, either.

In many respects, the same thing can be said for Reason. William of Ockham wrote of Reason's relationship to individual rights and they somewhat echo Cicero's words in De re publica "True law is right reason in agreement with nature".

However, while these ideas were established long before the Enlightenment, it took until that time for them to become widely accepted and finally applied to government at the national level.

 

Well, there had to be a lot of progress from there, as in those early days Christianity was an autocracy, prescribing torture and death for those who didn't believe in the correct version of Christianity.

I think the more interesting aspect is the advent of democracy, which certainly had nothing to do with the church. In fact, it required the separation of government FROM religion.

We've had republics since Rome and before. The new idea is that of making decisions through representative democracy, independent of consulting prelates or ancient religious writings.

 

I'm not sure if "representative democracy" is really a good description of the current West. Granted Christianity has changed from the Council of Nicaea and again during the reformation, however it seems that the changes in Christianity are what changed the West. It's not like Christianity is "an autocracy, prescribing torture and death for those who didn't believe" now.

 

You don't believe in having a legislature and judicial system that can't use the Bible as a basis for law?

 

Just the opposite. It's the changes in Western thought/culture that changed Christianity.

 

Wow I really don't know where you got that from. I never said anything about the Bible or the law. I was talking about the broader influence of Christianity on the West.

 

I think there is a good argument to be made for that, particularly in modern times when Christianity as a direct influence on culture and thought has declined. But I think Christianity was impactful as to how we got here. Did the Enlightenment influence the Reformation or was it the other way around?