Introduction: Rubio’s Blunder
When Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, invoked notions of ‘Western Civilization’ at the Munich Security conference in Feb 2026, most of his supporting evidence was ahistorical and incoherent, even if it tugged at the in-group inclinations of his audience.
His speech conjured a Western civilization built on “European Values” that never existed, at least not in the way he claims. He credits Europe with inventing the rule of law, apparently unaware of Hammurabi's Code, and with creating the university, apparently unaware of Al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, that was founded in 859 CE, two centuries before Bologna. He credits Europe with the Scientific Revolution while omitting that it ran on Arabic algebra, Indian numerals, and Hellenic texts that had been preserved and transmitted back to Europe by Islamic scholars for almost 800 years.
Rubio celebrated the Beatles and the Rolling Stones as monuments of European genius while omitting that the Stones named themselves after a Muddy Waters song and that both bands were, by their own admission, channeling African American blues. He framed America's founding as a story of Christianity arriving in a new world, ignoring that its first settlers were themselves escaping religious persecution in Christian Europe.
This is not to discredit the significant cultural achievements of ‘Europeans’ as a whole or indeed of ‘the West’, but if we must assign credit, it’s important to be factual and balanced.
The very notion of Western civilization as a coherent, unified bloc collapses on contact with the actual historical record: for most of the last millennium, the nations Rubio lumps together as a single civilization were busily slaughtering one another - in the Hundred Years' War, the Thirty Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, and two World Wars so catastrophic they required the construction of entirely new international institutions just to stop it happening a third time.
Perhaps his actual argument was that the US's unipolar military and economic dominance is at risk, implying therefore that Europeans should, "feel threatened too". The fact that it might have worked on his audience demonstrates how susceptible we are to in-group flattery. It also shows that beneficiaries of the current model will inevitably resist any evolution (hence the term ‘reactionary’).
Rather than signalling an opportunity for deeper connection with the wider world, he was signalling separation: East vs West, Liberal Democracies vs Flawed Democracies, One-Party, Monarchies and Religious States, and so on. The notion that the Western World is comparatively peaceful today is precisely because it managed to transcend its own tribal, feudal, mystical and militaristic-nationalistic periods, in the aftermath of WW2. This dance has existed at each seminal moment in history, as one level of group consciousness evolves towards another through collision, conflict, and moments of wisdom.
We already taste the benefits from non-zero sum dynamics in the tightly-knit global economy that gives us cheap phones, cheaper clothes and bananas all year round. This is partly why we need Russian oil despite “principled” economic sanctions on Russia, the Strait of Hormuz open despite a regime-change war with Iran, and persistent Chinese manufacturing despite our concerns about Taiwan’s imminent reunification with the PRC. We try to reconcile our interdependent global network of societies with our parochial civilizational outlook, but we can’t.
Of course, philosophical contradictions have always existed between, for example, the US and China, apparent adversaries. And historic progress was made despite them.
Deng Xiaoping’s pivot toward market-led capitalism ("reform and opening") was greatly facilitated by the diplomatic work of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon’s visit in 1972. Interestingly, the opening came through the realisation of a shared strategic interest (containing the Soviet Union), but it nonetheless worked as a pretext for lowering ideological defences. Deng understood that restoring economic growth required that he set aside Maoist / Communist ideals. America reciprocated. The effects of this moment of civilizational open-mindedness are abundantly clear today in China’s economic and industrial primacy - and likewise in the undeniable fact that China adapted Western-style market capitalism to its purposes.
My argument is not that we must fuse our civilizations more forcefully but rather that we can approach our civilizational horizon(s) with great historical self-awareness, humility, and creativity. And in doing so, the inevitable harmonising of our diverse philosophies and our common consciousness, will come more naturally and less violently. Doing so will also allow us to face our common global challenges with great effectiveness.
