Category: society

What Is the Point of Politics?

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‘Politics is not worth a lightning bolt to me. Throw it to the sharks,’ sang the Dutch band Normaal in the 1980s. Many people feel disillusioned with the government and politicians. Is there something wrong with politics? Is it the system? Are our expectations too high? Do politicians interfere with matters that should require expert knowledge? Do we not elect the right people? Is the political system not democratic enough? There are no simple answers, but some countries do better than others. Francis Fukuyama wrote two books about political order. Good government is an uphill struggle that never stops.

And democracy often has frustrated the establishment of good government. So, there is reason to think, ‘What is the point of politics?’ Over the centuries, there might have been some progress in political institutions, which are customs, laws, government organisations, and other arrangements. Human nature does not change, so politicians have not evolved to a higher standard. People in the past devised institutions to provide stability and make governments work better. In recent decades, globalisation has made several institutions dysfunctional, most notably, the nation-state.

The basics

So, what is the point of politics? We organise ourselves economically and politically with the use of ideas. Among those ideas are money, states, and religions or ideologies. That made us successful as a species. We have languages to describe situations and the things we can do. And we discuss other people and what they are doing and thinking. That gives us information about other people, for instance, who can do a particular job best and who are reliable and who are not. We use that information to cooperate.1

Politics deals with questions like: what should we do as a group, what must our rules be, and who shall lead us? What we are going to do, is decided by ideas like sowing crops in the spring, doing a rain dance in the summer to please the rain fairy, and harvesting in the autumn. And we may have a priest who leads the rain dance. We do the rain dance we believe in the rain fairy. If rain does not come, we might try to please the fairy by electing another priest. But beliefs can be wrong.

This short tale already tells a lot about politics. There is a belief system. There are rules. And there is authority. Villagers believe the performance of the priest influences the rainfall. Political leaders influence what happens, but in many cases, they must deal with circumstances over which they have little control. Leaders might revert to public display, like ordering more elaborate rain dances to show us they are working on the problem. Things can go wrong because of our beliefs.

The big man

We are social animals, and politics is in our nature. We discuss plans, who should do what, which rules we must follow, and who should lead. Traditional societies also have politicians. For example, the big man leads a family group in Papua New Guinea. He earns his status by gaining the community’s trust, usually by solving conflicts and distributing resources to the members of his tribe. The big man can lose his position, and someone else can take his place.2

The big man is a politician, like the alpha male of a chimpanzee band. Much of politics comes down to solving conflicts in the group and distributing resources and favours. To become the leader, the big man forges a coalition of followers. His followers benefit from his leadership. He can also take actions that benefit the entire community and gain widespread respect. Not much has changed since then. Politicians look after the interests of their followers and can work in the public interest.

The role of institutions

Politicians are like big men in Papua New Guinea or priests of the rain fairy. And they can disappoint us by giving us fewer favours than we expected or not bringing rain. In democracies, we elect our leaders, so why do we not select better ones? Perhaps the problem is not politicians but how we conduct politics and organise societies. The programmatic political parties of Western Europe may have been an apex in the development of politics. They promoted general policies in the interest of their constituency or the public interest. But these parties have lost their lustre.

Today’s world differs from the world where they emerged and flourished. If you were born in a socialist or Roman Catholic family in the Netherlands in 1900, you remained a socialist or a Roman Catholic for the rest of your life. Dutch society was stable, and politicians did not need to compete for attention. The ideologies and religions of these parties have not passed the test of time. They have no answers to the questions of today. Many voters think traditional parties do not represent interests. In the absence of new ideas, politics becomes about identities and personalities.

Institutions can raise politics beyond the level of individuals and their interests, emotions and weaknesses. Traditional societies already have them. The rule of electing a new priest when rain fails to come is an institution. It tells us what we should do when rain doesn’t come. Otherwise, villagers might disagree and start a bloody conflict. The harvest is of the utmost importance. If you do not have faith in the measures taken, you feel obliged to protect yourself and your family from the stupidity of others. Institutions like rain dances can keep the peace but do not guarantee good outcomes.

Political development

The first humans were hunter-gatherers who lived in small bands. They had no property. In times of conflict, they often relocated. Later on, bands coalesced into tribes. Tribes could arrange more men for warfare. A reason to do so was the Agricultural Revolution, causing a switch to crop planting and cattle herding. Crops and livestock that needed defence from thievery and pillaging.

People living in tribes could have a lot of freedom. Tribes were loosely connected, and tribal leaders had limited authority. They might settle disputes, but only if parties agreed on them being the referee. Tribal leaders usually did not give orders. Another political development was the lord with his armed vassals. In Europe, this was called feudalism. Similar arrangements existed elsewhere in the form of warlords and gangs.

The requirements of warfare promoted the development of states. There was intense competition between states in China during the warring states era. Chinese states had armies of up to 500,000 men. They rationalised their organisation and tax systems. As a result, the first modern states appeared in China, and China remained the most advanced state for nearly 2,000 years.

States have the authority to order people. After humans switched to crop planting and cattle herding, there was more food, and more people could live in the same area. And more people could create more sizeable production surpluses to maintain states. States provided more security than tribes as they had police and standing armies, so the inhabitants could benefit from the defence and political stability that states could provide.

The modern state

Modern states have a rationally organised administration with merit-based recruitment and promotion. That happened in China first. Chinese emperors did not have to pass an exam. They inherited the title or came out on top during a power struggle. Emperors had unchecked powers, and there was no guarantee that only good emperors made it to the throne.2 Institutions can protect the country from poor rulers. This problem does not go away if we elect our leaders. That is why democratic states also have institutions, most notably, the separation of powers.

The separation of powers aims to split the state into three independent branches, which are the administration (the executive), the parliaments (the legislative) and the courts (the judiciary). Each has its responsibilities, and the branches should not interfere with each other’s tasks. Parliaments make the laws, the administration executes them, and the courts verify whether they are applied correctly. Ideally, the administration has no power over the parliaments and the courts. For instance, the administration should not nominate or appoint candidates for the parliaments and the courts, and the courts should stay out of political affairs, which is the domain of parliaments.

As political leaders change and can raise controversy, many nations have a ceremonial head of state to provide a sense of stability and continuity in the form of a person. Some countries hold on to their royal families, while others have presidents to perform that role. Usually, ceremonial presidents are highly respected individuals who do not interfere with political affairs. Royals can also provide a stable sense of nationhood, but kingship is a birthright. Kings do not need to have particular qualities, so they may lose the respect of their nation, while a ceremonial president has earned the nation’s respect and, therefore, is less likely to lose it.

Our predicament

Improvements in democratic political systems are possible, but our current predicament is not so much the result of a lack of democracy. Our belief systems are at stake, for instance, nationalism, socialism and liberalism, but also cultures, religions and traditions. And we have made money the prime mover of our decisions. Wealth inequality has increased in recent decades, creating a self-reinforcing trend in which an oligarchy has all the wealth and power. Identity conflicts and pride also block progress.

You can analyse the economy from a socialist or a capitalist perspective. The results are very different, and neither is the analysis entirely wrong or right. The proponents of ideologies and religions tend to have an explanation for everything. Within the confines of their models, their arguments make sense. If you believe in the rain fairy, it makes sense to think she is angry when rainfall does not come. Many of our belief systems are models of reality with merits and drawbacks, and we should treat them like so.

