Sublime

While Zhao’s effort to create a blueprint for an alternative to the Westphalian/Vatellian/UN order is laudable, it seems quite impracticable for the foreseeable future.

I argue that the Chinese case has largely escaped the conflicts among confessional communities through much of its history. It also largely escaped the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century penetration of faith-based models of nationalism that appeared in Japan, which is discussed at the end of this chapter (it also appeared in India as

Furthermore, as seen within the larger framework of circulatory histories, when the imperative to compete for survival in the modern world spread to other societies, several Asian societies with dominant traditions of dialogical transcendence sought to confessionalize their religious traditions for national mobilization and exclusivity.

Hayden White expresses what I believe is a sympathetic critique of Ricoeur’s ideas.

In the early twenty-first century, we are again entering into a new geopolitical era; power is becoming more diffused, most notably with Asia joining Western Europe and the United States in technological, economic, and military preeminence. China, India, North Korea, and Pakistan are nuclear powers. The new age of digital technologies is abetting

Buddhist economics, dark green religion, animal ethics, ecofeminism and, not least, Green political ideology, have already established the possibility of elevating nature and natural sustainability to a transcendent ideal.

The rise of Asia, and China in particular, has been accompanied by the need to project a new, more just vision of the world that is not simply a new hegemony.

The greatest obstacles facing the elevation of sustainability to a transcendent level are the untrammeled power of capitalist consumption and the imperative felt by national populaces and their leaders to avoid sacrificing national interests at all – or perhaps, almost all, costs.