Author of ‘Non-Zero’, Robert Wright, recently said: “I think we are on the threshold of a global community. We’re obviously not there [yet] because we have wars, we have cold wars, and I think technology is forcing us to decide whether we want to transcend this kind of conflict and function as a global community and thereby deal with some of the [significant] challenges we face or…” (Robert Right, 1957 CE - )
This essay aims to decode some of the mechanisms that have led us here and offer some ideas on where to go next:
(i) how language and culture construct us before we are conscious enough to consent embedding hierarchies, categories of friend and foe, and entire ways of thinking about the world;
(ii) how unprocessed collective trauma follows a consistent sequence (injury, shame, denial, supremacy, violence) and how these wounds, if not healed, search for an ideology and a righteous cause to heal the trauma;
(iii) how conflict, paradoxically, has been one of history's most reliable engines of civilizational growth because to understand an adversary you must enter their world, and in doing so you often discover common ground;
(iv) why openness requires roots to be sustainable and that the real problem is not ‘suicidal empathy’ but asymmetry, which is a coordination problem requiring better mechanisms, not higher walls; and
(v) how we can meet the civilizational horizon by mastering and transcending our inherited in-group programming and seek out higher principles of cooperation and co-existence (higher group consciousness) while acknowledging the best aspects of our heritage.
The Architecture of the Cage
Imagine being loaded onto a railway track at birth. Before you were conscious enough to ask for your destination, the train had already left the station. The landscape outside the window - the hills, the light, the weather, the language on the signs - came to feel not like one of many views, but like the view. It all felt inevitable.
This ‘track’ is metaphorical of course. In reality, it burrows inward into all parts of our psyche. Language is its deepest instrument: it conveys hierarchies, distinctions, vagaries of humour, categories of friend and foe; it includes words that make certain thoughts easy and others nearly unthinkable.
Ludwig Wittgenstein said: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world". Language thus doesn't simply describe reality - it constructs it. To speak a language is to inherit a way of thinking about the world.
You did not simply learn your language and cultural identity. You were built by it, at a level deeper than conscious memory, in a period before you had the tools to evaluate what was happening. It is your soil. It is self-referential and, as a result, very hard to transcend.
For example, whereas English has only singular and plural, Arabic has a third form, the dual, which is a dedicated grammatical category for two of something, distinct from both one and many. Thus ‘two people speaking over there’ is distinct from ‘people speaking over there’. Arabic also has a verb form that has reflexivity in its structure: ‘ta'allama’ doesn't simply mean "he learned" but carries within it the sense that the learning came upon him from the inside.
Not all inheritance is bad. Indeed, civilizations would not exist at all were it not for new generations inheriting and imitating the cultures they were born into. That inertia keeps civilizations together and functioning. Civilizations, like families, seek togetherness, even as they evolve organically. Their first instinct, like ours, is self-preservation and with that comes defensiveness. This is, in a sense, the first law of in-group dynamics: defend your group blindly no matter what.
The machinery that produces tribal identity is far older than any of the particular modern identities it generates. The willingness to sacrifice for your people and fight against ‘theirs’ were adaptive features for small bands of 50 to 150 humans navigating a world of scarcity and predators. For most of human history, your tribe was your life-support system and so to be expelled from it was a death sentence.
The hardware, in other words, was built for a hunter-gatherer world that no longer exists. Henri Tajfel and John Turner's Social Identity Theory (1970-1980) showed that threatening someone's group membership is not just an inconvenience but an attack on their self-esteem - their psychological foundation. The experiments also showed that people would discriminate in favor of in-group members even when groups were assigned on the basis of something entirely arbitrary: a preference for one abstract painting over another, or even the flip of a coin.
A more recent study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025) extended this finding further: discriminatory resource allocation emerges even in the complete absence of group identity, arising simply from the perception of difference itself. You don't need an organized enemy.
Consider what this means. Your allegiance to a football club, a religious denomination (Catholic, Protestant, Sunni, Shia, Alawite, Dudist, Bahai), a political party, a nation - things for which some would blindly die for - can be totally random anyway. The entire edifice of self, with all its fierce certainties, is balanced on a coin tossed often by fate.
The brain manufactures tribal tension from almost nothing.
And yet we defend it ferociously, because we believe that not defending it is a form of psychological annihilation. Which is why some arguments are so hard. To question the track you’re on (even if the inner voice is hinting that you must) is to risk exile from everyone who knows you and to demolish your own self-esteem. The price of apostasy is the loss of community, family, belonging. The network enforces conformity not through violence alone, but through the threat fracture from the group.
We seek togetherness as instinct.
"To forget one's ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root." — Chinese proverb
Networks of belief and identity accumulate inertia over time. They develop institutional architecture such as churches, constitutions, legal codes, cuisines, musical traditions, that makes them progressively harder to redirect. This applies to any coherent cultural system. And as Nietzsche saw clearly: "The most dangerous form of blindness is believing your perspective is the only reality." The truly trapped person is not the one who knows they are in a cage. It is the one who has mistaken the cage bars for the sky.
