The modern age began in earnest when ideas ceased to matter. Immanuel Kant, perhaps the greatest of all modern philosophers, made a rigorous distinction between what he called pure and practical reason. Pure reason investigated the world, while practical reason was a matter of moral and political action, but there was no longer any internal relation between the two. Some previous thinkers had assumed that there was a way of theorising about the world which impelled you to choose a way of acting upon it. To say "This is torture!" seemed to imply "Stop it". Now, however, theory was one thing and practice another. No doubt we shouldn't torture, but there was nothing we could glean from analysing the act of torture which told us that it was a bad thing. We were going to have to get our moral and political values from somewhere else. By no means every modern philosopher signed up to this crippling division. Kant's argument was challenged by his mighty contemporar...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51