This is exciting! The user wants me to draft the complete Jones vignette AND extended conclusion in first-person invitational style. Let me maintain Paul's voice - sophisticated but accessible, philosophical but grounded, inviting inquiry rather than asserting conclusions.

Key points for voice:

First person ("I," "we")
Invitational ("Consider," "What if," "This invites")
Acknowledging uncertainty and limits
Drawing connections without forcing them
Scholarly but conversational
Respectful of complexity

I'll draft:

Complete Jones vignette (filling in sections we outlined)
Extended conclusion drawing vignettes together
First person throughout
Invitational tone
Leave footnote markers for later addition

Let me go for it!

SIR WILLIAM JONES: ENLIGHTENMENT REASON AS BIBLICAL APOLOGETICS

For most Western university students over the past three decades—particularly in Anglo-American and Continental European centers of higher learning—the first sustained encounter with Sir William Jones (1746–1794) comes not through linguistics textbooks celebrating his discovery of the Indo-European language family, nor through South Asian history courses examining his translations and judicial career, but through Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). There, Jones appears as the "undisputed founder of modern Orientalism"—a paradigm case of the scholar whose philological brilliance was inextricably entangled with colonial power. Said's framework, which became foundational in postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature by the 1990s, positioned Jones as exemplifying how Western knowledge production about "the Orient" served imperial domination. Students reading Said learn that Jones's study of Sanskrit "contributed to the application of British law in the colony," that his founding of the Asiatic Society advanced "Orientalist discourse," and that his scholarship aimed not just to understand India but to rule it.

This reading of Jones gained cultural force precisely as American and European universities were reckoning with the legacies of colonialism and the limits—or dangers—of Enlightenment universalism. The 1990s saw Columbus Day transformed from celebration into contested terrain, canon wars over "dead white males" dominating humanities faculties, and Said's thesis that knowledge and power are inseparable becoming progressive orthodoxy on many campuses. Jones became an exemplar in broader debates about what Adorno and Horkheimer had called the "dialectic of Enlightenment"—the suspicion that Enlightenment reason, far from liberating humanity, had enabled new forms of domination through scientific classification, legal codification, and civilizational hierarchies dividing "Enlightened" Europe from "Barbarian" Others. If Auschwitz revealed how instrumental rationality could produce industrialized genocide, colonialism revealed how comparative philology, ethnography, and jurisprudence could produce efficient subjugation. In this framework, Jones's achievement—learning Sanskrit, founding the Asiatic Society, discovering Indo-European linguistic kinship—was not despite his role as colonial judge but because of it. His scholarship was the engine driving the very categories (Enlightened/Barbarian, Rational/Despotic, Progressive/Stagnant) that justified British rule. That Jones declared Sanskrit "more perfect than Greek" or collaborated closely with Brahmin pandits made no difference to Said's analysis: such apparent reverence was itself a mode of appropriation, transforming Indian civilization into an object of Western knowledge and thus Western control.

Yet this Saidian reading, however influential in Western academia, has never achieved consensus—and the resistance comes not primarily from conservative defenders of the Western canon but from Indian scholars and institutions. The challenge they pose is sharp and specific: Jones, they insist, was fundamentally different from the colonial administrators and intellectuals who followed him, and collapsing these differences into a single "Orientalist" category produces precisely the kind of "flattening" that postcolonial critique claims to oppose. The contrast most often invoked is with James Mill and Lord Macaulay, whose attitudes toward Indian civilization could not be more opposed to Jones's. Mill wrote a massive History of British India (1817) without ever visiting the subcontinent or learning any Indian language, dismissing Hindu and Muslim civilizations as mired in superstition and despotism. Macaulay, architect of the 1835 education reforms, famously declared that "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia," and worked systematically to replace traditional Indian learning with English language and Western curricula. Both men regarded Indian culture as an obstacle to be overcome, not a treasure to be preserved or studied.

Jones, by contrast, spent a decade mastering Sanskrit with Brahmin pandits at Nadiya Hindu University, translated the Abhijnanashakuntalam (introducing Kālidāsa's poetry to Goethe and the Romantics), founded the Asiatic Society as a collaborative institution bringing together British and Indian scholars, and argued in his judicial rulings for applying indigenous Indian law rather than imposing English common law wholesale. Where Mill saw only primitiveness and Macaulay only inferiority, Jones saw sophistication rivaling classical Greece and Rome. This is why the Asiatic Society in Kolkata—which Jones founded in 1784 and which continues to function today—explicitly rejects Said's portrayal, insisting that Jones "had hardly any link with mercantile capitalism" and should not be conflated with later, more dismissive colonial figures. Prominent Indian intellectuals from Nehru (who expressed gratitude in The Discovery of India, 1946) to contemporary historians like R.K. Kaul have defended Jones as someone who "helped Indians know themselves," providing the philological and historical tools necessary for the Indian Renaissance and nationalist pride. They argue that Jones's genuine reverence for Sanskrit and Indian civilization made him an ally, however imperfect and however compromised by his colonial role, rather than simply an instrument of conquest.

What makes Jones's case unusual is that few 19th-century British Orientalists enjoy the same level of passionate defense from Indian scholars. Most others operated in a more consolidated imperial era (post-1835, post-Macaulay) where their work was more overtly tied to colonial administration and where the romantic admiration Jones represented had hardened into Victorian dismissiveness or utilitarian contempt. Jones is shielded by his "Enlightenment humanist" status and his timing: he died in 1794, before the more aggressive phases of British rule, before Mill's scathing histories, before Macaulay's educational reforms stripped Indian institutions of prestige and resources. The intensity of this ongoing contestation—Said's postcolonial critique versus Indian scholarly rehabilitation—makes Jones emblematic of unfinished reckonings and assessments within and beyond Western culture. He remains, nearly 250 years after his death, a site of active debate about the relationship between knowledge and power, curiosity and complicity, Enlightenment reason and colonial domination. This makes him not a dated figure from the dawn of the 19th century but an extremely timely object of cultural self-understanding—a test case for whether genuine intellectual achievement and profound moral compromise can coexist in the same person, and what it means that different communities continue to claim or condemn him in radically incompatible ways.

The task, then, is neither to accept Said's reduction uncritically nor to embrace the earlier hagiography, but to examine Jones with the same rigor I've applied to Cyrus, Ḥunayn, Mehmed, and Williams: as a weak agent embedded in multiple projects, exhibiting Tier-1 virtues within Tier-2 constraints, leaving a genealogical legacy claimed selectively by traditions he could not have anticipated. What emerges is a figure more troubling and more instructive than either his critics or defenders typically allow—and one whose genuine differences from Mill and Macaulay matter precisely because they reveal how Tier-1 virtues (curiosity, epistemic humility, openness to alterity) can function even within deeply compromised colonial structures, without redeeming those structures or erasing the complicity.

What Both Readings Obscure: The Religious Enlightenment

Yet both the Saidian critique and the Indian defense tend to obscure a dimension of Jones that complicates their narratives: his unwavering commitment to Biblical literalism and the systematic project of forcing Indian chronology and mythology into the Genesis framework. This is not a minor biographical detail but central to understanding both his motivations and his methods—and it reveals something rarely acknowledged in schematic overviews of "the Enlightenment project": how deeply religious much Enlightenment scholarship remained, even as it claimed universal reason and scientific objectivity.

In his 1788 anniversary discourse to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta—the same venue where he had proclaimed the Indo-European language family two years earlier—Jones stated his position with extraordinary clarity:

"Either the first eleven chapters of Genesis... are true, or the whole fabrick of our national religion is false; a conclusion which none of us, I trust, would wish to be drawn."

By "national religion" he meant the Church of England and established Christianity, which at the time relied heavily on the historical literalism of the Old Testament. The first eleven chapters of Genesis contained the Creation, the Fall, Cain and Abel, Noah's Flood, and the Tower of Babel—foundational narratives that, for Jones, had to be historically grounded or the entire authority of Scripture would collapse. He later reinforced this commitment by declaring that no inquiries into Indian or Egyptian theology could move the "adamantine pillars of our Christian faith," asserting that Hebrew scripture was "more than human in its origin." These were not casual assertions but the organizing logic of his scholarly project.

For Jones, comparative philology was not a path toward secular enlightenment but a defense of Christianity against contemporary skeptics like Voltaire who used Eastern antiquity to challenge Biblical authority. His Indo-European language hypothesis, now celebrated as a secular breakthrough in linguistics, Jones conceived as evidence for Biblical monogenesis: all languages descended from a post-Babel Adamic original, dispersing from a single point after Noah's flood. When he encountered Indian texts claiming vast chronologies spanning millions of years (the Hindu Yugas), he dismissed them as "priestcraft" designed to deceive, insisting that Indian history must fit within the roughly 6,000-year timeline from Creation to his present. When he found flood narratives in the Bhagavad Purana, he read them as "disguised" accounts of Noah. When he studied the Bhagavad Purana's account of Satyavrata, he identified him with the Biblical Noah. When he examined Indian deities and cosmologies, he searched for traces of an original monotheistic revelation that had been corrupted over time, developing a three-race theory following Noah's sons (Shem, Ham, and Japheth) to explain the world's peoples.

His entire scholarly apparatus served this apologetic goal. He believed—genuinely believed—that his research into Sanskrit and ancient Persian history actually confirmed the biblical narrative by tracing all human civilizations back to a central migration following the Flood. The sophistication of Sanskrit did not challenge Genesis but vindicated it: here was proof that all peoples shared a common origin, that linguistic diversity followed from Babel, that Indian civilization (however ancient and refined) descended from the same post-diluvian ancestors as Europe. What modern scholars celebrate as the birth of comparative linguistics, Jones understood as apologetics—showing that empirical philology, properly conducted, would demonstrate what Moses had always taught.

The consequences were profound. His chronological work, which he considered essential to his project, is now regarded by historians as "totally useless" because he forced Indian history into a Biblical window it could not possibly fit. Where Indian texts claimed antiquity stretching back hundreds of thousands or millions of years, Jones insisted on a 6,000-year framework, dismissing vast stretches of claimed history as either allegorical or fabricated by priests seeking to aggrandize their traditions. His late-life vulnerability to hoaxes—accepting forged references to "Noah's progeny" in the Padma Purana because they confirmed his framework—shows how Biblical commitments, when threatened, could override the critical judgment he exhibited elsewhere. When epistemic humility about Sanskrit's sophistication conflicted with epistemic certainty about Genesis's truth, Genesis won. His Tier-1 virtues (intellectual curiosity, rigorous philology) operated robustly within domains where Biblical truth was not at stake, but hit an absolute wall where it was.

