The 1st Annual International Symposium on: 

Sey-yed Nourod-din Shah Nematollah Vali 

October 11-12, 2002

Morris Dailey Auditorium

  San Jose State University (SJSU), San Jose, California, USA

         SSNV PAPER: 

            CIVILIZATION: A GLOBAL JOURNEY

A very brief autobiography of Professor Majid Tehranian:

Majid Tehranian is professor of international communication at the University of Hawaii and director of the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research. A graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard, Tehranian's publications include 20 books and more than 100 articles in over a dozen languages. He also edits Peace & Policy as well as the Toda Institute Book Series. This essay presents a draft of chapter 1 of his forthcoming book, Civilization: A Global Journey. Comments and criticisms would be most welcomed. Email: majid@hawaii.edu Website: www2.hawaii.edu/~majid

A glance at Professor Tehranian's speech:

Civilization has been often employed as an ideology to assert ethnocentric prejudices that promote myths of racial or cultural superiority. This essay argues that in reality there is only a single Majestic Tree of Global Civilization to which all nations have contributed by their scientific, technological, and cultural feeders. As in a relay marathon, the torch of global civilization has been handed from nation to nation for the last seven million years of human life on earth. The spiritual unity of all sentient beings in the universe is the foundation stone of global civilization and its secret of survival.