03.20.08
Provincial illusions
A Convergence Of Civilizations
Books | Review of: Worlds at War
Conservatives seem to find 9/11 some vindications of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, to the point of reviving the false duality of ‘east and west’. And it is a false duality. The illusion of separation can be seen from looking at the Axial Age where a global synchronous emergentism is at work across Eurasia. In general the perspective of the eonic effect, a superset pattern of the Axial phenomenon shows that One Civilization is developing across the planet, whatever its temporary differentiations on the short, and illusory, time-frame of less than two millennia. The sudden rise of the West requires understanding in that context, and can only be understood as a globalization phenomenon, not as the action of some ‘Western Civilization’, that provincial illusion.
Yet the subtitle of Mr. Pagden’s book — “The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West” — shows how, in the post-September 11, 2001, era, this once-discredited worldview is roaring back to life, under the more neutral name of “the clash of civilizations.” With Osama bin Laden and his accomplices vowing to restore the seventh-century caliphate, it is once more possible to think of civilizations as having essences, which do not change, rather than potentialities, which do. This covert essentialism is what makes “Worlds at War,” for all its righteous passion in defense of the West and its freedoms, a troubling book. In his eagerness to point out what is admirable in the Western tradition — liberty, individualism, reason, the separation of religion from power — Mr. Pagden risks turning history into a Manichean pageant, in which the West is always fighting for justice against an unjust and unreasonable East.