against civilisational nostalgia: western identity and global cognitive drift

All should have 'Remorse For Intemperate Speech'*

(*from the WB Yeats poem title, of which more below)

Recent arguments from within the U.S. policy establishment aired here on

Substack

urge a civilisational renewal grounded in shared Western heritage; however, beneath the rhetoric lie deeply entrenched cognitive biases, selective historical memory, and a misreading of the evolving geopolitical landscape.

The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe

Here, I reframe the debate through psychological and cognitive science, showing how the supposed narrative of civilisational unity obscures systematic motivated reasoning, prevent adaptive institutional evolution. Against the backdrop of three emerging civilisational styles—the American, the pan-European, and the Chinese—I explore how perception, identity, and demographic momentum are reshaping global order.

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

collapse of cognitive pluralism

“Our transatlantic partnership is underpinned by a rich Western tradition…”

The essay invokes a singular cultural identity—“Western civilization”—as if it were:

• Historically homogeneous

• Morally univocal

• Politically endangered by internal dissent

But cognitive pluralism—the distributed diversity of thought, memory, language, identity, and perspective—is a core feature of both democratic vitality and especially of historical Western development. Cognitive pluralism - driven in very large part by the claims of the scientific enlightment, the exercise of reason, and murderous clashes between differing claims of religious absolutism regarding which is the one, true, faith - has long been the Western way.

The moral arc of Europe is not the continuity of a supposed singular “civilization,”, continuous in time, but the emergence of shared self-restraint and the subtle identifying with Europe as a shared ideal - as well as the nation-state - after two catastrophic wars.

The EU is not anti-democratic—it is a memory institution/cognitive community designed to interrupt Europe's worst habits of the past thousand or more years: intercountry wars, civil wars, colonial domination, racisms of many different types, authoritarianism (religious and civil), deep religious animosities, clashes of ideology, eliminationist pogroms, the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Great Famine (and much more besides; this list is just for the last two hundred years).

This wiki gives a list of conflicts in Europe back to 500 BCE: take a deep breath before you read it; I’ve put the list for the 21st C here¹.

As WB Yeats declaimed:

Out of Ireland have we come.

Great hatred, little room,

Maimed us at the start.

I carry from my mother's womb

A fanatic heart.

Ireland is not alone in these tendencies, as recent European history shows. The danger here is converting memory into mythology—activating affective coherence at the expense of factual complexity. This is a classic case of narrative compression, a form of cognitive schematisation that stabilises group identity - something Halbwachs noted about a century ago (I discuss this phenomenon in detail here).

We should encourage epistemic diversity, not monocultural nostalgia masquerading as virtue. Real democratic resilience arises not from uniform values, but conflict mediated by trusted cognitive communities (aka, institutions). Presenting dissent as betrayal narrows the space for adaptive thought, and disavows the cognitive diversity the “collision of adverse opinions” necessary for truth-finding allows (JS Mill; 1859!).

We are all (latent) cosmopolitan globalists

myth, memory, and the illusion of unity

Humans construct meaning through narratives—simplified, emotionally resonant stories helping reduce cognitive load and resolve ambiguity. The U.S. State Department’s appeal to a curated historical arc from Athens to Washington, presenting Western identity as coherent and endangered is a great example of this tendency.

This simplification is cognitively convenient, but historically misleading, filtering out a staggering history of intra-European violence, internal colonisation (e.g., of Ireland, Poland, the Balkans), religious fragmentation and hatred, as well as ideological revolutions (the Great Terror, Marxism, Fascism). It ignores the savage landwar ongoing at present on the European mainland, where there is a genuine and deep clash of political ideologies: one of a ravenous imperialism, disregarding the Westphalian logic underpinning the international order, and the other a liberal democracy (itself a work in progress) defending itself against invasion.

The US should know better. Without its decisive interventions during the 1990s, peace in Northern Ireland would have been much more difficult to attain. Many forget of course one of the signal events in US history - the landing of the Mayflower - was in fact the arrival of puritanical pilgrims fleeing a society they regarded as sordid and deviating from the one, true, faithful way.

‘a low dishonest decade’

group identity, threat perception, and civilisational style

That group identity strengthens in response to perceived threat is a standard finding in social psychology. The rhetoric of a West ‘under siege’ activates parochial altruism and “us-versus-them” framing. Targeting pluralism, migration, or speech regulation as signs of decay reflects a deeper dynamic: discomfort with distributed agency and changing norms.

Group identity is not neutral: it provides a cognitive lens that changes how you see the world. Social identity theory suggests perceived threats to a group activate tighter boundaries, moral exclusion of outsiders, and heightened emotional valence regarding threat signals (even where there is no threat actually there).

The State Department’s concern with migration, speech regulation, and digital policy in Europe reflects less a rigorous analytical position than a projection of in-group threat sensitivity.

The defence of the West becomes a metaphysical struggle, not a practical one, resulting in a kind of a cognitive myopia, where policies are not judged on outcomes, but on fidelity to identity. The invocation of religious values, natural law, and classical heritage serves to frame any divergence as betrayal—not disagreement.

