WELCOME TO THE NEW WORLD CIVILIZATION
SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY HAPPENED over the last few decades. For the first time in human history, a single global civilization emerged.
“We are witnessing a cultural shift of world-historic proportions,” I wrote in an essay for Reason’s 20th anniversary. “East and West are fusing in the most momentous combination of powerful civilizations since Hellenism collided with the Middle East—leaving Christianity in its wake.”
It was 1988, the last full year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and, we did not yet realize, of the Berlin Wall. The Soviet Union still existed. The internet as we know it—the World Wide Web, with its hyperlinks and browsers—did not. China was liberalizing but still awaited the economic reforms that would transform it into a global powerhouse and allow it to gain entry into the World Trade Organization.
Unanticipated in my essay, the end of the Cold War, the rise of
