Yes! Someone said it! It is time to put the past behind us and think about the future. I feel as though somehow the West (as a civilization) has become overc

Yes! Someone said it! It is time to put the past behind us and think about the future. I feel as though somehow the West (as a civilization) has become overcome with embarrassment at what it did in the past (to Africans, Native Americans, and Asians, in particular) and now, instead of moving on and pursuing reconciliation in good faith, we have decided the only recourse is to obsess about how we are the enemies of civilization. Future? What future? We did so much bad stuff in the past. How could we take any pride in who we are? We're still so racist, sexist, etc. Nevermind the fact that modern life owes a great debt to the West (aircraft, antibiotics, modern representative government, etc.) There are serious problems facing the world today (climate change potentially a existential threat to our species). If you look at the past few centuries, you would think that it is precisely the West that has the institutions and paradigms to address those problems. I'm not saying China isn't destined for great things, or won't contribute to addressing the problems. But imagine what China could do if it worked hand in hand with a 21st century USA that was as determined to end climate change as the 20th century USA was to end various infectious diseases (polio, tuberculosis, measles, for example) or put a man on the moon. Our team is losing the basketball game because one of our star players is at home moping about a mistake he made last season. It's societal narcissism, and, instead of helping "the Rest" (to use Niall Ferguson's shorthand for non-Westerners), it serves no one. My point is: we need to see we are sick as a society. We are too preoccupied by things that happened in the past. Isn't this the lesson of at least one of the great classical tragedies? Why did Romeo and Juliet die? Because their families were stuck in the past and couldn't see that the future was more important than their petty feuds. There's no question we should continue to mind how we treat others (women, immigrants, people from other ethnicities), but we also (in the US, say) need to rediscover a sense of shared national heritage and purpose. History did not, as Fukuyama says, end with the destruction of the USSR. Surely, now that the USSR is gone, the interesting (and peaceful!) work should begin. Instead we're bickering amongst ourselves?