GCIS INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING: Niall Ferguson: why the West is now in decline

ISSUED BY: GCIS Communications Command Center

SOURCE: Telegraph

22March2011 7:00amEST

GCIS INTELLIGENCE UPDATE: There was a time when we believed in Western civilisation. By “we”, I mean Europeans and their cousins in the colonies of European settlement, above all the United States.

You can chart the rise of that self-belief if you go to Google’s latest gizmo, Google labs, which allows you to search the huge number of books Google has scanned to date to see how frequently a word occurs in them.

In English, “civilisation” (from the French) was a term scarcely used until the later 18th century. Thereafter – not coincidentally, as European empires spread to rule more than half the world – the C word’s popularity with authors grew steadily, reaching a peak in the middle of the 20th century.

Interestingly, that peak came in the period of maximum conflict within Western civilisation, between 1914 and 1945, when writers in the English-speaking world insisted that their countries were defending civilisation against German “barbarism”.

During the Cold War, “Western civilisation” was a phrase that still resonated. In high schools and colleges all over the US, there were mandatory courses with titles like “From Plato to Nato”.

In Britain, public school boys and Oxbridge men (and it was mostly men) were expected not only to have read the classics of the ancient world (Western civilisation’s first incarnation) but also to have a good grasp of the West’s revival after the Dark Ages and subsequent rise to global dominance.

Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution, French and American Revolutions, Industrial Revolution, Electoral Reform – the big “Rs” of the West’s ascent – were noted, memorised and then “discussed” in innumerable essays.

When Kenneth Clark defined civilisation in his acclaimed 1969 television series of that name, he left viewers in no doubt that he meant the civilisation of the West – and primarily the art and architecture of Western Europe from the Middle Ages until the 19th century.

Clark’s hugely successful series defined civilisation for a generation in the English-speaking world. Civilisation was the chateaux of the Loire, the palazzi of Florence, the Sistine Chapel, Versailles.

And then something changed.(read full report)

"GCIS INTELLIGENCE UPDATE" is an intelligence briefing presented by Griffith Colson Intelligence Service, and provided to the public for informative purposes only. All subject matter is credited to it's source of origin, and is not intended to represent original content authored by GCIS, it's partners or affiliates. All opinions presented are those of the author, and not necessarily those of GCIS or it's partners.