I’m reading an extraordinary essay by Wesley J. Wildman, “The Quest For Harmony.” I think he gets to the heart of the problem of the worldwide dominance of Western culture.

Some excerpts:

“Modernity, however, has proved to be both boon and bane. These transformations are so powerful and pervasive that it is scarcely possible to escape their influence, no matter where in the world one lives; the modern West seems to sweep all before it, or under it, capturing or breaking the imagination of many people in other cultures, and transforming life for better or worse. To many non-Western cultures less geared to expansion and consumption, this is a matter of great concern, for they find themselves changing rapidly under the influence of the West, but with little internal capacity to assess, assimilate, or resist what is happening.”

“…widespread overreliance on our analytical and controlling expertise, to the point that our feeling for nature, for community, for history, and for spirituality has been dramatically weakened… We seem to know a great deal about how we human beings and the world work, but we are often at a loss to know how to affirm meaning for our existence in that supposedly ‘well-understood’ world, unless it is by means of regression to that naïveté so seductively packaged in religious fundamentalism and political fanaticism of the right and left.”

“…the root cause of the problematic character of modern Western culture is a profound confusion, a schizophrenic uncertainty, about how to be in the world.”