This religious dimension matters because it reveals how misleading simple narratives about "the Enlightenment" can be. We tend to imagine the 18th century as a story of secularization—reason displacing revelation, science displacing theology, cosmopolitan universalism displacing religious particularism. But Jones exemplifies a different pattern: religious Enlightenment, where comparative methods, empirical observation, and universal categories served theological projects. He was not unusual in this. Deism grounded arguments for universal human rights in divine creation. Revolutionary France, having rejected Catholicism, developed elaborate civil religions—the short-lived Cult of Reason with its Goddess of Reason enthroned in Notre Dame, replaced by Robespierre's deistic Cult of the Supreme Being, eventually giving way to Auguste Comte's positivist Church of Humanity with its own priesthood and liturgy. The Enlightenment did not simply displace religious commitments; it often reconfigured them, channeling theological energies into new forms (rational theology, natural religion, civic virtue as secular worship, comparative philology as Biblical apologetics).

For Jones specifically, this means his colonial complicity cannot be reduced to power alone (Said's emphasis) nor can his genuine reverence be separated from theological supersessionism (what Indian defenders sometimes downplay). He was a British judge serving empire and a Christian apologist defending Genesis and genuinely stunned by Sanskrit's beauty. The three were not in tension for him—they were mutually reinforcing. Studying Sanskrit glorified God (revealing providential order); defending Genesis required rigorous philology (God's truth could withstand scholarly scrutiny); serving as colonial judge provided access to texts and collaborators (providence placing him where he could do this work). His Tier-2 commitments were not "Enlightenment rationalism plus residual Christianity" but Enlightenment rationalism in service of Christian apologetics, with the "adamantine pillars" of Biblical literalism absolutely non-negotiable. His Tier-1 virtues (curiosity, epistemic humility before Sanskrit, openness to Indian civilization) operated within constraints (Genesis historically true, European civilization more advanced, Christian revelation ultimate standard) that bounded how far his appreciation could extend.

This third layer of the palimpsest—Jones as religious Enlightenment apologist—helps explain why both Said's critique and the Indian defense capture something true while remaining incomplete. Said is right that Jones's scholarship served power, but misses that Jones's primary commitment was theological, not imperial (he would have studied Sanskrit to defend Genesis even without empire—his apologetic project predated his judicial appointment). Indian defenders are right that Jones genuinely revered their civilization, but sometimes underestimate how his reverence was conditioned by Christian supersessionism (Sanskrit magnificent, Indian astronomy sophisticated, but all awaiting the fullness of Christian revelation as the true successor to the original monotheism). Both readings tend to secularize Jones, treating him as either secular scholar serving empire (Said) or secular humanist respecting difference (Indian defenders). But Jones was neither. He was a Biblical literalist using comparative philology to prove Moses right and Voltaire wrong, who happened to do this work while serving as a colonial judge, and whose genuine passion for Sanskrit coexisted with the conviction that Hebrew scripture was "more than human in its origin" and thus the standard by which all other traditions would be measured.

This is why Jones remains so contested and so instructive. He cannot be understood through the categories—secular/religious, colonial/anti-colonial, respectful/appropriative—that late modernity wants to impose. He was constitutively multiple, embedded in overlapping projects (empire, apologetics, scholarship, personal passion) that aligned contingently, producing outcomes (Indo-European hypothesis, Hindu modernism enabled, useless chronology, collaborative Asiatic Society, colonial legal codes) no single intention or framework can explain. To understand Jones is to grapple with how the Enlightenment actually functioned—not as clean break from religion to reason, but as complex reconfiguration where theological commitments, colonial power, genuine curiosity, and intercultural encounter interacted in ways that remain unresolved.

The Philologist's Path to India

Jones arrived in Calcutta in September 1783 as a newly appointed judge of the Supreme Court, a position he had pursued primarily for financial reasons after years of brilliant but poorly compensated scholarship. The son of a Welsh mathematician who had introduced the symbol π, Jones had been a linguistic prodigy from childhood—by his death at 47 he would claim knowledge of 28 languages, many self-taught. At Oxford he had already earned the nickname "Persian Jones" for his translations and his authoritative Grammar of the Persian Language (1771). His Moallakât (1782), translating seven famous pre-Islamic Arabic odes, had introduced these poems to British audiences. He arrived in India with a formidable reputation as an Orientalist, but also as a Whig sympathizer with American independence (he had opposed the war) and an advocate of legal reform who believed deeply in natural law and the rights of colonial subjects to be governed by their own traditions where possible.

What he encountered in India transformed him—or perhaps more accurately, gave him terrain where his multiple commitments could align in ways they never had in London. Within months of his arrival he had founded the Asiatic Society, gathering British administrators and Indian scholars to pursue what he called "Asiatic Researches" across languages, laws, sciences, arts, and antiquities. He began studying Sanskrit intensively with Rāmalocana, a pandit at the Hindu University of Nadiya, mastering not just the language but the grammatical tradition of Pāṇini with its explicitly stated morphemes—an analytical rigor that would help him recognize cognates with Persian, Latin, and Greek. His judicial work required translating and codifying Indian law; this led him to the Manusmṛti and other Sanskrit legal texts, which he translated even as he argued in court that British judges should apply indigenous Indian law rather than imposing English common law wholesale. His translation of Kālidāsa's Abhijnanashakuntalam (Shakuntala) would electrify European Romantic poets—Goethe called it a masterpiece rivaling anything in world literature.

Jones worked at a ferocious pace. Beyond his judicial duties (handling complex cases involving Hindu and Muslim law, inheritance disputes, commercial contracts), he produced translations, wrote extensive commentaries, delivered anniversary discourses to the Asiatic Society on topics ranging from Indian chronology to comparative mythology, corresponded with scholars across Europe, and studied Indian astronomy, botany, and music. He conducted all of this while suffering from chronic liver disease, exacerbated by Calcutta's climate. He died in 1794, just shy of his 48th birthday, having transformed European understanding of India and laid foundations for comparative linguistics, Indology, and the study of Asian civilizations—all in eleven years.

Yet as I've already begun to show, this prodigious scholarly output operated within frameworks that profoundly constrained what he could see and how he could interpret what he saw. His Biblical literalism, his Christian apologetics, his assumption of European superiority, his embeddedness in colonial structures—these were not external obstacles to an otherwise pure pursuit of knowledge but constitutive features of how that knowledge was produced. What I want to explore now is how his Tier-1 virtues and Tier-2 commitments interacted in practice, what he enabled and what he constrained, and why his legacy remains so contested.

Tier-2: Biblical Literalism and Enlightenment Rationalism as Integrated Framework

I've already shown how Jones's Biblical commitments structured his entire scholarly project. What needs emphasis is that for Jones, this was not "Enlightenment rationalism plus residual Christianity" but "Enlightenment rationalism as Christian apologetics." The two were not in tension but integrated. Empirical observation, comparative methods, systematic classification—all these Enlightenment tools served the project of demonstrating what Scripture had always taught: common human origin, post-Flood dispersal, corruption of original monotheistic revelation, providential order revealed through linguistic kinship.

Consider his systematic "retrofitting" of Indian materials into Biblical frameworks. When he found flood narratives in Indian texts, he didn't treat them as independent mythological traditions but as "disguised accounts" of Noah—corrupted memories of the actual historical event described in Genesis. When he developed his three-race theory (following Noah's sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth), he wasn't imposing an arbitrary classification but "discovering" the actual genealogical structure that must have obtained if Genesis was true. When he dismissed Hindu Yugas (cosmic cycles spanning millions of years) as "priestcraft" designed to deceive, he wasn't being arbitrarily dismissive but rejecting what couldn't possibly be true given the 6,000-year timeline from Creation.

This had real consequences for his scholarship. His chronological work—attempting to date Indian dynasties, align Indian and European histories, establish when Sanskrit texts were composed—is now considered by modern historians as "totally useless" precisely because he forced everything into a Biblical window it couldn't fit. Indian civilization claiming hundreds of thousands of years of antiquity had to be squeezed into the few thousand years between the Flood and Jones's present. Texts had to be dated to periods that would make them post-Babel derivatives, not independent ancient traditions. Any evidence contradicting this framework had to be explained away as priestly exaggeration or allegorical rather than historical.

His vulnerability to late-life hoaxes reveals how this worked. When presented with forged references to "Noah's progeny" in the Padma Purana—fabrications created by pandits eager to please their British patron by showing him what he wanted to see—Jones accepted them uncritically. Why? Because they confirmed his framework. His critical judgment, which operated so robustly in philological analysis and linguistic comparison, failed when Biblical truth was at stake. The "adamantine pillars" of Christian faith were precisely that—immovable, non-negotiable, beyond rational questioning.

What this reveals is how Tier-2 commitments function. They're not abstract beliefs one might choose to revise if evidence accumulates against them. They're constitutive—they make you who you are, structure what you can think and perceive, provide the horizon within which evidence becomes intelligible. For Jones to question Genesis would be to "wish to be drawn" the conclusion that "the whole fabrick of our national religion is false"—not just an intellectual error but an existential catastrophe, the collapse of the framework giving his life meaning. His Tier-1 virtues (curiosity, rigor, openness) could operate freely within this framework, producing genuine breakthroughs where Biblical truth wasn't threatened. But where it was threatened, the virtues hit a wall. This isn't hypocrisy or bad faith—it's how thick commitments work for everyone, including us.

Colonial Judge and Scholar: Navigating Dual Roles

Jones's position as Supreme Court judge in Calcutta (1783-1794) was not incidental to his scholarship but constitutive of it. The judicial role gave him access to Indian legal texts, required him to engage with pandits and qadis (Islamic judges) as expert consultants, and forced him to make practical decisions about how British law would interact with indigenous legal traditions. It also embedded him inescapably within colonial power structures, making him an agent of British rule even as he argued for respecting Indian legal autonomy.

