"When I was in university, Athens and Jerusalem were served to us as the separate wellsprings of western civilization. Their status was a given, like western civ itself. I’m finding though, that it may be a bit late; the old categories don’t seem as firm. ...
"What made us picture Plato and Aristotle as Oxford dons or German philosophers? You can see Turkey from parts of Greece; it receives more African and Asian immigrants, legal and illegal, than any other EU nation and they seem at home. ...
"The last piece of my little intellectual undergrad castle to teeter might be the idea of western civ itself. I don’t mean in Gandhi’s puckish sense, who said that it — western civilization — would be a good idea. It used to seem so solid. ... it’s also a result of globalization in its economic and Internet senses. It’s easier now to see how everything human tends to interpenetrate and bleed into everything else — and harder to imagine that it ever didn’t."
Full article: From the cradles of western civilization tour.
