The Anglo imagining of "Western Civilization" has never existed. It's a fake narrative crafted to give legitimacy to their barbarism and conquests.
Why the Idea of Western Civilization is More Myth Than History
Greeks did not give us Western Civilization. That there is no golden thread, unfurling unbroken through time from Plato to NATO. That we in the modern West are not the heirs of a unique and elevated cultural tradition, stretching back through Atlantic modernity to Enlightenment and Renaissance Europe, and from there through the darkness of the medieval period and ultimately back to the glories of classical Greece and Rome.
For most of us, it seems normal—even natural—to think of Western history in these terms. Unthinkingly, we assume that the modern West is the custodian of a privileged inheritance, passed down through a kind of cultural genealogy that we usually refer to as “Western Civilization.”
Greeks and Romans were much more diverse than we might think. They were neither predominantly white nor predominantly European, and indeed did not conceive of racial and geographical categories in the same way that we now do. As a result, the monks of western Europe, laboriously copying Latin manuscripts in their dusty scriptoria, were not the only medieval heirs of classical antiquity.
So too were the merchants of fourteenth century Sudan, conducting their trade in Greek; and so too were the Buddhist sculptors of northern India and Pakistan, who drew on the artistic traditions of the Indo-Greek kingdoms.
But perhaps the greatest centre of medieval classical learning when it came to the sciences was in Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, where classical scholarship was fused with new philosophical and scientific developments drawn from across Asia, Africa, and Europe.
It was only with the expansion of European overseas imperialism over the course of the seventeenth century that a more coherent idea of the West began to emerge, being deployed as a conceptual tool to draw the distinction between the type of people who could legitimately be colonised, and those who could legitimately be colonizers.
With the invention of the West came the invention of Western history—an elevated and exclusive lineage that provided an historical justification for the Western domination. According to the English jurist and philosopher Francis Bacon, there were only three periods of learning and civilization in human history: “one among the Greeks, the second among the Romans, and the last among us, that is to say, the nations of Western Europe.”
It was the privileged inheritance of Western Civilization, the cultural and intellectual correlate of race, that justified the differential treatment of different groups of Americans.
Western Civilization is therefore not just a myth in the sense that it is a fiction that we tell ourselves, despite knowing that it is factually false. It is a myth that was invented to justify slavery, imperialism, and oppression. As such, it served the ideological needs of the time of its invention, reflecting the core values of the society that produced it.