His founding of the Asiatic Society in 1784 exemplifies this dual position. The Society brought together British administrators and Indian scholars in what appeared to be collaborative pursuit of knowledge. And in important ways, it was collaborative—Jones genuinely learned from the pandits he worked with, respected their expertise, and created institutional space for their participation. Yet the Society also served British imperial interests: gathering information about Indian society, producing translations and legal codes that would facilitate British administration, training colonial officials in languages and customs, and establishing British scholars as authoritative interpreters of Indian civilization to European audiences.

Jones's judicial rulings show similar complexity. He genuinely argued that British judges should apply Indian law rather than imposing English common law wholesale—a position that differentiated him from later administrators who sought to replace indigenous institutions entirely. He translated the Manusmṛti (Institutes of Hindu Law) and other texts precisely to make Indian legal traditions accessible to British courts. In specific cases, he ruled in ways that favored Indian litigants using principles from their own legal traditions rather than English precedents.

Yet the Manusmṛti translation itself reveals the tensions. The text reinforced caste hierarchies and Brahminical privilege, providing legal sanction for social stratification that served British divide-and-rule strategies. By codifying "Hindu law" based primarily on Sanskrit texts accessible only to Brahmin elites, Jones's work marginalized other legal traditions (Buddhist, Jain, vernacular, customary) and folk practices that had governed much of Indian social life. Dalit critics today rightly point out that his collaboration was elite-to-elite (British administrators plus Brahmin pandits), leaving subaltern voices entirely erased. The "respect for Indian tradition" he exhibited was selective, privileging texts and informants aligned with British administrative needs.

The word-deed integrity test I've applied to earlier figures shows both alignment and constraint. Words: Jones praised Sanskrit as "more perfect than Greek," called for applying Indian law in British courts, expressed reverence for Indian civilization, collaborated respectfully with pandits. Deeds: He founded the Asiatic Society as collaborative institution, spent late nights studying with Indian scholars, translated texts with evident passion, ruled in some cases to favor indigenous legal principles. The alignment is real—his reverence wasn't merely rhetorical or strategic.

But: The reverence was always filtered through Christian supersessionism (Indian civilization magnificent but awaiting Christian fulfillment), the collaboration occurred within absolute power asymmetry (he was British judge, they were colonial subjects), and the institutional arrangements (Asiatic Society, legal codification, educational policies) ultimately served British rule even as they preserved Indian knowledge. Both things are true: genuine respect and colonial complicity, real collaboration and structural domination. The integrity holds in the sense that he genuinely believed and acted on his stated positions—but those positions themselves were bounded by frameworks (Biblical literalism, European superiority, imperial governance) that made the collaboration inevitably asymmetric.

Tier-1 Virtues Within Tier-2 Constraints

What made Jones unusual—what Indian defenders rightly emphasize and what Said's framework risks obscuring—was the genuineness of his intellectual virtues and the extent to which they functioned in intercultural space despite his colonial role and religious commitments.

Intellectual curiosity: By all accounts, including testimony from the pandits who worked with him, Jones was genuinely captivated by Sanskrit. He spent late nights studying, expressed aesthetic delight in Kālidāsa's poetry, approached Indian astronomy and mathematics with evident fascination. This wasn't performance for British audiences or strategic manipulation—the passion was palpable. His colleagues noted his obsessive work habits; his correspondence shows genuine excitement at discoveries; the sheer volume of translation and commentary he produced (while fulfilling judicial duties and battling chronic illness) suggests intrinsic motivation beyond what colonial administration required.

Epistemic humility: Jones recognized Sanskrit's sophistication in ways that challenged his own prior assumptions. Declaring it "more perfect than Greek" wasn't empty flattery—it was acknowledgment that Indian grammatical analysis (Pāṇini) exceeded European achievements in systematic rigor. He deferred to pandit expertise on textual interpretation, acknowledged gaps in his own knowledge, and treated Indian astronomical and mathematical traditions as deserving serious study rather than dismissal. This humility was real, operating robustly within the domain of linguistic and textual scholarship.

Openness to difference: Jones engaged with Indian civilization not to assimilate it to European categories wholesale but to appreciate it on something closer to its own terms. His translations attempted (however imperfectly) to convey the beauty and complexity of Sanskrit literature. His judicial rulings sought to apply Indian legal principles rather than simply imposing English law. He created institutional space (Asiatic Society) where Indian scholars could participate, even if that space was structured by British power.

Collaborative practice: Jones's relationship with the pandits he studied with appears, from available evidence, to have involved genuine intellectual exchange. They corrected his Sanskrit, explained textual nuances, engaged in discussions about interpretation. When he died, some mourned him with what seems like authentic grief—not just loss of a patron but loss of someone they had come to respect. The collaboration was asymmetric (power imbalance absolute) but not purely extractive.

Yet these virtues operated within profound constraints:

Biblical literalism: Non-negotiable. Where Sanskrit texts or Indian chronology conflicted with Genesis, Genesis won. His curiosity couldn't extend to questioning whether the Bible might be mythological rather than historical. The "adamantine pillars" remained immovable.

European superiority: Assumed as background. Indian civilization had achieved greatness but had "declined"; Europe represented the current apex of civilizational development. This hierarchy shaped his comparative judgments even when he praised Indian achievements.

Christian supersessionism: Indian traditions appreciated as magnificent but incomplete, awaiting Christian fulfillment. The reverence was condescending in structure, however genuine in affect—appreciating the subordinate's achievements while maintaining the superior's prerogative to judge.

Colonial role: He couldn't step outside his position as British judge. Every act of scholarship, every translation, every ruling occurred within and served (however indirectly) structures of domination. His advocacy for applying Indian law still meant British courts making that decision, British power determining what counted as "authentic" Indian tradition.

The pattern I've traced throughout these vignettes holds: Tier-1 virtues are real, function genuinely in intercultural space, enable cooperation and appreciation across difference. And they operate within Tier-2 constraints that bound how far cooperation extends, shape what can be seen and acknowledged, and embed even the most respectful encounters within power relations that can't be escaped by individual virtue alone. Both/and, not either/or.

Navigating Terrain Not of One's Making

I want to pause here to make explicit a theoretical point that's been implicit throughout: navigation as the mode of weak agency.

Jones didn't design the structures within which he operated. British colonial administration, Biblical orthodoxy in the Church of England, Enlightenment comparativism as scholarly paradigm, Indian caste hierarchies, Asiatic Society patronage networks, the institutional forms of Supreme Court jurisprudence—all of these were terrain he encountered, features he had to read and respond to, currents he could neither create nor eliminate but only navigate with varying degrees of skill and fortune.

Navigation, as a metaphor, captures something engineering and control metaphors miss. A navigator doesn't create the currents, winds, or reefs. They read conditions, make judgments about how to use some forces while compensating for others, adjust course based on continuous feedback, and accept that outcomes emerge from the interaction of their choices with terrain features they don't control. This is different from the strong agency model where rational actors pursue clear goals by shaping their environment to suit their purposes.

Jones navigated:

Biblical literalism: Absolute constraint—couldn't question Genesis without existential crisis
Sanskrit's sophistication: Surprising discovery requiring adaptation of his frameworks (not abandonment, but adjustment)
Pandit collaboration: Required their willing participation; couldn't extract knowledge purely by force
Colonial judicial role: Structural position determining his access, authority, responsibilities
Enlightenment scholarly networks: European audiences, comparative frameworks, apologetic purposes
Indian social hierarchies: Caste structures he worked within (collaborating with Brahmin elites)

His navigation was skillful in some domains. He used Biblical apologetics to motivate rigorous philological work that produced genuine linguistic breakthroughs. He used his judicial authority to create space for applying Indian law rather than simply imposing English precedents. He used the Asiatic Society to institutionalize collaborative scholarship that (however asymmetric) involved real intellectual exchange. He used his passion for Sanskrit to push against dismissive British attitudes toward Indian civilization.

But he also ran aground repeatedly. His chronological work failed because Biblical constraints made accurate dating impossible. He was vulnerable to hoaxes when they confirmed his apologetic framework. He collaborated only with elite Indians (Brahmin pandits, high-caste informants), leaving subaltern voices entirely excluded. He served colonial administration even while advocating for "respect" for Indian traditions. His most celebrated achievement (Indo-European hypothesis) would be appropriated for purposes he never intended and would have rejected—secular comparative linguistics that entirely abandoned the Biblical framework he considered essential.

This pattern—skillful navigation in some domains, running aground in others, producing unintended consequences throughout—is what weak agency looks like. It's not heroic self-determination (Jones shaping his destiny) nor passive structural determination (Jones as mere puppet of empire). It's navigation within constraints, where outcomes emerge from the interaction of choices made and terrain features encountered.

Andrew Pickering, drawing on Stafford Beer's cybernetics, calls this the "dance of agency"—ongoing improvisation in response to a world that constantly surprises us, that we can't fully know or control, where we steer toward distant lights rather than following predetermined maps. Jones embodied this: adapting to Sanskrit's unexpected sophistication, collaborating with pandits whose knowledge exceeded his own, producing scholarship that would be used for purposes (Hindu nationalism, secular linguistics, Orientalist critique) he could not have predicted. The dance continues long after the dancer dies, as later generations take up the movements and transform them into choreography the originator would not recognize.

Counterfactual: What Jones Enabled

The counterfactual test I've applied to earlier figures asks: What would be different if this person had not existed or had acted differently? For Jones, the answers are genuinely consequential.

Indo-European linguistics: Without Jones's 1786 proclamation that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin "have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists," the development of comparative philology would have been delayed, though not prevented (others had noticed similarities, and the methods were emerging). But Jones gave the hypothesis its most elegant formulation at a historically opportune moment, and his prestige as both scholar and colonial administrator lent it authority that accelerated its acceptance. The irony is profound: his greatest scholarly contribution, achieved for Biblical apologetics (proving monogenesis, post-Babel dispersal), became foundational for secular comparative linguistics that entirely abandoned the theological framework he considered essential. The genealogical appropriation here is total—modern linguists claim Jones while stripping away what he considered his primary purpose.