Nonetheless, human societies do inevitably adapt and in doing so move progressively from one set of group associations (or common consciousness) to another, actively seeking comfort, reassurance, and protection from that association. What started as in-group allegiance to clans, expanded to include whole ethnic tribes, then mystical groupings (religions), world models (liberalism, science), nation states (France) and eventually supra-national groups (Western, European).
If there is any ‘rule’ it is that our group associations, and the self-esteem derived from them, change and expand with time, through conflict, and the collision of competing models. The point here is that we can only depart one cage by finding another that makes more sense - by seeking our self-esteem and security in a new model of belonging that integrates and builds on the previous systems that we inherited.
The hint that we are overdue for an upgrade is when we reach a moment of incoherence or obvious cultural stagnation / decline. Like what ‘The West’ is facing now.
When Trauma Becomes a Weapon
Although conflict has always shaped successive civilizations, there is a particular and devastating sequence that occurs when trauma and humiliation is inflicted on a group at sufficient scale. The logic is awfully consistent across history that it begins to look less circumstantial and more like a law.
It begins with genuine, catastrophic injury. A people are defeated, displaced, murdered, and humiliated. Their institutions destroyed, their identity attacked, and their sense of collective dignity shattered. The wound is real. The suffering is not manufactured or exaggerated.
The pain of collective trauma festers, if it cannot be processed or if there is no space for genuine grief, no external acknowledgment, no justice, and no restoration. The injury does not disappear - it transforms. The sequence runs, predictably as follows: injury → shame → denial → supremacy → violence. The group that was broken begins to reassemble itself around the story of its breaking, and that story over time becomes a weapon.
Germany after the First World War is perhaps the most consequential example in modern history. The Treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany not merely military defeat but deliberate humiliation. It assigned sole moral responsibility for the conflict to Germany, crippled the economy through reparations, and disbanded the military that had been central to national self-conception. In other words, the shame was structural. Into it stepped a political program (Nazism) that offered a precise antidote; the conversion of humiliation into supremacy:
You were not defeated because you were weak. You were stabbed in the back by enemies within (Jews, communists, homosexuals) who had betrayed a nation that was in fact exceptional and destined.
The shame was inverted rather than being processed. The violence that followed was not an aberration from the trauma - it was its direct expression of trauma.
The Holocaust of 1933-1945 was one of the most systematic and total acts of destruction ever visited on a people: approximately six million killed, and a people almost entirely annihilated. The trauma was, by any measure, all-compassing for those who survived. The founding of Israel (a 19th Century idea that had never gained steam) in the immediate aftermath was a collective psychological response to that trauma and supported by the guilt of Allied powers. It was a declaration that the vulnerability which had made the Holocaust possible would never be permitted again. ‘Never again’ was not merely a slogan. It was the conversion of the identity of the victim into the identity of a sovereign power, which could protect itself. The logic is understandable; it is what traumatized individuals do when they gain agency. They build walls and develop hypervigilance. They reorganise themselves around a North Star of ‘survival no matter what’.
The tragedy is that this reorganization, left unprocessed, reproduces the very patterns inflicted on the victims when they were powerless - in this case, the suppression of indigenous Palestinian identity, the mass expulsions, the construction of separation barriers, land theft, and collective punishment. These are not the behaviors of people who have healed from trauma. They are the behaviors of a people still living unconsciously inside it, still organized around the wound, unable to see that the logic of supremacy they are now deploying is the same logic that was once deployed against them. The oppressed do not automatically become the liberators. They frequently become the next oppressors, because oppression is what trauma, unprocessed, knows how to build.
“The vanquished always want to imitate the victor” (Ibn Khaldun, 1332-1406 CE).
This is not a political argument about territorial rights. It is a psychological observation about what happens when collective shame is converted into state power without the intermediate step of collective healing. The pattern runs through the history of empires and of every group that has been broken and then, given the chance, has broken others.
Unprocessed collective trauma, like the train carriage with a poisonous cargo, moves forward through time, looking for a form. It finds the children and grandchildren, and gives itself to them as identity. It finds the opportune political moment, and offers itself as ideology. It looks for anything that can heal the shame and restore self-esteem. It finds the perceived threat and presents itself as righteous self-defense.
