ABSTRACT

The concept of "civilization" has been employed in contradictory ways-- as an ideological tool, as an analytical category, and in reference to a long historical journey. In light of its ideological abuses, is "civilization" as an analytical category capable of salvation? This article takes a fresh look at an old problem. If "civilization" is still a useful category of analysis, are such partitions as the East and the West valid in the context of an emerging global civilization? If not, how can we reconceptualize the common journey toward a more civilized world order? The article argues that human civilization is an imaginary fuelled by changing technologies, mythologies, and communication carriers. The transitions from nomadic to agrarian, commercial, industrial, and informatic civilizations may be considered as higher orders of differentiation, complexity, and integration. Is so viewed, the journey appears as a single but uneven and self-contradictory movement. In our own epoch, the global reach of informatic technologies necessitates an integrating myth such as the Gaia Hypothesis viewing the Planet Earth as a single living organism transcending all boundaries. That myth would teach us to value human unity in diversity. However, the current pathologies of commodity and identity fetishism, expressed in state and opposition terrorism, are obstructing peaceful globalization.

The Problem

In the post-Cold War international discourse, two concepts have found great currency: globalization and civilization. Both concepts have been often employed in the singular rather than plural. However, both concepts may be better understood in the plural. The two concepts generally refer to the material and cultural achievements by humanity through international exchanges in science, technology, and culture. In successive trials and errors at war or peace throughout human history, technological and cultural exchanges have advanced human civilization (Bentley 1993; Frank & Gills 1993).

Five major types of globalization can be easily discerned in written history, including (1) nomadic conquests of sedentary population exemplified by the Aryan, Arab, Mongol, Teutonic, and Turkik tribes, (2) agrarian empires such as those of the Sumerian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Persian, Greek, and Roman, (3) commercial trade routes such as those of the Silk, Incense, and Spice Roads, (4) European, Russian, American, and Japanese industrial empires, and (5) the current round of an expanding informatic empire encompassing nearly all parts of the world through its global market and communication networks. In the current round, globalization also has come to mean the promotion of a neo-liberal economic and political agenda2 promoted by an ideology of civilization.

Ideological discourses often see the world in self-righteous black and white terms. They employ dichotomous categories in order to mobilize resources for the ensuing struggles. "Civilization" has been often employed as an ideological weapon to legitimate most globalization policies in the past and present. By making dichotomous distinctions between the so-called "civilized" and "barbarian", a presumed Axis of Virtue against an "Axis of Evil,"3 hegemonic ambitions have tried to gain moral legitimacy. In the current round, opposition to the dominant globalization policies has similarly employed "civilization" as its ideological weapon of choice. Witness the frequent use of "civilization" in speeches by President George W. Bush as well as by Osama Ben Laden.

The challenge is to understand the complex patterns of an emerging world civilization, particularly its globalizing and civilizing forces. Employing normative concepts without falling prey to their ideological abuses is part of that challenge. Some may argue that "civilization" is analytically beyond salvation. However, the option to abandon normative concepts is not a realistic one. Human societies are normative social constructions. In competition or in concert, norms such as salvation, order, freedom, equality, solidarity, justice, or civilization frame the unwritten, and sometimes written, constitutions of society. Without such normative glues, human societies would fall apart. Norms and values are in turn symbolically revealed in foundation myths.

As the Biblical myth of creation reveals, once Adam and Eve ate the Apple from the Tree of Knowledge, they were permanently thrown out of their conditions of ignorance and bliss in paradise. They attained the status of free agents who must choose, enjoy, or suffer the consequences of their choices. First, they became aware of their nakedness, i. e. they gained consciousness. Second, they were faced with the struggles of living such as labor in child bearing and toil in the sweat of their brow. Third, they gained the freedom to choose between good and evil. According to this Abrahamic foundation myth, the human condition entails struggle, learning, and freedom. Modern natural science also seems to confirm this finding. We seem to be hard-wired for struggle, love, learning, and creativity (Lewis, Amini, and Lannon 2000). But we are also genetically programmed for identity, territoriality, and aggression (Ardrey 1966).

In the Biblical myth of creation, God created man in his own image. That myth posits a profound truth about consciousness in the human condition. The Gospel according to St. John starkly states, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." If we interpret "the Word" as communicative competence it is broadest possible terms or better yet, consciousness or enlightenment, we can better understand the profound meaning of the statement. As Seyyed Hossein Nasr (2003:14) has aptly put it, "Consciousness, for traditional civilizations, for religions and traditional philosophies, is not only a state. It is a substance and not a process. It is something that is, like Being itself, which at its highest level of reality is at once luminous and numinous. Consciousness at its elevated levels is at once knowing and knowing that it knows, knowledgeable of its own knowledge. It is at once the source of all sentience, of all experience, and beyond all experience of the knowledge that something is being experienced. That is why even the more skeptical philosophers have had a great deal of trouble negating it, even those who have been skeptics from a religious point of view."