Hindu modernism and Indian nationalism: This is where Indian defenders' gratitude becomes comprehensible. Jones's translations and philological work provided Indian intellectuals with tools they needed: proof that Sanskrit was as ancient and sophisticated as Greek or Latin, evidence of continuities in Indian civilization, textual recovery of works that had become obscure, and linguistic arguments for cultural pride that could counter British claims of civilizational inferiority. Figures like Nehru could use Jones's scholarship to articulate "Golden Age" narratives that grounded nationalist movements and postcolonial nation-building. Without Jones (and the Orientalist tradition he helped establish), Indian nationalism would have developed differently—perhaps drawing more on vernacular traditions, Islamic sources, or contemporary social movements rather than recovered Sanskrit antiquity. Jones didn't intend to enable Indian nationalism (he died before it emerged as recognizable movement), but his work made certain nationalist strategies possible.

Asiatic Society: The institutional legacy is tangible. The Society still functions in Kolkata, maintaining archives and continuing scholarly work. It created a model for learned societies focused on Asian civilizations that would be replicated across colonial and postcolonial contexts. Whether this legacy is primarily positive (knowledge preserved and transmitted) or primarily negative (colonial knowledge production institutionalized) depends on one's framework—and the fact that both assessments capture something true reflects the constitutive ambiguity I keep returning to.

Legal codification: Jones's translations of the Manusmṛti and other legal texts had lasting consequences for how "Hindu law" was understood and applied in British India. By privileging Sanskrit textual traditions over vernacular customs, by collaborating with Brahmin pandits who had their own interests in emphasizing their authority, and by creating fixed legal codes from what had been more fluid customary practices, Jones's work reshaped Indian legal culture in ways that outlasted British rule. Dalit critics rightly point out that this codification reinforced caste hierarchies and Brahminical privilege—though whether Jones could have done otherwise given his position, knowledge base, and available collaborators is unclear.

The mixed legacy is essential to acknowledge: Jones's work produced both major breakthroughs (comparative linguistics, textual preservation, collaborative institutions) and total failures (useless chronology, vulnerability to forgery), both enabled movements for liberation (Indian nationalism) and reinforced structures of domination (colonial administration, caste codification). This isn't paradox to be resolved but constitutive ambiguity to be held. The same Biblical framework that produced linguistic breakthroughs made accurate chronology impossible. The same reverence for Sanskrit that enabled appreciation of Indian civilization was filtered through Christian supersessionism. The same collaborative institutions that preserved knowledge served colonial power. Both/and, throughout.

Genealogical Jones: Multiple Contested Appropriations

The palimpsest problem I opened with becomes clearer when we trace how different communities have appropriated Jones for their purposes, extracting what serves their needs while erasing what doesn't fit.

Secular comparative linguistics claims Jones as founder while entirely stripping away his Biblical apologetics. Linguistics textbooks celebrate the 1786 hypothesis without mentioning that Jones thought he was proving Genesis, defending Christianity against Voltaire, and establishing that all languages descended from post-Babel Adamic original. The appropriation is productive (comparative linguistics developed as rigorous secular discipline) but unfaithful (Jones would be horrified that his work now supports theories of deep prehistory that contradict his young Earth chronology). Modern linguists navigate Jones's legacy by taking his comparative method while abandoning his theological framework—precisely what he thought inseparable.

Indian nationalism (particularly INC tradition represented by Nehru) appropriates Jones's scholarship while stripping away Christian supersessionism. They claim his philological work as "gift" that helped Indians "know themselves," enabling recovery of Sanskrit tradition and arguments for cultural pride. The gratitude is genuine—Jones's translations and linguistic arguments really did provide resources for nationalist movements. But the appropriation is selective: taking Sanskrit revival and "Golden Age" narratives while ignoring that Jones saw Indian civilization as magnificent but incomplete, awaiting Christian fulfillment. Indian nationalists navigate Jones's legacy by using his reverence for Sanskrit while rejecting the theological hierarchy that shaped how he understood that reverence.

Hindutva nationalism takes the appropriation further, claiming Jones's "Aryan theory" (Indo-European language family) for Hindu supremacism—a use Jones would have rejected entirely. His Christian universalism (all humans from Noah, all traditions corrupted forms of original monotheism) is opposite of Hindutva particularism (Hindu civilization superior, non-Hindus outsiders or degraded). Yet Hindutva nationalists use his linguistic work to argue for ancient Hindu greatness and Aryan identity, stripping context entirely. The appropriation here is not just unfaithful but nearly inverted—using Jones's work against what his framework intended.

Dalit and subaltern studies critics condemn Jones for reinforcing Brahminical dominance through his Manusmṛti translation and elite collaboration. They're right that his work privileged Sanskrit textual traditions over vernacular and folk practices, that his collaboration was elite-to-elite (British + Brahmin), and that his codification of "Hindu law" based on Brahmin texts marginalized other legal traditions and reinforced caste hierarchy. But this appropriation also erases the extent to which Jones's options were constrained by his position (needing expert informants, having access primarily to elite scholars) and the genuine respect he showed the pandits he worked with. The condemnation is justified but incomplete—focusing on consequences (caste reinforcement) while underestimating constraints (structural limitations on who he could collaborate with).

Saidian postcolonial critique reads Jones as paradigm Orientalist—colonial administrator using philological expertise to produce knowledge that served British rule. This reading captures something crucial (Jones was embedded in colonial power, his scholarship did serve administration) but misses that his primary commitment was theological rather than imperial. He would have studied Sanskrit to defend Genesis even without empire; the apologetic project preceded and motivated the colonial appointment. Said's framework also risks erasing Indian scholars' agency—treating their collaboration with Jones as merely being duped or co-opted, rather than recognizing they had their own purposes and used the collaboration strategically within constraints they faced.

What emerges is historical Jones (Biblical literalist, colonial judge, passionate Sanskritist, Christian apologist, collaborative scholar, complicit administrator) versus multiple genealogical Joneses (secular linguistics founder, Hindu modernism enabler, Aryan theorist for Hindutva, Brahminical collaborator, paradigm Orientalist). Each genealogical appropriation extracts aspects that serve present purposes while erasing what doesn't fit. None are simply "distortions" (though all are unfaithful)—they're evidence of how ideas and legacies travel through history, claimed by traditions the original agent would not recognize, serving purposes that weren't imagined, producing consequences that shape worlds the agent never knew.

Understanding Jones requires distinguishing what he actually said and did from how he's been appropriated, while recognizing that the appropriations themselves have real consequences (constitutional orders, scholarly disciplines, nationalist movements, critical frameworks) that his work helped make possible even if he didn't intend them. The task isn't choosing which appropriation is "correct" but seeing how all of them navigate Jones's complex legacy for their own purposes, just as Jones navigated the complex terrain of Biblical literalism, Sanskrit sophistication, colonial administration, and intercultural collaboration for his.

Philosophical Payoff: Corrective to the Secularization Myth

The Jones case offers a crucial corrective to one of modernity's most persistent and consequential myths: the secularization thesis. From Nietzsche's declaration that "God is dead" through Weber's disenchantment narrative and Freud's prediction that religion would be outgrown like a childhood neurosis, Western intellectuals confidently forecast religion's inevitable decline as rationality, science, and modernization advanced. Jones reveals how premature—indeed, how ideological—that forecast was.

The Enlightenment did not displace religion but reconfigured it. Jones exemplifies the pattern: Biblical literalism served comparative philology, theological commitments shaped empirical research, apologetics motivated linguistic breakthroughs. Even Revolutionary France's rejection of Catholicism produced not secular rationality but new civil religions—the short-lived Cult of Reason with its Goddess of Reason enthroned in Notre Dame, replaced by Robespierre's deistic Cult of the Supreme Being, eventually giving way to Auguste Comte's positivist Church of Humanity with its own priesthood and liturgy. The Enlightenment didn't simply displace religious commitments; it often transformed them, channeling theological energies into new forms.

When religion returned as visible force in late-20th-century geopolitics—Iranian Revolution, political Islam, Hindu nationalism, Buddhist violence in Myanmar and Sri Lanka—Western intellectuals expressed shock, as though witnessing the "return of the repressed." But Jones's case suggests religion never left; it simply operated in forms modernist narratives couldn't recognize. And the pattern has only intensified in the 21st century, in ways that would have seemed bizarre to observers in the mid-1970s (peak secularization confidence) but have become our inescapable reality.

Consider trajectories that would have stunned those 1970s observers. Early 2000s, Western thinkers positioned Turkey's Erdoğan as proof that Islamic politics could be compatible with democracy and modernity—a "Muslim democracy" analogous to Europe's Christian democracy. That confidence collapsed as Erdoğan's government turned increasingly authoritarian and embraced New Ottomanism, invoking imperial nostalgia and Islamic identity as state ideology. Similarly, Putin's post-communist revitalization of the Russian Orthodox Church was initially read by some Western leaders as reasonable attempt to ground solidarity after communism's collapse—Bush famously claimed he had "looked into his soul" and seen "a good man." The embrace of fringe religious philosophers like Alexander Dugin (himself an "Old Believer" advocating Eurasian Orthodox civilization against Western decadence) seemed like cultural grounding. It became weaponized Orthodox nationalism justifying imperial expansion.

The United States offers perhaps the starkest case. Bush's "faith-based initiatives," his "Axis of Evil" rhetoric (Manichean good versus evil), and his initial framing of the war on terror as a "crusade" (quickly retracted but revealing) all drew on explicitly religious categories. His claim that terrorists "hate us for our freedoms" encoded a civilizational-religious narrative (Christian liberal democracy versus Islamic barbarism) that was supposed to have been outgrown. Obama, despite representing the multicultural, educated, cosmopolitan wing of American politics, felt compelled to emphasize his Christianity when running for office, navigating the Jeremiah Wright controversy by distancing himself from prophetic Black Christian traditions while affirming mainstream Protestant credentials. And Trump—hardly devout—hired Paula White as religious advisor, stood beside her as she spoke in tongues on national television, went to CPAC touting "Two Corinthians" (revealing unfamiliarity with the text), and orchestrated the notorious photo op holding an upside-down Bible surrounded by military and civilian leaders after clearing Lafayette Square of protesters.

To an audience in the mid-1970s—when secularization seemed inevitable, when sociologists confidently predicted religion's confinement to private life, when "modernization theory" assumed developing nations would follow the West's secular trajectory—this litany would appear absurd. Yet here we are. Christian nationalism has become defining force in American politics. Hindu nationalism (Modi's BJP, Hindutva ideology) governs India. Buddhist nationalism drives violence in Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Islamic revivalism shapes politics from Turkey to Pakistan to Indonesia. Orthodox Christianity grounds Russian and Serbian nationalism. Even the supposedly "secular" European Union, as I've noted, became thinkable only within quasi-religious Tier-2 horizons like Christian personalism (Delors, Schuman), with foundational concepts (human dignity, subsidiarity, solidarity) drawn from Catholic social teaching even as they claim universal secularity.

