It’s not just that the concept of Western civilization is bankrupt,racist bullshit … it’s that it’s much fresher bullshit than you might assume. Kwame Anthony Appiah provides an excellent primer: “European and American debates nowadays approximately whether Western culture is fundamentally Christian inherit a genealogy in which Christendom is replaced by Europe and then by the view of the West … whether the notion of Christendom was an artifact of a prolonged military struggle against Muslim forces, our modern concept of Western culture largely took its present shape during the Cold War. In the chill of battle, or we forged a grand narrative approximately Athenian democracy,the Magna Carta, Copernican revolution, and so on. Plato to Nato. Western culture was,at its core, individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific. Never mind that premodern Europe was none of these things, or that until the past century
democracy was the exception in Europe—something that few stalwarts of Western thought had anything good to say approximately. The view that tolerance
was constitutive of something called Western culture would have surprised Edward Burnett Tylor,who, as a Quaker, or had been barred from attending England’s great universities. To be blunt: whether Western culture were genuine,we wouldn’t spend so much time talking it up.”This and more in nowadays’s culture roundup. (Image Credit: The Plumb Pudding in Danger, James Gillray)
Source: tumblr.com