Nathan Gardels, writing in Noema "From The Trap Of Geopolitics To A Geo-Civilizational Paradigm", argues that the nation-state is a Western export — and that India and China are now reaching past it, back to older civilizational identities, to find a way out of the zero-sum logic of geopolitics.
The essay leans heavily on Bruno Maçães's new book In Search of Greater India. Maçães's core move is to contrast the Western/Jungian model of the ego — which projects its own repressed darkness onto an enemy, turning politics into a fight between good and evil — with the Indian philosophical tradition of Advaita (nondualism). In Advaita, the opposition between self and other is a lower-level illusion; at the highest level of realization, the individual soul (jiva) is identical with universal consciousness (Shiva). Shashi Tharoor's line captures it neatly: in Christianity the body has a soul, but in Hinduism the soul has a body. If everyone is fundamentally one atman, harming another is self-harm, and ethics doesn't need an external rulebook — it falls out of correctly perceiving reality.
Gardels then complicates this with a hard historical irony: India tested its first nuclear weapon in 1974, and its 1998 test triggered Pakistan's own bomb the same year — dualistic, mimetic rivalry playing out in a civilization whose deepest philosophy explicitly rejects dualism. He pairs this with Peter Sloterdijk's observation that Daoism suffered the same fate in China: just as the West rediscovers the ecological wisdom of "acting in alignment with the cosmos," the Eastern mind that produced it has already been colonized by Western instrumental reason.
The essay's resolution is paradoxical: China and India could only reclaim their civilizational roots after becoming powerful modern nation-states — meaning the tool for asserting a post-Western identity is itself a Western-shaped instrument (state power, international order) whose logic runs counter to civilizational holism. Gardels closes by citing historian Wang Gungwu's warning that trouble starts when a "civilization power" gets conflated with national interest and claimed as universal — and Toynbee's line that the nationalist chapter that began in the West "will have to have an Indian ending... either the 'Indian way' or the bomb."
A Deeper Problem the Essay Doesn't Reach:
What Gardels's piece doesn't address is why nondualism has such a poor track record at actually taming "us versus them" thinking, even on its home turf. The answer may lie further back than Western colonization or modern nationalism — in the Paleolithic structure of human social life itself. For most of our species' history, humans lived in bands of roughly 150 individuals or fewer (Dunbar's number), and "us versus them" wasn't a philosophical error to be corrected — it was an adaptive strategy for competing with rival bands over scarce resources. That wiring predates Advaita, predates Daoism, predates every civilizational tradition that later tried to theorize its way past it. Nondualism confronts something considerably older and deeper than geopolitics: the human animal’s extraordinary capacity to cooperate with its own group while competing with another.
This is worth remembering when reaching for a "golden age" before Western nation-states supposedly imposed dualism on more holistic civilizations: tribal and inter-polity warfare was endemic in pre-colonial India and China too. The Indian epic cited in the essay for nondualist wisdom—the Mahabharata—is built around a devastating, total war between rival factions of a single dynasty. The period when Daoism and Confucianism actually developed was literally named the Warring States Period (475–221 BCE)—a brutal multi-century struggle for territorial dominance. What the modern nation-state did wasn't introduce the us/them impulse — it gave the ancient Paleolithic impulse vastly larger populations, harder borders, and industrial-scale weapons to work with. The problem isn't that the West exported dualism to civilizations that had transcended it; it's that no civilization has durably transcended it, because the underlying tribal psychology long predates any of the philosophies now being offered as the cure.
[The above article summary and my 'deeper problem' critique of it were crafted in conversations with ChatGPT, gemini, and Claude.]
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