Luke Slattery: There's Always Been some East in the West
[Luke Slattery is an author and critic and a commentator on higher education issues.]
THE idea of the West as a distinct yet endangered entity rose to prominence in the late 1980s during the debate known as the culture wars....
We are still dealing with the reverberations of this conflict whenever the phrase "clash of civilisations" is used. And of course it became something more than a rhetorical debate about literary culture and tradition after the attacks on the US in 2001 drove home the point of Muslim rage, shifting the terms of the dispute emphatically on to an East-West axis.
But here's the thing: there is no such thing as a Western culture untouched by the East. Western culture was born and nurtured in the East. At the risk of coming over all gnomic on a Saturday morning, it could even be said that the West is the East and East is West. Let me spin the globe and explain. The border of East and West, the point where Europe by tradition meets Asia, is the Hellespont, or Dardanelles: the mouth of the Bosphorus. It is straddled by the modern Turkish city of Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, founded in the early 4th century by Constantine the Great on the site of ancient Greek Byzantium....
Read entire article at The Australian
THE idea of the West as a distinct yet endangered entity rose to prominence in the late 1980s during the debate known as the culture wars....
We are still dealing with the reverberations of this conflict whenever the phrase "clash of civilisations" is used. And of course it became something more than a rhetorical debate about literary culture and tradition after the attacks on the US in 2001 drove home the point of Muslim rage, shifting the terms of the dispute emphatically on to an East-West axis.
But here's the thing: there is no such thing as a Western culture untouched by the East. Western culture was born and nurtured in the East. At the risk of coming over all gnomic on a Saturday morning, it could even be said that the West is the East and East is West. Let me spin the globe and explain. The border of East and West, the point where Europe by tradition meets Asia, is the Hellespont, or Dardanelles: the mouth of the Bosphorus. It is straddled by the modern Turkish city of Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, founded in the early 4th century by Constantine the Great on the site of ancient Greek Byzantium....