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Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (6993)	4/5/2002 11:47:47 AM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

Western civilization is more or less the civilization that sprung up around the Mediterranean basin, including Asia Minor and the northern coast of Africa. It was initially roughly consolidated during the Hellenistic period, and given a greater political and economic infrastructure by the Romans. After the fall of the Western Empire, it was kept alive in Byzantium, and by the Church in the West. After a time, the locus shifted to the West, first, during the High Middle Ages, and, after the fall of Constantinople, in the Renaissance. Although the Muslims had been part of the West, to a degree, during the Middle Ages, the advent of the Turks pretty much cut off significant contact, and during the Renaissance, the West was mainly represented by the more advanced nations of Europe. As the West extended itself through trade and empire, it was influenced to some extent by other civilizations, like the Chinese and that of the Indian subcontinent, but even more, in the long run influenced others. The key event of the colonial period was the establishment of the United States, which was to show the way, to some extent, as modernization and urbanization worked its way throughout the West. Some of the fundamental ideas that have come to animate the West, in the course of time, are these: the dignity of the individual, the duty of government towards its citizens, the rule of law, the centrality of rational discourse, and the value of progress. Some of the fundamental institutions: parliaments, universities, courts of law, learned societies, the press, and the free market. You ask "what is the point of the paragraph". To distinguish between progress and undermining the very structures which inform and enable progress........