Western Civ

Is the concept of "the West" destined to be useless in normal discussions?

Academics have lots of interesting things to say about it; but they struggle to say anything which spreads far from their various specialized fields, without a lot being lost and distorted.

At the same time, the general public tends to constantly be attracted to extremists and caricatures. People tend to gravitate either to thinly disguised racial thinking, all about whether Europeans were better or worse or more aggressive or more rational, or whatever, than other people. Or; when people consciously try to avoid this they tend to simply take the opposite position of saying that it was all dumb luck, and being in the right place at the right time.

What most thoughtful approaches have in common is that they try to look at for human traditions that were unique; and which made a difference. The general public tends to be vaguely aware of such ideas, but even among scholars the common threads which connect things like modern science, the papal influence on medieval politics and law, humanism, Greek philosophy, the memory of Rome, the old and new testaments, and so on, are hard to name.

I think that the common theme which unites much of what made the west especially successful, apart from luck and so on, has been identified, but not well explained. It is the (apparently Greek) concept of "nature" as something which can be understood as rules or laws, describing how things always work outside of human control, but not completely outside of human understanding.

All over the world, just because of human nature, there must have always been people making up rules both on the basis of what seemed fair and agreeable to a group of equal people, and also sometimes based on an idea of a higher authority. So a "rule of law" concept is not something especially western, of course. And all religions and traditions must have had rules which were deemed sacred in one way or another, either because they were fixed by very respected ancestors, or because of some murkier explanation, inevitably sometimes cynically fabricated.

Indeed it must surely also be according to basic human nature for some people to realize that whatever the origin of rules and laws, it is sometimes useful, independent of whether you are altruistic or selfish, to treat them as sacred and nevertheless sometimes also useful to find ways to adjust them. Religions in the end are not much more than this when they begin?

Somehow the Greek idea of nature having its own rules seems to have crept into western Christianity's rationalizations of human law's basis of sacred authority. It has meant in the long run that law can be justified more openly as human-based, and both changeable but needing a certain amount of changeability.

It is perhaps possible to describe this as a way of making large-scale legal systems work more like the common sense rules which have always been agreed for temporary purposes between equals, for example even when children play games. It means that even relatively ignorant people are allowed to see what the cynical always saw: that laws are human made and changeable, but work only when they can not be changed too easily, and that laws can be designed in the interests of different groups.