1.0.1 Text资料文件与下载

1.0 Introduction

1 Hi, welcome to my class, the History of Western Civilization. This is the Introduction. My name Liu Junyang, from the University of International Relations. Let’s start with some photos.

2 The Parthenon temple of goddess Athena from the ancient Greece

3 Remember the Socratic paradox "I know one thing that I know nothing". I think at this moment Socrates is saying I know one thing that I will die, but I’m not afraid. I refused to escape because I respect the Athenian law.

4 Nike the winged goddess of victory, and Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci.

5 The University of Bologna, Italy, The first university in the world from 1088.

6 Birth of Venus by Botticelli during the Italian Renaissance.

7 The Creation of Adam and Eve from Michelangelo’s fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in The Vatican.

8 Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, the best expression of the spirit of the French revolution.

9 Arc de Triomphe in Paris. This gate of victory honors those who fought and died for France in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. This street is the famous Champs Elysees.

10 The Palace of Westminster in London, the meeting place of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

11 The National Mall in Washington D.C. You can see the Capitol Hill, The Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.

12. All these photos are so beautiful and powerful. They showed the glories of the Western civilization. However, learning this class critical thinking is important. We can’t forget the dark side of the western Civilization. The terrible wars, the Spanish Inquisition, the bloody slave trade, the brutal colonization, the crimes of the Holocaust committed by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

This is a French political cartoon from 1898, China - The Cake of Kings And Emperors. We can see how powerless is this Great Qing official when he is watching China being divided up by Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, the German king, the Russian king, the goddess Marianne of France and a samurai of Japan. Since the Opium War China had become a piece of cake to the western powers, so many unequal treaties signed, so many territories lost.

13. China has changed a lot. We just celebrated the 70th anniversary of the new China. Today’s China is no more a weak country but one of the most powerful countries in the world, and we are playing a more important role in the international community.

The world also changed a lot. This class is about the history of the Western world, but we should also try to understand today’s world. We should try to understand President Xi’s initiative of Building an International Community with a Shared Future for Mankind. This imitative and a New Type of International Relations of Win-Win Cooperation are the two pillars of Chinese foreign policy today.

On 15 May 2019, The Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations took place in Beijing. In his speech at the opening ceremony, President Xi said: “It is foolish to believe that one's race and civilization are superior to others, and it is disastrous to willfully reshape or even replace other civilizations”.

14. I took part in the Think Tank Forum on “Mutual Learning Among Asian Civilizations and Building a Community With a Shared Future for Mankind”. This forum organized by my university and the Global Institute of Strategy, Chinese Academic of social Sciences. It is part of the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations. I made a speech The World Need Dialogue Not Clash, which published in the English newspaper Shanghai Daily. Let me share some of my ideas:

Attitude of Superiority

In 1793 the British envoy George McCartney came to Beijing, he refused to kowtow to the Chinese emperor, finally Qianlong received him. Qianlong told him proudly “The Celestial Empire is abundant for everything. Nothing we don’t have. We don’t need trade barbarian goods”. In the early days of the human history all civilizations thought they are the center of the world, their race and culture are superior to others and all others are barbarians. This attitude is natural and understandable during that time. However, as the contacts and communication between civilizations have become more extensive and deeper, this attitude became foolish. If one civilization uses this attitude of superiority as an excuse to conquer and convert others that will be disastrous, western colonization is a horrible example. The slogan of the colonists is “God, Gold and Glory”. Huntingdon said: “the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

15. Modernization Is Not Westernization

After the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama predicted, “the end of history is the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. There is only one way for all the country that is the Western democracy because it is universal”. I think he drank too much to celebrate the victory of the cold war. Fukuyama’s teacher Huntingdon disagreed with him. The motive of the clash of civilization theory was Huntingdon’s worry of the decline of the West and the rising of the East. Many people criticized his prejudice to the non-western civilizations. However, I think his theory provided a meaningful warning and a new paradigm to look at the international politics after the Cold War. He wrote, “What I expect is that my efforts to raise awareness of the dangers of the clash of civilizations will help to promote dialogue among civilizations throughout the world." He wrote “If non-Western societies are to modernize, they must do it their own way not the Western way”. His book published in 1996, 13 years passed, history has proved his prediction.  

16. My Dream of a Roundtable Meeting

One day I dreamt a roundtable meeting of Jesus Christ, Shakyamuni, Confucius, Plato and the Prophet Muhammad. What happened? They had a very nice and wise dialogue instead of fighting each other. Of cause, they have differences but they all taught about love, peace, kindness and tolerance. Are they satisfied about today’s world? They may not, because we still have so many conflicts. Following their teaching, people from different civilizations have no reason not to coexist peacefully. To coexist we need dialogue among civilizations. The principle of dialogue should be to listen, to learn and to appreciate, not to convert, to convince and to influence. It is not about how right and how beautiful you are, it is about how right and how beautiful the others are.