The Purpose

This essay engages in a politics of discourse imposed by our historical circumstances. It begins with a focus on the current conceptual quagmire. It offers seven propositions on the interactions among three major historical forces, including technologies, mythologies, and communication carriers. By globalization, I simply mean an intensification of human interactions across territorial boundaries. By civilization, I mean the unfinished journey that humanity has undertaken to tame its aggressive impulses in order to achieve a peaceful management of conflicts through dialogue, negotiation, law, diplomacy, mediation, arbitration, and Satyagraha. By technology, I mean the hardware and software know-how of solving human problems. By mythology, I mean the narratives that try to explain the unexplainable (Campbell 1997)4. By communications, I am referring to those carriers of human messages that we commonly know as verbal and non-verbal signs, transportation, and the media.

The Argument

The essay argues that technologies, mythologies, and communications are the perennial forces that have shaped global history in the past and will probably continue to do so in the future. Civilization clearly begins with the ingenious human uses of natural environment. Available natural resources, their discovery through science and technology, and the ensuring struggles to control them are the perennial saga of human history. But technology by itself cannot sustain human societies. It takes shared foundation myths to build human societies. Human civilization has been built through scientific, technological, and cultural exchanges achieved by means of expanding global communication. Civilization may be thus viewed as a normative social construction to manage human problems, drawing on technologies, mythologies, and communications. Human civilization has evolved toward greater differentiation, complexity, and integration (Figure 1). Technological developments impose greater differentiation in social structures and functions. Greater differentiation brings about more complexity and contradiction. Complexity and contradiction necessitate higher orders of social integration. Social integration, in turn, calls for new foundation myths relevant to the new material and cultural conditions. As technological advances and cultural lags bring about greater complexity and contradiction between the old and new paradigms, the crises of transition inevitably surface. In this respect, the movement of human civilization is fundamentally no different from the revolutionary processes in scientific progress (Kuhn 1962). The revolutions from nomadic to agrarian, commercial, industrial, and informatic civilizations have been accompanied with great cultural transformations. However, each revolutionary change has been followed by a long period of normalization of the values of the new civilization's modes of production, legitimation, and communication.

The Conceptual Quagmire

The Manichean dichotomies between civilized versus barbarian, or more generally "us" versus "them," seem to be a propensity of the human mind5. Ideology as a modern discourse and tool of political struggle often resorts to such dichotomies. In the modern world with the mass media playing a critical role, such dichotomies have become a common currency. State and commercial media alike often engage in dichotomizing political struggles, demonizing the perceived enemy, and dramatizing their own narratives to capture, manipulate, and entertain their audiences. For the commercial media, this strategy also maximizes audiences and profits.

The exploding scholarly literature on globalization has been trapped in this ideological quagmire. In a moment of enthusiasm, for example, Francis Fukuyama (1989) declared that the 20th century has witnessed the triumph of liberal capitalism over communism and fascism. The rest of human history, he argued, will be spent on the boring details of implementing the capitalist democratic regimes6. A more pessimistic voice was aired by Samuel Huntington (1993a & b, 1996) during the 1990s. The wars in the Persian Gulf, Somalia, and former Yugoslavia, suggested no easy victories. In his Clash of Civilizations, Huntington argued that the wars of the future will be conflicts among civilizations, most notably between the West and the rest. He also singled out an Islamic-Confucian alliance as the West's main enemy. In a more critical vein, Benjamin Barber (1995) identified the central problem of globalization as the ensuing conflict between capitalist consumerism and tribalist militancy. However, by employing the metaphors of McWorld vs. Jihad, he regionalized a global problem. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (2000) used the metaphor of The Lexus and the Olive Tree. That metaphor may be more relevant to upwardly mobile upper middle classes rather than Barber's lower middle classes!

As Robert Cox (1997: 251) has aptly put it, conceptual dualisms reveal a "culture of contentment" challenging a culture of discontent. The ardent globalizers and the reluctant globalized approach the same problems from different perspectives based on contradictory interests. Those interests and perspectives are the dialectically interacting aspects of the same historical dilemma7. The dominant and dissenting views reflect different constructions of reality. From the center perspective, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States seemed to bear out Huntington's dark prophecy and Barber's fearsome forebodings. It was ironic that 2001 had been also declared by the United Nations General Assembly as the Year of Dialogue among Civilizations. The terrorist attacks demonstrated that we live in a truly globalized world. History's greatest superpower was no longer protected by the two vast Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

The language of violence subsequently assumed a prominent position in international discourse. The U. S. invasions of Afghanistan in 2002 and Iraq in 2003 were the expressions of a dual project: (a) to stem oppositional terrorism in its bud, and (b) to establish a New American Century. In 1997, the Project for a New American Century (NAC) had been initiated by the future leaders of the Bush Administration. It was to promote "a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is good both for America and for the world; that such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle; and that too few political leaders today are making the case for global leadership"8. The NAC project pooled two American historical traditions into one ideological basket. The Bushists have argued that to promote democracy in the world, the United States must be ready to employ pre-emptive strikes9.

Proposition 1. There is one single human civilization, but there are numerous cultures.

We may speak of many civilizations in human history, some dead, others living. But human civilization also may be viewed as a grand, old tree with many branches, flowers, and fruits. The different branches, flowers, and fruits each have their own shapes, colors, aromas, and tastes. But they all are nurtured by the same earth, water, air, and human ingenuity. There is a clear unity in diversity. Although isolated for centuries from their Eurasian varieties, the American civilizations (including the Native Americans, Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas) also were based on technological advances and mythological foundations. Cultivation of edible crops, domestication of animals, development of media of communication and exchange, and the myth of sacrifice as a foundation for political unity seem to be common to all human civilizations (Diamond 1999).