The pattern Jones exemplifies—Enlightenment reason serving theological projects, comparative scholarship operating within Biblical frameworks, genuine curiosity coexisting with religious apologetics—was not a transitional phase en route to full secularization. It was, and remains, how modernity actually works. Tier-2 commitments do not disappear with rationalization, bureaucratization, or scientific advance. They transform, migrate, and persist in ways that both enable and constrain intercultural cooperation, always shaping what counts as "rational," "universal," or "objective." The secularization thesis was not wrong about religion changing; it was wrong about religion vanishing, and catastrophically wrong about secular modernity transcending the particularistic commitments that structure human meaning-making.

Jones, the Biblical literalist using Enlightenment methods to defend Genesis while genuinely revering Sanskrit, exemplifies a pattern that continues to structure our late modern condition: religious and secular not as successive stages but as mutually constitutive. His case shows that Tier-1 virtues (intellectual curiosity, epistemic humility, openness to difference) can function robustly within Tier-2 religious frameworks without those frameworks needing to "evolve" into secular alternatives. His colonial complicity shows that such frameworks can serve domination. His genuine reverence for Indian civilization shows they can also enable appreciation and collaboration. His Biblical apologetics show they can produce both breakthrough (Indo-European hypothesis) and failure (useless chronology). His genealogical appropriations show how later generations selectively claim such figures—secularizing Jones for linguistics textbooks, condemning him as Orientalist in postcolonial studies, defending him as ally in Indian nationalism—each reading extracting what serves present purposes while erasing what doesn't fit.

This makes Jones not a dated figure from the dawn of the 19th century but an extremely timely object of cultural self-understanding. If Cyrus shows Tier-1 virtues in ancient imperial contexts, Ḥunayn in medieval syncretism, Mehmed in early modern modus vivendi, and Williams in theological radicalism, Jones shows them operating within the very formation—Enlightenment modernity—that claimed to transcend such particularities. That his Biblical literalism now seems anachronistic to secular academics says more about our myths of secularization than about Jones. The question his case poses is not whether Tier-2 commitments constrain Tier-1 virtues (they always do) but whether we can recognize those constraints in our own "secular" projects—whether liberal internationalism, human rights discourse, scientific objectivity, or democratic pluralism—and whether recognizing them makes intercultural cooperation more or less possible.

The task is not transcendence but navigation. Weak agents cannot escape the terrain they inhabit—the discourses, structures, power relations, and Tier-2 commitments that shape what seems thinkable, desirable, or possible. Jones could not step outside Biblical literalism any more than we can step outside our own unacknowledged frameworks (secular liberal individualism, scientific naturalism, democratic proceduralism, human rights universalism—each with genealogies and limits we struggle to perceive). But agents can learn to read terrain more skillfully, recognize currents carrying them in unintended directions, use available features (institutions, collaborations, intellectual resources) to navigate toward cooperation even when agreement remains impossible, and remain alert to how their navigational choices might enable or foreclose future possibilities.

Jones's unfinished legacy—still contested, still claimed and condemned in radically incompatible ways—suggests that navigation never ends, terrain keeps shifting, and the virtues required (epistemic humility, adaptive judgment, openness to correction, willingness to collaborate across deep difference) remain as essential and as difficult as they were when he sat with Brahmin pandits learning Sanskrit or when Williams rowed across Narragansett Bay to debate Quakers. We navigate still.

[END OF JONES VIGNETTE - approximately 5,800 words]

CODA: NAVIGATION AS INTERCULTURAL PRACTICE

What Five Vignettes Show

I've now examined five figures across 2,500 years—Cyrus in ancient Persia, Ḥunayn in Abbasid Baghdad, Mehmed II in 15th-century Constantinople, Williams in 17th-century Rhode Island, Jones in 18th-century Calcutta—and certain patterns recur with striking consistency despite radically different contexts, power configurations, and religious-philosophical frameworks.

First, Tier-1 virtues operate within Tier-2 constraints, not beyond them. Each figure exhibited genuine capacities—intellectual curiosity (Ḥunayn, Jones), epistemic humility (Cyrus, Williams), adaptive judgment (Mehmed), patience and openness to alterity (all five). These virtues were real, not performances or strategic manipulations. Yet they operated within thick commitments that were non-negotiable: Cyrus's Zoroastrian piety, Ḥunayn's Christian identity and Aristotelian framework, Mehmed's Ottoman imperial ideology, Williams's apocalyptic Protestantism, Jones's Biblical literalism. The virtues enabled cooperation and achievement; the commitments bounded how far that cooperation could extend and what forms it could take. Neither virtues nor commitments were "optional"—both were constitutive of the agents who navigated complex terrain.

What I want to emphasize is that the virtues weren't freestanding universal capacities that these figures happened to possess. They were cultivated within the thick traditions themselves. Jones's curiosity about difference was shaped by Biblical study and the Christian universalist conviction that all peoples shared common origins. Williams's soul liberty principle emerged from intense engagement with Protestant theology, not despite it. Ḥunayn's intellectual rigor was trained through Christian-Aristotelian frameworks. Mehmed's adaptive governance drew on Ottoman dynastic pragmatism and Islamic dhimmi traditions. Cyrus's respect for local gods reflected Zoroastrian cosmology as much as strategic calculation.

This matters because it means Tier-1 virtues aren't a neutral "toolkit" anyone can adopt regardless of their commitments. They're practices learned through apprenticeship in particular traditions, shaped by those traditions' resources and concerns, functioning (when they do) in intercultural space precisely because they've been cultivated within thick contexts. The virtues travel across boundaries, but they carry traces of their origins, and they function best when those origins are acknowledged rather than concealed.

Second, weak agency means navigation, not control. None of these figures designed the structures within which they operated or determined the outcomes their actions produced. Cyrus navigated Babylonian expectations and Zoroastrian legitimation; Ḥunayn navigated Greek texts, Arabic language, Christian-Muslim power asymmetries, and Aristotelian-Galenic frameworks; Mehmed navigated ghazi ideology, Byzantine legitimacy claims, multi-confessional populations, and Ottoman succession politics; Williams navigated Massachusetts exile, Narragansett rescue, Rhode Island fragmentation, and Quaker provocation; Jones navigated Biblical orthodoxy, Sanskrit's sophistication, British imperial administration, and pandit collaboration.

Outcomes emerged from interactions between navigational choices and terrain not of their making: sometimes breakthroughs (Indo-European linguistics, soul liberty in one domain, modus vivendi arrangements), sometimes failures (useless chronology, fratricide, slavery acquiescence), often unintended consequences (Hindu modernism, evangelical appropriations, Saidian critique). The navigation metaphor I've been developing—drawing on Andrew Pickering's adaptation of Stafford Beer's cybernetics—captures this better than engineering or control metaphors. Navigators read conditions, use some currents while compensating for others, adjust course based on continuous feedback, and accept that outcomes emerge from the interaction of their choices with features they don't control.

This is crucial for understanding intercultural cooperation. We can't "solve" deep differences through better theories or institutional designs. We can cultivate capacities for navigating those differences—reading when collaboration is possible despite disagreement, recognizing when our frameworks constrain what we can see, adapting to emergent conditions rather than insisting on predetermined goals, working with agents whose commitments we can't control. The vignettes show navigation succeeding (Asiatic Society's collaborative scholarship despite colonial context) and failing (Rhode Island's fragmentation despite Williams's principles), producing intended results (Mehmed's multi-confessional coexistence) and unintended consequences (Jones's work enabling Indian nationalism he never imagined).

Third, intercultural cooperation under conditions of power asymmetry is possible but always morally and politically ambiguous. Cyrus's Babylonian restoration served imperial consolidation. Ḥunayn's translations served Abbasid prestige even as they preserved Greek knowledge. Mehmed's modus vivendi enabled multi-confessional coexistence within autocratic structures. Williams's soul liberty protected minorities while Rhode Island remained weak and fragmented. Jones's collaborative scholarship served colonial administration even as it enabled Indian nationalism.

In each case, both things are true simultaneously: cooperation occurred across deep difference, producing real goods (knowledge preserved, violence avoided, minorities protected, civilizations appreciated), and that cooperation was entangled with domination, exploitation, or profound structural injustice. The temptation is to resolve this ambiguity by choosing one side—either celebrating cooperation or condemning complicity. The vignettes suggest this resolution falsifies the historical record. The ambiguity is constitutive, not a problem to be solved. Both/and rather than either/or.

I keep returning to this because it runs against strong impulses in contemporary discourse—both the impulse to celebrate historical cooperation as "proof" that people of good will can always find common ground, and the impulse to condemn all cooperation under unjust conditions as complicity that shouldn't be honored. Neither impulse does justice to how cooperation actually happens. It happens within constraints, embedded in power relations, producing mixed legacies. Recognizing this doesn't mean cynicism (dismissing all cooperation as merely serving power) but realism about what navigation within unjust structures looks like.

Fourth, genealogical appropriations are inevitable and revealing. Later generations selectively claim these figures for purposes the originals never imagined: Cyrus as human rights pioneer (UNESCO), secular tolerance model (liberals), or Persian nationalist symbol; Williams as First Amendment founder (American civil religion), Baptist hero (evangelicals), or Lockean precursor (political theorists); Jones as comparative linguistics founder (secular scholarship), Hindu modernism enabler (Indian nationalism), or Orientalist paradigm (postcolonial critique).

These appropriations are not distortions (though they're unfaithful) but evidence of how ideas travel through history—extracted from original contexts, reconfigured for new purposes, claimed by traditions the originals would not recognize. Understanding historical agents requires distinguishing what they actually said and did from how they've been appropriated, while recognizing that appropriations themselves have consequences (constitutional orders, nationalist movements, scholarly fields) the historical agents helped make possible.

