Asian Connections (Series). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Prasenjit Duara will not be contained. He thinks both through the interstices and beyond the confines of our academic disciplines and our self-balkanized area studies to challenge conventional methodologies with a new one of his own making: historical sociology. In many ways, this new book for me is a summary, capturing as it does Duara’s advocacy of the interdisciplinary, empirical, and cutting-edge research that has distinguished the Asia Research Institute he directed at the National University of Singapore that for many years has been one of our academy’s most exciting intellectual forums.
Duara’s argument is both simple and intricate. The three pieces of it are captured in the title of his book: the crisis of global modernity, sustainability, and the Asian traditions. His first task is to unravel and identify the intertwined matrix of economic, political, and importantly, cultural forces that, with their depleting conquest of nature, have in our time converged in crisis as an unsustainable modernity. In a world in which the modern universalisms of high culture available to plot our way have been reduced to a wholly disenchanted nationalism and consumerism that now threaten our very physical survival, there is real urgency in finding a new compass to correct our course: a revisionist, post-Western modernity.
As this global crisis—this perfect storm—continues to billow forth and darken on the horizon, the existing Western, Eurocentric system of competing sovereign “nation-states” in their various forms no longer has the possibility of tacking through the squalls of solvable problems. Indeed, the crisis is diffused, circulatory, and global in scale, and not reducible to problems at all. We have come face-to-face with a full-blown predicament the resolution of which is fundamentally religious and cultural, requiring of us nothing less than a change in our values, our intentions, and perhaps most pressing, our practices.
Four identifiable characteristics of this predicament of modernity that we can draw from the pages of Duara’s book are that it is organic, interpenetrating, and zero-sum: we cannot address any one “problem” effectively without striving to resolve them all. Second, this predicament respects no national, ethnic, or cultural boundaries. Indeed, it challenges the very idea of boundaries with complexity theory and “big history”—“pulsating global networks of exchange . . . of capital, of political systems, and of culture” (13). Third, the coterminous and interdependent nature of the various elements of the predicament means that no single actors on the world stage can address the malaise alone.
As a species we either win together, or we all lose big time. And finally with the good news, we probably have the depth of cultural resources available to us to reshape our present conditions to produce a sustainable emergent and processual post-Western modernity. But in order to transition to this alternative modernity, we need to abandon the current mentality of sovereign nation-states contending at all costs to win, and to embrace a new dialogical vision of our complex and interdependent “circulatory histories.” As Duara insists, our destiny is either planetary, or not at all.
Duara looks for a path to sustainability by expanding our relevant cultural assets to take full advantage of the Asian traditions. He opens up, surveys, and inventories the full cornucopia of humanistic resources that can be drawn upon for the resolution of the looming predicament, with particular emphasis on resourcing the values of the antique and largely ignored Asian traditions that to date have been denied their proper place at the table. With the rise of Asia, and particularly China, in one generation we have witnessed a seismic sea change in the economic and political order of the world, a reconfiguration of power that is relatively easy to track.
But what about the reach and influence of Asia on a newly emerging world cultural order? While Charles Taylor would appeal to the language of “hypergoods” as his description of the fundamental, architechtonic religio-ethical goods that serve as the basis of our moral frameworks, Duara wants to play with “transcendent authorities” as his alternative term of art. By appealing to a contrast between notions such as “radical transcendence,” associated with the symbol of an absolute and hegemonic Abrahamic God, and the “dialogical transcendence” that grounds more pluralistic religious practices, Duara attempts in a nuanced way to address the question: “How do movements founded on transcendence seek to control, shape, and authorize circulatory forms even as they themselves may be shaped by circulations?” (13). In the emergence of our local and changing idealities, reverence and reason are intertwined with networks of hope to provide these transcendent imperatives with their sacrality and a moral force that can inspire us to aspire to our highest human standards as a universal commons.
This book is dense and demanding of its readers, reporting as it does on a messy world with all of its existing complexities. And a short review of it at best can only be an invitation to readers to take it on. But the reward is more than worth it. While Duara abjures some easy answer to our pressing problems, he does provide a new framework for registering how the global predicament has arisen, and how we might move beyond it most effectively. At the end of the day, perhaps most reassuring is our confidence in the hopeful Duara who has, on thinking through this crisis of global modernity, recommended a way forward for us.
