Despite failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of the West’s most prominent intellectuals still operate under the assumption that liberal values are universal.

In his new magnum opus, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Harvard psychology professor and Renaissance man Steven Pinker highlights what he regards to be "the most important thing that has ever happened in human history." Violence has declined and today "we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species' existence."

But Pinker's decline-of-violence thesis reflects a more ambitious exercise: The professor aims to develop a grand theory, one that assumes that "we" or "humanity" or "our species" have all become part of "modernity," defined as the sense that the old foundations of societies—family, tribe, tradition and religion—are being eroded by the forces of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason and science.

In Pinker’s view, a global civilizing process is creating a new culture. This new way, which is more secular, more democratic, more commercial, more "feminized," is becoming dominant worldwide, and explains why our civilization has become more conducive to peaceful coexistence. Forget the bloodbaths of the twentieth century, including two world wars, civil wars and genocides, Pinker argues. We are entering into the era of the New Peace, where violence against the "Other" national, ethnic, and religious groups, against women, children and even animals, will become a taboo. History has indeed ended and we're all turning into one big, happy civilization.

If you have been residing for most of your life in the West and were educated and exposed to the dominant cultural currents, in places like the United States, Germany or Australia, the political civilization that Pinker is describing sounds familiar. Whether you are liberal or conservative, you would have to agree that our national societies have become less religious, more materialistic and effeminate—and that even (some) animals now enjoy legal protection...

So if by "we," Pinker is describing the political and cultural transformation of what we refer to as "the West" in the period since the end of World War II and then the collapse of communism (when central and eastern Europe rejoined it), he makes some good points. He notes, for example, that notwithstanding the recent shooting in Newtown and other images of violence we are exposed to on a daily basis, rates of violence in the United States have been falling...

Yet not unlike the liberal internationalists and their ideological clones on the political right, the neoconservatives (who have been influencing the foreign policies of western governments since the end of the Cold War), Pinker has bought into the notion that the Enlightenment project or versions of it that have taken root in America and Europe would and should be promoted in the rest of the world. It assumes that if India (the "world's largest democracy") and South Africa (supposedly a successful experiment in multiculturalism) are close to being "like us," it was only a question of time before the civilizing process would transform the Muslim world and China into liberal democracies. Only backward and evil leaders in those countries are retarding this journey to enlightenment.

Whether all of that is true is not an academic issue. After all, costly policies promoted by Republican and Democrat administrations, including through the use of military force, were based on the expectations that with a gentle or heavy push from Washington, the principles of liberal democracy and its close cousins (capitalism, secularism, multiculturalism, feminism) could and should be applied on a universal level, with the United States having an interest and obligation to lead the way.

There is a political and intellectual consensus in Washington that the campaign launched by President George W. Bush to remake the Middle East along liberal-democratic lines as part of an ambitious Freedom Agenda has failed miserably, and if anything, led to the emergence of anti-Western political forces in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine.

Similar expectations in Washington and among Western politicians and intellectuals—that the so-called Arab Spring would end up looking like a rerun of the 1989 political spring in central and eastern Europe and usher in an era of a New Peace in the Middle East—proved to be wishful thinking. These movements have actually helped strengthen political forces that are opposed to the principles embodied in the Enlightenment project, including religious freedom and women's rights. The Muslim world is not being feminized.

READ FULL SOURCE ARTICLE: 02/19/2013

Editor's Note: To be absolutely certain, the attempt to install "Democracy" in the Middle East and resulted in mob rule and the ascension of the best organized and best funded groups, specifically fundamentalist jihadi factions. Democracy was abhorred by the Framers of the United States Constitution specifically because Democracy does not protect the rights of the minority. It is for that reason -- almost exclusively -- that the brilliance of these great men (and women) delivered unto the American people a Constitutional Republic...