Better Together

For the past 200 years, the Western canon has framed global progress as an arrow flying in a single direction: West to East, North to South, metropolis to periphery. Yet the twenty-first century is exposing the fragility of that line. Climate shocks, demographic shifts, and tectonic political realignments are unpicking the weave that once held “the West” together, revealing threads that reach far beyond Europe or North America. What emerges is not a rejection of Western achievement, but a fuller, richer fabric—one woven from multiple civilisational logics working in concert.

In Doha you see it in steel and sandstone: universities from six nations sharing a spine of palm-lined boulevards; galleries where African Afrofuturists share wall space with Arab minimalists. From Jakarta to Kigali to São Paulo, a similar pattern repeats. Capital, talent, and intellectual property are flowing on routes once dismissed as “South-South,” unmediated by London or New York. Institutions such as the Islamic Development Bank and the African Continental Free Trade Area are staking claims to shape finance, trade, and governance on their own terms.

What economists call “informal finance” in West Africa—rotating savings associations, communal credit circles—looks uncannily similar to emergent models for Web3 liquidity pools. The practice predates modern banking by centuries. In India, panchayat dispute resolution still settles the majority of civil disagreements in rural districts; Silicon Valley’s passion for decentralised consensus is, in a sense, a late echo of that same instinct. These are not quaint relics. They are living systems tested against volatility Western institutions now struggle to withstand.

The cliché is that technology flattens culture. In reality it refracts it. Mobile-money rails in Kenya allowed micro-merchants to replicate the social trust underpinning harambee savings groups, but at national scale. In Qatar, blockchain pilots for end-to-end halal supply-chain traceability blend cutting-edge cryptography with jurisprudence arising from the ninth-century jurist Al-Shāfiʿī. When technology meets rooted culture, the output is not mere efficiency; it is legitimacy.

No single civilisation owns the template for the century ahead. The crises of climate, inequality, and power concentration require a braided response: Western strengths in scientific method and formal rule of law interlaced with non-Western strengths in social consensus, spiritual accountability, and relational governance. The mindset shift is simple but profound: instead of asking which model is right, we begin asking how multiple models can interoperate.

To my mind progress is not a race track but a loom. The West still carries threads of extraordinary tensile strength, yet it is no longer the only shuttle in motion. A woven future is messier, more colourful, and ultimately more resilient. For those willing to learn a new craft, now is the moment to pick up the shuttle and join the weave. The future is multi polar, financially, culturally and socially – and that might actually turn out to be a very good thing indeed.