Setting the record straight.
[This essay was published in Iceland’s leading newspaper, Morgunblaðið, on September 2, 2025. See screenshot below.]
A PDF version may be downloaded here.
The coming decades will witness a far-reaching rebalancing. India and China, the world’s most enduring civilisations, are reclaiming their place as global powers. As the centre of gravity shifts eastward, the West will, one hopes, remain a pole, but no longer the sole arbiter of modernity. This is not merely geopolitical; it is a civilisational reset that demands a reckoning with history, ideas, and culture.
In Iceland, as across much of the West, history is taught through a narrow Eurocentric frame. Civilisations beyond Europe are cast as peripheral, their contributions acknowledged only in passing. The result is a worldview that inflates Western “firsts” and “onlys” while overlooking parallel or prior achievements elsewhere. Such a view cannot survive the coming century. To face the new world honestly, the West must see itself not as the sun around which others revolve, but as one bright star in a larger constellation.
This is not to belittle the West. I have straddled two worlds and benefited from Western civilisation. Its record of achievement is immense, and many of its thinkers remain my guides. What is needed is a corrective: much taken as uniquely Western has roots in Asia. The human story is manifold, and recognition of that plurality enriches us all.
Take philosophy. The standard claim that it was born in ancient Greece, with other traditions offering only “proto-philosophy,” is a conceit. India had developed systematic inquiries into reality, ethics, and knowledge centuries earlier. The Upanishads wrestled with being and consciousness long before Socrates. China, too, cultivated rich traditions – Confucian, Daoist, Legalist – each in its own idiom. The Greek term philosophia named one branch of a universal tree; it conferred no monopoly. To admit this takes nothing away from Greece; it affirms philosophy as a human quest.
In political ideas, the imbalance is clear. The West has long exalted Machiavelli, yet he is an amateur beside Kautilya, the 4th-century BC author of the Arthashastra. That treatise is a systematic science of power covering statecraft, economics, espionage, and war while The Prince is a thin tract for minor rulers. To enthrone Machiavelli and ignore Kautilya is Eurocentric distortion at its purest.
Or take freedom of thought. The idea that it is a uniquely Western gift is untenable. In India, debate between rival schools was institutionalised. The famous encounter in the 7th century AD between Shankara and Mandana Mishra, judged by Mishra’s wife, exemplifies fearless disputation. The Buddha himself arose in open defiance of Vedic authority, denying a creator god and proposing a new path. In China, the “Hundred Schools of Thought” period (6th-3rd century BC) set Confucians, Daoists, Mohists, and Legalists arguing with a vigour that shaped centuries. What the West achieved later was remarkable: it codified free expression in law, enshrined it in constitutions, and tied it to individual rights. That was distinctive, not exclusive.
In science and technology the record is as clear. India gave the world zero and the decimal system, the foundations of mathematics, long misnamed as “Arabic numerals.” Hindu mathematicians such as Bhaskara II anticipated ideas of calculus, such as derivatives and instantaneous change, centuries before Leibniz and Newton systematised them with rigorous notation and wide application.
The sage Sushruta pioneered surgery in the 6th century BC, and his rhinoplasty techniques remain recognisable to this day. Three millennia before Christ, the Indus Valley civilisation built cities with planned streets, wells, and drainage systems of striking sophistication. Europe, by contrast, after Rome’s decline, endured foul, disease-ridden towns until the modern era. History delights in reversing roles.
The cultural sphere is another realm where Western dominance has owed more to geopolitical muscle than to intrinsic merit. That imbalance must now be faced and redressed.
Consider music. The Indian conception of raga opens a universe of melodic thought, beyond the narrow tonal palette of the West. A raga is not a tune or a scale but a living organism that colours the mind and stirs the soul. It is a fundamental musical reality, standing to music as the integer stands to mathematics: a discovery of civilisation rather than the invention of an individual. Chinese calligraphy and Taoist philosophy are likewise testaments to refined sensibilities long ignored by the Eurocentric gaze.
In addition to Mozart and Bach, the canon of human achievement must also speak the names of Tyagaraja and Kalidasa, of Confucius and Laozi. These figures embody traditions as luminous as anything the West has produced, yet they remain almost unknown outside their homelands.
But civilisations do not mirror one another. Western modernity staked its identity on conquest of nature, technical mastery, and law. India and China never neglected those pursuits, but their genius flowered in realms of consciousness, ethics, aesthetics, and inner transformation – the shaping of self as much as world.
These achievements form humanity’s shared inheritance. Rabindranath Tagore, drawing on the ancient Rig Veda, put it thus:
“Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin. Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of man are mine.”
– RP, September 2025
Morgunblaðið, September 2, 2025