Clash of Civilization and World Community
* Article: The Clash of Civilization and World Community. By Ban Wang. Telos 199, Summer 2022
URL = https://www.academia.edu/84280719/The_Clash_of_Civilization_and_World_Community
"The paper questions the parochial use of the term civilization and defends the visions of universalism that could transcend national and ethnic divides."
Description
"To claim that East and West can never meet is to make a false claim. But in recent years, the myth of civilizational clash has become the currency of international relations and cross-cultural understanding. This stance spawns the stale but fake news that China and the West are locked in a collision course over civilizational norms—individualism vs. authoritarianism, state capitalism vs. neoliberalism, democracy vs. autocracy. This view is in the grip of “civilization” as if it were the genetic code of a body politic that has remained unchanged across thousands of years and countless generations. A cultural DNA is said to constitute the identity of a national society, placing China on Venus and the West on Mars. The West evolves liberal democracy as its vital essence, whereas China has been bedridden with the century-old pathology of autocracy. Here, “civilization” is a blanket and meaningless term because it regards a political-cultural order as being sealed in an organic, unchanging, and ahistorical totality. Now, if we probe into “liberalism,” surely a core Western value, the term quickly dissolves in messiness and has mean different things for different people and in different historical times. If the twentieth century was the American Century marked by rising democratization, critics of hegemony and imperialism have long questioned how “democracy” can be meaningful in describing the identity of Pax Americana and its military-corporate complex."
Excerpt
Tianxia
Bang Wan:
"The aspiration for “a realm of the universally human” puts Schwartz squarely in the Chinese tradition of tianxia, which means “unity of all under heaven.” Chinese thinkers have long harbored the aspiration that different cultures and civilizations can and should contribute to and par-take of a universal culture based on common humanity. Confucianism, for example, urges that the gentleman strive for harmony but not uniformity, and that in harmony each component remains distinct and different. Rooted in ancient cosmology, tianxia has an ancient lineage in tianli (principle of heaven). Dong Zhongshu of the Han dynasty elevated this universal moral authority to a cosmic order where humans live in tune with heavenly designs. Neo-Confucianists of the Song dynasty extended the idea and conceived the principle of heaven as inner-directed reection.
They deployed this transcendent principle to critique the political agenda and practices that fell short of it. In Zhu Xi, the prominent Song Confucian philosopher, the principle of heaven comes to light through an arduous practice of self-cultivation, reection, and learning."
(https://www.academia.edu/84280719/The_Clash_of_Civilization_and_World_Community)