Our political institutions are the result of ideas from the past. They still have merits but grow increasingly problematic. Clinging to obsolete thoughts is like doing rain dances to prevent harvest failures when the cause is climate change. If existing ideas stop working, people become frustrated and lose faith. If crops continue to fail, some villagers may realise that electing a new priest does not solve the problem. They may worship the weather spirit instead and start a violent conflict with followers of the rain fairy.

The issues we now face come primarily from failing ideas and institutions rather than politicians. Existing religions and ideologies have no answers to the issues of today as many are global collective action problems, while centralised complex systems are ineffective in dealing with them. If the collapse is at hand, we may need to find common ground about what we should do and delegate practical decision-making about how to do it to the local level when possible.

Featured image: House Of Commons in the United Kingdom. Parliament.uk. [link]

1. Sapiens: A Brief History Of Humankind. Yuval Noah Harari (2014). Harvil Secker.
2. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. Francis Fukuyama (2011).

Rational debates and progress

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Knowledge or wisdom?

Ancient cultures had religious traditions and wisdom. Chief Seattle’s speech reflects the beliefs of traditional peoples who live in nature as hunter-gatherers. It is an idealised version as traditional peoples like the Native Americans also drove species into extinction. They didn’t have the means to destroy nature as much as we do. Modern people may think these so-called primitives and their ways of knowing are irrational. Knowledge and rationality aren’t wisdom. It is the theme of the biblical story of The Fall. Instead of listening to God, who knew better, Eve and Adam wanted to learn the truth themselves. We would not have been in this mess today if they followed God’s command.

The Chinese have their own tradition and wisdom. Confucius was their best-known philosopher. He lived 2,500 years ago and is still influential today. His teachings comprise moral rules, correct social relationships, justice, kindness, and sincerity. Chinese tradition and beliefs like loyalty to the family, ancestor veneration, and respect for elders were the basis of Confucius’ teachings. Confucius argued that family should also be central to government policies. The Chinese Tao is the natural order of the universe. You can only grasp it intuitively. You can’t understand it with reason, let alone quantify it. The Tao path to wisdom is understanding the whole by experiencing it. One of the greatest poems ever written is the Tao Te Ching, attributed to the sage Laozi. It begins like this,

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

When you try to express the natural order in words or give it a name, you are astray already, or so says the Tao. It disconnects you from the whole of Creation. The Buddha is another source of ancient wisdom. Our desires trap us in this world of suffering, he taught. Once you have what you desire, you desire something else, so you will never be happy. You can escape that and achieve enlightenment with the help of meditation, physical labour and good behaviour. The end of craving is the end of suffering. The capitalist consumerist system aims at the opposite, which is creating new desires, and if needed for that, making us unhappy.

The Western tradition is one of expressing things in words and quantifying them. Wisdom in Greek refers to knowledge and insight and its practical application in life. In Greek philosophy, wisdom was the highest good a human could aspire to. We can develop this virtue through study, reflection and experience. The Greeks believed wisdom comes from knowledge. In hindsight, that was a mistake.

Socrates was a Greek philosopher who lived around 400 BC. He is a founder of the practice of rational debate. Socratic debates are discussions between people with different viewpoints who wish to establish the truth using reasoned arguments. In his dialogues, Socrates acted as if he was ignorant. Admitting your ignorance is the first step in acquiring knowledge. The Greek philosophers began a quest for knowledge. European philosophers and scientists continued it nearly 2,000 later.

Is there progress, or can there be?

When we think of progress, we think of things getting better. But are they getting better? One invention can cure a disease, but another can kill us. Undoubtedly, our knowledge has increased. But is that progress? And can there be progress if we are less happy than our grandparents were? So, is there such a thing as progress? And if so, can we achieve progress through rational debates and persuasion? Or does it come by force because of the competition between groups of people?

We see progress as moving towards a goal, for instance, well-being. According to science, we do not have a purpose. Some religions, like Christianity, see history moving towards God’s aim. We enter Paradise one day, and all that occurs is necessary to get there. That is a peculiar view, but it implies progress and a type of progress that eludes the understanding of mere mortals like us. Did Jesus have to die? Was the Holocaust necessary? Was there no other way?

If we have a purpose, and you can get your hands on a time machine, there is a fellow you might want to meet, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He believed that spirit drives history through ideas and that history progresses towards a goal. Hegel lived before Charles Darwin published On The Origin Of Species, and it shows. The evolution theory completely upset our thinking about the purpose of humanity. Most intellectuals eventually considered it silly to think we exist for a reason.

Around 1800 AD, when Hegel was alive, scientific discoveries began to affect the lives of ordinary people, and the Industrial Revolution took off. At the same time, enlightenment ideas started to affect societies. The American Revolution followed the Glorious Revolution in England. Then came the French Revolution, which ended the old aristocratic regime and mobilised the masses for the first time. A few years later, the armies of Napoleon spread enlightenment ideas over Europe.

Hegel was there to witness it, and he was impressed. He learned to see history as a struggle towards progress where more powerful ideas replace weaker ones. He made a daring attempt to explain history, and as a result, his thinking greatly affected history. Marxism and the Soviet Union would not have existed without him. The conflict between capitalism and socialism dominated global politics for most of the twentieth century. His thinking inspired others, for instance, the Neoconservatives.

Hegel’s dialectic


Hegel was a philosopher of progress. He believed things would get better and we would, one day, live in a utopia. We increase our knowledge over time. By reflecting on our thoughts, we can challenge them. Or something might happen that changes your mind. You might believe all swans are white until a black one comes along. From then on, you think most swans are white while some are black. Hegel came up with a three-stage scheme for progress in thought:

  1. You believe all swans are white. That is your thesis.
  2. There comes a shocker. You see a black swan, the antithesis.
  3. Then you think most swans are white, and some are black. It is the synthesis.

And that is progress. Hegelian dialectic is this elegant three-stage scheme with thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. You can see why people liked it so much. It is wonderfully simplistic, and it explains so much, or so it appears. The synthesis is incorrect if there are red swans, but it is better than the thesis. The prediction that the next swan I see will be black or white is more often correct than that the next swan will be white. And even though the synthesis may still be incorrect, it better predicts future events. You can also apply it to Socratic dialogues, where people with different viewpoints wish to establish the truth using reasoned arguments. Our viewpoints are imperfect, and exchanging ideas can bring progress, which we can discover using Hegel’s dialectic.

Suppose we have a time machine and fetch Adam Smith from 1770 and Karl Marx from 1870 and bring them to the present so they can meet. They first study each other’s books, and then we let them start an argument. Smith sets out the thesis. He says capitalism and free markets work best at raising the general living standard because self-interest makes people do a good job, and increases in scale improve efficiency. Then, Marx comes up with the antithesis. He argues that the living conditions for workers are miserable, and capitalism distributes its benefits unfairly as factory owners and traders are wealthy. They agree on minimum wages, as they have good intentions.


Ideas may look great in theory but usually work out differently in practice. Experiments can help to find out. There was a capitalist experiment in the United States and a communist one in the Soviet Union. Perhaps Marx would be disappointed when the time machine brought him to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The workers in Western capitalist societies were better off. And maybe Smith will be disappointed when he sees the United States today. And both may say, ‘This is not how it is supposed to be.’ They may not blame the plan but the execution. It is always someone else’s fault. That is the standard excuse of planners who have seen their plans fail.

