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In this article, the author assumes that Western civilization (found in Western and Eastern Europe, North America, the USSR, and Muslim societies) has been dominant in the world, and he explores the positive and negative effects of this civilizational penetration on Hindu, Sinic and Nipponic traditions. Approaching the investigation from a cosmological perspective, he argues that civilizations are in incessant interaction – lending, borrowing, sending, receiving, imposing and submitting as people, things and ideas move in space and time. The consequences of interaction are twofold: (1) it gives rise to similarities in deep structures and ideologies of otherwise dissimilar civilizations; (2) it could mitigate the dominance of one civilization across time. Applied to Western penetration, this analysis suggests that during a period of expansion, the dominant civilization transmits its central themes to civilizations unable to resist penetration through isolation (the Sinic case) or through economic-military countermeasures (the Nipponic case). (Hindu civilization is a class apart, since its extraordinary richness enables it to both absorb and modify external influences.) As the dominant civilization becomes overextended, it enters a period of contraction marked by some openness to civilizations in the expansion mode. This process is iterative. The author concludes that Western European and North American aspects of Western civilization (the inner West) are in contraction while Islam, East European and Soviet forms are expanding, and the remaining civilizations are occidentalizing. Thus, the inner West, which is basically dominance-oriented and exploitative in the expansion mode, may now be ready to enter a dialogue with less aggressive cosmologies, with potentially important consequences for global civilization.

Culturist and rationalist explanations for behavior have vied for preeminence with no resolution of their contradictory assumptions. Moral development theory, with its richer psychological framework, provides a solution to this dilemma. It provides, as well, a fresh insight into the causes of deviance. A brief case study of corruption in Nigeria and a more extensive analysis of corruption in China prior to the Tiananmen incident are the major comparative examples. The article makes clear how people endanger a political system by the pursuit of ends that are justified by parochial and developmentally weak moral orientations.