Whether we speak of one singular human civilization or its many branches, history shows that every new civilization has heavily borrowed from the past to build up its own achievements. The invention of fire, wheel, compass, print, automobile, satellites, and computers have been contributed by different nations. Comparable to the great technological breakthroughs in history, new moral heights also have been envisioned by many peoples and traditions. No nation or combination of nations can claim a monopoly of civilization. Hammurabi (1792-1750 BCE) offered us the first legal code. Moses gave us the Ten Commandments (13th century BCE). Cyrus (5th century BCE) liberated the Jews and established a policy of cultural tolerance in his empire. Buddha (563-483 BCE) and Jesus (1st century CE) advocated a world ruled by love and compassion. Lao-tze (604 BCE) and Confucius (551-479 BCE) laid the moral and legal foundations for the Chinese civilization. In accordance with Buddhist Dharma (principles of right life), Emperor Ashoka (ruled 265-238 BCE) of the Mauryan dynasty in India renounced all violence. Mahatma Gandhi struggled for Indian independence by non-violent means. In his campaign for civil rights, Martin Luther King followed non-violent resistance strategies. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1945) combined the wisdom of European civilizations with those inherited from others to establish a new and higher standard of ethical conduct by states. The list can go on and on.

All civilizations are, to employ Benedict Anderson's felicitous phrase (1983), "imaginaries." Since all civilizations in history have heavily borrowed from others, it would be inaccurate to speak of them as disconnected imaginaries. Jared Diamond (1999) has argued that the Eurasian East-West Axis allowed material and cultural exchanges greater than those in the North-South axis of the Americas. But the propensity to travel, conquer, and exchange has been a perennial force in history on the East-West as well as North-South axes. Native Americans, for instance, are believed to have come mainly from Asia via Alaska (Diamond 1999: 36ff). In Eurasian history, the mythologies, sciences, and technologies of the ancient Sumerian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, and Roman civilizations were passed on to modern Europe via the medieval Islamic civilization. The same can be said of the Japanese and Korean civilizations that heavily borrowed from China.

Proposition 2. Civilization may be considered as the increasing technological, mythological, and communicative capacity of human societies to manage human problems.

In the Mediterranean world, civilization has been traditionally identified with city-dwelling. In the European languages as well as Arabic and Persian (madaniyya, tammadon), the word for civilization suggests city life. Civitas, civility, civil, and citizen are its derivations. By contrast, in East Asian languages, the term for civilization (Wen Ming in Chinese; Bun Mei in Japanese) suggests learning and enlightenment. The urban bias of the Mediterranean is historically understandable. To arrive at a global understanding, we need to emphasize what is common to all historical experiences. Ecological diversity and technological change provide the most solid footing for such an understanding. All human civilizations are founded on certain institutional arrangements, including the organization of family, tribes, states, and businesses. Moreover, all civilizations are based on certain cosmologies or mythologies focusing their attention on perennial truths and changing historical challenges. The Biblical myths relate to nomadic and agrarian societies, while the myths of Nationalism or Globalism concern industrial and informatic civilization. As a result of uneven developments in the world, we are currently witnessing a clash of mythologies. The myth of Divine sovereignty is encountering the myth of popular sovereignty. The two myths have been reconciled in the doctrine of separation of church and state, to wit "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and give to God that what is God's." In theocratic regimes, however, the issue remains unresolved.

As Joseph Campbell (1997) has argued, certain archetypical myths keep repeating themselves under various guises in different cultures. The myth of sacrifice, for instance, runs through the so-called "primitive" as well as "advanced" cultures. To pacify the angry Gods who presumably caused natural catastrophes, many societies engaged in a variety of sacrificial rites. To satisfy the male gods, in some societies, they even sacrificed their virgins. As an expression of his faith in Yahweh in the story of Abraham, the myth of sacrifice is embedded in his willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac10. However, Angel Gabriel brought him a lamb to sacrifice instead. Millions of Muslims today sacrifice a lamb on the last day of their pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca as a memorial to that day. In the Christian mythology, Jesus offered himself as "the Lamb of God" to be sacrificed to redeem humanity from its sinfulness. In the modern nationalist states, young men and women are called upon on times of war to sacrifice their lives at the altar of another God, namely the State.

Myths are neither true nor false. They are relevant or irrelevant to changing historical circumstances, functional or dysfunction in the management of certain social systems. The practice of human sacrifices to appease gods took place in many ancient societies, but modern discoveries of the causes of natural disasters have rendered that kind of myth highly irrelevant and dysfunctional. Proposed by James Lovelock (1988), the Gaia Hypothesis, for instance, may be considered an appropriate myth for our own times. As a biologist, Lovelock has found considerable evidence to suggest that the Planet Earth could be considered a living organism. It breathes in and out, it can thrive in health or fall sick to pollutant toxins, it sustains life but it also can kill, it is responding to the human impact on its environment (such as global warming), and it may be considered to have a finite life. This intriguing hypothesis cannot be proved and disproved beyond doubt. But it can constitute a mythological belief or scientific postulate on the basis of which environmental policies are formulated to achieve greater sustainability.

