History as a starting point

In relation to our article A garden of civilisations

Erik Aslaksen, Australia, Jan 20, 2025

Kari McKern’s contribution (https://johnmenadue.com/a-garden-of-civilisations/) is the latest in a long line of excellent contributions to P&I advocating for a sensible and promising way forward for the world society, a society of civilisations cooperating and developing for mutual benefit. However, we are not starting from scratch, and if I may make an analogy with mathematics, it is one thing to find a general solution to a differential equation describing the time dependence of a variable; a specific solution depends on the initial condition. What practically all of the laudable proposed solutions for the evolution of the world society ignore is the initial condition, which in this case is defined by our shared history. The West likes to portray this history as an admirable evolution of humanity from its barbarous origins through the sequence of Athenian society, the glory of the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, on to the current state where Western culture and society provide a shining “light on the hill” to guide humanity forward.

A slightly different view might see history as the disruption of the largely separate evolution of multiple civilisations by the serendipitous confluence of various factors that allowed a small fraction of the world’s population – the West – to rise to world domination through the brutal rape, pillage, and subjugation of the rest of the world, culminating in a culture that intends to maintain its hegemonial position at all cost and that is characterised mainly by its fascination with warfare and the development of ever more powerful weapons.

Clearly these two, admittedly extreme, initial conditions are going to result in significantly different solutions to the equation describing the evolution of humanity from here onwards, so that rather than worrying about the exact values of the parameters in the equation we should first sort out a common understanding of the initial condition.