We play a small part in a greater whole of humanity. Hegel says our consciousnesses are part of a general consciousness called spirit. Spirit reflects the ideas in society and how they change. Our ideas about slavery are an example. Today, most people believe slavery is wrong, but in the past, most people didn’t think so. The spirit requires individual freedom of thought and the ability to be part of society with a spirit containing these ideas. In dialectic terms, the individual is the thesis, our society the antithesis, and to take part in that society is the synthesis. We have our individual thoughts and desires. But we live in a society. By engaging ourselves, we become part of that spirit.

We aren’t free and subject to outside forces, but we can cut ourselves off from the outside world, turn inward, and experience freedom of thought. That makes us unhappy because we desire unity with the eternal absolute truth, God or the universe, Hegel claims. We express this desire in religion. We feel insignificant towards that absolute and want to be part of it. Our reason is the alternative absolute. We can imagine a relationship between the particular, which are objects like cows and the universal ideas. So, a cow participates in the universal concept of cowness that all cows share. We exist in unity with the universal, and with reason, we can conquer the world. Thus, knowledge is power.

Hegel claims reason conquers the world. And now we get back at Napoleon. Hegel saw Napoleon as the embodiment of Enlightenment ideas conquering the world. Napoleon did so by military force. He was impressed by the French successes. He learned to see history as a struggle towards progress where more powerful ideas replace weaker ones. It is good to know that Hegel believed there is an absolute truth, so reasonable people might, or should, not compromise with unreasonable people and overcome them by force. And that belief has had a significant impact on history. It became the model for ideological conflict. Leaders may fight for power, but ideological conflicts are about ideas.

Hegel and history

The most well-known is the conflict between communism and capitalism. Hegel’s dialectic affected Marx’s thinking and that of the communist revolutionaries. Hegel believed the direction of human history is progress towards greater rationality. Hegel was an idealist, which means his philosophy was concerned with ideas. Marx, on the other hand, was a materialist who believed historical changes have material causes. Change doesn’t come from ideas but from circumstances in the world around us. Often, these are economic. So, Hegel might argue that slavery would end because people consider it wrong, while Marx might say slavery will stop when other forms of labour are economically more efficient.

Marx claimed we work in relations like master-slave or employer-employee, not because we want to, but because it is the most appropriate way of production in a given stage of our economic development. These relations form the structure of a society, the foundation on which a legal and political system arises, and that shapes our social consciousness. So, in a capitalist society, the legal system might centre around property rights, and labour rights might be non-existent. And it was like so in the 19th century. Not our consciousness directs our social existence, but our social existence determines our consciousness. So, serfdom in Europe didn’t end because serfs wanted to be free; it was because new forms of labour organisation had become more efficient.

Change comes from contradictions between the underlying material reality and the social superstructure. You can see that in Hegelian terms. There was serfdom in Western Europe because it suited economic conditions (thesis). It ended because serfs flocked to cities to earn more as craftspeople. It undermined the social superstructure of serfdom (antithesis). Lords of manors had to provide an attractive alternative to keep their peasants. Serfs became free (synthesis), which best suited the new conditions. Marx believed humans were free at first and lived as communists (thesis). As the economic reality changed (antithesis), societies became slave states (synthesis). In the following sequence of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, slave states developed into feudal societies. Those societies became capitalist states because of economies of scale and capital requirements. The thesis-antithesis-synthesis may seem contrived, but the status quo changes due to forces that undermine it, creating a new status quo.

Marx prophesied that in the next round of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, the working class would overthrow the capitalist states and start socialism. Marx believed it was a historical necessity. After all, the Hegelian dialectic works behind it, so communists were more advanced, reasonable people who sought to overthrow the backward capitalist order. Marx was a prophet as he prophesied what would happen and had a vision of paradise. Humans first lived in a state of nature, the simple communism of the group, Marx’s Eden and we will return to communism, Marx’s paradise. Marx called religion opium for the masses, but Marxism resembles a religion. Like Christianity, Marxists think history has a purpose and an end times in which we enter the worker’s paradise. Ideologies come with prophets and holy books. The Capital of Karl Marx was the sacred book of Marxism.

Ideas require power to change the world. Marx claimed the exploited masses, the employees, should rise against their employers because their profits come from paying workers less than they are worth. All the workers across the world had to unite in a revolution. Capitalists disagreed. They argued that wages are the market price of labour, and the capitalist sells his products at the market price. The profits and the losses are for him. An entrepreneur seeks to employ the means of production, including labour, in the most efficient way, so the market value of an employee might increase due to the capitalist production organisation. Workers in socialist countries often had lower wages than workers in Western market economies. The communists and the capitalists believed they were reasonable, that their ideas were better, and that you shouldn’t compromise with unreasonable people, causing a stand-off between two ideological blocks, the Cold War.

In a Hegelian sense, capitalism seems better because it won out. However, capitalist societies introduced reforms like minimum wages and welfare. Agreeable societies have mixed economies, a mixture of capitalist and socialist elements, thus a market economy and an active government that intervenes in markets with regulations or money transfers like welfare. That could be the synthesis of capitalism and socialism. Capitalism is now the thesis of a new Hegelian question. The antithesis is that our production and consumption are about to cause an ecological or technological catastrophe. We need a different political economy. Hegelian thinking has limitations. It stylises questions as choices between two opposites. So, it is either capitalism or socialism or a mixture of both. Experts often use models to deal with complex problems. The use of models requires expertise or even wisdom. We have to learn how the parts interact and contribute to the whole.

Featured image: Portrait of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Jakob Schlesinger (1831). Public Domain.

one ring to rule them all

Multiculturalism

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An astounding success

You may think multiculturalism is a failure when large numbers of immigrants arrive in your country, fail to adapt properly, and cause trouble. Usually, problems attract attention, not the things that turn out right. We live today and hardly think of how the world will be in a hundred years. Our time horizon, if we think ahead at all, is perhaps a few years or maybe decades, not centuries. Overall, multiculturalism has been one of the greatest successes in history. Today, in only a handful of countries, more than 85% of the population belongs to a single ethnic group. The alternative to making multiculturalism work is civil war and the displacement of people.

Successful empires in the past allowed people from diverse cultures to coexist peacefully under a single government. These were multicultural states. Cultures don’t change overnight, so for an empire to achieve political stability, it had to allow subjugated peoples to retain their customs and religions as long as they didn’t threaten the political and social order. Multiculturalism is thus a tool of the emperor, and like the One Ring to Rule Them All from The Lord of the Rings. A successful multicultural emperor was Cyrus the Great, who ruled around 550 BC and respected various faiths and traditions in his empire. He helped the Jews return to their homeland and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.

If the empire lasted long enough, the nations in it integrated into a common culture. The Roman Empire is a good example. Conquered peoples could keep their gods, languages and customs as long as they respected the Roman authorities. Greek culture spread in the east, and Roman culture spread in the west. Several later Roman emperors came from the provinces such as France, Africa or Arabia. After the empire collapsed, the conquered peoples, like the Gauls, didn’t reappear as independent nations.1 The Chinese standardised their writing using pictures, allowing people to read each other’s writings despite having different languages. That helped to form a lasting national identity.

The case of Bosnia exemplifies the strengths and vulnerabilities of multiculturalism. For over 500 years, Roman Catholics, Muslims, and Orthodox Christians lived relatively peacefully together in three successive multicultural states: the Ottoman Empire, Austria, and Yugoslavia. In the 1990s, identity politics turned them into Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Serbs, and they began murdering each other in a civil war. Religion became the divisive factor, as they shared an ethnicity, history, culture and language. Any distinction can divide us and lead to civil war. The Soviet Union was also a multicultural empire, but it didn’t last. After it collapsed, a series of nationalist wars broke out.