Proposition 3. Human civilization has been driven by four major forces in history, including ecologies, technologies, mythologies, and communications.

Jared Diamond (1999) has shown how diverse ecologies have led to differences among human settlements and their respective advances in the military, economic, and social fields. He also has demonstrated how technological advances by certain nations have led to domination of other nations. If we carefully look at human civilization as a whole, three other critical factors stand out. Modes of production, legitimation, and communication are driven by technological innovations to homogenize the world. However, ecologies and mythologies are unique to particular times and spaces and can perhaps best explain the diversities in human civilization.

Technologies such as the invention of fire, wheel, compass, gunpowder, animal domestication, steam engine, assembly line, or nuclear fission, have always privileged those first acquiring them. The desire to dominate and exploit seems to be a recurrent phenomenon in history. Such desires are often supported by technologies, mythologies, and communication carriers at hand. Technologies and mythologies of domination, however, have to be relevant to particular projects. The myth of racial purity and superiority, for instance, served the purpose of Western and Japanese colonialism. The myths of civilization and democracy are currently fuelling the American imperial ambitions11.

To be diffused worldwide, technologies and mythologies depend on communication carriers (Denemark 2000; McNeill 1998, Fernandez-Armesto 2002). From messenger pigeons to postal systems, mass media, and the Internet, the communication media have served such a function. Camels, horses, automobiles, trains, and planes also have served the same function. The growing global communication networks are proliferating old and new technologies and mythologies. For centuries, the Chinese attempted to keep the production of silk a secret. In an act of piety during the 13th century, two Nestorian Christian priests traveled from Beijing to Constantinople, the Byzantine Imperial Court, and revealed the secret of silk production to the Europeans. Atomic weapons are currently in the exclusive possession of several countries. As a young Swedish scientist has demonstrated, knowledge of production of atomic weapons can be easily obtained in any good library. If libraries are not adequate, the black markets for weapons of mass destruction have proved their efficacy. Witness Pakistan's complicity in selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya, and North Korea12. Following the massive air attacks on the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, smaller countries have a great incentive to develop nuclear weapons in the belief that they would provide deterrent against similar invasions. A proliferation regime that privileges some states with nuclear weapons while denying others is thus founded on delusion.

Proposition 4. Human civilization has gone through five major, overlapping technological transformations, including nomadic, agrarian, commercial, industrial, and informatic.

Stage theories of history such as those of Marx & Engels (1848), Rostow (1960), or Bell (1973) have one flaw in common. They more or less assume a universal and progressive evolution from lower to higher levels of social and economic development. Cyclical views of history such as those of Ibn Khaldun (1958), Toynbee (1962), or Sarkar (Galtung & Inayatullah 1997: chapter 2.18) have another common flaw. They assume a universal repetition of similar cyclical patterns.

Much can be learned from the great scholars who have tackled universal history. But historical evidence and current world conditions do not justify inevitable universal progress or cyclical patterns. In the post-war period, certain countries (notably in West Asia and Africa) have been economically destroyed. On the other hand, in some parts of the world, we have witnessed rapid economic progress. Still in some others, civil wars or political instability have produced economic stagnation or regression, and increases in poverty (UNDP 2003).

Layering of history, however, seems to be universally the case. An Israeli archeologist once showed me 27 layers of human settlement in one of the archeological sites near Jerusalem. A layering of global history thus seems closer to empirical realities than stages or cycles. Table 1 presents such a view. However, a few caveats are in order. First, the table provides a global view of long stretches of time and space. It should be taken seriously but not too seriously! In other words, it should be considered heuristic rather than definitive. Second, the dates should be considered suggestive. They mark historical watersheds that can be legitimately debated. Third, because we witness today the presence of all five layers of human civilization, all dates continue into the present. Fourth, the emergence of leading sectors such as agriculture or commerce or manufacturing occurs in sequential historical epochs. Fifth, the table provides a matrix of civilization layers and globalization processes, including modes of production (economy and technology), legitimation (mythology and ideology), and communication (culture and its carriers).

Proposition 5. Each historical layer can be characterized by its leading modes of production, legitimation, and communication.

The transitions in the mode of production from hunting and gathering to agriculture, commerce, manufacturing, and informatics are rather well-known. Each transition has involved major transformations in the economy, polity, and culture. The following account cannot be but a bird's-eye-view of a complex history.

Changing Modes of Production. The nomadic layer in human civilization constituted some 99 per cent of the history of homo sapiens. The major river basins pioneered the transition to agriculture only some 10,000 years ago. Agricultural surpluses made commerce possible and desirable. Without political security, however, commerce could not have flourished. The advent of multi-national agrarian empires created common currencies, customs, laws, and commerce. Whenever the Eurasian landmass was ruled by three contiguous imperial systems in the East, West, and Center, international trade flourished. The discovery of the New World in the 15-16th centuries by the Europeans inaugurated a new mode of production that we may call industrial. It also radically changed the trade routes from land to ocean. Monetization of the European economies through import of gold and silver from the New World facilitated the rise of consumer markets and manufacturing. The technological inventions of the 17th-18th centuries led to an Industrial Revolution in England. Due mainly to changing trade routes and lack of access to the riches of the New World, some Asian countries such as China that were equal if not ahead of Europe at the time were left behind. The Industrial Revolution spread to other European countries and North America. The role of European colonialism in this historical process was twofold. By facilitating access to cheap labor (including slavery), raw materials, and consumer markets, colonial domination augmented European industrial growth. However, by spreading the European ideas of liberty and equality, colonialism also dug its own grave. However, the global transition from industrial to post-industrial, informatic societies has been as uneven as the spread of industrial system.

