This new economy involved a shift in the perception of value from the past to the future and from an unchanging and fixed Platonic order to a world view of motion and change. Ming Chinese society was based upon ancestor worship and the mandate from heaven to the Emperor in the past. The Ming Court was locked into a single center, suspicious of peripheries and foreigners, and unable to understand the shift to the new mathematical mentality, and so it ordered the contraction of Xeng He’s naval world projection, moved the capital from coastal Nanking to inland Beijing, and imploded in a tightly geometric Confucian world view with its rigid and unchanging social order. Xeng He was a Muslim eunuch Admiral and not a Confucian lord. Had Ming China – then the world’s most advanced civilization equipped with print, monetary currency, and gunpowder – been able to complete the shift from the geometric mentality to the algebraic and dynamical mentalities, we would all now be speaking Chinese instead of English. The projection of a civilization into a new world economy fell to Europe, and Western Europe, reinforced by the new mentality in mathematics and capitalism, projected energetically in a complex and mutually competing polycentric civilization. The new economy in the Anglo-Dutch Glorious Revolution shifted sovereignty from the sovereign to the parliament, created the Bank of England based upon the model of the Bank of Amsterdam, and unconsciously shifted their sense of value from the past to the future when one’s ship came in and the risk paid off. Interestingly enough, at this time, children begin to be seen as carriers of the value of the future in Dutch domestic and genre paintings – such as those of Jan Steen and Judith Lester.

If we wish to tell the truth about the cultural phenomenology of humans on planet Earth, then Asia and Africa have to take their medicine and swallow the bitter pill that the reason we are now living in a Eurocentric projection is because Europe effected not just one, but two world cultural bifurcations. The first was the Galilean Dynamical Mentality, reinforced by the mathematics of Newton and Leibniz and Anglo-Dutch capitalism; and the second was the Poincaré bifurcation and the emergence of complex dynamical systems, reinforced by American globalizing capitalism. Trying to erase these embarrassing facts in a PC and po-mo ideological shift away from Eurocentric narratives does not explain why these Asian and African cultures feel dissed in the first place. After all, Gayatri Spivak teaches at Columbia not Calcutta, and Homi Bhabha teaches at Harvard not Bombay.

In the first European world projection, ballistics and currencies became the charismatic object that expressed the uniqueness of the new world view. Money became a dominant theme in the English novel, and the new narrative of motion described the path of the individual, released from bondage in medieval serfdom, from rags to riches. In the second European projection, identity is no longer exclusively based upon land or class but on consciousness and knowledge. Consciousness becomes the new charismatic object or vessel that carries the uniqueness of the new world view. Consciousness is to us what soil was for an agricultural society; it is the ground of our being. For those students of history who like events sharply perceived in dates – such as 1453 – we can date this emergence of the shift from the industrial nation-state to the noetic polity to 1889.