Israeli intellectuals Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Boaz Evron were among those who raised alarms early, with Leibowitz accusing Israel of "Nazification" and Evron warning that Israel was displaying "racist Nazi attitudes”. The goal (a dream of a Jewish homeland) was justified. The means (Palestinian expulsion and murder) was not.
The wound, if left untended, becomes the knife. The survivor who cannot grieve, be supported through healing, will eventually find someone to punish for what they survived. Understanding this sequence is not an act of moral equivalence. It is important because if unhealed collective trauma can start World Wars, Holocausts, and Mass Displacement then it is indeed a formidable force in the shaping of our civilization(s).
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The Collision that Teaches
There is also a paradox.
To fight a perceived enemy effectively you must study their language, customs, the way they pray and grieve. You must attempt to explore their ‘track’. And in doing so, we often re-humanize them because we access universal truths about humanity and life as a whole. This requires us to contemplate our in-group instincts and fear of others, even if temporarily, from a different point of view.
The military historian John Keegan documented this most vividly in the bizarre intimacy of the World War I trenches, where British and German soldiers shared tobacco through gaps in the barbed wire and famously played football together on Christmas Day (before resuming battle). Gordon Allport in his 1954 Contact Hypothesis explains that prejudice dissolves through structured encounter: equal-status contact, shared goals, the necessity of cooperation (like Nixon and Deng).
Indeed history's greatest civilizational flowerings have, almost without exception, been moments of orderly collision. Between 700-1100 CE, Al-Andalus (Spain) provided a unique hub of cultural, scientific, and religious tolerance under Muslim rule, as did the Norman rulers of Sicily (1072-1194) who had become so comfortable with their Muslim and Jewish cohabitants after conquering Sicily that they refused papal orders to join the Crusades.
Tang Dynasty China (618-907 CE) offers another sweeping example: at its height, Chang'an was the largest city on earth and an exemplary crucible of encounter: Persian merchants, Arab traders, Nestorian Christians, Buddhist monks, Zoroastrian priests, and Confucian scholars sharing goods, musical forms, craftsmanship, astronomical knowledge, and agricultural techniques from across the known world.
The result was an explosion of poetry, painting, medicine, and statecraft that China still regards as its classical civilizational peak. It is perhaps no coincidence that contemporary China, having spent several decades absorbing the best of American technology and product practices, has within a generation become a peer competitor in almost every field: robotics, clean energy, communications, automotive, etc. The formula for civilizational growth remains the same after a thousand years: purity is stagnation, mixing is generative.
Indeed, a majority of major Silicon Valley’s technology companies were founded by immigrants (incl. Apple, eBay, SUN, Google, Cisco, etc) who chose to go there - a testament to the region’s openness to new people but also its willingness to create through the orderly collision of ideas atop of a fundamentally stable, confident, yet tolerant, cultural foundation (e.g. Andalusian, Tang, or Californian).
The Limits of Openness
There is a counter-argument, articulated with increasing force by Elon Musk and others ‘Western civilizationists’, that frames cultural openness as "suicidal empathy" - i.e. openness is a lowered drawbridge, no longer a virtue but a vulnerability waiting to be exploited.
A person with no stable core is not enlightened but available - colonisable by the most aggressive identity system in the room. Societies, it follows, are no different. Samuel Huntington famously made the philosophical case in The Clash of Civilizations, arguing that liberal universalism is itself a culturally particular worldview. To insist that everyone wants the same things and will converge on the same institutions is not open-mindedness, it is a failure of (anthropological) imagination dressed up as tolerance.
There is a real kernel here. But the conclusion mistakes the diagnosis for the prescription.
A tree is not a tumbleweed. Deep roots do not prevent growth; they enable it. The psychological literature on secure attachment offers a good model for what healthy cultural identity looks like at scale: a child confident in a stable base of love becomes more willing to explore, not less. Securely attached individuals seek encounter with the unfamiliar because they are not threatened by it. The anxious cling to the familiar because any challenge to their existing model feels like an attack on their self-esteem, and thus their existence. The pattern holds for civilisations as much as for children.
The real problem the ‘suicidal empathy’ critique identifies is not empathy but the dangers of asymmetry - one civilisation lowering its defences while another keeps theirs raised. This is a genuine coordination problem, much like the WW1 soldiers attempting to share a cigarette in no-man’s land.
