PART ONE

Ripples From Our History

On a hot, still afternoon in August, a young man took his life. This tragedy occurred only a few miles from where I live. It felt particularly close. And apparently not just to me. Jason Arday’s death brought London momentarily to its knees. A palpable shock vibrated across the city as the news broke.

Arday’s name was familiar to many, largely because of the relentless, harsh spotlight and abuse he had been subjected to by media for months. At 41, a Professor of Sociology of Education at an elite university, Arday had broken through formidable barriers three years earlier, becoming the youngest Black Professor hired by Cambridge University in its history. This was significant not only because of his age, but because he was Black.

 In 2025 Cambridge had a total of 75 Black to 6,180 non-Black academic staff. Its professorial rate was even lower with 0.4% professors of Black ethnicity.

It was not only the barrier of race that Jason Arday had surmounted to arrive at Cambridge in 2023. Throughout his life he had struggled and overcome the challenges of autism. During a relatively short academic tenure, he became a loved and respected figure for the doors he opened, by championing an academic career path for many who might never have conceived of this possibility.

Three days after his death, I was standing alone in the large crowd honouring his life, in Trafalgar Square. Amid a sea of silent emotion, I sensed a crack in the dark vault of cultural memory…a shared awareness that history was being repeated.

A young man bullied to death brought ripples from our dark imperial past to the surface. The truth is that Western liberalism was never universal – liberty, equality, fraternity and the rights these bestowed – were never meant for everyone.

The colonial project proved this. Forgotten by many, erased by a carefully curated narrative of economic success and cultural superiority, this truth lies buried in the belly of British culture. However, it’s a truth that has never been forgotten by the global majority, who came under the heavy fist of colonialism. And like a ghost it reveals itself in tragic instances like Professor Arday’s death.

But in the outpouring of silent grief, anger, love and profound sorrow, I experienced something else – a tangible sense of communion that transcended our ancestries yet at the same time embraced our shared history. There was an honesty to the depth of what Jason Arday’s death opened in the British soul. Binding us together, it held all that emotion, without judgement, without recoil, and without dividing us.

This experience had a deep impact on me, leading to an inquiry into the critical significance of facing the truths of our entangled histories. What kind of ‘new’ world can we create together, particularly with the rise of A. I. if there are dark, forgotten parts to our collective psyche that are not integrated?

This essay forms part of this ongoing inquiry which led me to revisit the epistemic foundations of Western modernity and the world this has created, one in which we are all living.

The Shallows of ‘Wokeism’

The aftermath of editorials, statements of defence and accusation, including from Cambridge University, made it apparent that Jason Arday’s was not a simple story.

But what is clear is that the process of hiring this brilliant young man was questionable. Allegedly, by the university’s own academic pre-requisites, Arday did not qualify for such a senior position.

What this highlights is the disingenuous motives of certain elite institutions which, like Cambridge, too often simply want to burnish their liberal credentials.

Jason Arday was a genuine asset for Cambridge University and could have continued a brilliant career with the right support and placement for his gifts. Instead, his character was dragged through a “racist feeding frenzy” – the words of Cambridge University’s chancellor, Chris Smith, himself.

Under the heat of media scrutiny and right-wing pressure, the university reneged on its responsibility to its young professor. Publicly stating that it was re-opening an investigation into allegations of plagiarism (already reviewed and refuted), it exposed one man’s life to becoming a media spectacle.

Allegations of plagiarism are serious but in any other circumstance rank as misconduct. Not a crime. Yet typically we witness the whitewashing of political and corporate crime – tax fraud, sexual harassment, corruption, lying. These are passed off as normal phenomena these days, even when committed by alumni from the very elite institutions that Jason Arday had the audacity to enter.

The dots are easy to connect. Deep-seated racism still permeates liberal institutions of power and wealth, cynically articulated by former MP Jacob Rees Mogg, whose response to this tragedy was, “Cambridge has drunk the D.E.I Kool-Aid.”’

A racism that coexists with today’s liberal policies, exposes the absence of honest engagement with a colonial history, that pervades not only modern Britain, but most of the Western world. There is a startling reluctance for a real reckoning with a civilizational arrogance, which obscures a history of extraordinary violence.

Why is this significant now?

Because in a world of escalating crises, the West remains a dominant force not only militarily and economically, but also epistemically. This has created a cultural identity of superiority, which remains firmly intact, despite the role Western systems and policies of coercion and extraction are playing in the precarity of our planet, and collective future.

Without some kind of objective reckoning that the world can come together on, the ripples of our inherited past remain alive, creating undercurrents of distrust and insecurity.

Yet cracks are occurring with increasing frequency in the West’s presumptive identity of ‘rightful’ global leadership. 20^th century assumptions are dissolving. And despite an inadequate portrayal of the West’s footprint on global events by legacy media ,and Western educational institutions, the rest of the world is, and has been long aware of the dangers and inequalities inherent in the Western system.

