Question
What is the greatest achievement of Western civilization? What can Westerners be proud of in the global community?
Answer
By definition, "Western" suggests a contrast with "Eastern," and in that comparison and the very word "achievement" in the question, you can find the answer. I'll juxtapose "Western" against one major "Eastern" culture: the Indian one. I believe the comparison with Sinic culture works out the same way (Japanese culture is the outlier in Asia, in having a more Western DNA).
As an Indian, I can afford to be a little more politically incorrect than the European-descendant answer writers, who seem to be a little shy and modest about giving Western culture its due credit, for fear of offending the "left behind" Eastern cultures.
The greatest achievement of Western civilization is actually "achievement" itself. An "achievement" is something new and valuable that is seen as such, and is allowed to cause its consequences because of a faith that they will be good overall (even if they are initially destructive or disruptive) rather than being ignored or damped out.
A "greatest achievement" is a competitive notion. "Competition" is the idea that humans don't need to be stuck in the conditions they are born in, and can get into better positions by changing their environments or doing better than their peers or superiors. This legitimization of competition, social mobility and the opening up of the mind to the idea of achievement and change together constitute a belief in a more general possibility and process of positive change -- "progress."
The idea of "progress" is a historicist notion that says that the future will be different from the past and better, that the story will go somewhere rather than round and round in circles. Curiously, believing in "progress" is necessary and almost sufficient to make it happen. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In mathematical terms, human cultures have the capacity to get on positive-feedback, exponential-change uni-directional trajectories of change. Many conditions need to hold for such trajectories to take off, with belief in progress itself being a major one. Other things being equal, a culture that believes in, and legitimizes progress, will progress, and rack up a string of "achievements." One that doesn't, will not. Only one culture in human history got on this track, the Western one.
This is actually the biggest achievement of the West. By contrast, the two major cultures of the East, Chinese and Indian, have both historically been non-historicist. To the extent that "progress" was a legitimate idea at all, it was considered wrong. Not in the sense that Western "conservatives" thinking of "progressives" as evil-wrong (in fact, in the West, both believe in progress; just different kinds), but in the sense of a belief in a timeless, cyclic view of the universe where nothing can or should change irreversibly, and relative to which "progress" is viewed as a factually wrong notion, a sort of logical fallacy. Like belief in perpetual motion.
In particular, in the West, there has been a long tradition of letting innovations serve as the seeds of radical change. When new ideas are discovered, the West has always grabbed them and run with them. Tiny seeds can grow into oak trees. In the East, they have largely been ignored, so that they remain isolated or die out. Noise in the karmic cycle. The seeds remain seeds.
The West pours oil on sparks, water on seeds, even if it means destroying the prevailing order. In the East, they have historically been ignored if they were perceived to be not dangerous on their own, treated indulgently as childish amusements or isolated hacks (many great inventions look like no more than funny toys or hacks for immediate problems when they start), or stamped out if they are seen as a threat to some notion of timeless stability.
One consequence of accepting change and progress as being okay is that history, and in particular a history viewed in terms of "achievements" becomes VERY important. If the future is not going to be like the past, and the change is/should be good, you'd better keep a record of history to "measure" your progress and bring history back on track to continue racking up new achievements if it wanders or gets lazy.
In other words, you have to keep track of "achievements" and keep particular track of "greatest achievements" because they are a measure of progress in a high-watermark sense. You have to lament "dark ages" and be proud of "golden ages." You have to try and steer history so you get continuous progress with no slumps if possible. If that's not possible, at least the high water mark should keep rising.
(if Europe, India and China were kids in the same piano class, Europe would be the kid that learned consciously with 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in the sense of Gladwell's Outliers).
If the future is going to be the same as the past, and it's all pre-ordained endless karmic cycling, there's no real point in tracking history or "achievements." There is nothing important to learn that isn't already in the Vedas or Confucius, so you don't try. So you have the interesting consequence that the West has kept vastly better records of its own history compared to the East. There is a tradition of historigraphy based on facts, as best as they can be documented.
