Whenever people try to explain everything, I get a little nervous that they will be reducing things to the point of absurdity. This is just some warmed over orientalism in a shiny new “cultural” instead of racial package. This is just Samuel P. Huntington’s late Cold War views on how the world works. It was not particularly convincing then, nor is it convincing now.
Organizing the world in such a manner is just a way to justify attempts to control it. The same people who write stuff like this, would spend hours telling you how reductive and wrong Marx was… yet they do the same thing. The only way to understand the world is to actually live in it and if you want to describe it, you can only do that by the things that actually happen. Theory is always going to be an ad hoc approach to reality. It’s never going to give you all the answers. There is no “this is the whole world”, as far as I’m concerned.
