By Ooi Kee Beng, for The Edge, 1-6 August 2026
Serious change in a person’s pathos and ethos—their will and the rationale for their actions and feelings—is most likely to take place when their self-image is altered.
A self-image, in turn, is constructed on the network of narratives relevant to their surrounding—their reference group, basically; and to the more-or-less collective story they share, and to the commonalities expressed in their expressed discourses.
This collective self-image sustains itself or evolves in response to internal dynamics as well as external dynamics. At its base though, lie ideas about its history. Orientating itself in time, which is strongly determined by its received history and its origin tales, and locating itself in space, namely where in geographical or universal space it has its home and who its constant neighbours are, this collective story determines its self-image and its values in relation to the natural and human world at large.
In recent centuries, the world has shrunk though, and rapidly increasing knowledge about the world as a whole, with its diversity in civilization, culture, knowledge, values and the existence of contradicting collective stories in the human family, has rendered each collective story inadequate. Each was inevitably based on parochial knowledge overstretched to function as universal insights. Each was limited in time and space in their grasp of knowledge about the world.
Technologies are not objective innovations
The recent centuries of globalization have been filled with exploration and discoveries, no doubt, but they were also cramped with wars, genocides and slavery of “others” (who had other collective stories). Perceiving this as a transitional period in inter-continental and inter-civilizational interactions, the need becomes obvious for what I would call “global histories”, of the construction of a “collective history” for all of mankind. A global self-image that does not require eradication and erasure of other lines of human history is possible, even imperative.
While Science aims for, and conjures objectivity of knowledge, civilizations have been bigger ventures affecting all aspects of human life. For that reason, we see that technologies are not as objective and neutral as Science may be.
Human solutions were always limited and determined by experiences distinctive to each civilization, to each culture.
Modernity is the term we have come to use to describe the rushed connections between continents and civilizations powered by western development of Science, and of the technologies that its self-image innovated consequently. Maritime travel propelled western mobility out into the world, beyond what its self-image and its collective story could handle.
As the great historian Wang Gungwu realised, The Modern is Maritime.
Innovative approaches
But what should also belong to the Modern Project is the search for a Global History. The human world needs a collective story that is globally inclusive, and not parochial. The human self-image has to take the global stage in order to see itself anew—within new understandings of civilizational time and space.
The struggles today on the geopolitical and geo-economic front—inevitably couched in zero-sum win-or-lose ways of thought—are in line with the self-image and collective story of western civilization, and need to be seen as part of the transitional era in globalisation, and not as the inevitable war that must occur when a primary power is threatened by a secondary power.
Academic movements towards a more inclusive Global History have indeed started, and these often use Geography to weaken the parochialism of pre-modern collective stories and civilizational self-images. More innovations from historians are needed.
What all this boils down to is this. There is a great need today for the dominant amplified collective story of western civilization to reflect and realise its parochial nature and its civilisational arrogance, perceive the transitional nature of the recent era of globalisation, and accept the fact that the human world is deeply anchored in multiple collective stories and diverse self-images. Global consciousness requires acceptance of this fact, and this fact needs to be illuminated by Global histories on which a Global self-image for mankind can be built.
The chances are good that global histories can reveal the parochiality, not only of old collective stories, but of the embedded vanity and arrogance in each of their claims to universal relevance.
It should be made clear though, that whatever the collective story we study, each of them is naturally the long-term result of a history of political ambitions within that collective. This is the Hegemony of which Antonio Gramsci spoke. One can be proud of one’s collective story or of one’s collective or individual self-image, but one should also realise that they are incidental, constructed over time by the powers-that-be to coerce and to generate consent.
In realising this to be the nature of our past, perhaps future collective stories relevant to the whole world can be less about superiority and dominance, and more about fairness and inclusiveness. We may also come to realise that our collective self-images from the past, however much we love them and are proud of them, have always been based on fear because that public sentiment serves the powerful. Fear is based on the unknown. A global history should make the unknown more known, and less scary.
* As with my June column, this article was also inspired during my stay at the Artists’ Retreat of Rimbun Dahan in Sungei Buloh.
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