The terrorist attacks of 9/11 briefly disrupted celebrations of a world globalised by capital and consumption.
Tanpinar presciently feared that to embrace the western conception of progress was to be mentally enslaved by a whole new epistemology, one that compartmentalised knowledge and concealed an instrumental view of human beings as no more than things to be manipulated.
Force-backed humanitarianism, which relies on rational influence over events in other countries, may have been a more feasible project in the bipolar era of the Cold War, with its relatively defined and stable web of alliances and proxies.
Countries that managed to rebuild commanding state structures after popular nationalist revolutions – such as China, Vietnam, and Iran – look stable and cohesive when compared with a traditional monarchy such as Thailand or wholly artificial nation-states like Iraq and Syria.
Happily, financial capitalism and free trade have not done away with national languages and literatures, as Marx rather too blithely hoped.
The Dalai Lama can claim the sanction of the Buddha, who is said to have altered his teachings in order to reach a diverse audience.
The Korean War, which China entered on the side of North Korea, fixed Mao’s image in the United States as another unappeasable Communist.
As the 19th century progressed, Europe’s innovations, norms and categories came to achieve a truly universal hegemony.
I think the presence of caste in India, how the villages are geographically structured on caste lines, is very different from China. The presence of an egalitarian culture is striking in a Chinese village.
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