The result is a cognitive closure loop: affectively coherent, but epistemically sealed.

three emerging civilisational styles

While the Western alliance continues to reference a shared cultural past, another lens sees three macro-civilisational formations coalescing and emerging:

• American mode – centred on national exceptionalism, technological dominance, and a belief in a ‘global shaping’ capacity. This mode overestimates U.S. agency and underestimates systemic complexity. Its domestic political fragmentation is a liability, but its entrepreneurial dynamism and networked influence remain powerful, and its cultural soft power is far, far greater than any other country.

• pan-European mode – slow, process-oriented, institutionally plural. Anchored by the EU but extending to Canada, Japan, Australia, and parts of Latin America, this mode favours norms, law, and shared sovereignty. The European Union is the West’s most successful cognitive experiment in pluralism, peace, and institutional learning. It lacks American narrative clarity but compensates through distributed legitimacy and multilateral learning. It consists of so many different countries that unity of purpose can be very slow to emerge. There will never be a United States of Europe along American lines. But there will be a slow consolidation of express unity of purpose and action around norms and values.

• Chinese mode – hierarchical, state-centric, and developmentalist. This model combines rapid feedback loops with cultural continuity and long-term infrastructural strategy. It privileges state coherence over individual dissent and adapts technology to reinforce state legitimacy.

Together, these three blocs account for roughly 70–75% of global GDP (as of 2025 estimates), though their internal cohesion varies. U.S. and EU+ allies constitute nearly 50–55%, China and its closer satellites about 20%, with overlap in transactional partners (e.g., ASEAN, Gulf States). These three blocs only account for perhaps 2.5 billion of the world's population, however.

How institutions think

the future is demographic and distributed

These blocs are not fixed. Brexit may well be reversed in a decade or so, giving a boost in economic growth to the UK, and in overall economic size to the EU, adding back about 3T to a 22T economy. The EU economy is a work in progress, with poor, low productivity, high unemployment regions accompanied by regions of great concentrated wealth and employment.

But much is happening elsewhere. Demographics and educational investment suggest Africa, India, and South America may drive the next century’s rebalancing, as these regions generate new civilisational logics of their own. With youthful populations, rapid urbanisation, and burgeoning educational ecosystems, they will increasingly set norms rather than merely absorb them, marking the arrival of a truly polycentric world: these regions are poised to challenge the tri-polar system.

Western narrative frames, however, have not caught up. Epistemically, the West remains encumbered by illusions of centrality. We still suffer from cultural egocentrism: the belief one’s own cultural schema is natural, normative, and globally transferable. It disables adaptive feedback and generates repeated strategic misreads—from Iraq to Afghanistan to pandemic response.

What we are losing; what we have lost

As more nations pursue their own cognitive and cultural paths to modernity, the idea of a single civilisational mission will almost certainly fade.

toward epistemic humility and institutional adaptation

We don’t need an assertion of mythic civilisational unity. Instead we need cognitive flexibility and institutional humility:

• Recognising the psychological pull of identity narratives while resisting their distorting power.

• Strengthening mechanisms for feedback, correction, and participatory legitimacy.

• Accepting multipolarity not as threat but as opportunity for innovation in governance.

The future is not found in defending a static West, but in cultivating a dynamic architecture of global cooperation capable of learning from and adapting to differences.

affect, identity, and populist illiberalism

By emphasising threat, decline, and betrayal, the essay activates the threat-salience networks bypassing deliberative reasoning.

This is not the language of diplomacy; it is the language of siege.

By blurring the line between populist grievance and legitimate critique, it reinforces a worldview in which any effort to regulate platforms, enforce equality, or share sovereignty becomes an existential threat to freedom.

a different kind of transatlanticism

The call should not be for “civilizational allies”, but for cognitive allies: societies capable of reflection, restraint, and regeneration that share a commitment to building institutions that learn, adapt, and correct themselves; a shared belief in the open society: one that defends rights through law, not nostalgia; that resolves conflict through institutions, not charisma; that treats disagreement not as betrayal but as the engine of progress.

towards cognitive resilience and institutional maturity

We now need collective cognitive resilience:

• Bias awareness: recognising the distortive role of identity framing, loss aversion, and confirmation bias in elite policy discourse.

• Feedback literacy: building institutional capacity to incorporate divergent sources of learning.

• Narrative humility: creating evolving political stories, rather than canonising fixed narratives from the past.

• Multipolar engagement: acknowledging the legitimacy of different development pathways without reverting to relativism.

This means treating global pluralism not as decay but as data: the diversity of institutional forms offers a laboratory for learning.

conclusion: narrative delusions and adaptive failure

Instead of doubling down on civilisational nostalgia, the challenge is to construct adaptive narratives. The most dangerous illusion is thinking the world can return to a prior order through sheer assertion of will.

The State Department’s civilisational call to arms is a textbook case of motivated cognition: a story crafted not to understand the world but to stabilise a threatened identity within it. It might succeed rhetorically for a while, but its historical omissions, cognitive distortions, and rigid framing render it epistemically fragile—unsuited to the demands of an interdependent and increasingly post-hegemonic world.

To lead in the 21st C, the differing civilisational modes in the West need to become the first to learn in public—to institutionalise epistemic humility, plural cognition, and feedback-driven governance. In a world shaped by plural intelligences and dramatically different world views, uneven emergence from poverty and history, and asymmetric shocks, the civilisation that will survive is the one that can learn and adapt.

grading the original State Department essay