The West is an idea: There has never been a single concept of the West, which helps explain its potency as an idea. (Jeremy Jennings, 3/12/26, Englesberg Ideas)
Some of these criticisms of the West might well be justified but, in Varouxakis’ view, the call for the wholesale demolition of western civilisation risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A better approach, he suggests, is for us to cease referring to the institutions and ideas we hold dear as ‘western’ and to begin referring to them by universal names. ‘They deserve’, he writes, ‘to be adopted not because they are “Western” but rather because they are freedom-promoting, fair, equitable, conducive to justice, peace-promoting, happiness-enhancing, and so on.’ The classic texts of Greek and Roman literature, he holds, ‘constitute an inheritance for the whole of humanity’.