全球现代性的危机：亚洲传统与可持续的未来
https://www.amazon.ca/Crisis-Global-Modernity-Sustainable-Connections-ebook/dp/B00OUWJKEG/ref=
作者：Prasenjit Duara
在这项重要的新研究中，Prasenjit Duara 扩展了他颇具影响力的理论框架，将循环的跨国历史作为民族主义历史的替代品。Duara 认为，当今时代是由三种全球变化的交汇所定义的：非西方国家的崛起、环境可持续性的危机以及他所称的超越权威来源的丧失——曾经存在于宗教或政治意识形态中的理想、原则和道德。
拯救世界正在成为——也必须成为——我们时代的超越目标，但这一目标如果要成功，必须超越国家主权。杜赞奇认为，可持续发展的可行基础可以在亚洲传统中找到，这些传统提供了理解个人、生态和普遍关系的不同方式。必须通过这些传统的传播方式以及它们与当代发展的融合来理解它们。
全球现代性的危机：亚洲传统与可持续的未来
https://pacificaffairs.ubc.ca/book-reviews/the-crisis-of-global-modernity-asian-traditions-and-a-sustainable-future-by-prasenjit-duara/
作者：Prasenjit Duara
亚洲联系（系列）。剑桥：剑桥大学出版社，2015 年。
Prasenjit Duara 不会被束缚。他既通过间隙思考，又超越我们学术学科和我们自我分裂的区域研究的界限，用他自己创造的新方法挑战传统方法：历史社会学。从很多方面来看，这本新书对我来说是一个总结，因为它体现了杜赞奇倡导的跨学科、实证和前沿研究，这些研究使他在新加坡国立大学领导的亚洲研究所脱颖而出，多年来，该研究所一直是我们学院最令人兴奋的知识论坛之一。
杜赞奇的论点既简单又复杂。他的书名概括了其中的三个部分：全球现代性的危机、可持续性和亚洲传统。他的首要任务是解开并识别相互交织的经济、政治和文化力量矩阵，这些力量随着对自然的消耗性征服，在我们这个时代汇聚成一种不可持续的现代性危机。在这个世界上，可供我们规划道路的现代高雅文化普遍主义已经沦为完全幻灭的民族主义和消费主义，现在威胁着我们的生存，我们迫切需要找到一个新的指南针来纠正我们的路线：一种修正主义的后西方现代性。
随着这场全球危机——这场完美的风暴——继续在地平线上翻腾和变暗，现有的西方、欧洲中心主义的、以各种形式相互竞争的主权“民族国家”体系不再可能应对可解决的问题。事实上，这场危机是分散的、循环的、全球性的，根本无法归结为问题。我们面临的是一个全面的困境，解决这一困境从根本上讲是宗教和文化的，要求我们至少改变我们的价值观、我们的意图，也许最紧迫的是改变我们的实践。
从杜赞奇的书中，我们可以得出现代性困境的四个可识别特征：它是有机的、相互渗透的和零和的：如果不努力解决所有问题，我们就无法有效地解决任何一个“问题”。第二，这种困境不分国家、种族或文化界限。事实上，它用复杂性理论和“大历史”——“资本、政治制度和文化的脉动全球交流网络” (13)——挑战了边界的概念。第三，困境中各种因素的共存和相互依存性意味着，世界舞台上没有任何一个参与者能够独自解决这一问题。
作为一个物种，我们要么共同获胜，要么全部失败。最后，好消息是，我们可能拥有丰富的文化资源，可以重塑我们目前的状况，以产生可持续的、新兴的、过程化的后西方现代性。但为了过渡到这种替代性的现代性，我们需要放弃当前主权民族国家不惜一切代价争取胜利的心态，接受一种新的对话视角，以了解我们复杂而相互依存的“循环历史”。正如杜赞奇所坚持的那样，我们的命运要么是全球性的，要么根本不存在。
杜赞奇通过扩大我们相关的文化资产来充分利用亚洲传统，寻找可持续发展的道路。他开拓、调查和盘点了可用于解决迫在眉睫的困境的丰富人文资源，特别强调了古代和被忽视的亚洲传统的价值，这些传统至今仍被剥夺了应有的地位。随着亚洲尤其是中国的崛起，在一代人的时间里，我们目睹了世界经济和政治秩序的巨变，权力的重新配置相对容易追踪。
但亚洲对新兴世界文化秩序的影响又如何呢？查尔斯·泰勒会用“超级好”这个词来描述作为我们道德框架基础的基本的、建筑化的宗教伦理好，而杜赞奇则想用“超然权威”作为他的另一个艺术术语。通过对比“激进超越”等概念（与绝对和霸权的亚伯拉罕神的象征相关）和“对话超越”等概念（后者奠定了更多元化的宗教实践的基础），杜赞奇试图以一种微妙的方式回答这个问题：“建立在超越基础上的运动如何寻求控制、塑造和授权流通形式，即使它们本身可能
“我们是否应该被循环所塑造？”（13）。在我们本土的、不断变化的理想的出现过程中，敬畏和理性与希望的网络交织在一起，为这些超然的命令提供了神圣性和道德力量，激励我们追求作为普遍共同体的最高人类标准。
这本书内容丰富，对读者要求高，因为它报道了一个混乱的世界及其现有的所有复杂性。对它的简短评论充其量只能是邀请读者接受它。但回报是值得的。虽然杜赞奇放弃了一些解决我们紧迫问题的简单答案，但他确实提供了一个新的框架来记录全球困境是如何产生的，以及我们如何最有效地超越它。归根结底，也许最令人放心的是我们对充满希望的杜赞奇的信心，他在思考这场全球现代化危机后，为我们推荐了一条前进的道路。
The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future
https://www.amazon.ca/Crisis-Global-Modernity-Sustainable-Connections-ebook/dp/B00OUWJKEG/ref=
by Prasenjit Duara
In this major new study, Prasenjit Duara expands his influential theoretical framework to present circulatory, transnational histories as an alternative to nationalist history. Duara argues that the present day is defined by the intersection of three global changes: the rise of non-western powers, the crisis of environmental sustainability and the loss of authoritative sources of what he terms transcendence - the ideals, principles and ethics once found in religions or political ideologies.
