by C F Munro

Created on: March 28, 2009   Last Updated: April 12, 2009

The west in today is characterised by having certain attributes these include Democracy,Freedom of speech, Christianity, and a high socio-economic living standard. Now a days The West is made up of Europe, North America, and Australasia; with Japan, South Korea and Twain seen to have the economic attributes, but having a distinctly different culture. South America has the cultural and religious elements, but lacks the standard of living. It is up for debate as to weather Eastern Europe should or should not be considered a part of The West.

The West has changed in boundaries over the years; in essence it holds central the advent of critical thinking that first appeared in the Mediterranean in Greece and The Roman Empire around 400BC. Other historians, such as Carroll Quigley (Evolution of Civilizations) hold that the advent of western culture was brought about by Renaissance.In the renaissance there was the biggest transfer of knowledge and technology from Arabian Middle East to Europe; after which Western Europe came to wield power far beyond that of any empires before it. This was due to the Age of Enlightenment, The Voyages of Discovery, the industrial and farming revolutions and the colonization of other parts of the world.

Class in the modern age is a very complicated area as it is knitted together by many different factors within society, many of which stem from historical inequalities and others are more modern factors. Technology has played a crucial role in the distribution of wealth, income and social status throughout history and still does to this day. To begin with there was a very low degree of inequality in society within the hunter gatherer societies it was usually along the lines of gender, age and ability, with advent of farming and the formation of Agrarian societies there was huge socio-economic inequality and there was a caste system in play which ordained the position of a person in society at birth; this system is very stable, but it did not allow for any social mobility what so ever. The Industrial revolution brought with it individualism at first rewarding the inventors and innovators like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, with time these rewards are passed on to hard workers and the more skilled ones. With this rise of individualism, skill and talent social mobility increased thus reducing the inequalities of the Agrarian society. This trend was brought forward in the form of a graph by the Nobel peace prize winner Simon Kuznet, called the

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