Multicultural empires, such as the Roman Empire, allowed for gradual assimilation. It led towards greater unity. Over time, the number of cultures declined as smaller groups merged into larger ones. There have been temporary reversions as empires collapsed. Still, the long-term trend is unmistakable. The world gradually became more integrated. Nowadays, the world is closely interconnected, and a global culture may emerge. There will still be subcultures, thus regional differences and groups of people sharing common interests, such as pop artists, soccer clubs, or costumes and dances.

Identity politics changed multiculturalism. Rather than peaceful coexistence under one administration and acceptance of the social order, modern multiculturalism is about respect for other cultures and accommodating them. That slows down the unification process. And closed groups that don’t integrate into society pose a problem. In the past, the Jews were often that group. Today, it is often the Muslims. Muslims and Christians may learn to live together like Protestants and Catholics learned to do, but the latter only came to agree on that issue after centuries of religious wars. So if people in Western Europe think that it is better not to have Muslims around, they have a reason for that.

Us and them

Us and them
And after all, we’re only ordinary men
Me and you

Pink Floyd, Us and them

We divide humanity between us and them. We are the good people, while the others are the evil ones who act oddly, look different, have funny accents and wear peculiar outfits. People differ in skin colour, religion, sexual preferences, or other qualities. We find it taxing to deal with these differences. Even when you think you are open-minded, you hate those narrow-minded bigots and racists who are not like you. Welcome to human nature. We are xenophobic creatures. Evolution did that to us. Fear of the unknown can protect us from harm, such as diseases or eating poisonous plants. It can be a powerful emotion because human violence has always been one of the top causes of death. However, having peace with others comes with tremendous windfalls, allowing us to overcome these feelings.

Discrimination doesn’t always come from xenophobia. We are social animals who cooperate in groups. That requires a shared understanding of our rules and methods for handling various situations. That is our culture. These things make the group work. Otherwise, there is confusion, discomfort and conflict. Imagine you like to barbecue in a neighbourhood with militant animal rights activists. That is a recipe for trouble. And so, we prefer the company of like-minded individuals. Those who do not fit in can tell personal stories about bullying, physical violence and exclusion.

If your culture is dominant, you enjoy advantages you may not realise you have. Societies in Western Europe and the United States may be multicultural, but Western culture is dominant. Western culture has had such a profound impact on the world that it has become the dominant culture. We live in a European world, and if you doubt it, even the proud nationalist Chinese base their nation on European Marxism rather than Chinese Confucianism. The scientific method is a superior way of gaining knowledge, but sadly, there is no such method to gain wisdom. White privilege is growing up inside the dominant culture. It is often not about discrimination but having the proper upbringing to succeed.

Similar privileges exist everywhere for members of the dominant cultures. Being Chinese is an advantage in China. In Western multicultural societies, everyone is equal before the law, at least in theory. People from other ethnic groups also have opportunities. Jews and Asians do relatively well, often outperforming whites. It suggests that white privilege is less critical than upbringing and support from your family and community.

Our civilisation is on the verge of collapse due to excessive resource consumption and unchecked technology. The West has long led in science and capitalism. Blaming the West is not helpful. Competition drove this development. It is an iron law that those with greater means and better technology tend to prevail. Without capitalist greed, we wouldn’t have seen this dramatic change. Had the Chinese or the Africans started this, history would have been equally brutal and unfair, and we would still have ended up where we are now.

Competition is a mindless process that ultimately leads to destruction. Being anti-West, anti-capitalist, or anti-science doesn’t address that underlying issue. The most effective and efficient will win until the ecological or technological catastrophe materialises. Even then, they will win unless we end that competition. There is competition between businesses and between states, which goes hand in hand. Ending it means establishing a single world order where business decisions are subject to political choices. As long as we are at the mercy of the merchants, they determine what happens. And as long as we have no single government, there will be wars. And even when economic efficiency doesn’t drive our choices, there can be enough for everyone.

The world is interconnected

In September 2023, a flood killed over 10,000 people in Libya. Global warming may have contributed to this disaster. So did the overthrow of the Libyan regime with the help of NATO in 2011. During the ensuing civil war, critical infrastructure, such as dams, became neglected. No one voted for this intervention. Who is to blame? To some degree, it is you and I driving cars. On the day Tripoli fell, the New York Times headlined ‘The Scramble for Access to Libya’s Oil Wealth Begins.’ And exhaust gases contribute to global warming. Everything is interconnected, so change doesn’t come easily. And there are unintended consequences, so when you try to improve things, you might make them worse.

That also applies to multicultural societies. Those who promoted them were often quite naive. Cultural differences are a source of trouble, and identity politics can lead to civil war. However, it will be impossible to halt the further integration of the world. Cultural exchange is a two-way process. Chinese, Muslims, Native Americans and others are probably not thrilled by the cultural enrichment the West has brought them, either. To a Muslim, a mosque looks much better than a McDonald’s restaurant. Culture is not always related to ethnicity. In many countries, a growing divide emerges between urban and rural populations.

With colonisation came slavery and exploitation. And others are proud of their heritage. However, the multicultural societies that have emerged in the West may be the closest to what the future world society will look like. These societies provide a learning experience. The institutions developed in the West often emerged under the pressure of competition. One of the reasons the Industrial Revolution began in England was its well-developed financial markets, which included a central bank. Nearly every country has a central bank. It is a historical accident that modernisation started in Europe, and then competition began to drive innovation and the copying and improving of inventions. It allowed Europe to conquer the world and drag the world into this process.

We are stuck with each other, for better or worse. Border walls and pushbacks are not permanent solutions. And exchanging platitudes about diversity or the greatness of our cultural heritages will not help us to meet the challenges we face. The process that Europe initiated, which could have started elsewhere but did not, has grown out of control and is about to consume us. We need a new set of values, and we can only accept diversity as long as it doesn’t cause harm to others. There are tough, politically incorrect conclusions to draw. To begin with, working hard to get ahead often comes down to stealing scarce resources from the poor and future generations.

The consumerist culture promoted by capitalism is one of the world’s most pressing problems. It doesn’t help to criticise Western culture for it, as the future requires a global society with shared values. And environmentalism hardly exists outside the West. It is a paradox. Environmentalism developed as a reaction to capitalist consumerism in a Hegelian dialectic. If you go to Asian countries like Thailand or Vietnam, you find massive amounts of plastic dumped in nature. Pundits attribute it to the phase of development, as these countries are not yet high-income countries. But there is no lack of excuses disguised as explanations. Instead of looking for causes, we should recognise our contribution to these issues and help solve them.

Change begins with our attitudes. It is better to define what our values and conduct should be and reason from there before demanding that minorities adapt. You don’t want people to adapt to a death cult centred around the ethics of the merchant, which is no ethics at all. All our precious values come into question, and everything we once believed in may crumble to dust. We need to adapt. It can be harsh and painful, a cultural identity crisis, which could be like dying spiritually and being born again. And then, there will be a new dawn, and life will be better than it otherwise would have been. Like Jesus said, there is only a place for sheep in God’s kingdom. Goats are unruly, and you can’t herd eight billion of them. I can’t promise you bliss, but you may soon find yourself living in God’s paradise.