17. Let’s look at two western theories.

Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. Huntington believes cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world, and there would be two major Clashes. Between West and Islamic, and between West and Sinic. Sinic means Chinese.

Joseph Nye’ theory of soft power. Soft power is the ability to achieve one's goals not by force but by diplomacy, persuasion and the attraction of culture and political value. Recently there is a new kind of China threat theory, Sharp Power. Some Americans demonized China and Russia using media and cultural activities to influence public opinion around the world.

18. Learning this class, we should always think these questions: What’s the soft power of the western and Chinese civilization? How to increase Chinese soft power? Will there be a clash between the western and Chines civilization? Is the peaceful rise of China a threat to the whole world? Why we need dialogue among civilizations? Why the world need to build an International Community with Shared Fortune?

19. OK. Let’s look at the content of this class

Early Greece, Classical and Hellenistic Greece, Ancient Roman Civilization 1, Ancient Roman Civilization 2, Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, West in the Seventeenth century and west in the Eighteenth Century. I am sorry to say because one semester is too short, this this class could only cover the 18th Century, for the 19th and 20th centuries I can only gave a very brief introduction.

20 Why teach in English

I am not teaching English, I am teaching in English. I used to work as an English interpreter and tour guild for 20 years. I used to live in Europe and US as visiting scholars. I have been learning English for 40 years, and English has been my working language for 30 years. From my learning, teaching and working experiences, I found many students have the same problem I called it Walking Stick Dependency Syndrome. Learning English, most students can reach the intermediate level. Something like the level of CET Band 4, but going further seems very difficult. Selinker’s Interlanguage theory called this phenomenon fossilization. The progress of learning stopped, and fossilized like dinosaurs. Interlanguage means your English is not pure English but a mixture of Chinese and English. Our brain has enough room for two languages stored and operates separately. Computer and cell phone can work in Chinese or English but never bilingually. By the way, maybe you can try to change the working language of your phone and computer into English. Believe me that will be fun. You can’t always rely on Chinese to help your English. Walking Stick is Chinese. If you are strong enough you don’t need a stick to walk. Get rid of it. Don’t say your English isn’t good enough to take this class. No, I don’t think so. I think your English is good enough because you had already passed the English exam of Gaokao and became university students now. Your English is good enough.

21. How to study?

I have 3 Requirements

1. Before watching the video please read the subtitles and check the new words. I will send you all the subtitles. I am writing a textbook, A Brief History of Western Civilization based on these subtitles, it will be published soon.

2. Study the key words and questions. You need a notebook to write down the definitions of the key words and answers of the questions.

3. Please finish all the exercises on time

22. I have three suggestions

1. Read classics

I am a passionate reader. How many English books I have read? Maybe 400. Some of them are real classics, like Homer’s epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, Machiavelli’s the Prince, Thomas More’s Utopia, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. I am not asking you to read these books right now, too difficult, but hope you would read at least one classical book every semester. 

Let Plato be your friend, and Aristotle, but more let your friend be truth. This is not the school motto of the Harvard University. Isaac Newton wrote it. We should read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, but the most important thing is to seek the truth. I can’t remember who said that in the university the most important thing is to get you in touch with what the greatest minds have thought.

What are the western classics? Please search online the Harvard Classics; It’s a 51-volume anthology of classic works of the world recommended by the Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot in 1909. Most of the works from the west. An anthology is a collection of writings by different writers.

23. 2.Read in English

How many years you have been learning English? More than 10, right? I always say it is shameful to read English books in Chinese translation if you have been learning English for more than 10 years.

3. Search in English

Search in Chinese we Baidu, but search in English. I want you Google, Bing, Yahoo, Britannica, Wikipedia, and hope you can often go to some western websites like BBC, CNN, and the New York Times. One more thing, there are many online dictionaries, You’d better use an English-English dictionary, not an English-Chinese one. And you should often look at maps, Bing maps in English is a very good one.

24. I have eight books here. Hope you can read at least one each semester. You’d better read it in English. Marcus Aurelius: Meditations, Niccolo Machiavelli: the Prince, Thomas More: Utopia, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Confessions, Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws, Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations, Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities, George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four

25. Look at this book, A Brief History of Western Civilization, the Unfinished Legacy by Mark Kishlansky, Geary and O'Brien. You can see some notes I wrote there, this is my reading habit. It is a textbook in many American universities. 600 pages. Don’t be afraid I’m not asking you to read it, too difficult, but I suggest you to try.

26. These are the key words:

Building a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind, Walking Stick Dependency Syndrome, Harvard Classics, Clash of Civilizations, Soft power, Mark Kishlansky: A Brief History of Western Civilization.

This is the introduction of this class. Thank you for taking this class, and hope you will enjoy it.