Changing Modes of Legitimation. Agricultural surpluses changed the modes of legitimation. They led to the rise of multi-national, agrarian empires. Such empires differentiated between the temporal and spiritual authorities, undertook wars of conquest, established relative security over vast expanses of territory, and thus encouraged technological and cultural exchange among different peoples under their rule. They also facilitated the rise of Universalist religions such as Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. These Universalist religions facilitated commerce and provided legitimation doctrines for the ensuring commercial empires such as the Byzantium, Abbasid, Tang, Safavid, and Ottoman. Under the industrial order, secular humanism and its Enlightenment philosophy emerged as a dominant Universalist mode of legitimation. Under the banner of "the white man's burden," it provided a doctrine of legitimacy for the European and American empires. An emerging informatic empire is based more on social class than ethnicity. To advance its cause, it employs the democratic doctrines of legitimacy. By privileging liberty, equality, and solidarity as their respective axial principles, liberal, social, and communitarian democratic doctrines provide contradictory policy perspectives. Hence, the myth of democracy is both powerful and contentious.

Globalization has been always focused on the control of natural resources through conquest, domination, or trade. In this round, however, the encounter between secular and religious doctrines of legitimacy has created a global, cultural civil war within and among nations. Witness particularly the United States, India, China, Israel, and the Islamic world. In an increasingly atomized world, the fetish of identity has focused on consumer commodities, for those with access to material goods, and cultural identity for those without. Jihad vs. MacWorld (Barber 1995) is not the peculiarity of Islamic and American worldviews. It is a more general phenomenon reflecting the great material and cultural chasms that informatic imperialism is creating in the world.

Changing Modes of Communication. Facilitated by improvements in transportation and communication, technological and cultural exchanges have accelerated throughout history. Through such technologies as domesticated animals (donkeys, horses, and camels), the wheel, carriages, ships, compass, writing, print, electronic media, satellites, computers, and the internet, the world has become a global village. However, this village shows none of the cohesion and intimacy of the traditional villages. There are some 10 billion pages on the World Wide Web available to all those with computer and modem access. However, the divisions in their perspectives demonstrate a materially and culturally divided world that is groping for order within anachronistic political institutions. Technological advances in the global military, economic, and communication sectors have left the cultural and political sectors far behind. Hit-Kill ratios, for instance, have steadily advanced in the last three centuries, but since the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, the nation-state system has dominated the world political order. Technological leads and cultural lags have created an ever-widening and alarming chasm.

On the other hand, the democratizing impact of expanding markets, communication networks, and cultural exchanges cannot be ignored. In the rising environmentalist, civil society, and ecumenical movements, we have witnessed antidotes to the prevailing hegemony. Awareness of the global problems of pollution in congested cities, the ozone layer, and over-exploited forests, rivers, and oceans has impacted the international discourse. Non-governmental organizations such as the Greenpeace, Amnesty International, and the anti-Landmine movement have had some measurable impact. Transborder communication networks have limited the ability of governments to mislead the public.

Proposition 6. The current world conflicts stem from material and cultural gaps represented by two global pathologies, namely commodity and identity fetishism.

All historical transitions from one civilization layer to another have created zones of complexity and contradiction. The modes of production, legitimation, and communication of the old and new inevitably collide. As a result of their collision, the established "truths" of the old order are challenged by "the truths" of the new system. Such contradictions are the stuff of historical transitions. As the pace of technological and economic change increases, we can expect the expansion of zones of complexity and contradiction13.

Two examples of such zones may contribute to an understanding of the enormity of ensuing social conflicts. The transition from an Industrial to an Informatic Civilization in the United State provides an apt historical example. That transition may be generally dated to the postwar period (1945-present). The mode of production under Industrial Civilization was best symbolized by the homogenizing influences of the assembly line and high mass consumption. The latter depended on an acquisitive society promoted by commercial advertising. The pathology of such a society could be identified as commodity fetishism, a tendency to evaluate the worth of an individual by the commodities he or she consumes. The house, automobile, clothes, and perfumes consumed thus tend to define personal identities in high consumption societies. In his theory of the leisure class and conspicuous consumption, Thorstein Veblen (2001) had anticipated this pathology. "To keep up with the Joneses" became the prevailing social attitude in postwar American society. The frugality of the earlier periods of industrialization and its heroes (e.g. John D. Rockefeller) gave way to the rise of the new heroes of capitalism such as Donald Trump with his displays of glamour, consumption, and television.