Latest revision: 5 July 2025

Featured image: One Ring to Rule Them All. Xander (2007). Public Domain.

1. A Brief History Of Humankind. Yuval Noah Harari (2014). Harvil Secker.

The flag of the Iroquois Confederacy

The Great Law Of Peace

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Can we have a free and equal society? They say that the road to tyranny is paved with good intentions. So can we ask this question at all? Or do we lack the vision? In 1142, five North American tribes, Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca, formed a league known as the Haudenosaunee, Iroquois or Five Nations. In 1722 a sixth tribe, Tuscarora, joined, and they became the Six Nations. Their constitution is known as The Great Law Of Peace.

The league had a considerable impact on world history. The Haudenosaunee had equality and liberty for all. That is not uncommon in tribal societies, but the Haudenosaunee influenced the European colonists settling in the United States and 18th-century European thinkers. Freedom, equality and brotherhood became the motto of the French Revolution. They are still the values many people believe societies should pursue.1

Legend has it that three people made it happen, Dekanawida, known as the Great Peacemaker, Ayenwatha, also called Hiawatha and Jigonhsasee, the Mother of Nations, whose home was open to everyone. They proposed the league to end the warfare between the tribes. The warrior leader, Tododaho of the Onondaga, opposed the idea.

Deganawidah then took a single arrow and asked Tododaho to break it, which he did without effort. Then he bundled five arrows together and asked Tododaho to break them too. He could not. Deganawidah prophesied that the Five Nations, each weak on its own, would fall unless they joined forces. Soon after Deganawidah’s warning, a solar eclipse occurred, and the shaken Tododaho agreed to the alliance.

The Great Law Of Peace consists of 117 codicils dealing with the affairs of the Six Nations. Major decisions require the consent of the people in the league. When issues come up, the male chiefs of the clans come together at the council fire in the territory of Onondaga.

The league aims for consensus. Decisions require large majorities of both the clan mothers and the sachems. It presses individuals not to impede decision-making with insignificant objections or frivolous considerations. Referendums decide matters of great importance.

Women have considerable influence and are entitled to the land and its produce. The clan mothers deal with the internal affairs of their tribe. They elect the sachems of their tribe and can remove them from office. Hence, the sachems heed the advice of their female relatives.

Compared to the despotic European societies of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Haudenosaunee was a liberal form of government. In the first two centuries of European colonisation, there was no clear border between natives and newcomers. The two societies mingled. Europeans could see from close by how the natives lived. They had a personal freedom common to tribal peoples but unseen in Europe.1

As for the Haudenosaunee, the colonial administrator Cadwallader Colden declared in 1749 that they had such absolute notions of liberty that they allowed no superiority of one over another and banished all servitude from their territories. Colden had been an adoptee of the Mohawks. Other Europeans complained the natives did not know what it was to obey and thought everyone had the right to his own opinion.

Social equality was as important as personal liberty to the North American natives. The European division into social classes appalled them. Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron of Lahontan, a French adventurer who lived in Canada between 1683 and 1694, noted that the natives he visited could not understand why one man should have more than another and why the rich deserve more respect than the poor.

The leaders of Jamestown tried to persuade the natives to become like Europeans. Instead, many English joined their tribes despite threats of dire punishment. The same thing happened in New England. Puritan leaders were horrified when some members of a rival English settlement began living with the local tribes. As Franklin lamented in 1753:

When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, though ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life … and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, when there is no reclaiming them.

usseal
United States Seal

The European colonists had to adapt. Otherwise, they could lose their people to the native tribes. That may have helped make American society more free and equal. The American natives may have influenced European philosophers of the 18th century and their ideas of freedom and equality. That eventually led to the French Revolution. Freedom and equality are now basic principles of democratic nations.

The ideals of liberty and limited government influenced the United States Constitution. Equality and consensus did not. The US Seal features a bald eagle holding thirteen arrows bound together, representing the thirteen founding states reminiscent of the bald eagle and the five arrows from the legend of the Five Nations.

The North American natives lived as hunter-gatherers on sparsely populated land. They had little need for higher levels of organisation like a state. Tribes of hunter-gatherers were often equal societies. With the advent of agriculture, farmers had to defend their property, and states with their militaries provided more permanent security. And agriculture can feed more people from the same land.

As population levels increased, people encroached on each other’s freedoms more and more, and the need for authority to settle conflicts and manage other problems grew, for instance, maintaining irrigation works and distributing food. Therefore, advanced civilisations in populated areas had a state. For a long time, the United States was sparsely populated as colonists moved to the West, and the United States needed little government.

Latest update: 29 May 2023

Featured image: The flag of the Iroquois Confederacy. Mont Clair State University website (Montclair.edu).

1. New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005). Charles C. Mann. Knopf. [link]

World Civilisation And Universal Culture

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The West and the rest

Those who hope to understand why the world is the way it is must learn about civilisations and cultures, especially Western civilisation and culture. Over the last 500 years, living conditions have changed dramatically due to modernisation. If you lived 2,000 years ago, you could go forward 500 years or more and live a life more or less the same as before. If you lived 500 years ago, you couldn’t, because you would have entered a completely different world. Modernisation involves the division of labour, industrialisation, urbanisation, social mobilisation, and increased education and wealth. Social mobilisation occurs when groups in society organise themselves politically to advance their interests. Expanding scientific and engineering knowledge allows us to shape our environment like never before. Modernisation was the most dramatic change in the history of humankind.

The West’s imperialism unified the world, but it also destroyed the ways of indigenous peoples. The Chinese speak of one hundred years of national humiliation when referring to the era between 1840 and 1950, when Western powers broke the Chinese Empire and plunged it into civil war. It all began with British drug dealers lobbying with their government to start a war in the name of free trade after the Chinese government tried to get rid of them. Among Muslims, similar sentiments exist because of Western military interventions in Islamic countries. There is oil in Iraq, and the United States invaded the country under a false pretext. Coincidence? It may not be much of a solace to them, but Westerners killed more of their kind than of any other race during their internal wars. One might ask what the world would have been like if the Chinese or the Muslims had been the first to modernise. As Karl Marx guessed, capitalism, hence a bourgeois society, was essential to modernisation, so it wouldn’t have made much of a difference.

We live in a bourgeois world rather than a religious one. Moral values don’t drive it, but trade and finance or the ethics of the merchant, which means no ethics at all. How that happened may seem like a complex historical process, but if you look under the hood, the engine was competition. The bourgeois culture of trade and finance has now spread over the globe. No corner of the Earth remained unaffected. Some societies adapted more successfully than others. History is a bitch. For centuries, white males have invented nearly everything. Some white males who haven’t invented anything think they deserve special privileges for that. But cultures appropriate from other cultures and move on. The West inherited from the Greek and Roman cultures that preceded it, and other cultures have inherited from the West. Today, Europe, where it all started, is becoming a backwater.

Blaming the West for history doesn’t help, nor does denying that the West shaped the world as it is today. It is crucial to see that competition drove this process, and that trade drives the competition, so the apocalyptic disaster we are about to face is primarily an issue of bourgeois culture, not Christian culture, a truth that the bourgeoisie has been successful in making us ignore with their Gospel of Eternal Growth and by bribing us with more stuff. Modernisation might not have happened in any other way, for you must keep a carrot before the donkey to make it run. If you take a cynical stance, you may summarise the bourgeois culture as having three pillars:

  • personal freedom, thus doing as you please,
  • capitalism, thus taking what you can,
  • imperialism, thus imposing your will upon others.

