Western Culture

Western culture (or Western civilization) broadly refers to the cultural heritage, ethics, traditions, belief systems, artifacts, political sensibilities, and technologies associated with European societies and later disseminated globally through trade, empire, and colonization. Western culture is a particular set of societal characteristics that emerged out of classical Mediterranean Europe with the Roman Catholic Church serving as a primary vector carrying this culture throughout the Western Hemisphere to North and South America. The geographic area of the West has changed over time with globalization but generally includes European Union (EU) countries and some extra-European societies historically shaped by European settlement and institutions. The origins of Western culture begin in ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. Diverse artistic, philosophical, literary and legal frameworks associated with Greek, Roman, Celtic, Germanic, West Slavic, and Jewish ethnic traditions have historically informed Western culture.

Brief History

Mesopotamia and the region of the Tigris-Euphrates rivers are often described as the cradle of early civilization, and they influenced later Mediterranean societies that contributed to Western culture. The Greeks distinguished themselves from their neighbors during the Trojan wars and prior to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, during a period when the Roman Republic was expanding in the Mediterranean world. For ancient societies, music and art functioned as carriers of ideas expressing specific emotion to time and place. Ethos was an ancient Greek idea that music was a microcosm of the universe where certain instruments and modes influence the balance in the brain between logos (“rational thought”) and pathos (“emotional experience”), e.g., anger, kindness, and love.

As Christianity emerged from Judaism along the Mediterranean, Roman culture was transformed into something new. With the fall of Rome, much of Greco-Roman art, literature, and technology were buried as Europe entered a period of political fragmentation that contributed to the development of systems based on feudalism. Religion, specifically the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Church, gained increasing influence from the fourth century. The Church reshaped ancient culture, replacing pagan culture. The Church also exercised political and military authority, influencing art, literature, law, education, and governance in ways that aligned with Christian doctrine.

Beginning in Italy during the fourteenth century, the Renaissance brought about a massive artistic, architectural, scientific, and philosophical revival of interest in classical thinking that missionaries and explorers carried to other parts of the world. Greek sensibilities of humanism from antiquity were reasserted. The implication was that intellectual conversations shifted away from an exclusive emphasis on religious devotion and preparation for the afterlife toward renewed interest in human life, achievement, and inquiry. Advances in thinking from the Middle Ages opened the door to highly intellectualized cultural advances during the Renaissance, when interest in classicism and perspective from the visual arts created new audiences in the merchant classes for more expressive, meaningful music in religious and secular sectors.

Overview

The European origins of Western media are traced back to the Renaissance and the development of moveable type and the printing press. Florentine book publisher Aldus Manutius innovated the Humanist or Old Style book design during the Renaissance and introduced a portable vessel for ideas in the form of a pocket-sized book featuring italicized type. Humanist beliefs stress the potential value and goodness of human beings, emphasize common human needs, and seek solely rational ways of solving human problems. Scholasticism, the system of theology and philosophy taught in medieval European universities, was based on Aristotelian logic and the writings of the early Church Fathers and had a strong emphasis on tradition and dogma. Humanism, a Renaissance cultural movement that revived interest in ancient Greek and Roman thought, was a sensibility that attached primary importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters.

During the coinciding ages of Discovery and Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, concepts of Western culture began to evolve toward what it is in the modern era. Increasingly secular works and middle-class consumerism fostered new secular ideas and beliefs that spread across Europe. The subsequent Industrial Revolution from the late eighteenth century to mid-nineteenth century brought about new manufacturing and distribution lines and expanded the merchant class that started in Great Britain, and spread to Western Europe and North America, when income and population growth was unprecedented.

The rise of the middle classes, amateurism, and nationalism was manifested in the development of a new and innovative Viennese classical music style that married northern and southern European traditions. Music and the arts increasingly became less complex and more entertaining to the masses, who wanted more social and educational equity, leading to self-determination. In music, Enlightenment ideals contributed to clearer formal structures and more regular rhythmic patterns.

Bibliography

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Eid, Mahmoud, and Karim H. Karim, editors. Re-imagining the Other: Culture, Media, and Western-Muslim Intersections. Palgrave, 2014.

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