The Flower Revolution of the 1960s may be considered as a reaction against the exacting demands of an Industrial Civilization. Since it was led by a post-war affluent younger generation, Peter Berger (1977) has called it "the soft revolution." The celebration of nature, sexuality, peace, and participatory democracy were part of a cultural revolution against the exacting industrial demands for domination of nature and society based on competitiveness, elitism, and imperialism. Since the 1960's, American society has been torn between the two competing cultural values of Industrial and Informatic Civilizations. Increasing mobility and atomization has resulted in a passionate search for identity focused on gender, ethnicity, and religion. Social movements such as the feminist, gay, lesbian, and Christian fundamentalism have become the hallmark of American cultural conflicts. But so long as the economy can provide jobs, consumerism is the unifying social factor. Loss of jobs caused by the flight of American industries to low-cost locations is producing class conflict, while loss or denial of social status is creating identity anxiety and conflict. Commodity and identity fetishism in American society has thus become the two dialectical sides of the same social coin.

Anther example may focus on Iran. Under the monarchical regimes (1953-79), Iran came directly under American political, economic, and cultural influence. With increasing oil revenues, the country entered into a period of rapid economic growth and widening disparities in wealth, income, and ways of life. The economic gaps increasingly sharpened the cultural chasm between the secular and religious societies. The country was deeply divided into two nations. Some 5 percent of the population seemed to have adopted secular values promoted by easy access to consumer goods. The other 95 percent reacted to the conspicuous consumption of the urban elite by resorting to their traditional identity as Shi'a Muslims. The social and cultural conflicts between commodity and identity fetishism generated the Islamic Revolution of 1979 (Tehranian 1980). Since the revolution, the country has continued to be deeply torn between the value systems of an industrializing and acquisitive society and the traditional agrarian values of modesty, abstinence, and frugality. Put directly into the hands of the state and its clerical-merchant rulers, oil revenues in Iran have widened the gaps and exacerbated the social conflicts. The conflict between the Iranian so-called conservatives and reformers may be viewed as a conflict between tradition and modernity focusing on two contradictory doctrines of legitimacy. The conservative clerics emphasize velayat-i-faqih, the doctrine of guardianship of the (Shi'a) jurists (Tehranian 1992). The reformers accuse them of akhundshahi, or clerical monarchy, while calling for popular sovereignty.

On a global scale, the growing economic and cultural gaps within and among nations are breeding an international and intercultural civil war without physical and moral boundaries. Globalization forces are resulting in fragmentation and intense competition among ethnic, religious, and status groups (Chua 2003). Once the traditional restraints on exercise of power are weakened, the competition can erupt into bloody massacres of one group by the other. The genocide of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda-Burundi, the Shi'a and Kurdish population by the Sunnis in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and the Chinese minorities in Indonesia provide the most recent examples.

Globalization also creates the insecurities of distant proximity (Rosenau 2003).
The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be better understood in this light. The presence of a global oil industry has systematically brought the Persian Gulf region into the vortex of globalization and proximity to the U. S. domestic politics. With over 60 percent of the world oil reserves and exports, local conflicts in the Persian Gulf have inevitably become globalized. In the meantime, global forces have created a wedge between the sectors of the population who benefit from the oil wealth and those who do not. The terrorist attacks on the United States were the culmination of several decades of convergence of global and local forces.

Global forces thus tend to have a fragmenting impact on the social structures of developed as well as developing countries. Deepening material and cultural divisions among communities that are neighbors in urban America or in Israel/Palestine are resulting in gated communities of the rich and the poor. Building a wall around the West Bank to cordon off the Palestinians from Israelis serves essentially the same function as building gated communities in affluent urban neighborhoods to protect them against threats from outside. Caught in the same territorial space but with different cultural identities and styles of life, the confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians has degenerated into an endless blood feud. This confrontation assumes greater intensity when it concerns land rights between the lower strata of Israeli and Palestinian population, namely the West Bank Jewish settlers and the Palestinian Jihad and Hamas organizations. Similarly at the global level, as physical distances diminish by the international communication networks, cultural and political differences are magnified into security threats. As a security measure, the initial response is to build physical and symbolic walls, to impose stringent visa requirements, and to enlarge surveillance. Gated communities and the Berlin and Jerusalem Walls physically separate communities, but they also antagonize and strengthen the will to destroy them in a next phase of struggle. Since international disparities in wealth and income are often replicated domestically, these walls cannot ultimately contain the two fetishisms of commodity and identity.

Proposition 7. A new global civilization and citizenship is beginning to respond to the challenges of constructing a more peaceful, ecologically balanced, democratic, and just world.

Since the cultural revolution of the 1960s, a major paradigmatic shift has been taking place in the dominant worldviews of Industrial Civilization. The fundamental assumptions of the Enlightenment Project have been increasingly brought into question, among them the naïve faith in (1) the justice of the marketplace, (1) the infinite perfectibility of humankind, (2) the inevitability of historical progress, (3) the moral legitimacy of human domination and exploitation of nature, (4) the civilizing mission of the so-called advanced nations, and (5) the universal truth of empirical science. The anti-war, national liberation, environmentalist, feminist, phenomenology, and theology of liberation, and postmodernist movements each have contributed in their own unique ways to undermine the dominance of the Enlightenment worldviews.

Meanwhile, Informatic Civilization has been emerging from the womb of Industrial societies (Tehranian 1990b: chapter 2). It has been labeled as Post-Industrial (Bell 1973), Information (Porat 1977), Knowledge (Machlup1980), Postmodern (Harvey 1990), and Network (Castells 1996-2000) Society. As in the Jain legend about the elephant and the blind men touching and describing different parts of a single creature, each of the above labels captures a different aspect of a complex and evolving social system.