Capitalism may seem plunder, but it often is not. That is the bourgeoisie’s argument. Both parties can gain from a trade. Equally often, it is plunder, and that is what they hide from us with their fairy tales of mutual benefit. Both parties might benefit at the expense of others, future generations, or other life on the planet. The essence of trade, according to the official propaganda line of the capitalist politbureau, is that two parties engage in it out of free will, and both benefit or believe they do, which also makes them happy, so that it doesn’t matter that they get screwed.

We are consumption addicts. Drug dealers and opioid addicts also think they benefit. A tool salesman and a logger both profit from trading a chainsaw to cut down the rainforest. Still, had the world not modernised, we would still live in shacks and have barely enough food. Thanks to this morally depraved system, we have the means to live in Paradise, so something good came out of the evil, at least if we now succeed in overcoming the evil. That bourgeois culture didn’t magically pop out of thin air. It is part of the Western cultural heritage, which thus merits further investigation.

Western culture

Hence, we might need a world civilisation and perhaps even a universal culture, as there is a limit to the diversity we can handle. You can’t allow harmful activities to continue, so all cultures need scrutiny. The West was the first civilisation to modernise. But why? Samuel Huntington mentions the characteristics of Western civilisation he believed crucial for modernisation.1 Modernisation affects everyone, so, researching how a future global civilisation and culture will look, might include investigating which elements of Western culture are universal rather than typically Western. And to explain how we got here, we could focus on the features of Western civilisation and how they emerged and developed. According to Huntington, the defining characteristics of Western civilisation are:

  • The Classical legacy. The West inherited from previous civilisations, most notably Classical civilisation. This legacy includes Greek philosophy and rationalism, Roman law, and Christianity. The Islamic and Orthodox cultures also inherited from Classical civilisation, but not as much as the West.
  • Western Christendom, Catholicism and Protestantism. Western Christian peoples believe they differ from Muslims, Orthodox Christians and others. The rift between Catholicism and Protestantism did not change that.
  • Separation of the spiritual and the temporal. Jesus taught that his kingdom was not of this world and that his followers should respect worldly authorities, even pagan ones like the Roman Empire. And so church and state could become separate authorities.
  • The rule of law. It was often a distant ideal, but the idea persisted that power should be constrained. The rule of law is the basis of constitutionalism and the protection of human rights.
  • Individualism. Individualism gradually developed during the Middle Ages. Eventually, people began to promote equal rights for everyone.
  • Social pluralism. The West had diverse autonomous groups not based on kinship or marriage, like monasteries and guilds, and later other associations and societies. Most Western societies had a powerful aristocracy, a substantial peasantry, and an influential class of merchants. The strength of the feudal aristocracy helped to check absolutism.
  • Representative bodies. Social pluralism gave rise to Estates and Parliaments to represent the interests of the aristocracy, clergy, merchants and other groups. Local self-government forced nobles to share their power with burghers, and in the end, yield it. Representation at the national level supplemented autonomy at the local level.

The above list is not complete, nor were all those characteristics always present in every Western society. Some of these characteristics were also present in non-Western societies. It is the combination of features that makes Western civilisation unique. Huntington claimed that Western culture is not universal and added that such a belief is a form of arrogance promoted by centuries of Western dominance.1

That view is not beyond dispute. For instance, liberal democracy has at least some appeal to people from other civilisations. The experiences from Taiwan and Hong Kong indicate that the Chinese may prefer liberal democracy too if they are free to choose. On the other hand, recent developments in the United States and Europe suggest that the legitimacy of democracy can still be contested. Most people would prefer food and security to political influence. So, if a dictator promises to address a real or perceived threat, he might even become popular. In any case, the West has seen an unprecedented amount of social experiments, and in the process, the West may have uncovered elements of universal culture.

The list above does not tell us why the West came to dominate the world for so long. Western culture is a product of a historical accident, but not entirely so, and therein lies the issue. The accident may be about how these characteristics emerged. Their interaction may be a different story. Presumably, there is competition between societies, and the most successful tend to win out. This process involves trying ideas and discarding less successful ones. Conquest usually comes with imposing ideas on others. And you cannot go back in time, so once successful ideas have spread, there is no going back. It is, therefore, not always clear what is typically Western about Western culture.

There are reasons to believe that the future will be entirely different from the past. Humanity is using far more resources than the planet can provide. Something has to give. If humans succeed in dealing with this issue in a civilised manner, then the world may change to the point that the present cultures have lost most of their meaning. The future is unknown, but the past is not. To explain where we are now and why Western civilisation has led the modernisation process, we can investigate the characteristics of Western culture and how they interact.

Greek philosophy

Traditional cultures centre around an idea of wisdom reflected in belief. Wisdom was a greater good than knowledge. If you studied the teachings of the great ancient prophets and philosophers, whether it was Buddha, Confucius, or Christ, you know all you need to know.2 Traditional cultures do not pursue new knowledge for the sake of it, for instance, by studying gravity to come up with a theory of gravity. Greek philosophy was different. Greek philosophers engaged in a rational and fundamental inquiry into the nature of reality and our knowledge and beliefs. It was a quest for knowledge rather than wisdom.

Western Christendom

From Christianity, the West inherited a claim on universalism. Christianity, like Islam, claims to represent the only universal truth that everyone should accept. Christianity, like Islam, also maintains that all people are equal. Everyone can either embrace or reject the only true religion, so there are only believers and non-believers. Non-believers may be inferior to believers, but that is due to their own choice. The West thus inherited the principle of equality from Christianity. In the first few centuries, Christianity spread through individual conversions. Christianity promotes a message of personal salvation, and in this way, it planted the seeds of individualism in the West.

Confucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism do not claim to be the universal truth, while Judaism lacks missionary zeal. Equality was not the main concern for these religions either. Ideologies invented in the West like Liberalism and Socialism and prescriptions to organise societies promoted by the West like human rights, democracy, and free trade also came with passionate claims on universal truth. Even some atheists demonstrate a desire to convert others. This missionary zeal is not prevalent in other civilisations, except Islam. For instance, China and India do not demand other nations to take over their religions or economic and social models.

Christianity features a division between the profane and the spiritual. Jesus allegedly has said that his kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36). Hence a Christian does not need to challenge worldly authorities. And you should give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s (Mark12:17). A Christian could pay Roman taxes. That made it possible to separate church and state so that, in modern Western societies, religions can be equal before the law. And, Christianity came with a powerful message of mercifulness and equality that appealed to the masses.

And it allowed Christianity to spread within the Roman Empire without causing wars and uprisings. As a result, Roman authorities did not consistently view the new religion as the most urgent threat to the empire as there were barbarian invasions and rebellions to deal with. Periods of persecution thus alternated with periods of relative peace for the Christians. Christians believed the Creator to be a higher authority than the emperor, and they renounced the Roman gods, but they did not challenge Roman rule. The Jews did resist, and so Roman armies practically wiped them out.

