"...Civilization, to recapitulate, requires genuine belief in and devotion to higher political and artistic purpose". DK
I agree, at least re the West's traditional concept of its own civilization.
I would just point out that the American Rebellion from Britain was, at least in my view, against even these principles.
While it seemed for these principles, but mainly only in terminology, it was actually against them, nevertheless, in spirit, and in effect.
How was this the case?
It seems to me that this point comes out rather clearly from Bailyn's Ideological Origins.
American Radical Whiggism, a sort of Counter Radical Whiggism existing in England too, attacked radical Whiggism itself, but with Whiggist critical tools, and was where much of the inspiration for the Rebellion came from, and was not much impressed by higher political or artistic British civilizational purposes, even the early Radical Whiggish ones of Shaftsbury, Locke, and others, from which it sprang.
To see the kind of Radical Whig distinctions at play, perhaps contrast Locke's Charter (apparently the only one he himself ever wrote) for South Carolina, with charters for Massachusetts 1629, or for other New England colonies.
Here, Bailyn shows the American and British Radical ' Counter ' Whigs of the 18th century, to have been ranged against the Radical Whigs of the 17th :
"Ignoring the complacence and general high level of satisfaction of the time, they called for vigilance against the government of Walpole equal to what their predecessors had shown against the Stuarts. They insisted, at a time when government was felt to be less oppressive than it had been for two hundred years, that it was necessarily-- by its very nature-- hostile to human liberty and happiness..." Bailyn, pb. p. 47. (my underlining)
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