Ocean Model of Civilization

Description

Nayef Al-Rodhan:

"Transcultural understanding, cultural cross-fertilization, and historically-based cultural commonality have a long and rich history, one that has been forgotten or downplayed by the Western collective memory, as demonstrated by rhetoric such as that espoused in the framework of the global war on terror. Recovering this common history helps us to go beyond cultural and civilizational stereotyping and to recognize conflict as contingent rather than inevitable. ...

The Ocean Model of Civilisation (claims that)... "human civilization is like an ocean into which many rivers flow and add depth, which in turn are sourced by tributaries. In other words, there is one collective human civilisation which is an accumulation of contributions from a series of distinct but intertwined geo-cultural domains, themselves influenced by different sub-cultures. The Ocean Model thus views human civilisation as cumulative, acknowledging that all cultural interactions inform collective culture. This conception accounts for cultural influences of varying degrees in the form of larger rivers representing the dominant cultural forces of the day, but also for the more pronounced cultural mixing that occurs today as a result of increased access to instant worldwide communication and the instantaneous dissemination of information. Crucially, the Ocean Model attributes worth to all cultures insofar as they are all constitutive of one human civilisation encapsulating a common human story. In so doing it provides a theoretical basis for understanding international relations in less strictly adversarial terms.

The representation of History as an account of conflict between multiple civilizations is both historically incorrect and politically problematic, offering tools of manipulation and Othering in public discourse. This discourse has enabled the facile division of “East” and “West,” and has played readily into the hands of those with an exclusionary nationalist or isolationist bent."

(https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/ocean-model-civilization-sustainable-history-theory-and-global-cultural-understanding/)