Western Culture

Immediately after the terrorist attacks in Paris the other day I became involved in a discussion, one in which a tangent involved Western, i.e. European and American, culture and how it was under attack. The Paris killings were presented as an example of this. There were also discussions of how to properly respond to terrorism, mainly in military terms, but I would like to  ruminate a bit on Western culture, what it is, what's good about it, what's bad about it and what can be done to maintain it (or whether we should just let it die).

Let's start by listing a few things that define Western culture - some of these things might overlap with other cultures, and some might be in name only, but let's start:

• Importance of the nation-state as opposed to the ethnic or tribal state (Westphalian sovereignty)
• Importance of individual liberty as opposed to that of the group
• Christianity as the religion of the majority within a secular state
• Rule of law
• Liberal democracy as a form of governance (liberal not as defined by American political dichotomy, but as in an open society)
• Roots in Greek & Roman philosophy, Judeo-Christian ethics, and Renaissance/Enlightenment Humanism
• Independent Judiciary
• Capitalism as the primary economic system
• Exceptionalism
• Use of science to understand the world and to create new terchnologies

I'm sure that there are more, and there might be some disagreement over some of the entries, but this is a start. Some of these relate to the way a Western state is governed and some to the mindset of the people within the Western nations. There are also aspects of Western Civilization/Culture that at one time were dominant, but have since faded away. One example is the idea that Europeans were superior to all other "races". The Age of Exploration and its attendant colonialism was based on the idea that there were "lesser races" and it was right and natural that the Europeans would dominate them. This led to slavery, in its extreme manifestation and European colonialism in its more common form. What's left of this can be seen in the exceptionalism mindset of some peoples: Americans and Russians in particular. 

I'll be devoting posts to one item [maybe more than one post] and will likely be adding items as I go along.