Matt Beat, a high school social studies teacher, aka popular YouTuber Mr. Beat, with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, in 2022 posted a 17-minute video seeking to explain Western civilization and Western values. You might call him a skeptic that they actually exist.
The transcript is available here.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, a professor of philosophy and law at New York University, argued in a BBC lecture and article for The Guardian in 2016 that “there is no such thing as Western civilization. The values of liberty, tolerance, and rational inquiry are not the birthright of a single culture. In fact, the very notion of something called ‘Western culture’ is a modern invention.”
The term “Western culture,” he wrote, “is surprisingly modern – more recent certainly than the phonograph. The study of Western civilization did not really begin until the 1890s, “during a heated era of imperialism, and gains broader currency only in the 20th century.” Around the time of the First World War, Oswald Spengler introduced “The Decline of the West.” “He scoffed at the notion that there were continuities between Western culture and the classical world,” Appiah wrote.
“In the chill of battle, we forged a grand narrative about Athenian democracy, the Magna Carta, Copernican revolution, and so on. Plato to Nato. Western culture was, at its core, individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific. Never mind that pre-modern Europe was none of these things,
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