It is fairly clear, however, that the new modes of production depend on informatic technologies and significantly differ from the past industrial forms in several respects. First and foremost, the application of informatic technologies has made automation and robotics increasingly possible. For example, in computer-assisted design and computer-assisted manufacturing (CAD-CAM), most industries have become increasingly automated. Second, the electronic transfer of news, data, and images has led to new business organizations that have been called multinational, transnational, or global corporation. The global reach of some 1000 global corporations annually reported by the Fortune Magazine has made it possible for them to spread their manufacturing facilities around the world in order to minimize risks and maximize profits. Lower labor, rent, tax, and regulation costs have lured the global corporation from the old industrial centers in North America and Western Europe to the industrializing countries in East Asia and Latin America. Third, this kind of flexible accumulation (Harvey 1990) has distributed the production of the different parts of a single product among diverse locations while allowing for "just in time" assembly to meet changing market demands. Finally, with the automation and robotization of manufacturing and a consequent decline of demand for physical labor, the national economies of the informatic world have shifted from agriculture and manufacturing to services. For the United States, this shift started in the late 1950s (Porat 1977). The long-term trend for all countries has been to shift from primary (agriculture and mining) to secondary (manufacturing), and tertiary (services) production. In industrial countries, agriculture contributes about 1-3 percent, manufacturing about 20-30 percent, and services about 70-80 percent of Gross Domestic Product. For middle and high income countries, the World Bank data show that the structures of employment have significantly shifted from agriculture and industry to services (World Bank 2003: 48).

The most visible changes can be witnessed in the global and national communications systems. Informatization has facilitated several other changes, including (1) convergence of telecommunication and computers, (2) miniaturization of personal communication devices, (3) rapid expansion of the wireless, and (4) application of information storage, processing, and retrieval in nearly all industries and services. Internet and News networks such as the CNN, BBC, Sky TV, and lately Aljazeera have provided more news and information accompanied with greater international anxiety and stereotyping14. Improving transportation facilities have made greater international migration possible. Diasporic and cosmopolitan identities have been on the rise among a population of global nomads, including immigrants as well as TNC, NGO, and IGO personnel. In contrast to the priesthoods of the agrarian and commercial eras, and the ideologues of the industrial epoch, a new class of technologues has emerged to lead the informatic revolution. Figures such as Steve Job, Bill Gates, and the teeming hardware and software engineers around the world engaged in the informatic industries and services, may be considered as the new communications elite.
In politics, however, two other types of figures have been privileged by the rise of Informatic Civilization. For want of better terminology, we may call them communologues and jestologues (Tehranian 1990b: 67). Communologues such as Ayatollah Khomeini, Zapatista leader Commandant Marcos (Ronfedt et al. 1998), and Osama Ben Laden (Ronfedt & Arquilla 2001) are political leaders who have dipped into the rich mythological resources of particular nations to frame their respective messages. When the power of the new communications technologies are combined with the old mythologies of marginalized population, they can produce significant social movements such as the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Al-Qaedeh in the Islamic world, or the Zapatista Movement in Mexico (Gills 2000).

The global spread of television as a source of news and entertainment also has had another interesting political consequence. It has reduced the importance of traditional political parties and privileged those leaders who can use the medium for direct appeals to the electorate. Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwaznneger in the United States, Shintaro Ishihara in Japan, and Joseph Estrada and Fernando Poe Jr. in the Philippines provide the best-known examples of actors who have made a successful transition from the world of entertainment to politics. We may call such figures jestologues because they intuitively understand that the new mediated politics is primarily about entertaining your audience without alienating particular sets of voters. Politics as bread, circus, and roots has found a new meaning in the Informatic Age.

The emergence of communologues and jestologues as communication leaders in media-intensive societies may have long-run consequences. It seems to encourage extremism. Alex De Tocqueville's warning about "tyranny of majorities" seems to have taken a new turn. With the decline of voluntary associations (Putnam 2000) to act as a balancer, mass audiences seem to be easily manipulated into believing the prevailing ideological propaganda. In media-intensive societies, the fundamental assumptions of liberal democracy seem to have become increasingly irrelevant to popular sovereignty. Manipulation of voter anxieties by political advertising financed by special interests has left little room for the classical liberal view of deliberate debate on public policies (Habermas 1991). Voluntary associations and the public sphere of discourse are increasingly shifting from the mass media to the interactive internet channels.

Informatic Civilization is thus creating unprecedented challenges and opportunities. It is laying the technological foundations for a truly global civilization. It is also forcing different cultures and mythologies into direct contact, confrontation, and dialogue. In the failing states of Sub-Saharan Africa, war-torn countries (former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq), and all other transitional societies, it has created zones of complexity, contradiction, and chaos. Can the world build international peace, security and order out of chaos, war, and human suffering? That question may be addressed by focusing on problems and prospects for more democratic global governance.