Not challenging worldly authorities allowed the Catholic Church to establish a vast network of priests, monasteries, and convents and a hierarchy to manage them. As a result of the Investiture Conflict, the Catholic Church gained control over the appointment of bishops and thus became an independent institution with political influence all over Europe. That contrasts with other civilisations. In Orthodox Christianity, the emperor oversaw the church. In Islam and Hinduism, priests and religious scholars could have considerable influence on political affairs. Only, these civilisations had no centralised independent religious institution like the Catholic Church. In China, established religion did not play a prominent role in politics.3

Rule of law and representative bodies

Law consists of the rules of justice in a community. In pre-modern societies, the law was often believed to be fixed by a higher authority, for instance, custom, a divine authority or nature. It made law independent from rulers, at least in theory, and to some extent also in practice. Religious law is administered by priests explaining holy texts. That applies to Judaism, Islam and Hinduism. In China, the state provided the law.3 There never was a Christian law like there is Islamic law, so Christians accepted worldly authorities and their laws.

The Catholic Church embarked on a project of introducing Roman Law throughout Europe. Consequently, Roman Law is nowadays the basis of the laws of most European nations and many nations outside Europe. Roman Law is a civil law meant to regulate affairs between citizens in a society and is not religious. The involvement of the Catholic Church in this project reflects the Christian separation between spiritual and worldly affairs. In England, another tradition of civil law called Common Law emerged.

The rule of law requires the law to be a countervailing power to worldly rulers. Feudal Europe did not have centralised states, so the Catholic Church could use its political power to introduce Roman Law. In England, a power struggle between king and nobility led the king to promote Common Law in the Royal Court to undermine his opponents who administrated the local courts.3 The king prevailed but remained checked by the rule of law and a strong aristocracy who forced him to sign a document, the Magna Carta, that guaranteed the rights of the nobility. The Magna Carta is a precursor to modern constitutions.

The rule of law often was a distant ideal rather than a reality. The outcome depended on the balance of power between the political actors in each society. These were the king, the aristocracy, and the clergy. Traditionally, the aristocrats and clergy were powerful. They had a representation in the Parliaments called Estates that decided over taxes. After the Middle Ages, centralised states began to emerge with kings trying to acquire absolute power and aspiring to decide on their own over taxes.

A power struggle between the kings and the aristocracy ensued. In Poland and Hungary, the aristocrats prevailed. These states soon collapsed because the aristocrats did not want to pay taxes for the defence of the country. In France and Spain, the king more or less prevailed by bribing the aristocracy with tax exemptions and putting the burden of taxes on peasants and the bourgeoisie, who had no representation in the Estates. This move undermined the tax base of the state. In England, a civil war broke out that ended with the arrangement that the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie represented in Parliament decided over the taxes they paid.3

It made taxation legitimate as it required the consent of those who paid taxes. The aristocracy and bourgeoisie in England had a stake in the success of the state. They profited from the colonies, for instance, via the slave and opium trade, so they were willing to pay taxes if they believed that it was necessary. In this way, England could win out in the colonial wars with France in the century that followed despite having fewer resources. England’s finances were in good shape, so England could borrow more money at lower interest rates to finance these wars than France could.

Individualism and social pluralism

In traditional societies, male family lines were the basis of the organisation of families. Families rather than individuals owned property. Family elders made important decisions. In Western Europe, individuals could make important decisions about marriage and property themselves. They already had substantial freedoms in the Middle Ages. This development started soon after Germanic tribes had overrun the Roman Empire and converted to Christianity.3 Christianity comes with an individualistic message of personal salvation.

The Catholic Church took a strong stance against practices that held family structures together, such as marriages between close kin, marriages to widows of dead relatives, the adoption of children and divorce. It allowed the church to benefit from property-owning Christians who died without an heir. For that reason, women could own property too. These individual property rights undermined family structures.3 Individual property rights later became crucial for the development of modern capitalism.

As a result, the Catholic Church could finance its large organisation, provide relief to the poor, and become a significant power. Western Europeans in the Middle Ages did not trace their descent only through the family line of their father, which would be necessary to maintain strict boundaries between families. In this way, it became harder to carry out blood feuds as the circle of vengeance was smaller, and many people felt related to both sides.3

It allowed feudalism to replace kinship as a basis for social solidarity so that social organisation could become a matter of choice rather than custom. In theory, feudalism was a voluntary submission of one individual to another based on the exchange of protection for service. In practice, this was often not the case, but with the spread of the rule of law, feudal relationships turned into legal contracts in which both the lord and serf had rights and obligations.3

In the Middle Ages, there were no strong states in Western Europe. The aristocracy was powerful and responsible for the defence of their realms. As the economy began to flourish, an influential class of merchants emerged in the cities. Many cities gained independence and became responsible for their governance and defence. Serfs flocked to cities in search of opportunities and freedom, thereby further undermining the power of feudal lords. In Northern Italy, feudalism had already ended by 1200 AD and cities run by wealthy merchants came to dominate the area.

Kinship as an organising method had largely vanished. Europeans could organise themselves for a wide array of purposes. In the Middle Ages, there were monasteries, convents, and guilds. There were also military orders, such as the Knights Templars. Later on, societies and corporations emerged. This European pluralism contrasted with the absence of civil society, the weakness of the aristocracy, and the strength of centralised bureaucracies in Russia, China, and the Ottoman Empire.1

The Renaissance

The Renaissance began in the merchant towns of Northern Italy. The elites of Northern Italy became less religious. This process is called secularisation. Wealthy merchants had money to spend on frivolous pursuits like art and literary works. Optimism replaced pessimism. Medieval virtues like poverty, contemplation and chastity came to be replaced by new virtues like participating in social life and enjoying life. The Italian cities needed the active participation of wealthy individuals to finance public efforts like defence.

The pursuit of wealth became seen as a virtue, which signalled the emergence of modern capitalism. People in traditional societies and Medieval Europe frowned upon trade and the pursuit of wealth. They believed that wealthy people must share their riches with their community. Trade often comes with questionable ethics and was seen as a necessary evil.

Building on the existing European tradition of individualism, entrepreneurial individuals came to be cherished. The Italian Renaissance tradition includes individuals like Michelangelo, who was known for his unparalleled artistic versatility, and Giovanni Giustiniani, a mercenary who organised the defence of Constantinople against the Turks and Christopher Columbus, who discovered America.

The separation between the worldly and spiritual realms reduced the obstacles to secularisation. The Renaissance started in the cradle of the Roman Empire. Italian merchants sailed the Mediterranean. The legacy of the ancient Greeks and Romans was everywhere around them. It prompted a renewed interest in classical antiquity, including ancient Greek and Latin texts. The works of the Greek philosophers and their rational enquiries into the nature of reality were rediscovered and began to affect European thought. These texts were secular and promoted virtues different from Christian virtues.

Printing and gunpowder were Chinese inventions that came to Europe. Around 1450, the first movable type printing system was introduced in Europe, making it possible to print books in large numbers. From then on, new ideas could spread faster. Constantinople, the last Christian stronghold in the Eastern Mediterranean, fell into the hands of the Ottoman Turks, blocking traditional trade routes with the Indies. The Portuguese then began to look for new trade routes by sailing around Africa, starting the European exploration of the world.

Double shock

Around 1500, two developments rocked Europe. The first was the discovery of a previously unknown continent, America. It uprooted the belief in traditional knowledge as Europeans discovered their ignorance. It spurred a fundamental questioning of existing ideas and a drive for knowledge2 that would lead to modern science that uses observations to produce general theories. The works of the Greek philosophers turned out to be helpful in this respect.

