Politics, Ethics and Culture in Our Time: A Post-Civilizational Perspective

Global capitalism is effecting changes in human life as momentous as those that occurred during the Neolithic Revolution, the Axial Age (700-300 BC), and the modern era post-1500, when industrial capitalism, state power, and science reshaped the civilized world. The transformation is paradoxical, however. Science and technology ensure material progress but the market promotes cultural obsolescence and erodes belief in the Enlightenment ideals that inspired the quest for progress. In Western democracies, liberty and equality are proving irreconcilable, citizens becoming demoralized, fraternity fractured; meanwhile despotic Eurasian states are recycling old faiths and concocting neo-imperialist ideologies. These contradictions must be confronted if the cultural values that sustain civilized life are to be conserved.