Non-Western scholarship differentiates between the Western and the Modern. In fact, they try to retrieve some universals for their benefit out of the winning story of the Western civilization in its modern age. For the Western world, they remain indistinguishable experiences but they may make a differentiation for either academic purposes or, in a sinister way, leading or misleading the rest of the world in their own way. The fact remains that these two are inextricably interwoven, and extracting secular out of ethnicity is helplessly tricky. For instance, many non-Western peoples lapped up for Marxism from the Westen composite of political-economic thinking, which was largely a Christianity without God.
The point here is that mining good things from the Western world may not be of much help.
Learning from anywhere is fine, but wisdom in any land grows out of its own soil. We must plant functional institutions and let them grow so they bear nourishing fruits.
Niraj Kumar Jha
