“Western social science has made three metaphysical mistakes. The first was to assume that its laws and lessons were, like the physical sciences, universally applicable to all societies.
Harvard Professor Theodore Levitt captured the prevailing zeitgeist well when he wrote in 1983: “The world’s needs and desires have been irrevocably homogenised.”
That may have been true 40 years ago. It is no longer. One indirect consequence of this assumption – that the whole world was converging towards a common set of tastes and aspirations – was that Western universities progressively abandoned area studies.
This has left the West ill-equipped to see how profoundly the world has changed since the 1980s,” writes the distinguished Singaporean academic, diplomat and bestselling author, one of Asia’s most prominent public intellectuals, Kishore Mahbubani, to an audience for the National Youth Council in Singapore.
The West, bolstered by the events of the past two centuries, has come to assume superiority of its civilization over all other civilizations. This is a terrible mistake, Mahbubani points out.
RELATED ARTICLES:
- The Billionaire World Economic Forum mirror the Corporate Raiders of the British East India Company
- The Total Humiliation of China: Western Drug Lords, Opium Wars and the Merging of Public and Private Funds in the East India Company
- China values freedom from chaos – The Chinese challenge to American primacy
- The American System of sovereign states vs. Globalism
- China used globalization to benefit its people, the West’ borderless globalism benefitted the billionaire class
- The destructive effect of moving American jobs to China
It has become very clear that those two centuries were the exception. From the time of Christ and up untill the 1820s, the largest economies in the world have always been China and India.
“When Asian societies began to succeed, most Western observers assumed they would inevitably, like Japan, become more Westernised. That was seen as the only path to success. This assumption rested on a third metaphysical error: the conflation of modernisation with Westernisation. They are, in fact, very different processes. Both China and India are modernising without Westernising. They are rediscovering their own civilisational roots and are, in fact, becoming less Western in many respects,” Dr. Mahbubani further points out.
“The defining new reality of the 21st century is therefore not a world of emerging markets, but of re-emerging civilisations. To thrive in this multi-civilisational world, global corporations must abandon the outdated assumption that the world is homogenising. Not all the insights of Western social science travel well.”
Western economists, for instance, tend to dismiss the efficacy of five-year plans, associating them with Soviet-era failures.
Nevertheless, China’s five-year plans have played a pivotal role in its remarkable ascent. In the year 2000, China accounted for approximately 5 percent of global manufacturing output.
At present, the figure stands at approximately 30 per cent. By the year 2030, this figure could reach 45%. This transformation was influenced by numerous factors, with deliberate state-led five-year plans playing a pivotal role.
China’s success also underscores the notion that the optimal equilibrium between state and market may deviate from Western standards. Why? This is due to the state’s historical role in Chinese society, which has spanned more than 2,000 years.
“We can no longer assume, like I did when I was growing up, that the West will remain unquestionably superior,” says Dr. Mahbubani.
Read the full article here.
The level of censorship in social media and search engines is all-time high. Do like thousands of others, subscribe to The Herland Report newsletter here!
Led by Scandinavian bestselling author, Hanne Nabintu Herland, The Herland Report provides independent analysis from leading Western intellectuals and ground breaking Podcasts and YouTube interviews, cutting through the mainstream media rhetoric. It is a great place to watch interviews and read the articles of leading intellectuals, thought leaders, authors and activists from across the political spectrum. The Herland Report believes in freedom of speech and its editorial policy resides above the traditional Left vs Right paradigm which we believe has lost its relevance and ability to describe the current driving forces in Western politics.