The physical salvation of the world is becoming - and must become - the transcendent goal of our times, but this goal must transcend national sovereignty if it is to succeed. Duara suggests that a viable foundation for sustainability might be found in the traditions of Asia, which offer different ways of understanding the relationship between the personal, ecological and universal. These traditions must be understood through the ways they have circulated and converged with contemporary developments.
THE CRISIS OF GLOBAL MODERNITY: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future
By Prasenjit Duara
Asian Connections (Series). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Prasenjit Duara will not be contained. He thinks both through the interstices and beyond the confines of our academic disciplines and our self-balkanized area studies to challenge conventional methodologies with a new one of his own making: historical sociology. In many ways, this new book for me is a summary, capturing as it does Duara’s advocacy of the interdisciplinary, empirical, and cutting-edge research that has distinguished the Asia Research Institute he directed at the National University of Singapore that for many years has been one of our academy’s most exciting intellectual forums.
Duara’s argument is both simple and intricate. The three pieces of it are captured in the title of his book: the crisis of global modernity, sustainability, and the Asian traditions. His first task is to unravel and identify the intertwined matrix of economic, political, and importantly, cultural forces that, with their depleting conquest of nature, have in our time converged in crisis as an unsustainable modernity. In a world in which the modern universalisms of high culture available to plot our way have been reduced to a wholly disenchanted nationalism and consumerism that now threaten our very physical survival, there is real urgency in finding a new compass to correct our course: a revisionist, post-Western modernity.
As this global crisis—this perfect storm—continues to billow forth and darken on the horizon, the existing Western, Eurocentric system of competing sovereign “nation-states” in their various forms no longer has the possibility of tacking through the squalls of solvable problems. Indeed, the crisis is diffused, circulatory, and global in scale, and not reducible to problems at all. We have come face-to-face with a full-blown predicament the resolution of which is fundamentally religious and cultural, requiring of us nothing less than a change in our values, our intentions, and perhaps most pressing, our practices.
Four identifiable characteristics of this predicament of modernity that we can draw from the pages of Duara’s book are that it is organic, interpenetrating, and zero-sum: we cannot address any one “problem” effectively without striving to resolve them all. Second, this predicament respects no national, ethnic, or cultural boundaries. Indeed, it challenges the very idea of boundaries with complexity theory and “big history”—“pulsating global networks of exchange . . . of capital, of political systems, and of culture” (13). Third, the coterminous and interdependent nature of the various elements of the predicament means that no single actors on the world stage can address the malaise alone.
As a species we either win together, or we all lose big time. And finally with the good news, we probably have the depth of cultural resources available to us to reshape our present conditions to produce a sustainable emergent and processual post-Western modernity. But in order to transition to this alternative modernity, we need to abandon the current mentality of sovereign nation-states contending at all costs to win, and to embrace a new dialogical vision of our complex and interdependent “circulatory histories.” As Duara insists, our destiny is either planetary, or not at all.
Duara looks for a path to sustainability by expanding our relevant cultural assets to take full advantage of the Asian traditions. He opens up, surveys, and inventories the full cornucopia of humanistic resources that can be drawn upon for the resolution of the looming predicament, with particular emphasis on resourcing the values of the antique and largely ignored Asian traditions that to date have been denied their proper place at the table. With the rise of Asia, and particularly China, in one generation we have witnessed a seismic sea change in the economic and political order of the world, a reconfiguration of power that is relatively easy to track.
But what about the reach and influence of Asia on a newly emerging world cultural order? While Charles Taylor would appeal to the language of “hypergoods” as his description of the fundamental, architechtonic religio-ethical goods that serve as the basis of our moral frameworks, Duara wants to play with “transcendent authorities” as his alternative term of art. By appealing to a contrast between notions such as “radical transcendence,” associated with the symbol of an absolute and hegemonic Abrahamic God, and the “dialogical transcendence” that grounds more pluralistic religious practices, Duara attempts in a nuanced way to address the question: “How do movements founded on transcendence seek to control, shape, and authorize circulatory forms even as they themselves may be shaped by circulations?” (13). In the emergence of our local and changing idealities, reverence and reason are intertwined with networks of hope to provide these transcendent imperatives with their sacrality and a moral force that can inspire us to aspire to our highest human standards as a universal commons.
This book is dense and demanding of its readers, reporting as it does on a messy world with all of its existing complexities. And a short review of it at best can only be an invitation to readers to take it on. But the reward is more than worth it. While Duara abjures some easy answer to our pressing problems, he does provide a new framework for registering how the global predicament has arisen, and how we might move beyond it most effectively. At the end of the day, perhaps most reassuring is our confidence in the hopeful Duara who has, on thinking through this crisis of global modernity, recommended a way forward for us.
