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What Is “Western Civilization”?
A Flight from Civilization
America’s Founding Fathers held the Middle Ages in contempt
Tracing the history of the concept of “Western Civilization” encompasses three problems: understanding the history of the idea of “the West,” tracing the history of the meaning of “civilization,” and understanding how, why, and when those two ideas joined and became a coherent concept in American thought and culture. If you ask people to define “Western Civilization” today, people may answer the question in different ways, but many people will agree that there is something called “Western Civilization” that has existed and developed and continued since the days of ancient Mesopotamia or ancient Egypt or ancient Greece.
What I am trying to get at is the history of that sense of coherence, a “Great Tradition” or heritage constituting an uninterrupted arc from the ancient past to the present day, from the Tigris and Euphrates to the Mississippi valley.
