Welcome back to 1122, this is the second half of Western Civilization.
We talked about the syllabus at the first course, assignments and things like that.
Today I want to do a couple of things.
The first thing I want to do is clarify what we mean by Western.
The title of this course is the second half of Western Civilization.
What if the world is that?
It has a lot of different meanings and these meanings have changed over time.
I suppose the original meaning was mostly geographic.
Western pertains to the Western edge of the Eurasian continent, that is, Europe.
American historians have tended to divide their history survey courses into three big
blocks.
We generally do a United States history survey; we do a world history survey quite often nowadays;
and we do Western Civ or Western Civilization.
So what historians have done is try to create these categories so that we can emphasize
different aspects of United States history, European history as Western Civ, and then
world history tries to pick up on those areas that quite often are simply left out of a
United States or a Western Civ course, with more emphasis say, on the Far East and China
and India and the Pacific islands and so on and so forth.
So Western Civ originally pertained to European history and then of course, when you follow
European history you have to follow its expansion.
We all know 1492, Columbus sails the New World and Europe follows him to the New World.
We have the creation of New Spain, New England, and New France, and other European nations.
Of course, the Portuguese will colonize Brazil, and this expansion of little Europes will
continue into the twentieth century all around the world.
So when we talk about Western civilization now, we’re not simply talking about Europe
proper, we’re talking about where Europeans went and where they settled and the societies
they created.
There are other aspects of this notion of the ‘West’ – probably put that in quotation
marks – there is a sense of participatory government in the West – parliamentary systems
or like in the United States with our representative government, our republic.
This, of course, is a generalization; it’s not always true.
Let’s face it, Germany is in the West and Hitler did not run a participatory government.
We’re also not quite sure where the West ends as we move Eastward across Eurasia.
Does it extend – how far into Russia does it extend?
Does it end at the Ural Mountains?
Who knows?
This is sort of an open question that continues to be debated.
So we have this notion of geography, of European culture and its spread, this notion of representative
government or republican-style governments.
There’s also another aspect of the West that we need to keep in mind, and that is
the economy, the market economy that dominates in the West – capitalism, to put it bluntly.
But we see – even when we discuss capitalism and participatory governments – this extends
all the way to Japan and South Korea, allies of the United States and of course, these
countries are in the Far East – yet – because of their participatory-style governments and
because of their participation in the capitalist system, we tend to include Taiwan and South
Korea and Japan as part of the West.
Of course, there’s a religious aspect to the West.
It’s dominated by Christianity.
In the twentieth century, twenty-first century now, there’s a great deal more religious
diversity in the West than there used to be, but it’s still dominated by the Christian
faith – over two million Christian adherents worldwide.
Other people will argue, I’ve heard historians discuss this and they talk about the notion
of curiosity, of rational inquiry, being a distinctly Western trait; I doubt that’s
true.
But we can go back and look at the Renaissance and the scientific revolution, and the enlightenment,
and of course, we can go all the way back to ancient Greece – the rise of Western
philosophy with Socrates and Plato and Aristotle.
So there is this sense of a rational inquiry, a sense of curiosity, a sort of innovative
spirit.
So when we talk about the West, we’re talking about all these things.
In this course we’re going to try to follow European history, but we’re not going to
stay in Europe, we’re going to travel with the Europeans around the world and look at
their settlements and their practices and try to determine why they were successful
in dominating world history for the last five hundred years.
That domination may be ending as we see the rise of Islam and the reassertion of China’s
strength in the world.
But nevertheless, that gives us a start.
I wanted to make these introductory remarks because I know students are sometimes confused
about what exactly are we talking about when we talk about Western civilization.
I’ve had students believe that the West simply means the wild, wild West in the United
States, with cowboys and Indians and bandits and cattle drives, and of course, that’s
not what we’re talking about.
Western civilization is centered on European history and the spread of European history
with its Christianity, with its market economy.
So we’ll stop this lecture here, as a brief introduction, and in our next lecture we’ll
talk about historical context and historical significance, and these two ways I organize
my lectures, and these are the type of questions that you’ll get on your quizzes and exams.
Thank you.