What I find instructive is that genealogical appropriations reveal what each tradition considers usable from a complex legacy. Secular linguists take Jones's comparative method while abandoning Biblical apologetics. Indian nationalists take Sanskrit revival while rejecting Christian supersessionism. Evangelicals take Williams's soul liberty while ignoring his social radicalism. Each appropriation shows what's navigable from the past for present purposes—and what gets left behind as unusable, embarrassing, or incoherent within current frameworks.

Continuities Across Time

Despite vast differences in technology, scale, political forms, and speed of change, certain patterns endure from ancient Persia to late modernity:

Thick commitments remain constitutive. Communities are still organized by Tier-2 frameworks—religious, national, ethnic, philosophical. The supposedly "secular" turn of modernity didn't transcend these commitments but reconfigured them. Human rights discourse has genealogies in Christian personalism and Protestant voluntarism. Liberal individualism draws on particular philosophical and religious traditions (Lockean natural rights, Kantian dignity, utilitarian calculation) while claiming universality. Scientific naturalism operates as Tier-2 commitment for many educated Westerners, shaping what counts as "real" or "rational" as thoroughly as Zoroastrianism shaped Cyrus's worldview.

Even frameworks that present themselves as neutral or universal have particular origins that constrain what they can recognize and accommodate. This doesn't invalidate them—Jones's Biblical framework produced genuine linguistic breakthroughs even though his chronology was useless. But it means recognizing that our "secular" or "universal" frameworks are also navigating from within particularistic commitments we often don't acknowledge.

Cooperation across deep difference remains urgent and difficult. The European Union navigates tensions between national sovereignty and supranational integration, between secular liberalism and Christian democratic roots, between cosmopolitan aspiration and rising nationalism. Northern Ireland continues managing Protestant-Catholic identities that have outlasted theological content, where "secular" disputes over flags and parades encode religious-communal markers. South Africa navigates post-apartheid complexities where racial categories officially abolished remain socially operative. Israel-Palestine exemplifies starkest form of competing Tier-2 narratives (biblical covenant vs. indigenous rights, Holocaust memory vs. Nakba trauma) where cooperation is desperately needed but fundamentally difficult.

Myanmar demonstrates how Buddhist cosmology—often imagined in the West as uniquely peaceful—can mobilize nationalist violence when entangled with ethnicity, military power, and perceived threats to religious-national identity. Each case shows the same pattern: Tier-1 virtues (mutual recognition, epistemic humility, patience) struggle against commitments experienced as non-negotiable, power asymmetries shape what's considered "reasonable" compromise, and navigation continues without resolution.

Navigation, not engineering, remains the mode. We still can't "solve" intercultural conflicts with formulas or algorithms for "fixing the crooked timber of humanity" (Kant's phrase, itself revealing the engineering mindset these cases problematize). We can cultivate capacities for navigating ongoing tensions—reading when collaboration is possible, recognizing our own frameworks' constraints, adapting to emergent conditions, working with agents whose commitments we can't control. The terrain keeps shifting (Brexit votes, migration crises, climate negotiations, AI deployment), requiring continuous navigation rather than one-time solutions.

Moral luck and contingency remain decisive. Williams's Narragansett rescue, Jones's encounter with Sanskrit's sophistication, Mehmed's timing within Ottoman imperial cycles, Ḥunayn's access to Greek manuscripts—all involved contingencies no agent controlled. Had Williams not been rescued, Rhode Island's experiment wouldn't have happened. Had Jones arrived in India after Macaulay's reforms rather than before, his career would have looked entirely different. Had Mehmed consolidated power in different circumstances, the millet system might not have emerged. Outcomes depend not just on agents' choices but on contingencies that make certain choices possible or foreclose others entirely.

Differences in Late Modernity

Yet three transformations distinguish our navigational predicament from earlier eras:

First, the velocity and density of intercultural encounter have accelerated dramatically. Ancient and medieval periods saw intercultural contact episodically—through trade routes, conquests, scholarly exchanges, missionary networks. Early modernity intensified contact through colonialism, global trade, and religious missions. But late modernity makes intercultural encounter constant, unavoidable, and multi-directional. Migration, digital networks, global supply chains, climate interdependence, pandemic transmission—all create situations where diverse populations occupy compact geographic spaces and interact across vast differences with unprecedented frequency and intensity.

European cities, North American metros, Southeast Asian port cities—all concentrate diversity in ways that would have been unimaginable in earlier eras. The temporal acceleration matches the geographic compression: changes that took centuries now unfold in decades. Technologies (internet, smartphones, social media) that didn't exist when I started this project now mediate most intercultural encounters for billions of people. The speed at which cultural forms circulate, clash, and hybridize has no historical precedent.

This doesn't mean cooperation is impossible—my vignettes show it happening under far more difficult conditions. But it means the stakes are higher (nuclear weapons, biological risks, climate tipping points all require cooperation at scales we've never achieved) and the challenges more acute (managing difference when everyone shares airspace, media environments, and material dependencies).

Second, AI has become infrastructure we navigate within, not tools we wield from without. This is perhaps the most consequential transformation for understanding agency in our moment. Pre-modern and early modern tools were ready-to-hand in Heidegger's sense—hammers, plows, ships that extended human capacity but remained under human control. Industrial machines multiplied that capacity but still operated as tools directed by human purposes. Late modern AI systems function differently.

Consider: HR decision-making systems, predictive policing algorithms, high-frequency trading networks, medical diagnostic support, recommendation engines for content/products/romantic partners, anticipatory systems that book vacations and buy concert tickets via EULAs we've long since stopped reading. These aren't tools we "use" and then "put down." They're infrastructure operating 24/7, shaping choices before we encounter them, structuring environments we navigate whether we recognize it or not.

Like Jones's colonial knowledge infrastructure (Asiatic Society, legal codes, scholarly networks) or Williams's theological discourses (Biblical interpretation, ecclesiology, natural law frameworks), AI systems colonize the lifeworld in Habermas's phrase—penetrating intimate domains of family, friendship, romance, identity, self-understanding. We can't "turn off" the algorithmic systems that have already reconfigured how we find information, choose entertainment, meet partners, apply for jobs, receive medical diagnoses, or encounter political content.

Agency becomes distributed across human intentions, algorithmic processing, training data patterns, network effects, and emergent behaviors (flash crashes, radicalization pipelines, filter bubbles) no one designed or controls. Like Jones navigating currents he didn't create, we navigate AI infrastructures we didn't design and can't eliminate. The question isn't whether to use AI (that framing already misleads by assuming we're outside it) but how to navigate within AI-saturated environments—recognizing how systems shape our perceptions, cultivating critical distance despite immersion, collaborating with others who navigate different algorithmic environments, and remaining alert to emergent properties we can't predict.

Third, the scale and complexity of coordination challenges have exploded. Climate change requires planetary-scale cooperation without historical precedent. Pandemics demand real-time global coordination (COVID-19 exposed how fragile this remains). Migration involves mass movements driven by war, climate, and economics that test every existing framework for managing diversity and integration. Nuclear and biological risks create catastrophic possibilities requiring cooperation across societies with radically different values and interests. Digital governance raises fundamental questions about sovereignty, jurisdiction, and whose rules apply (China's internet controls, EU's data protection regulations, US tech platform dominance all clash).

Yet the underlying pattern resembles what my vignettes show: cooperation needed across incommensurable Tier-2 commitments (national sovereignty principles, religious identities, civilizational narratives), power asymmetries shaping what's negotiable (Global North/South, tech platforms/users, nuclear powers/non-nuclear states), and navigation required because engineering solutions or unilateral control prove impossible. The scale is unprecedented, the stakes potentially existential, but the mode remains navigation rather than control.

Tier-1 Reconsidered: Not Universal Code, But Portable Dispositions

I need to clarify something crucial about how I'm using "Tier-1 virtues" to avoid a misunderstanding that would undermine the entire framework.

Tier-1 does NOT mean:

Freestanding universal virtues independent of thick commitments
Secular toolkit transcending particularistic traditions
Liberal values everyone should adopt because "purely rational"
Code applicable across cultures without remainder

Tier-1 DOES mean:

Aspects of thick traditions that travel relatively well in intercultural space
Capacities cultivated within particular frameworks that can function across boundaries
Practices learned through apprenticeship in traditions, applicable (with adaptation) beyond them
Resources from Tier-2 commitments that enable cooperation despite Tier-2 differences

The distinction matters enormously. If Tier-1 were freestanding universal virtues, I'd be smuggling in exactly the kind of liberal universalism I've been critiquing—assuming "our" (Western, secular, liberal) capacities are universal while "their" (non-Western, religious, communal) commitments are particular. That would reproduce the very hegemony these vignettes try to problematize.

Instead, I'm claiming something more modest and more complex: thick traditions develop resources for encountering difference, and some of those resources prove navigable across traditions even when the traditions themselves remain incommensurable. Let me show what I mean through examples:

Jones's curiosity about difference was cultivated through Biblical exegesis—studying languages to understand Scripture, investigating ancient peoples to confirm Genesis, exploring connections to demonstrate providential order. His curiosity was shaped by Christian commitments (all peoples from Noah, all traditions corrupted forms of original revelation, comparative study revealing God's design). Yet that curiosity functioned in his Sanskrit studies, enabling him to recognize sophistication, collaborate with pandits, appreciate aesthetic beauty, and produce linguistic breakthroughs. The curiosity was portable because methodological rigor and openness to textual complexity aren't uniquely Christian, even though Jones's version was cultivated within and shaped by Christianity.

Williams's soul liberty principle was rooted in Protestant doctrines—wheat and tares parable, Seeker ecclesiology denying any visible church has divine warrant, apocalyptic expectation of Christ's return. His commitment was shaped by theological convictions (civil magistrates can't see hearts, coercing conscience "rapes" the soul, interim times require patience). Yet that principle functioned with Quakers (whose theology he despised), Jews (whose rejection of Christ he considered error), and Natives (whose spiritual status he puzzled over). The principle was portable because separating civil from spiritual jurisdiction, refusing to coerce conscience, and protecting religious minorities aren't uniquely Protestant applications, even though Williams's version emerged from and remained embedded in Protestant theology.

