关于文化习俗的英语小作文

Western traditional Culture

The bombers in London and the insurgents in Iraq may think that they are avenging themselves on Western civilization. Some in Washington, London and Tel Aviv may think that they are blocking the ambition of radical Muslims to create some marvelous new caliphate to rule the world. Both are wrong.

The civilizations at war are modernity on the one hand and the traditional world on the other. The Islamic fundamentalists' terrorist attacks on the West are merely a sideshow - a bitter but doomed reaction to a war that modern society has already largely won, with liberals and conservatives united in their battle against the values, assumptions and mode of life of the vast majority of non-modern mankind.

They Westerners believe they are creating, as Roger Cohen recently wrote in The International Herald Tribune, a century that will make a diverse world more unified, prosperous and free than ever before.

The liberals and the conservatives of modern Western society firmly believe that. It is inconceivable to them that the traditional world, in which everyone except themselves lives, remains a valid choice for those who live in it.

The modern world is the aggressor, determined - without even seriously thinking about it - to destroy the backward civilizations of everyone else, which it sees as discredited remnants of the past. To destroy them is progress. Progress leads - where?

Here they run into the problem of utopia.

Utopia in a world dominated by religion is a reward for a worthy life, and is enjoyed in an afterlife. It exists outside of time. Or after time has come to a stop, in a timeless paradise.