But the answer to a coordination problem is neither unilateral defection nor an iron curtain. It is the construction of better coordination mechanisms: international institutions, cultural exchange, trade networks, shared scientific endeavours, diplomatic frameworks that create genuine reciprocity. Setting a sensible boundary is not tribal regression. It is the precondition for a genuine encounter.
“Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall” (Ronald Reagan, 1987)
Transcending the instinct (without denying it)
The in-group instinct cannot be eliminated. This is not pessimism - it is biology. Oxytocin, the molecule most associated with human bonding and love, simultaneously deepens our attachment to those we consider ours and sharpens our suspicion of those we consider ‘other’. The same neurochemistry that makes you willing to die for your children makes you capable of killing for your opposition. These are not separable features. They are the same feature, operating in different directions.
Unresolved trauma, insecurity and fear often make us compress the radius of our consciousness. Healing, security, and love expand the radius of our consciousness. The question is not: how do we destroy this instinct? The question is: how do we better understand this instinct and consciously extend the radius of who counts as "us"?
History suggests this is possible, even if frustratingly slow. The circle of moral concern has expanded, in fits and starts and frequent reversals, across millennia: from the immediate family to the clan, from the clan to the tribe, from the tribe to the city-state, from the city-state to the nation state (and many other layers in between). Each expansion was resisted. Each was denounced as heretical, destabilizing, dangerous to the established order. Each eventually became unremarkable, absorbed into the background assumptions of people who could not imagine living under the previous arrangement.
The expansion, however, is not automatic. It does not happen through the mere passage of time or the benevolent unfolding of history. It happens when enough individuals do the difficult internal work of examining their own programming: of asking (with Gabor Maté’s ‘compassionate inquiry’) where did this belief come from, who told me this was true, and what would I think if I had been born elsewhere? It comes by seeing growth as preferable to stagnation.
This is what ‘metacognition’ means in practice: the act of exploring your own assumptions and finding higher principles that are coherent across various experiences and consistently applied with universal human principles. Mapping the sources of your convictions is not a therapeutic exercise - it is a political act that seeks to transcend your inheritance and build a bigger castle.
It is the beginning of the only real freedom that is actually available to us.
Conclusion: The View from Above the Tracks
Return, one final time, to the image of the railway tracks.
From inside the carriage, your track looks like the world. It takes a tremendous act of imagination to remember that you are moving, that the view is particular, that somewhere just beyond what you can see there are other carriages, other windows, other landscapes that look equally inevitable to the people riding through them.
But ascend high enough above those tracks and something changes. From above, you can see all the tracks at once. You can see how many there are, how they crisscross the whole earth, how they were laid by human hands in particular centuries for particular reasons that made sense at the time.
This is what the work of self-knowledge makes possible: not the elimination of your track, but the ability to see it from above. And in that seeing, something becomes available that was not available before: freedom built on top of the roots of your inheritance. The freedom to choose, consciously and with open eyes, what to keep, what to let go, and where to go next.
Is the train driving you, or are you driving the train?
This is the difference between a life inherited and a life chosen. Between a civilization that happens to people and a civilization that people, consciously and together, decide to build. Whether at the scale of the individual, or that of a nation, it also requires the courage to make the leap towards something better - towards our civilizational horizon.
I will end with some practical reminders for individuals and the leaders of nations:
1. BUILD ‘TRANSLATION’ AS INFRASTRUCTURE, NOT AS A LUXURY
Author Amin Maalouf made the observation that people who navigate between civilizations (through birth or circumstance) carry something genuinely irreplaceable: trusted connections between tracks. What these connections generate: institutional investment in making one civilization's internal logic legible to another.
Thus, education and systems that expand the average number of tracks per citizen increases civilizational humility. Cultural translation needs to be treated as infrastructure in the way roads and ports are - towards educational models, sport, art, technology, philosophy, and of course, exchange of goods.
As I write this, social media platform X has implemented automatic language translation meaning I can read posts that have been written by X influencers in Turkish, Spanish, French, and Japanese but automatically translated into English.
This serves two goals: it opens a door for cooperation with societies different from our own, deepening understanding, friendship and the opportunity for non-zero sum dynamics. But it’s also quite self-serving: it allows us to learn new things and improve.
