The differentiation of disciplines, and the routinization of the impetus to
innovate, have shaped the reflexively modern world we have inhabited ever
since. Yet even here we are not entirely without Asian parallels. The scholas-
ticization of large-scale bureaucratic education was pioneered in China, and
has some parallel in the technicalities fostered by the maths of late medieval
India. And the same inflation of formalized cultural credentials in the shape of
the degree-seeking which erodes contemporary American academic life is vis-
ible in the inflation of grades of Buddhist enlightenment at periods in India
and Japan. Many of the ingredients have existed before; the modern West has
taken them to unpredecented levels.
Common ills imply a common makeup. In the 1980s it became fashionable,
indeed considered morally proper, to defend cultural uniqueness. But culture
is no deeper than skin color, though we have convinced ourselves it is more
respectable. To exult in the uniqueness and endurance of one’s own cultural
configuration is conservative ethnocentrism. To praise the same kind of endur-
ing essence in others is regarded as laudable humility; but as to the other it
remains ethnocentrism, merely at second order and projected into the distance.
The individual personalities that we take pride in as our own egos, and the
collective personalities we reify as cultures are fluid products of sociological
principles that are the same for all of us. We share a common humanity under
the skin because we are constructed of the same ingredients.
Conclusions: The Ingredients of Intellectual Life^ •^383