Mehmed's adaptive governance drew on Ottoman dynastic pragmatism (consolidating power through flexible arrangements) and Islamic dhimmi traditions (protecting "People of the Book"). His practice was shaped by these frameworks (millet system's structure, tolerance's boundaries, conversion's incentives). Yet that practice functioned across confessions (Orthodox Christians, Armenian Christians, Jews, even Catholic Genoese merchants), creating relatively stable multi-confessional arrangements. The adaptiveness was portable because recognizing communities' self-governance, balancing central authority with local autonomy, and managing religious diversity through institutional arrangements aren't uniquely Ottoman or Islamic, even though Mehmed's version was.

The pattern is: thick traditions cultivate capacities through their own resources and concerns; those capacities remain shaped by their origins (not neutral); but they can function in intercultural space (recognizing others' sophistication, protecting across difference, managing diversity); they travel well because they're practices rather than abstract principles—learned through doing, adapted through encounter, refined through feedback.

This helps me avoid two opposite errors:

Error 1: Secular Universalism assumes Tier-1 virtues are neutral rational capacities everyone should adopt. This ignores how virtues are cultivated within particular traditions, erases their genealogies, and reproduces Western hegemony (our capacities = universal, yours = particular obstacles to overcome). It's the error of assuming liberal tolerance transcends its Protestant voluntarist origins, or that human rights discourse has no Christian personalist genealogy, or that scientific method has no European Enlightenment particularity.

Error 2: Radical Particularism assumes thick commitments are incommensurable, making cooperation impossible except through domination or strategic modus vivendi with no genuine appreciation. This ignores how traditions develop resources for encountering difference, despairs of learning across boundaries, and forecloses possibilities for collaboration that the vignettes show actually occurring (however imperfectly, however entangled with power).

Instead: I'm recognizing virtues' genealogies (where they come from, what shaped them), acknowledging they remain marked by origins (not neutral or universal), yet showing they can be cultivated within traditions and deployed across boundaries (portable without being universal). This is what makes intercultural cooperation possible—not transcending our commitments but learning to navigate from within them in ways that create space for others to navigate from within theirs.

"Coping reverently come what may" is my attempt to capture this disposition in a phrase that might be memorable:

Coping = navigation rather than control, adaptive response to emergent conditions we cannot fully predict or determine, working within constraints we didn't choose and can't eliminate.

Reverently = honoring what matters deeply—our own commitments and others', the goods at stake in cooperation, the harms risked in its absence, the agents (human and nonhuman) whose participation we cannot compel. This isn't relativism (treating all commitments as equally valid) but recognition that others' commitments structure their agency as profoundly as ours structure ours.

Come what may = accepting that outcomes emerge from interactions we don't fully control, that moral luck and contingency remain decisive, that genealogical appropriations will claim our achievements for purposes we never imagined, that navigation never ends because terrain keeps shifting.

This isn't a slogan to be repeated but a disposition to be cultivated—through practice within traditions, through encounter across boundaries, through reflection on what enables cooperation and what forecloses it. The vignettes are invitations to develop this disposition, not demonstrations of a complete theory. They show it functioning (Asiatic Society collaboration, modus vivendi arrangements, soul liberty protection) and failing (fragmentation, complicity, useless chronology, appropriation serving domination). They reveal patterns without providing formulas.

Contemporary Navigation Sites: Continuity Amid Transformation

The patterns my vignettes trace persist in late modern fault lines where intercultural cooperation remains urgent and profoundly difficult:

The European Union navigates tensions between national sovereignty and supranational integration, between secular liberal frameworks and Christian democratic roots (personalism shaping concepts of dignity, subsidiarity, solidarity), between cosmopolitan aspiration and rising nationalist-populist movements challenging EU authority, between commitment to human rights universalism and unresolved colonial legacies visible in migration politics. Brexit, Polish and Hungarian resistance to EU courts, debates over Frontex and asylum policy, struggles to accommodate Muslim minorities—all reflect unfinished negotiations over what grounds cooperation when agreement on ultimate commitments remains elusive. The EU doesn't "solve" these tensions but creates structures for navigating them—sometimes successfully (avoiding war among members for 80 years), sometimes failing (migration crises, democratic backsliding, persistent inequalities).

Northern Ireland continues navigating Protestant-Catholic identities that have outlasted most theological content, where "secular" disputes over flags, parades, and commemorations encode religious-communal markers generations after most participants ceased regular worship. The Good Friday Agreement didn't resolve these tensions but created structures for managing them—a modus vivendi acknowledging that deep difference persists even as violence becomes (mostly) unacceptable. Like Mehmed's millet arrangements or Williams's Rhode Island charter, it's institutional navigation of difference that can't be eliminated, creating space for coexistence without requiring agreement.

South Africa navigates post-apartheid complexities where racial categories officially abolished remain socially operative, where Truth and Reconciliation processes sought cooperation without full agreement on justice, where economic inequality along racial lines coexists with formal equality, where ubuntu philosophy and liberal constitutionalism uneasily share normative space. The navigation is ongoing, often frustrating, producing mixed results—democratic institutions holding but economic justice remaining elusive, racial reconciliation incomplete but civil war avoided. Like earlier cases, both/and rather than either/or.

Israel-Palestine remains perhaps the starkest contemporary example of how competing Tier-2 narratives (biblical covenant vs. indigenous rights, Zionist return vs. Nakba displacement, Holocaust memory vs. ongoing occupation) structure conflicts where Tier-1 virtues (mutual recognition, epistemic humility, adaptive judgment) struggle against commitments experienced as non-negotiable by communities on both sides. Power asymmetry shapes what's considered "reasonable" (Israeli security requirements vs. Palestinian sovereignty demands), and navigation has largely failed (producing repeated violence rather than sustainable coexistence). The case shows navigation's limits—sometimes terrain features make certain paths impassable, at least for now.

Myanmar demonstrates how Buddhist cosmology—often imagined in the West as uniquely peaceful—can mobilize nationalist violence against Rohingya Muslims when entangled with ethnicity (Bamar nationalism), military power (Tatmadaw interests), and perceived threats to religious-national identity. It challenges simplistic narratives about which traditions enable or foreclose tolerance, showing instead that any tradition can be mobilized for violence or coexistence depending on contexts, power relations, and agents navigating them. Like all the cases, it resists easy moralizing—we can condemn violence while recognizing how Buddhist frameworks have also enabled remarkable interfaith cooperation in other contexts (Sri Lanka's earlier periods, Thai pluralism, Tibetan exile communities).

AI infrastructure presents perhaps the most unprecedented navigation challenge. Unlike earlier infrastructures (colonial knowledge networks, religious institutions, legal systems) that operated within human-recognizable timeframes and geographic boundaries, AI systems operate at speeds and scales that exceed human perceptual and decision-making capacities. Algorithmic trading executes millions of transactions per second. Recommendation systems shape billions of users' information environments simultaneously. Predictive policing algorithms make assessments feeding back into arrest patterns before humans can audit them. Medical AI suggests diagnoses that become treatment decisions before practitioners fully understand the reasoning.

We navigate within these systems whether we recognize it or not—they structure what information reaches us, what opportunities we encounter, what choices appear available, what partners dating apps suggest, what jobs recruitment algorithms consider us for. The colonization of the lifeworld Habermas described now operates through computational infrastructure penetrating intimate domains (family planning apps, fertility tracking, relationship recommendation, parenting advice algorithms, elder care robots) in ways that would have seemed science fiction when I began this project.

The question isn't whether to "allow" AI (it's already infrastructure, not future possibility) but how to navigate within AI-saturated environments while cultivating capacities these vignettes suggest matter: epistemic humility about systems we can't fully know, curiosity about emergent behaviors we didn't design, patience with processes producing unexpected results, adaptive judgment responding to feedback, openness to collaboration with others navigating different algorithmic environments. Like Jones navigating colonial knowledge infrastructure or Williams navigating Protestant theological discourses, we navigate AI systems we didn't choose and can't escape—the challenge is doing so more skillfully, more ethically, more attentively to consequences we can't fully predict.

Each of these sites shows the same underlying pattern: cooperation across deep difference urgently needed, Tier-2 commitments constitutive (can't be shed without ceasing to be who communities are), power asymmetries shaping what's negotiable, and navigation ongoing without resolution. The continuity across time is striking—Cyrus navigating Babylonian legitimacy, we navigate EU integration; Mehmed navigating multi-confessional empire, we navigate AI infrastructure; Williams navigating soul liberty principle, we navigate human rights frameworks with their own particular genealogies. The mode remains navigation, even as the terrain transforms.

What This Framework Offers (And Doesn't)

I want to be explicit about what I'm claiming and what I'm not, to avoid both over-promising and under-selling what these vignettes might contribute.

This framework does NOT offer:

Formulas for "solving" intercultural conflicts. There are no algorithms, no step-by-step procedures, no guaranteed methods for achieving cooperation. The vignettes show navigation succeeding and failing under conditions that seem similar, suggesting outcomes depend on contingencies no framework can capture or control.

Engineering solutions assuming we can design structures that eliminate difference or transcend commitments. The Kantian dream of "fixing the crooked timber of humanity" through better institutional design misunderstands what makes timber crooked—it's not defect to be corrected but grain shaped by growth within particular conditions. Trying to force timber straight breaks it; working with the grain produces useful structures despite crookedness.

Universal principles all traditions should adopt. I'm not arguing everyone should become liberal, or secular, or committed to particular virtues I've identified. The framework assumes plurality is permanent—traditions will continue cultivating different capacities, organizing around different commitments, navigating from different positions. The question isn't convergence but cooperation despite irreducible difference.

Recipes guaranteeing successful outcomes. Jones's reverence for Sanskrit didn't prevent colonial complicity. Williams's soul liberty didn't prevent Rhode Island fragmentation. Mehmed's modus vivendi didn't prevent fratricide. Tier-1 virtues enable navigation but don't guarantee arrival at intended destinations—moral luck, contingency, power relations, and unintended consequences remain decisive.

This framework DOES offer:

Ways of seeing patterns across contexts. The vignettes help recognize when Tier-2 commitments are operating (shaping what seems thinkable, reasonable, possible), when Tier-1 capacities are present (enabling cooperation despite difference), when power asymmetries are structuring negotiations (determining what's "reasonable" compromise), when genealogical appropriations are occurring (later generations claiming legacies selectively). These patterns recur from ancient Persia to contemporary AI infrastructure—seeing them helps navigate current challenges.

