West 1
“In English, the very idea of the ‘West‘ …, doesn’t really emerge until the 1880s and 1890s, during a heated era of imperialism, and gains broader currency only in the twentieth century. … For that matter, talk of ‘civilizations‘, in the plural, is pretty much a nineteenth-century development, too. …
The kindred term ‘Western culture‘, too is surprisingly modern … The Decline of the West, written by Oswald Spengler around the time of the First World War, was the work that introduced many readers around the world to the concept. (He actually titled it Der Untergang des Abendlandes, literally, the decline of the evening lands – those lands nearest the setting sun. The term had once referred to the western provinces of the Roman Empire.) Yet, his conception of the West was startlingly different from the one that’s now commonplace. Spengler scuffed at the notion that there were continuities between Occidental culture and the classical world. ‘The word Europe ought to be struck out of history,’ he further avowed. ‘There is historically no European type.’ For him, critically, the West was defined by contrast to the culture of the classical world, to the culture of the ancient Christians (and Jews and Muslims), and to the ‘semi-developed’ culture of the Slavs. …
Our modern concept of Western culture largely took its present shape in the late 1940s and the 1950s, during the Cold War. … 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.”
aus: Kwame Anthony Appiah: The lies that bind. Rethinking identity. London: Profile 2018, S.200/201.
07/26
