WHERE IS THE WEST?

Margaret L. King

Visitors gathered outside the gates of the old Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, may read a sign announcing that they now stand "at the center of time and space." From that spot an imaginary line circles the earth from pole to pole, slicing the globe in half. The two halves are the Eastern and the Western hemispheres. The line is the Prime Meridian, the first and last of the infinite series of lines of longitude by which any location on the globe, East or West, can be accurately denoted by its precise variation in hours, minutes, and seconds from Greenwich time.

The packs of schoolchildren who come to Greenwich are often photographed grinning as they stand astride the Prime Meridian—each with one foot in the East and one in the West. Yet both feet are in England, in Europe, and in the zone of Western Civilization. Part of England and most of Europe (and all of Australia and New Zealand) lie in the Eastern hemisphere. Yet they belong to the West. A good fraction of Africa lies in the Western hemisphere. Yet it does not belong to the West. The people of the nations of Latin America lie in the western hemisphere, accept an official language which is European, and adhere for the most part to the Roman Catholic Church—is their civilization "Western?" Or does a struggling economy, or a large population of peoples of mixed indigenous and African heritage, mark them as non-Western?

What is the West? It isn't the "west" of the old movies, where for a brief moment cowboys prowled the frontier, and the native peoples of North America resisted the incursions of Europeans arriving from the East. It isn't the "west" of the Cold War era when eastern and western zones of Europe adhered to different ideologies, and the boundary between their mental and political battles was designated by an Iron Curtain in part mythical, in part real. The West is not defined by any number of terms which contain, in their designations, the word "west": the Western hemisphere, the North American West, or Western Europe. What is the West? It is not, in fact, a place.

Neither is the West a specific people, or race, or set of nations. Although all of the nations of Europe are Western, so too are other nations far away that were settled by Europeans who bore with them, along with their tools and skills, the elements of their civilization. In these scattered zones of Western civilization, and in the European homeland now as well, as migrations of peoples have altered its original population, people of greatly different origins have adopted aspects of Western civilization, just as anybody may learn French, or become a Methodist, anyone who so chooses may adopt and transmit the civilization of the West.

WHAT, THEN, IS THE WEST?

The West is a body of ideas, values, customs, and beliefs. These were forged over a period of centuries on the continent of Europe, which lay to the west of the then more advanced civilizations of the East. They triumphed during the centuries of European expansion; from approximately 1000 to 1900 of the Common Era, when Western values followed Western merchants, travelers, armies, and governors into every other corner of the inhabited globe. They are what the West means, and they are truly the meaning of the West.

Here are a few of the many concepts that have made the West and that constitute its core meaning:

• The principle of human dignity: that all human beings are equal in worth, that they possess rights which cannot be taken away, and that to the greatest possible degree they are free.
• The ideal of justice: that no person should be unfairly privileged above another.
• The value of democracy: that the power to shape the future of a community belongs to its people as a whole and not to arbitrarily selected leaders.
• The method of rationalism, which assumes that all phenomena may be subject to the critical scrutiny of the human mind.
• The inclination to progress, to work toward goals to be achieved in the future.
• The habit of self-examination, which encourages human beings to examine themselves seriously and often to test whether they have fulfilled their promise and their responsibilities.

These, among others, are the habits and values that together characterize Western civilization, and which have caused it to develop in the directions it has…