The foundations of modern global governance were laid by the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the Concert of Europe (1812-1914), the League of Nations (1918-1941), and the United Nations (1945-present). It took the Thirty Years' War among the Protestants and Catholics to establish the Peace of Westphalia recognizing freedom of religion and the existing boundaries among the emerging secular European nation-states. It took the Napoleonic Wars to achieve a precarious Concert of Europe focusing on the maintenance of the European status-quo. World War I led to the establishment of the League of Nations. But the failure of the United States to join the League significantly reduced its credibility and effectiveness. The League thus could not act in the cases of German, Italian, and Japanese aggression. World War II revived the League's principle of collective security, which was embodied in the United Nations Charter. However, the onset of the Cold War in 1947 and the division of the world into the three conflicting camps of capitalist, communist, and non-aligned nations hampered the United Nations. The wars in Korea, Vietnam, Africa, and the Middle East reflected an unstable and divided world order.

The end of the Cold War in 1989, the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the effective entry of China into the world markets in the 1990s, placed the United States in the position of a single superpower. Since the 1990s, the United States has fluctuated between three stark choices. (1) Neo-Isolationism-- to withdraw, as the Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush advocated in 2000, from police actions and nation-building while focusing on the pursuit of its own narrower economic and political interests. (2) Multilateralism-- to strengthen the multilateral institutions of global governance such as the United Nations or NATO in pursuit of its multilateral objectives. (3) Unilateralism-- to act unilaterally to impose its will particularly in the zones of contradiction and chaos such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel-Palestine, and North Korea.

The terrorist acts of 9/11 led the Bush Administration to take the latter course. That policy, however, has proved to be counterproductive. First, in an interdependent world, it lacks legitimacy. Second, the resources of a single state, even if a superpower, are inadequate for the challenges of state and nation building in countries that are in throes of a major historical transition to the modern world. Third, the 21st century conditions are radically different from those of the 19th century when Britain could rule a vast empire with relatively docile populations. The new Informatic Civilization has awakened millions of people around the world to their basic human needs, including the rights of self-determination. Unilateral policies in such context represent a historical regression.

On the other hand, the current institutions of global governance are profoundly out of sync with the technological and economic changes in the world (Aksu & Camilleri 2002). The Charter of the United Nations was approved in 1945. In the meantime, the composition of the Security Council and the right of veto has lost much of its legitimacy. Important factors have changed the power configuration of the world, including the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the decline of the United Kingdom, France, and Russia, the economic rise of Germany and Japan, the emergence of the European Union, and the rise of heavily populated countries such as China, India, Brazil, and Southeast Asia. Although difficult to achieve, a revision of the UN Charter to take account of the new realities is called for.

Informatic Civilization is creating a new global consciousness. That consciousness is based on an increasing awareness of the world's ecological and economic interdependence, cultural clashes, and the need for dialogue and democracy. Technological advances have shown their Janus face. On the one hand, they have opened up new possibilities in mass production, global communication, space, medicine, education, agriculture, and services. On the other hand, they have widened the economic and cultural gaps between the rich and poor within and among nations. The technologies of violence have dramatically increased the levels of kill by hits. The global institutions of governance have lagged far behind the technological and economic transformations.

Conclusion

Instead of focusing on the trees, this essay has taken up the challenge of taking a snapshot of the forest. It its analysis is anywhere close to the empirical realities of an increasingly complex and contradictory world, the following concluding reflections may be worthy of consideration:

If by "civilization" we understand the human journey toward a more peaceful and just world, the term continues to have relevance in any normative discussion of public policies. Throughout history, however, civilization also has been employed as an ideological tool to legitimate hegemonic rule by creating a wedge between "us" and "them." The challenge is therefore to reclaim "civilization" as global unity in diversity, the rule of law, and pacific resolution of conflicts.
Globalization has historically played a critical role in advancing human civilization through technological and cultural exchange. However, it also has come about by nomadic, agrarian, commercial, industrial, and informatic empires. In the current round of globalization, a Pancapital Empire is employing the neo-liberal doctrines of market competition and supremacy to legitimate its global control of natural resources (Tehranian 1999). Markets are clearly necessary for the efficient allocation of resources, but they are not sufficient for the welfare of human societies.
Human civilization has been fuelled by the prevailing technologies, mythologies, and communication carriers of each age. If we consider technological change as a decisive engine of change, human civilization has evolved from nomadic into agrarian, commercial, industrial, and informatic societies. While scientific and technological advances have accelerated, the cultural lag in mythological narratives has often trapped human societies into anachronistic laws and institutions. Technological globalization has thus advanced much more rapidly than economic, political, or political globalization.
Since technological advances have taken place unevenly, the world currently faces a double jeopardy in technological and cultural leads and lags (Toffler 1980). The increasing partition of the world into premodern, modern, and postmodern is producing some cultural contradictions and clashes of its own. The most notable pathology of this transitional period appears to be commodity and identity fetishism fueling state and opposition terrorism.
The passage to a truly global civilization in which the development of each person is considered as a condition for the development of all is a long cherished ideal. This ideal is perhaps today the most relevant myth, or leap of faith, that the world needs for its survival and welfare.
The ideal of civilization at this critical period in human history may be best sustained by democratizing local, national, regional, and global governance institutions. However, in the light of rapid technological changes that have taken place during the past 200 years, the doctrines of liberal, social, and communitarian democracy must be rethought and revised to fit the specific local, national, regional, and global conditions.

CIVILIZATION: A Pathway to Peace?1

CIVILIZATION:
A Pathway to Peace?1