It is now fashionable, and in some contexts dogmatically required, to deny that European civilization, which we also call Western civilization,^[1] might be superior in certain respects to other civilizations. But back in the 1960s (imagine!), Thomas Kuhn–who is smarter than you, and smarter than I–hadn’t gotten the memo. Here he is talking about why what we think of as “science” really only developed in the European cultural milieu.

The very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community. Just how special that community must be if science is to survive and grow may be indicated by the very tenuousness of humanity’s hold on the scientific enterprise. Every civilization or which we have records has possessed a technology, an art, a religion, a political system, laws, and so on. In many cases those facets of civilization have been as developed as our own. But only the civilizations that descend from Hellenic Greece have possessed more than the most rudimentary science. The bulk of scientific knowledge is a product of Europe in the last four centuries. No other place and time has supported the very special communities from which scientific productivity comes.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 4th ed., 166-67