The second was Protestantism challenging the moral authority of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church had become corrupted by the buying and selling of church offices. Martin Luther taught that salvation is a gift of God that you might receive through faith in Jesus Christ. In line with European individualism, he made faith a matter of personal choice rather than tradition. Luther taught that the Bible is the only source of divine knowledge, thereby challenging the authority of the Catholic Church. He translated the Bible into German, making it accessible to laypeople.

The Portuguese had found new trade routes to the Indies, and Columbus had discovered a continent that promised unparalleled riches. Small bands of Spaniards with firearms overran existing empires and plundered them. After plunder came exploitation. Colonisation was a profitable enterprise that could sustain itself. It generated sufficient revenues to expand the colonies further. Enterprise and investment capital rather than state armies and taxes drove European colonisation. The resulting larger markets favoured economies of scale. After the invention of the steam engine, these economies of scale propelled the Industrial Revolution.

A revolutionary mix

In 800 AD Western Europe was backward compared to the more powerful Islamic, Orthodox Byzantine, and Chinese civilisations. By 1800 AD, China was still a match for England and France, and the Ottoman Empire was a significant power. But the Industrial Revolution was taking off, tilting the balance of power decisively towards the West in the following decades. Europeans had acquired a mindset that made them more curious, enterprising, and flexible. When the gap between industrial and non-industrial nations became clear, Italy, Austria, and Russia started industrialising too. China, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire did not. It may now be possible to identify the elements of Western culture that were crucial to modernisation and shape the ways how Westerners behave:

  • a religion with a message of equality, missionary zeal and an uncompromising claim on the truth;
  • individualism promoting flexible organisation for different purposes;
  • a separation between spiritual and worldly affairs allowing for secular law and secular pursuits;
  • a quest for knowledge and truth, for instance, reflected in science and the scientific method;
  • an absence of a strong centralised political power, but instead, an uncertain balance between countries and political actors within countries that promoted competition;
  • a rule of law that limited the powers of political actors and guaranteed individual property rights so that investments were more secure;
  • entrepreneurial spirit and a drive for profit.

The introduction of railroads exemplifies this trend. The first commercial railroad opened in 1830 in England. By 1850 there were already 40,000 kilometres of railroads in Europe. Asia, Africa, and Latin America together had only 4,000 kilometres.2 The first railroad in China was opened only in 1876. It was 24 kilometres long and built by Europeans. The Chinese government destroyed it a year later. In Persia, the first railroad was built in 1888 by a Belgian company. In 1950 the railway network of Persia amounted to only 2,500 kilometres in a country seven times the size of Britain which had 48,000 kilometres of railroads. The technology of railroads was relatively simple, but the Chinese and the Persians did not catch on. They could not do so because they thought and organised very differently.2

Until 1800, Europe did not enjoy an obvious advantage over China, Persia or the Ottoman Empire, but Europe had gradually built a unique potential. It had developed a culture of individualism, curiosity, and enterprise. When the technological inventions of the Industrial Revolution appeared, Europeans were in the best position to use them.2 They were more innovative, motivated by profit, and organised themselves flexibly for new purposes like building and maintaining railroads.

On the back of these advantages, European ideas spread over the world. Ideologies invented in Europe like capitalism and communism inherited the missionary zeal and uncompromising claim on the truth from Christianity. Similar thoughts were formulated elsewhere, for instance, by Chinese philosophers, but not as a coherent ideology. A few Chinese philosophers proposed that theories require the support of empirical evidence, but they did not develop a scientific method. Science was at the basis of European inventions. Science produced results, which promoted European power and fostered European superiority thinking.

The culture of the future

As the first civilisation to modernise, the West has led in the culture of modernity for several centuries. During that time, the West could impose its will on other civilisations and often did so. Western ideas and values have spread over the globe. As other societies are catching up and acquiring similar patterns for education, work, wealth, and class structure, there may be a universal culture in the future.1 It is by no means certain, but it is possible, most notably if some ideas are superior to others or work better, but that is the same.

Hegelian dialectic sees history as a battleground for ideas. Revolutions like the French Revolution illustrate this point. The old order tried to undo its achievements but failed in the end. Indeed, the French Revolution was why Hegel came up with his concept in the first place. It suggests that more powerful ideas replace weaker ones in a survival-of-the-fittest-like competition. Nearly all the ideological struggle has taken place in the West so the surviving ideas from the West could be superior. It might explain why liberal democracy is a success, to varying degrees at least, in countries with different cultures, for instance, Japan, India, Botswana, Turkey, Taiwan, Costa Rica, Pakistan, Thailand, Uruguay, South Africa, Ukraine, Indonesia and Hong Kong.

The future may be different from the past, so existing cultures may not last. Humanity must face issues like the limits of the planet and poverty as one civilisation. And modernisation does not have to mean Westernisation. Japan was the first non-Western country to modernise. Today it is one of the most advanced countries in the world, and also, a liberal democracy. At the same time, Japan has retained its unique culture and identity. So far, non-Western cultures have been modernising without disappearing. In many ways, Chinese, Islamic, Buddhist or Hindu cultures reassert themselves. As the wealth and influence of non-Western societies is increasing, they are becoming more confident about the merits of their cultural heritage and may be less likely to Westernise.1

Furthermore, the West may not be in the best position for the future as the future could put different demands on societies than the past. There still is competition between countries. Other countries, for instance, China, may now be better positioned to deal with future challenges so that other civilisations, including the West, may have to adapt to China, most notably with issues regarding government effectiveness. That does not necessarily imply dictatorship, but other nations may increasingly copy features from Confucian societies. For the West, it may mean that individualism and individual rights will be reversed to some extent. And charging interest on money and debts may promote wealth inequality, financial instability, excessive government interference in the economy, and short-term thinking so other societies may have to adapt to the Islamic civilisation and abolish interest on money and debts.

People from different cultures interact more often, so a global culture may emerge in the longer term. In any case, the West cannot impose its ideas and values upon others in the future. Often people from other civilisations are resentful of the West’s imperialism.1 The Chinese speak of one hundred years of national humiliation when referring to the period between 1850 and 1950 in which Western powers broke the Chinese Empire and plunged it into civil war. Among Muslims, similar sentiments exist. The West’s recent military interventions in Islamic countries stirred up these sentiments.

These feelings may subside over time, and non-Western peoples may develop a neutral stance towards the West and its past. In the process, they may discover that at least some elements of Western culture have universal appeal. Societies from different civilisations have much in common because human nature does not depend on culture. There may be concepts, for instance, democracy, that can work in other civilisations. The West has tried out more ideas than other civilisations, so it more likely has uncovered elements of a possible universal culture in the process than other civilisations.

Barring a collective challenge coinciding with the emergence of a universal religion that inspires people from all backgrounds, global culture is unlikely to emerge anytime soon. A universal religion has not yet arrived, but this universe could be a virtual reality created by an advanced humanoid civilisation for the personal entertainment of someone we can call God. And so, the advent of a new religion is a realistic possibility. This religion could provide a plausible explanation for our existence, promote a shared destiny, and allow for a greater degree of diversity than currently existing religions and ideologies.

Featured image: Map from Clash of Civilisations, Wikimedia Commons, User Kyle Cronan and User Olahus, GFDL.

1. The Clash of Civilisations and the remaking of world order. Samuel. P. Huntington (1996).
2. Sapiens: A Brief History Of Humankind. Yuval Noah Harari (2014). Harvil Secker.
3. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. Francis Fukuyama (2011).