Ignorance of the inner life of other civilizations is now showing up as defective knowledge. Bewilderment is creeping into the discourse of Western political elites in the face of current geopolitics. In a changing world, narrow binaries no longer fit what is happening in the world. The Western ideological lens, assumed to be reality, is proving inadequate, even to itself.                    

Unheard, Unseen – Alternative Contexts for Modernity

That there are other worldviews and complex civilizational knowledge systems barely registers on the Western radar, and rarely ever has.

At the height of the colonial project in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, intellectuals from ancient civilizations, having witnessed the pillaging of their inner and outer wealth, began to re-evaluate Western modernity against their own civilizational principles.

In their dealings with young nations drunk on superior military power, and steeped in beliefs of civilizational superiority, they saw the greed generated by Western individualism and exploitative materialism as corrosive of social cohesion and moral integrity.

 At the same time, these scholars and activists recognised the need for social and economic renewal within their own societies that the Western model offered. 

China, whose rapid ascendency today challenges simplistic political clichés, was grappling in the early 20^th century with how to create a uniquely Chinese modernity. Yan Fu, a scholar and early advocate of Western modernity, later came to believe that China’s real renewal lay in the selective revival of Confucian values. Yan believed that Confucianism was a living, evolving tradition, capable of adapting to modern challenges.

Other Chinese classicists like Kang Youwei and Chen Huanzhang shared Yan’s vision, that by integrating Western political and technological advancements with a spiritual path, China could cultivate ethical individuals and create a harmonious, prosperous society.

This view aligned them with a broader intellectual movement across the Middle East and Asia that sought to reconcile modernity with tradition.

However, under pressure of Western power and expansion, attempts to blend traditional spiritual values with the technological advances of modernity were overruled by younger secular reformists.

Ignorance and Entangled Histories

Knowledge of the violence of colonialism, buried beneath the propaganda of free trade and revisionist histories, has left global leaders (particularly from the West), bereft of a valuable context for contemporary challenges.

In his memoir, Tony Blair recalls overseeing the handover of Hong Kong back to China. As the officiating Prime Minister then, he admits knowing almost nothing of Britain’s violent history with China: illegal drug running, gunboat diplomacy, and the brutal enforcement of access to China’s markets through the so-called Opium wars.

 In contrast, Chinese schoolchildren today still study these events and the ‘Century of Humiliation’, a narrative that China has been bent on rectifying.

In short, Western leaders are, for the most, ill-equipped to see beyond their existing system and its beliefs, to find new ways to collaboratively address the global challenges we face.

Outdated Fantasies

Instead, as the 20^th century unfolded, and Soviet communism was finally defeated, fantasies of the all-encompassing power of neoliberalism’s free markets to create prosperity worldwide, grew to fever pitch.  Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” marked the glorious triumph of Western liberal democracy. Fantasies of globalization and the myth of ‘a hot flat world’, where Middle Eastern, Asian and African societies would become more secular, more ‘American’, flourished…… temporarily.

What was missing from this picture, however, was the recognition of the violent power dynamics inherent in the West’s progress. The imperial project had ‘worked’ for the colonisers but at a cost to the rest of the world that is almost impossible to recover.

Replication of Western progress, based (literally) on an ideology of profit-at-any-cost is not the answer.

There is no doubt, however, that the West’s advances have made it a symbol of a desirable life of health and prosperity. As such, it’s a magnet for those seeking refuge from conflict, war, climate catastrophe. But the imprint of the brutal origins of our success has left no illusion of the shallow roots of liberalism with its hypocrisies, morally ambiguous economic and foreign policies, 

 What this has created is an unsafe world of radical climate change, extreme wealth inequality, shifting allegiances, hostile undercurrents, and the impunity of neo-colonial violence.

Not everyone in the West has been a cheerleader of Western triumphalism. Far from it.

During the cold war, Reinhold Niebuhr, an American theologian and public intellectual (some of whose views are controversial), observed that,“The most violent century in human history…is hardly the best advertisement for the bland fanatics of western civilisation, who regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of human existence”.

There are a long line of Western thinkers, activists, and spiritual philosophers who have voiced alternatives to Western materialism. Yet, the trope of superiority and entitlement lives on, imprinted in our cultural psyche.

 Ultimately, we are the ‘good guys’, ours is a civilizing mission, which entitles us to levels of prosperity and consumerism that the ‘rest’ will eventually ‘catch up to’.

Privilege creates a prison that blinds, an opaqueness to reality that can easily result in a lack of accountability.  Our unwillingness to acknowledge objective, recorded facts and take responsibility for the crimes of the past (or present), makes our assumptive position as the world’s champion of justice, law, and human rights highly untrustworthy.

PART TWO

Epistemic Foundations – How Did we Get Here?

Many thinkers, both Eastern and Western, have questioned valorising economic growth as the only index of civilizational prosperity. Other more wholistic, richer ways of conceiving the ‘good life’ have existed. And still do. But there is a reason that crude utilitarian thinking which, as Pankaj Mishra describes, “institutionalises greed, credits slavery with economic value, and confuses individual freedom with consumer choices,” is still dominant.