In the East by contrast (and this is more true of India than China), history is rarely remembered except as a side-effect of being incorporated into art, literature, philosophy and mythology. Most Indian history was discovered and written down by foreigners, and much of it is actually based on foreign accounts (such as the Greek ambassador to the Mauryan empire, Megasthenes, or the Chinese traveler in search of Buddhist manuscripts, Hieun Tsang, or the Arab traveler Ibn Batuta). In the native accounts written by Indians, facts and fiction are usually impossible to tease apart. True works of history are incredibly rare. Timeless knowledge becomes more important than time-bound knowledge.
If you don't believe that "achievement" itself is the greatest achievement, look at a comparison between India and the West. What should strike you is not that the "greatest" Western achievement is possibly greater than the "greatest" Indian achievement (for the sake of argument, let's say "putting a man on the moon" vs. "the invention of the zero-based decimal system") but the fact that there's just so much MORE in the Western column of the comparison. The West does not have 5% or 10% more achievements more than India. It has 10,000x more. But around 1200 AD when the West started pulling away, India and Europe had roughly the same antiquity and size (population wise). So where did the 10,000x difference come from? Looks like compound interest, doesn't it? Even if assume for the sake of testing the argument (apologies if this offends some of you) that Europeans are 2x smarter than Indians, you cannot explain such a huge difference without some system-level differences that create a compound interest type effect.
In fact the Moon vs. the Decimal System is a poor comparison because the former depended on the latter, and it is not clear that one is in fact greater than the other at all. Engineers would argue that the former was greater. Mathematicians would argue that the latter was.
But if you look at the complete Western and Indian columns in the spreadsheet, it is a complete no-brainer. On the Indian side, even generously accounting for the fact that the history is more poorly documented, there are simply several orders of magnitude FEWER items. There are like 10,000 inventions/discoveries in the West for every 1 in India of comparable magnitude.
Mathematics provides a good basis for comparison. A few isolated mathematicians in India figured out the basics of the decimal system and primitive algebra and wrote a few books. Look over to the Western column, and you get hundreds of mathematicians writing at a similar level and dozens of books making comparable leaps beyond existing knowledge. You get a robust intellectual culture around math. Take two specific examples from the same period, the 12th century. Bhaskara's Lilavati is a late work of Indian mathematics and Fibonacci's Liber Abaci is an early work of Western mathematics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lil...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lib...
Even the structure of Lilavati compared to Liber Abaci, shows you the difference in mathematics cultures. Lilavati is written as a whimsical conversation between a father and a precocious daughter. There is an Alice in Wonderland type meta-narrative and random poetry and philosophy thrown in. The story goes that Lilavati was the daughter of the mathematician who wrote the book (Bhaskara II), and he only wrote it down to console his daughter, who was apparently a very bright young woman who, due to an unfortunate accident, could not be married. If this is true, he might not even have written the stuff down if it hadn't been for the tragedy with his daughter.
Liber Abaci by contrast is serious stuff. No jokes, no bedtime story for a young girl. It is credited with introducing the zero and the decimal system to the West.
Both the Arabs and Europeans were generous in assigning a lot of credit to the "method of the Hindus" but Indians often like to take even more indirect credit for Arabic and Western mathematics by pointing to the fact that the seed was Indian.
This is Ponzi scheme/Amway credit accounting. It is the soil that matters more than the seed.
Alice in Wonderland is actually a good Western work to think about. It is a veiled story about mathematics (there are a lot of obscure math-geek jokes within) by a serious mathematician. Where would Western math be if all math knowledge had only been captured in Alice style? It would have gone nowhere.
Lilavati is more seriously and directly mathematical than Alice in Wonderland, but it was part of a culture of mathematics with no widespread belief in an idea of cumulative progress that might have allowed it to grow. So it went nowhere. It did not spark a furious cascade of innovation leading up to calculus, group theory and topology. Liber Abaci on the other hand, was just one of the seeds from which a 1000x oak tree forest grew, one that eventually got the West to the Moon (pardon my mixed metaphors here...)
Some blame external factors, like the Islamic takeover of India, but those I believe just amplified an existing tendency. The tendency to not believe in "progress" and letting seeds remain seeds was the major factor.
I'll leave it to someone else to make the detailed China comparison, but a similar story can be told I think.
