“Nation-states are a Western invention, naturally vulnerable to Western influence. Civilizations are an alternative to the West,” the Portuguese diplomat and scholar Bruno Maçães has written in Noema.

In his new book for Berggruen Press, “In Search Of Greater India,” Maçães explores what the light of Indian civilization that existed millennia before the advent of the nation-state might teach the modern West — and the rest of the world its dominance shaped for centuries.

He cites Carl Jung on the unenlightened and insecure person as an analogue for the national ego, which “projects the traits they repress or reject in themselves onto others, who as a result are transformed into convenient repositories of everything evil and ugly in the human personality. This is how world politics becomes a final confrontation between good and evil. The monsters we confront are the monsters we ourselves have created. And since they are all too ready to destroy us, we must be ready to destroy them. Until that final moment, one must wait, perhaps responsibly, but life is already haunted by annihilation.”

In the Indian tradition from the Emperor Ashoka to Mahatma Gandhi, Maçães writes, we find a different attitude and spirit that rejects such dualism as a fateful illusion.

“In Indian thought, dualism has been repeatedly rebutted. Advaita, or nondualism, sees the opposition between ego and other as proper to the lowest level of consciousness, while at the highest level of realization and freedom, the self identifies with the nature of ultimate reality, birthless and universal. The perceived personal self, or personality, is considered a temporary illusion or mask.”

As taught in the foundational Hindu epic the Mahabharata, “Jiva,” the individual soul of living beings, is “Shiva,” the supreme consciousness of ultimate reality: “He that can always realize the identity of all things with his own self certainly attains to immortality. He regards all beings as his own self and is engaged in the welfare of all beings.”

To Maçães, “Western moral theories seem almost churlish by comparison.” When Shashi Tharoor, the Indian diplomat and under-secretary-general of the United Nations, was asked by a Christian minister “Why should a Hindu be good?” Tharoor explained, as recounted in his book “Why I Am a Hindu,” “that whereas in Christianity the body has a soul, in Hinduism the soul has a body. In other words, we are emanations of a universal soul, the atman.” Advaita teaches that all human beings are one, regardless of appearances. Everyone is both what they are and also everyone else. To be good to others is to be good to yourself.

Indian philosophy, according to Maçães, teaches that it is “possible to rise above the empirical ego toward a universal perspective, which is no less ours. It is on this plane that we can meet other human beings and other political groups without raising our guard. It is precisely when we feel most vulnerable as an ego subject to the conflicts of the political world that we call for rules and order, concepts that can exist only on a higher plane. The more we fall, the louder the call to rise again.”

Even when conflict resorts to force, says Maçães, it must be based on the truth of nondualism. “World order can never be based on power but must grow from the effort to detach ourselves from power and from the world, having experienced its joys but knowing its limits. Those who willingly turn the world into hell ought to know that they too shall live there.”

It is from within this perspective that he cites the historian of the rise and fall of civilizations, Arnold Toynbee, on the “us versus them” dualism embodied in nationalism. “A chapter which had a Western beginning,” Toynbee remarked, “will have to have an Indian ending. It will be either the ‘Indian way’ or the bomb.”

Wisdom Lost Where It Originated

Despite the civilizational light of Advaita, the Indian nation-state nevertheless tested its first nuclear device in 1974 (named “Smiling Buddha”), nearly 30 years after independence. When India conducted its next test in 1998 under the code name “Operation Shakti” (Shakti is the Sanskrit word for the primordial force that sustains the universe), Pakistan’s then-opposition leader Benazir Bhutto hotheadedly called in a column for my Global Viewpoint syndication network for a preemptive strike against her neighbor to destroy its nuclear capacity. The ensuing bout of mimetic rivalry, already well in train, resulted in Pakistan’s own first nuclear test later that same year, making it the only Muslim-majority nation with the bomb.

This dualistic contest counter to the notion of Advaita brings to mind something Peter Sloterdijk once said about the eclipse of Daoist thought in China under the influence of Western modernity. Speaking of the Daoist dictum to act in alignment with the natural order of the cosmos, I asked the German philosopher if ancient Chinese thought offered just the philosophy we were looking for today in the age of climate change.

“In the abstract, yes,” he responded, “we can say that the spirit of Daoism approximates this new consciousness. But in reality, the Eastern mind has been colonized by the instrumental reason of Western Enlightenment, which became globally dominant in recent centuries. Paradoxically, at the very moment the truth of the old Asian worldview shows its plausibility anew, it has been lost where it originated.”

The independent nation-states that emerged in the immediate postcolonial period, which followed on from Western imperialism, remained in its mold. Only as they became strong and prosperous enough to stand on their own did the likes of China and India break free from that shadow of history and reclaim their civilizational roots as the guideposts to building a future in their own image.

Paradoxically, the wherewithal for asserting their foundational identity only resides within the power of modern states situated in an international order, the interests of which are at odds with the holism of their civilizational outlook.

As the Chinese-Singaporean historian Wang Gungwu has written in Noema, “civilizations can coexist across boundaries, but when ‘civilization power’ is claimed as universal and conflated with national interests, the world becomes a dangerous place.”

The trap of geopolitics in an international order is that it inexorably invites conflicts arising from the dualistic mentality that constitutes it. A geo-civilizational paradigm that draws on the wisdom of the ancients who understood the underlying unity behind all difference is the only way out of that trap. What has been a long time gone will be a long time coming.