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Films like Dr. Strange, however, bear little connection to these realities. One of the problems with these romantic fictions is ovesimplification. What we often think of as the “East” covers a vast, diverse group of communities. If the “East” is, as per Herodotus, anything east of Turkey, there really are a lot of peoples and places east of Turkey. While there are connections at times between civilizations like those of the ancient Persians, Turks, Indians, and Chinese, there are also massive differences and a vast range of nuance. Orientalist fictions produce generalizations about Asia, the Indian sub-continent, Arabia, and the Mediterranean that are simply put, imprecise and misleading. This is why the weirdly generic Kathmandu in Dr. Strange is, well, less than benign and more than problematic.

That being said, I am, however, tempted to accept the idea of “The West” to a point. These are areas held by the Roman empire and/or influenced by Greco-Roman culture and values. These areas do have strong common influences and share a cultural heritage and set of sensibilities. This ranges from the Greco-Roman inspired buildings of Washington, Paris, Mexico City, London, and other American and European capitals to the latin and greek roots of words in languages such as French, English, Spanish, and Italian that infuse the culture of the “West”.
Even here, though, it can get murky. Areas of the “Near East” and “Middle East” were part of the Roman empire and under the Muslim caliphates, they retained links to Greco-Roman heritage. Where important chunks of learning were lost to Europe during the Middle Ages, these continued to be nurtured during the Golden Age of Islam from the 7th to 9th centuries. Think of the great minds like Avicenna, Averroes and Maimonides. It was the transmission of lost Greek classics back to Europe that helped inspire the Rennaissance, the great revival of learning, science, and philosophy that launched what we now know as “Western” modernity.