The Legacy of Rene Descartes

The roots of the West’s current ideological framework, as many know, can be traced back to the 17^th century French polymath, Rene Decartes’ and his epistemic subject-object split.

Western civilization’s philosophical origins are deeper than this, but the ontological ramifications of Descartes’ binary are profound and of a cascading nature.

The elevation of reason as the sole path to truth, under science, dismissed wholesale, embodied experience, intuition, and relational knowing. The most obvious outcome of the objectification of nature was the reduction of the more-than-human-world to an inert resource, one that quickly became a source for human exploitation.

In brief, this split underpins the moral and ecological crises of today. As a philosophy it suited the early colonialists and industrialists hungry for resources. But if the “other” (human or non-human) is merely an object to be controlled, dominated, or extracted, then violence—whether colonial, social, or environmental—becomes not just possible, but logical within this framework.

The Cartesian binary was not just a theory. It infused Western culture, our institutions and systems, creating a worldview that objectifies the world; lacks any recognition of our interbeing with nature’s living systems, and ultimately prioritizes the subject/ the individual’s needs and desires over community.

It’s a complex story. For as modernity progressed in the West, parallel to this epistemic split and the dominance of rationality, other developmental advances took place within Western culture. Freed from dogma, our individuation, capacity for independent thinking, subjectivity, and reflexivity began to flower in the late 19^th and 20^th century.

Over time, however, to a great extent our sense of being an individual underwent increasing atomisation, identifying with a separate, sovereign ‘self’; a self, disconnected from others, from the earth, and by default competitive, existentially alone.

This is no doubt a highly simplified summary of specific inner and outer developments within the West, over the last 300 plus years years. But it’s easy to underestimate the impact on modernity of Descartes’ fundamental division, which has ultimately resulted in a secular culture, hungry for material fulfilment, and now beset by consumerism, competition and inner alienation.

The fragmentation of our self-sense, isolated from community, land, and cosmos, eviscerates our fundamental felt sense of belonging, of unity.

A Moral Vacuum

Such a fundamental epistemic separation opens the door to moral ambiguity. When we are deprived of meaning and relationality, our natural empathy and sense of moral responsibility can atrophy. The West’s loss of a moral compass is perhaps more to do with an essential inability to recognize the humanity (or aliveness) of any ‘other’, because our epistemic framework doesn’t allow for it.

 This is not a rationalization, but an attempt to widen and depersonalize the lens on how we got here. It’s not difficult to draw a line from Cartesian thinking to a culture that has objectified and commodified everything, from nature’s riches, to our bodies, our pets, our personal lives.

This transformation has and is happening in our lifetimes. Zuckerburg’s idealistic conception of the internet 22 years ago, as purely a tool to enable connectedness, is almost a lost memory; as Meta, along with others, has transformed into an agent of profit, hungry algorithms tracking any commercial opportunity.

Global Transitions

Nevertheless, consciousness is changing. A string of illegal, scandalous, and morally ambiguous acts by our leaders – wars, financial catastrophes and the impunity that often accompanies these – has created a crack in the edifice of Western superiority. Smug hyper-capitalism and liberal democratic structures now appear hollow, because of repeated compromise and corruption.

But it’s Gaza, an open wound in the global conscience, that has all but eclipsed the moral authority of the West. Crimes perpetrated with impunity, against an entire civilian population, have ruptured for many, especially young people, a narrative of moral superiority that has survived centuries.

As the editorial staff of Equator, a new media platform, succinctly stated, “The genocide in Gaza has destroyed what remains of the illusion that the West should determine the future of the rest of the world. The United States and its satellites, having taken the centre stage of history ….are now exiting in disgrace. “

A radical revision of modern Western civilization is taking place, albeit slowly, as the branches of liberal democracy – including human rights – wither from within.

 A hunger for community and justice is resurging as old narratives dissolve.

The reality of the climate crisis, and our leaders’ ineptitude, is igniting a receptivity to the knowledge systems of indigenous cultures and others rooted in a wholistic worldview, with different systems and ways of living.

The younger generation are more porous, raised with access to alternative forms of thinking, they are not as embedded in conventional narratives. Growing up in a world assuaged by climate change and human-created destruction, many of the younger generation’s attention is on something larger than just themselves. They are quick to recognize worn-out narratives propped up by hollow values, and vacuous promises. Many are deeply questioning the status quo, making different choices.

Transitions are messy and take many iterations.

Yet new and ancient ideas are spreading in response to the issues of our time. The early questions raised by Yan Fu and others, as to a more wholistic, moral context for our increasingly technological world, seem more relevant than ever. The world is changing, and with it the watertight ontology that has dominated for three centuries. The desire for honesty in a broken world is palpable. And out of this, as I glimpsed at the memorial for Jason Arday, a possibility of wholeness, of unity is emerging, as we let go of a civilizational identity that is not, and never was real.