Notice now in our contemporary war between globalization and terrorism that neither one is an expression of a territorial nation-state. Both multinational corporate globalization and Al Qaeda hold nation-states hostage to advance their cause. Al Qaeda uses global-positioning satellite phones, launders money and moves it around globally as effectively as any multinational corporation. It camouflages itself with medieval Islam, in precisely the same way that globalization camouflages itself with Enlightenment rhetoric and democratic values. Bush talks about free markets and free trade, but everywhere his anti-democratic putsch seeks to control populations for the benefit of corporations and has sought to eliminate environmental protection and worker safety in factories. He speaks out against terrorism but reserves the monopolistic right to apply violence to advance his party’s aims to control critical resources and maintain American military-industrial supremacy. This Bush–Bin Laden planetary civil war is not a war between nation-states, but a war of identity between two competing noetic plasmas struggling to become world polities.

We are no longer living in the inter-national world system that came into being after World War II and the formation of the United Nations. Small wonder that both NATO and the UN are in disarray. National noise is drawing the world-system toward a new basin of attraction. It is in the nature of a complex dynamical system that tiny initial conditions can create a cascade of effects that makes the outcome of a chaotic system totally unpredictable. No one knows how this new world-system will play itself out. Certainly, I don’t.

But precisely because world civilization is at stake, we need to appreciate the positive side of the values of the European Enlightenment – the spirit that freed artists and scholars from being the domestic servants of aristocrats – the spirit that enabled Schiller to defy the Duke of Baden’s demand that he be a military doctor and not a playwright and encouraged him to escape his feudal imprisonment for a freer life in a larger world. To move from an eighteenth century European Enlightenment to a twenty-first century planetary Enlightenment, we are going to have rethink the nature of education, to shift it from job-training for a globalizing economy to a new form of contemplative education that empowers the individual’s sense of value within a curriculum that situates the enlightened self in a planetary culture greater than that of warring tribes, races, nations, economic classes, and religions.