The West is the Best - 1 - Science, technology and the arts
The West has brought a lot of good to the world
During a protest at American Stanford University in the 1980s, students demanded the abolition of Western civilisation: "Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ (Civilisation) Has Got to Go", they shouted. In the late 1960s, feminist activist Susan Sontag even stated that 'the white race is the cancer of human history' and that the white race - its 'ideologies and inventions' - is the only thing in the world that 'destroys' other civilisations.
Loathing for Western civilisation is thus hardly new, but it has become more intense and widespread in recent years.
Activists argue that education should be 'decolonised', statues of historical figures should be pulled down and streets renamed. Politicians, teachers and opinion makers rush to proclaim how pernicious Western society and Western people are.
Guilt
We are supposed to feel guilty about our past. President Biden stated that there is still 'institutional racism' in the US. The anti-racist American author Robin DiAngelo ironically claims that whites are practically all racists.
When it comes to bad things like racism, colonialism, exploitation, environmental pollution, war and inequality, they are almost always associated with 'the West', rarely with other cultures or countries.
Because of the enormous amount of criticism and self-flagellation by Western leaders and intellectuals, many now think that there is indeed something structurally wrong with our society and that Western civilisation and history are predominantly based on exploitation and violence. It is fair to say that the West suffers from an identity crisis.
But is the West really as bad as it is made out to be? Self-criticism is a good quality (and one that is much less common outside the West). After all, no society is perfect. But a sober analysis of what the West has produced should lead to a very different conclusion than is currently being drawn. The West has brought a lot of good to the world - and Western ideals still represent the best hope for the future for the majority of the world's population. Misguided guilt undermines these hopes.
The West has brought a lot of good to the world - and Western ideals still represent the best hope for the future for the majority of the world's population.
Science and technology
For many centuries, the West has been the leader in art, science and technology. The American sociologist Charles Murray conducted an extensive quantitative analysis of encyclopaedias, textbooks and scientific and artistic studies. In his book Human
Accomplishment, he concludes that 97% of all significant, commonly accepted achievements from 1400 to 1950 in the fields of art and science have been achieved by people from Western Europe and North America.
In the fields of biology, astronomy, medicine, geosciences, physics and chemistry, inventors and scientists of European origin dominate. Newton, Einstein, Faraday, Archimedes. Hippocrates, Galileo, Edison, Tesla, Huygens, Darwin, Marie Curie, Copernicus, Pasteur, Crick and Watson, Charles Babbage - you could go on for a long time naming great scholars, but almost all of them come from Europe or North America. They have increased human knowledge tremendously and thus improved the lives of everyone around the world.
Of course, other peoples and continents have also contributed to the growth of science and technology, but the Western contribution is overwhelming.
Steam engine, Pasteur, Benz
The Industrial Revolution that took root in England in the 18th century, thanks in part to the invention of the steam engine, led to a spectacular rise in prosperity in Europe and later the rest of the world as industrialisation spread. The discovery of the existence of bacteria by Louis Pasteur led to an enormous improvement in public health. The average life expectancy of Europeans began to rise steadily from around 1800 onwards - something that had never been seen before.
The invention and spread of electricity that began in Europe and America is perhaps the most important in history and brought about an unprecedented improvement in living standards throughout the world. The German Karl Benz invented the two-stroke internal combustion engine in 1879, which together with his other invention, the motor car, greatly increased mobility. Indirectly, all countries with oil benefited from this. Without Western technology, that oil would have remained stuck in the ground uselessly.
The great thing about knowledge is that you can multiply it by sharing it. Through the application of Western technology, other countries also advanced at the same time.
The American Norman Borlaug, the father of the 'Green Revolution', brought about pioneering advances in crop enhancement in the 1950s and 1960s, which helped triple agricultural yields. India, a country where until then many people died of poverty and malnutrition, even became an exporter of grain through the application of Borlaug's insights. Borlaug is also known as 'The man who saved a billion lives'. The modern IT revolution - computers, internet, telephony - which has transformed the world, also largely originated in the West.
Art
Western contributions to architecture, visual arts, painting, literature and music are universally admired and have touched and uplifted many people around the world. The West gave the world, among other things, classical music, with the unrivalled musical creations of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, many centuries of unparalleled paintings, magnificent palaces and cathedrals.
Tourists come from all over the world to marvel at European architecture and urban design - from Amsterdam's ring of canals to Florence's Duomo, St Peter's Basilica in Rome, Versailles and hundreds of other magnificent buildings and cities. Is there any other continent that offers so much cultural beauty?
It is not possible to say with certainty what exactly caused the cultural, technological and scientific achievements. The Greek and Roman civilisations are at the basis of Western culture. Christianity has been influential, with its 'individualistic' message that every human being is valuable.
European diversity helped
The political fragmentation of the European continent has most likely provided greater dynamism and more opportunities for freedom than in centrally governed countries. The invention of the printing press, the development of the scientific method in the Renaissance, the free exchange of ideas, religious freedom (after long struggles), the notion of individual rights that first appeared in the West, are all special Western achievements that have undoubtedly contributed to the West's success.
Western countries have also, of course, been guilty of atrocious violence, repression, slavery, racism and oppression. We are not trying to deny that. The point is: there is no country and no culture that has not done so. However, Western achievements and accomplishments in technology, science and art are a unique gift to the world.
And that is not the whole story. In the social and political spheres, too, the West has achieved many unique feats. More on that in part two of this four-part series.
Authors: Frank Karsten and Karel Beckman