The broader question of course is whether the Western belief in "progress" is valid, and whether it has led to more good than harm overall. My guess is "yes." With maybe 73% confidence. Life sucked for most people other than royalty, for most of history, before "progress" came along. We may nearly destroy the planet and kill ourselves, but at least we'll have had a good time living as a species. The planet will recover and heal after we do that, so no long-term harm. Humanity would be just another asteroid-like mass extinction event.
As an Indian, I can afford to be a little more politically incorrect than the European-descendant answer writers, who seem to be a little shy and modest about giving Western culture its due credit, for fear of offending the "left behind" Eastern cultures.
The greatest achievement of Western civilization is actually "achievement" itself. An "achievement" is something new and valuable that is seen as such, and is allowed to cause its consequences because of a faith that they will be good overall (even if they are initially destructive or disruptive) rather than being ignored or damped out.
A "greatest achievement" is a competitive notion. "Competition" is the idea that humans don't need to be stuck in the conditions they are born in, and can get into better positions by changing their environments or doing better than their peers or superiors. This legitimization of competition, social mobility and the opening up of the mind to the idea of achievement and change together constitute a belief in a more general possibility and process of positive change -- "progress."
The idea of "progress" is a historicist notion that says that the future will be different from the past and better, that the story will go somewhere rather than round and round in circles. Curiously, believing in "progress" is necessary and almost sufficient to make it happen. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In mathematical terms, human cultures have the capacity to get on positive-feedback, exponential-change uni-directional trajectories of change. Many conditions need to hold for such trajectories to take off, with belief in progress itself being a major one. Other things being equal, a culture that believes in, and legitimizes progress, will progress, and rack up a string of "achievements." One that doesn't, will not. Only one culture in human history got on this track, the Western one.
This is actually the biggest achievement of the West. By contrast, the two major cultures of the East, Chinese and Indian, have both historically been non-historicist. To the extent that "progress" was a legitimate idea at all, it was considered wrong. Not in the sense that Western "conservatives" thinking of "progressives" as evil-wrong (in fact, in the West, both believe in progress; just different kinds), but in the sense of a belief in a timeless, cyclic view of the universe where nothing can or should change irreversibly, and relative to which "progress" is viewed as a factually wrong notion, a sort of logical fallacy. Like belief in perpetual motion.
In particular, in the West, there has been a long tradition of letting innovations serve as the seeds of radical change. When new ideas are discovered, the West has always grabbed them and run with them. Tiny seeds can grow into oak trees. In the East, they have largely been ignored, so that they remain isolated or die out. Noise in the karmic cycle. The seeds remain seeds.
The West pours oil on sparks, water on seeds, even if it means destroying the prevailing order. In the East, they have historically been ignored if they were perceived to be not dangerous on their own, treated indulgently as childish amusements or isolated hacks (many great inventions look like no more than funny toys or hacks for immediate problems when they start), or stamped out if they are seen as a threat to some notion of timeless stability.
One consequence of accepting change and progress as being okay is that history, and in particular a history viewed in terms of "achievements" becomes VERY important. If the future is not going to be like the past, and the change is/should be good, you'd better keep a record of history to "measure" your progress and bring history back on track to continue racking up new achievements if it wanders or gets lazy.
In other words, you have to keep track of "achievements" and keep particular track of "greatest achievements" because they are a measure of progress in a high-watermark sense. You have to lament "dark ages" and be proud of "golden ages." You have to try and steer history so you get continuous progress with no slumps if possible. If that's not possible, at least the high water mark should keep rising.
(if Europe, India and China were kids in the same piano class, Europe would be the kid that learned consciously with 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in the sense of Gladwell's Outliers).
If the future is going to be the same as the past, and it's all pre-ordained endless karmic cycling, there's no real point in tracking history or "achievements." There is nothing important to learn that isn't already in the Vedas or Confucius, so you don't try. So you have the interesting consequence that the West has kept vastly better records of its own history compared to the East. There is a tradition of historigraphy based on facts, as best as they can be documented.
In the East by contrast (and this is more true of India than China), history is rarely remembered except as a side-effect of being incorporated into art, literature, philosophy and mythology. Most Indian history was discovered and written down by foreigners, and much of it is actually based on foreign accounts (such as the Greek ambassador to the Mauryan empire, Megasthenes, or the Chinese traveler in search of Buddhist manuscripts, Hieun Tsang, or the Arab traveler Ibn Batuta). In the native accounts written by Indians, facts and fiction are usually impossible to tease apart. True works of history are incredibly rare. Timeless knowledge becomes more important than time-bound knowledge.