This also means: immigration systems that value cultural bilingualism as a strategic asset; educational curricula that treat code-switching and alternative perspectives as core skills rather than optional; diplomatic and business institutions that actively recruit people formed at civilizational junctions.
Studies programs recently defunded in Western universities need to be resuscitated as national security investments. Our diplomacy networks exist beyond government - and we can train our people in the languages, histories, mythologies, and cosmologies of the civilizations they engage with. Far cheaper and more effective than unbridled defence spending.
We already have great models for this: The International Space Station, The Olympics, CERN, UNESCO, etc. The deeper point is that this works when multi-track identity is built on genuine roots growing in different soils rather than rootlessness as an advantage. The goal is not to produce deracinated cosmopolitans.
2. TREAT COLLECTIVE TRAUMA AS A GEOPOLITICAL RISK; BUILD MECHANISMS TO ADDRESS IT
The typical trauma sequence (injury → shame → denial → supremacy → violence) is consistent enough that it should inform policy in the way other predictable (and very large) geopolitical risks do. A global community acting wisely, must foresee these trauma dynamics and create the conditions for genuine healing before the cycles of hate and violence are passed on for another generation.
What can be offered are three conditions without which processing cannot begin:
(i) Acknowledgment means the full, unambiguous, public naming of what happened. Not diplomatic language, but genuine witness to injustice. This took far too long, for example, in the case of the Armenian Genocide (1915-1916), because unwitnessed trauma cannot be adequately processed.
(ii) Safety means durable, institutional security established before asking a traumatized group to lower its defenses. This is not as a reward for healing but as the ground on which healing becomes possible. Asking survivors to transcend their trauma while the existential threat remains real is not therapy; it’s fundamentally counter-instinctual.
(iii) The third, and most essential, condition is the principle that ensures the victims break the cycle of violence: they cannot be permitted (directly or indirectly) to commit new crimes against new victims. Of course, this is not because survivors are inherently cruel, but because the logic of "never again" is one of control, which once institutionalized, becomes primed to see almost any interference as a threat that must be destroyed. If "never again" is a standard, then it must apply universally.
3. DESIGN FOR THE RIGHT KIND OF CONTACT
Contact reduces prejudice reliably only when it is structured around equal status and shared goals. Conversely, contact under conditions of competition or inequality tends to inflame the very tribal responses it was supposed to dissolve.
This has an immediate practical implication in contentious political issues such as migration. The debate between open borders and closed ones is the wrong argument. The right argument is about the design of contact conditions. Refugee integration programs that include pre-requisite language acquisition, equal-status yet meritocratic employment pathways, and sustained community encounter are not soft idealism. They are the conditions under which cultural contact is actually successful. The benefits to host nations are undeniable.
We have to move from debating whether to design for contact - which is inevitable - to investing seriously in how. Systems such as the Fulbright program, for all their limitations, are some of the most cost-effective foreign policy instruments ever devised precisely because they create repeated, equal-status, goal-oriented contact between people who would otherwise only encounter each other as abstractions. They should be significantly expanded.
The metaphor that captures this best is not a melting pot but a rail junction: a place where tracks meet and allow exchange. Civilizations don't need to become identical. They need more junctions.
4. MAKE METACOGNITION (KNOWING YOUR TRACK) A CORNERSTONE OF EDUCATION
The three preceding recommendations operate at the institutional level. This one operates at the individual cognitive level.
The core argument is that the train drives most people, most of the time, without their awareness or consent. The historical programming runs beneath conscious thought. Thus, the first act of civilizational consciousness is simply to see this reality - to gain enough altitude to recognise your track as a track and then transcend it.
From that higher vantage point, we inevitably see our common humanity, our inter-dependency, and - critically - opportunities to find new non-zero sum exchanges. We find a new higher consciousness matched to our global civilization, while likewise, integrating our tribal, national, religious and cultural models.
The practical recommendation is that education systems need to teach the origins of conviction alongside the content of knowledge. Not relativism (the claim that all views are equally valid) but the skill of tracing where your certainties came from, who built the track you're on, and what you would think if you had been born elsewhere.
This is what philosophy, comparative theology, history, and anthropology do at their best. It is in fact the foundational skill for navigating a century in which the world’s civilizations will be closer than at any point in history.
Physicist David Bohm (1917-1992 CE)
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