Politics: Once there were just men and women - Mars and Venus nodding to each other, sometimes pairing, often colliding, in their shared galaxy. The difference in their mentality, their abilities, their nature, was so striking that they might have come from a different planet, writes Bill McSweeney.
For any who doubted it, the Book of Genesis and biology confirmed for us that god and nature had divided the species into separate entities. And that was only 50 years ago.
A revolutionary change took place in that short period. The scales dropped from our eyes until we now see the extent to which sexual and gender difference was just a social convenience, a consequence of human choice, not divine anointing.
Such is the sceptical temper of today that it is difficult to imagine how we deluded ourselves for so long, or how we might fall for something like that again - believing that any one way of defining human nature and organising society was natural and valid for all. We are all muckrakers today, surely - all experts in uncovering the interests at the root of universal claims, of the "disinterested" exercise of power.
In the political arena, fascism and communism were attempts to project as universal a set of values arising from partisan choices and interests. And in the economic sphere today, just such an experiment is underway in the massive reconstruction of the international order following September 11th and the war in Iraq. It is the subject of John Gray's provocative, misleadingly titled and irritating essay.
More accurately, it is one of two quite distinct ideas which he explores. One concerns the idea of modernity, and challenges the claim that al-Qaeda is a throwback to medieval styles of belief and organisation. On the contrary, he says, bin Laden and his associates are products of the same western modernity which generated fascism and communism, while at the same time being modernity's greatest enemy.
This is tilting at windmills and is muddled - it is trivially true that al- Qaeda is modern in elements of its tactics and organisation, but it is profoundly anti-modernist in its theological orientation.
The second thesis explores the meaning of modernity and is more interesting. It claims that our inheritance from the Enlightenment has left us in thrall to the idea of inevitable progress through the triumph of science; that such progress is not only ours for the taking in the technological sphere but in every dimension of human existence.
Deriving from the positivism of Saint- Simon and Comte in the 19th century, the modernist project dogmatically proclaimed the belief that science would recreate the human condition. Comte promoted a utopian vision of history from which - inevitably - science would triumph over ethics to banish poverty and war and to refashion the world in its own rational image.
It is this same vision, writes Gray, which drives the current US project of projecting the global free-market economy as the natural arrangement for the satisfaction of human needs, and as the inevitable outcome of the course of human history. Like Hegel, Marx, and Fukuyama, the imperial design of current US foreign policy is predicated on the emergence of a universal civilisation and the end of history.
In recent times, Gray writes, the so-called "laws of economics" have been invoked to support the idea that the "free market" should be the model for economic life everywhere: "Americans see their country as embodying universal values. Other countries see the American way of life as one among many . . ."
Gray cites key documents of the Bush administration to demonstrate how the naïve tenets of the Enlightenment underpin the strategy of the White House to promote US-style capitalism throughout the world - in the belief, as the president expressed it, that the US system embodies "the only sustainable model of human development".
Gray is correct, I believe, but his case is weakened by the paucity of supporting evidence and lifeless prose. His sweeping claim that Asia views the US project "with incredulity, if not contempt" might be interesting if we knew what it meant and how the author knows it to be true.
The book by Benjamin Barber was published in 1995 in the US, but this is its first UK publication. Contrary to some critics at the time - misled perhaps by its confusing title, yet again - Barber's book is neither a rage against global capitalism nor a rant against Islam, still less a foretaste of apocalyptic struggle between the two. It is a study of democracy and of "the dangers democracy faces in a world where the forces of commerce and the forces reacting to commerce are locked in struggle".
It is all the more interesting to read today, in conjunction with Gray's argument against the universalism of US practices and ideals. "It is not capitalism", he writes, "but unrestrained capitalism counterbalanced by no other system of values that endangers democracy."
The US is turned on by consumerism, and believes it has a divine mandate to market its preferred lifestyle to the entire globe under the universal brand name of "freedom". But consumer choice is not freedom or democracy, and the attempt to export it as such is a form of totalitarianism.
If we could see through the myth that men are from Mars and women from Venus, we should not fall for the fiction that the whole human race is from Fifth Avenue.
Bill McSweeney teaches International Politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin
Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern. By John Gray, Faber, 145pp, £10.99
Jihad vs McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy. By Benjamin R. Barber, Corgi, 389pp, £7.99