| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In the process of proliferation from Africa, communities of Homo sapiens became more and more different in terms of the colour of their eyes and skin, the languages they spoke, the songs they sang, the animals they hunted or domesticated; now a reverse process seems to be slowly taking place. Of course, many differences remain and there is a strongly positive side to that. However, today in the emerging global megapolis, a painful process of assimilation is replacing the earlier process of dissimilation. The East and the West will probably meet somewhere in the middle ground; both not merely bringing their respective values to the evolving global normative synthesis, these values are being modified in this process. Neither exclusively "Eastern authoritarian collectivistic" nor "Western liberal individualistic" responses are adequate when facing contemporary challenges. In a sense, humankind may indeed be in the process of completing a full cycle: from a single community through the proliferation and diversification of communities towards the emergence of a community of communities that should become, in some important respects, more and more similar to each other, i.e., a slow and contradictory process of assimilation is replacing the millenia-long process of dissimilation.
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