If you don't believe that "achievement" itself is the greatest achievement, look at a comparison between India and the West. What should strike you is not that the "greatest" Western achievement is possibly greater than the "greatest" Indian achievement (for the sake of argument, let's say "putting a man on the moon" vs. "the invention of the zero-based decimal system") but the fact that there's just so much MORE in the Western column of the comparison. The West does not have 5% or 10% more achievements more than India. It has 10,000x more. But around 1200 AD when the West started pulling away, India and Europe had roughly the same antiquity and size (population wise). So where did the 10,000x difference come from? Looks like compound interest, doesn't it? Even if assume for the sake of testing the argument (apologies if this offends some of you) that Europeans are 2x smarter than Indians, you cannot explain such a huge difference without some system-level differences that create a compound interest type effect.
In fact the Moon vs. the Decimal System is a poor comparison because the former depended on the latter, and it is not clear that one is in fact greater than the other at all. Engineers would argue that the former was greater. Mathematicians would argue that the latter was.
But if you look at the complete Western and Indian columns in the spreadsheet, it is a complete no-brainer. On the Indian side, even generously accounting for the fact that the history is more poorly documented, there are simply several orders of magnitude FEWER items. There are like 10,000 inventions/discoveries in the West for every 1 in India of comparable magnitude.
Mathematics provides a good basis for comparison. A few isolated mathematicians in India figured out the basics of the decimal system and primitive algebra and wrote a few books. Look over to the Western column, and you get hundreds of mathematicians writing at a similar level and dozens of books making comparable leaps beyond existing knowledge. You get a robust intellectual culture around math. Take two specific examples from the same period, the 12th century. Bhaskara's Lilavati is a late work of Indian mathematics and Fibonacci's Liber Abaci is an early work of Western mathematics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lil...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lib...
Even the structure of Lilavati compared to Liber Abaci, shows you the difference in mathematics cultures. Lilavati is written as a whimsical conversation between a father and a precocious daughter. There is an Alice in Wonderland type meta-narrative and random poetry and philosophy thrown in. The story goes that Lilavati was the daughter of the mathematician who wrote the book (Bhaskara II), and he only wrote it down to console his daughter, who was apparently a very bright young woman who, due to an unfortunate accident, could not be married. If this is true, he might not even have written the stuff down if it hadn't been for the tragedy with his daughter.
Liber Abaci by contrast is serious stuff. No jokes, no bedtime story for a young girl. It is credited with introducing the zero and the decimal system to the West.
Both the Arabs and Europeans were generous in assigning a lot of credit to the "method of the Hindus" but Indians often like to take even more indirect credit for Arabic and Western mathematics by pointing to the fact that the seed was Indian.
This is Ponzi scheme/Amway credit accounting. It is the soil that matters more than the seed.
Alice in Wonderland is actually a good Western work to think about. It is a veiled story about mathematics (there are a lot of obscure math-geek jokes within) by a serious mathematician. Where would Western math be if all math knowledge had only been captured in Alice style? It would have gone nowhere.
Lilavati is more seriously and directly mathematical than Alice in Wonderland, but it was part of a culture of mathematics with no widespread belief in an idea of cumulative progress that might have allowed it to grow. So it went nowhere. It did not spark a furious cascade of innovation leading up to calculus, group theory and topology. Liber Abaci on the other hand, was just one of the seeds from which a 1000x oak tree forest grew, one that eventually got the West to the Moon (pardon my mixed metaphors here...)
Some blame external factors, like the Islamic takeover of India, but those I believe just amplified an existing tendency. The tendency to not believe in "progress" and letting seeds remain seeds was the major factor.
I'll leave it to someone else to make the detailed China comparison, but a similar story can be told I think.
The broader question of course is whether the Western belief in "progress" is valid, and whether it has led to more good than harm overall. My guess is "yes." With maybe 73% confidence. Life sucked for most people other than royalty, for most of history, before "progress" came along. We may nearly destroy the planet and kill ourselves, but at least we'll have had a good time living as a species. The planet will recover and heal after we do that, so no long-term harm. Humanity would be just another asteroid-like mass extinction event.