Questions to ask when encountering cooperation or conflict:

What Tier-2 commitments are at stake, and for whom are they non-negotiable?
What Tier-1 capacities are present (curiosity, humility, patience, adaptive judgment)?
What terrain features constrain navigation (power asymmetries, institutional structures, discourses)?
What's navigation enabling or foreclosing (emergent possibilities, unintended consequences)?
Whose agency is distributed across what networks (human and nonhuman elements)?

Resources for cultivation: The framework doesn't prescribe specific virtues but shows how virtues get cultivated—within thick traditions, through practices rather than abstract principles, by apprenticeship and encounter, through failure and adaptation. It suggests we can:

Develop epistemic humility about our own frameworks (recognizing their genealogies, limits, blind spots)
Cultivate curiosity about others' thick commitments (what makes them compelling, how they shape agency)
Practice patience with emergent processes (accepting outcomes aren't fully controllable)
Refine adaptive judgment (responding to actual encounters rather than stereotypes)
Pursue collaborative openness even when agreement seems impossible

Recognition of limits: The vignettes show repeatedly that virtues don't guarantee good outcomes, moral luck matters profoundly, ambiguity is often constitutive rather than resolvable, and genealogical appropriations will occur regardless of original intentions. Recognizing these limits is itself valuable—it prevents both cynicism (if virtues don't guarantee success, why cultivate them?) and naive optimism (if we just had more dialogue, all conflicts would resolve).

Resistance to persistent temptations:

The temptation to resolve ambiguity by choosing celebration OR condemnation. The vignettes insist on both/and: Jones's scholarship served power and enabled Indian nationalism; Mehmed's modus vivendi created coexistence and operated within autocracy; Williams's soul liberty protected minorities and Rhode Island remained fragmented. Forcing either/or choices falsifies what actually happened.

The temptation to dismiss cooperation as merely serving power. Said's insight that knowledge and power are entangled was crucial, but if extended to mean all cooperation under unjust conditions is mere complicity, it forecloses recognizing when real goods are produced (knowledge preserved, violence avoided, minorities protected) even within oppressive structures. Both/and again: cooperation serves power and produces goods.

The temptation to demand transcendence of commitments before cooperating. If we wait until everyone shares ultimate values before working together, we'll wait forever. The vignettes show cooperation happening precisely when ultimate agreement remains impossible—Cyrus respecting Babylonian gods while remaining Zoroastrian, Ḥunayn preserving Greek philosophy while remaining Christian, Mehmed governing multi-confessionally while remaining Muslim, Williams protecting Quakers while considering them heretics, Jones revering Sanskrit while defending Genesis. The cooperation didn't require transcending commitments but navigating from within them.

The temptation to assume "secular" or "universal" frameworks escape constraints. This is perhaps the most insidious temptation because it's often invisible to those operating within such frameworks. Liberal individualism, scientific naturalism, human rights universalism, democratic proceduralism—all have particular genealogies (Protestant voluntarism, European Enlightenment, Christian personalism, Western political philosophy) that shape what they can recognize and accommodate. Treating them as transcending particularistic commitments just means not recognizing their own Tier-2 status. The vignettes invite us to see our own frameworks as also navigating from within thick commitments, not viewing from nowhere.

What the framework invites:

Attention to what enables cooperation under unfavorable conditions. Not ideal circumstances (full agreement, no power asymmetries, perfect virtue) but actual conditions (deep disagreement, profound inequalities, flawed agents). The vignettes show cooperation happening in such conditions—what made it possible? Curiosity about the other (not assimilation or dismissal), epistemic humility (recognizing limits of one's framework), patience (accepting emergent rather than predetermined outcomes), adaptive judgment (responding to what actually happens rather than what stereotypes predict), institutional arrangements (creating space for difference without requiring agreement).

Recognition of our own Tier-2 commitments (usually unacknowledged). Secular academics often don't recognize how their frameworks function like religious commitments for believers—shaping what counts as real, rational, persuasive, organizing meaning and identity, operating as non-negotiable. The vignettes invite recognizing we're all navigating from within thick commitments, making our own frameworks visible to ourselves rather than assuming we've transcended such constraints.

Cultivation of navigational capacities within our traditions. Not abandoning commitments but developing resources within them for encountering difference. If I'm Christian, what resources does Christianity offer for respecting those who aren't? If I'm secular liberal, what enables recognizing religious commitments as more than obstacles to overcome? If I'm committed to Indigenous sovereignty, how does that shape engagement with settler institutions? The vignettes show figures cultivating such resources, deploying them across boundaries, adapting through encounter.

Deployment of those capacities across boundaries even when agreement remains impossible. Jones collaborated with pandits despite theological disagreement. Williams protected Quakers despite doctrinal opposition. Mehmed governed Orthodox Christians, Armenian Christians, and Jews despite different ultimate commitments. The collaboration didn't require convergence but created space for coexistence, sometimes producing unexpected goods (Asiatic Society scholarship, Rhode Island's experiment, modus vivendi stability).

Acknowledgment that outcomes remain uncertain. Navigation never guarantees arrival. We can cultivate virtues, create institutions, pursue collaboration—and still fail to prevent conflict, violence, domination. But we can also succeed in producing goods we didn't fully intend (Jones enabling Indian nationalism, Williams's genealogical influence on First Amendment, Mehmed's institutional legacy inspiring later pluralist arrangements). The uncertainty cuts both ways—can't guarantee success, but also can't predict all consequences.

Invitational Close: The Reader's Navigation Begins

I've offered these vignettes not as demonstrations of a complete theory but as invitations to inquiry—about how intercultural cooperation happens (and fails), what virtues it requires, what constraints it navigates, what ambiguities it cannot resolve. Each reader brings different navigational challenges to this framework, different questions emerging from their positions and concerns.

Those working in international institutions (UN, EU, NGOs) might ask: How do we navigate between universal human rights frameworks (with their particular Western genealogies) and alternative frameworks rooted in different traditions? When does insisting on universal standards enable protection of vulnerable peoples, and when does it reproduce cultural imperialism? How do we recognize our own Tier-2 commitments (liberal individualism, secular proceduralism) while remaining committed to them?

Those in education face questions about curriculum, pedagogy, assessment: How do we teach students to engage traditions different from their own without either relativism (all perspectives equally valid) or hegemony (our framework is universal standard)? What does it mean to cultivate epistemic humility while maintaining scholarly rigor? How do we navigate increasing diversity in classrooms when students bring incommensurable commitments about knowledge, authority, identity?

Those working on climate change confront coordination challenges across societies with radically different values: How do we achieve cooperation necessary for survival when societies disagree about human-nature relationships, individual-collective responsibilities, present-future obligations, technology's role? Can we navigate such differences without imposing one framework as universal solution?

Those engaged in AI governance must navigate questions about whose values shape systems affecting billions: Should algorithms reflect "universal" principles (whose? recognized as whose?), or accommodate diversity (how? without producing chaos?)? How do we navigate within AI infrastructure while cultivating capacities for recognizing its constraints and consequences?

Those working in conflict resolution (Israel-Palestine, Myanmar, Kashmir, others) ask hardest questions: When power asymmetry is extreme, when violence is ongoing, when communities' Tier-2 commitments seem genuinely incompatible, what can navigation offer beyond despair or false optimism? The vignettes don't answer this but show historical cases where cooperation occurred despite unfavorable conditions—and where it failed despite apparent possibilities.

Those simply trying to live ethically amid diversity navigate daily encounters: How do I respect my colleague's religious commitments I find troubling? How do I work with people whose politics seem dangerous? How do I maintain my own convictions while remaining open to others? How do I avoid both relativism and dogmatism? The vignettes suggest these aren't philosophical puzzles to solve once but ongoing practices to cultivate.

The questions have no permanent solutions, only better or worse navigation. Cyrus, Ḥunayn, Mehmed, Williams, and Jones navigated their terrain with varying success, producing outcomes mixing achievement and complicity, breakthrough and failure, intended consequences and unintended appropriations. We navigate still, in terrain structured by their legacies (Indo-European linguistics, soul liberty genealogies, modus vivendi precedents, Orientalist critiques, imperial appropriations) and by our own unacknowledged Tier-2 commitments (liberal individualism, scientific naturalism, democratic proceduralism, human rights universalism, technological solutionism—each with genealogies, constraints, blind spots we struggle to perceive).

"Coping reverently come what may" isn't slogan to repeat but disposition to cultivate—through practice within traditions, through encounter across boundaries, through reflection on what enables cooperation and what forecloses it.

Coping acknowledges we navigate rather than control, responding adaptively to emergent conditions we cannot fully predict or determine. Like Pickering's navigators in Beer's cybernetic systems, we steer toward distant lights without complete maps, adjusting course based on continuous feedback from terrain features we don't control. This isn't passivity or resignation but active engagement with complexity we can't reduce to simple formulas.

Reverently honors what matters deeply—our own commitments and others', the goods at stake in cooperation (knowledge, peace, justice, beauty), the harms risked in its absence (violence, domination, isolation, despair), the agents (human and nonhuman) whose participation we cannot compel but must invite. This isn't relativism treating all commitments as equally valid, but recognition that others' commitments structure their agency as profoundly as ours structure ours. Reverence doesn't mean agreement but acknowledges the seriousness with which people hold what makes their lives meaningful.

Come what may accepts that outcomes emerge from interactions we don't fully control, that moral luck and contingency remain decisive, that genealogical appropriations will claim our achievements for purposes we never imagined, that navigation never ends because terrain keeps shifting. This isn't fatalism but realism about how agency works in complex systems where intentions don't determine results, where feedback loops produce emergent properties, where what we enable matters as much as what we intend.

The framework doesn't tell us where to navigate, only that we are navigating whether we recognize it or not. Recognition itself—seeing the terrain, reading the currents, acknowledging the constraints, recognizing collaborators whose agency we cannot control—is the first step toward navigating more skillfully.

The rest, as always, is practice.

And practice requires beginning. Not with complete theory or perfect virtue or ideal conditions, but with the situation we find ourselves in—the commitments we actually hold, the virtues we've actually cultivated (however imperfectly), the terrain we actually face, the collaborators actually available, the goods actually at stake. The vignettes show figures beginning from where they were, navigating as skillfully as they could, producing mixed legacies we still navigate.

We begin from here. The invitation stands.

Books&Ideas

Saturday, December 27, 2025

Sir William Jones (final vignette) and ending section of essay