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Cristhian Ucedo's avatar

In this issue, I stand with Scott Alexander. What you describe is Modern Civilization, which is time-centered rather than space-centered.

Western Civilization was born with the Carolingian Empire and grew with its heirs, and died with the Industrial, Scientific, Glorious, and French Revolutions.

In what was Western civilization, the body was believed to have four humors, philosophers believed in the Ptolemaic model, and so on.

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Patrick M Kehoe's avatar

OR

Everyone (seemingly) knows what the West is and how to describe,

destroy, dismiss, defund or defend it? :)

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ellis derby's avatar

As I recently read Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, I think “the West” fits rather neatly into Latour’s definition of modernity, whether you accept his “constitution” or not. It’s a revolutionary vision. It has contradictions embedded in it. I tend to think of the Right, broadly speaking, as antimodern and reactionary. But as you’ve written, the right is a confused mix of right-modernists like Andreesen and right-antimodernists like the others (who I haven’t read and don’t know that much about, so there are probably more factions). But there are both left and right modernists who want to spread the Western revolution, right?

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