Our book is inspired by the observation that all attempts to provide a modern Western model for a convincingly nonimperial type of global civilisation have so far failed, just as the many fruits of the modernity it has fostered have spread, or at least are known, everywhere. The West has brought about the kind of society that is complex enough to necessitate those features that most of us cherish: subjective right and freedom of scientific enquiry; yet apart from that, it has also promoted the myth of a sovereign Will imposing a universal moral duty of working for ‘progress’ (as opposed to the idea that all work is always and essentially work-in-progress), which, often seen as promoting ‘emancipation’, is nearly as often the site of serial collateral damage, ending up, as most frequently it does, with the waste of yet another specific form of life. Ironically, subjective right and the freedom to enquire have, led us to discover, not to everybody's liking, that Contingency trumps Will, and that epigenetic developments trump causal explanations and require us to manage ever new unintended and unexpected consequences; yet the ‘West’ continues to distinguish itself ‘from the rest’, no longer as colonial master, but still as primus inter pares, on account of its blind trust in the ideological notion of cumulative progress and its concomitant indifference to the collateral damage produced, often unintentionally, in the course of its many initiatives that seek to lead the world to ‘progress’.

Our attempts to establish the reasons why current evolution seems to follow this direction ever more resolutely, have provoked a series of interrogations and investigations that further extend this unhappy result. What is lacking, we found, is not a more precise blueprint or model of a potentially shareable ‘institutional vocabulary’ that would enable us to trace the ground lines of global ‘occidental civilisation’ against its Eastern or Southern ‘other’. Nor does the solution lie in a new model of pluralism that would encompass multiculturalism.