A closer look at the values of progress presented in Chapter Two shows that, despite the different characteristics of human civilizations, ancient and new, they are values that belong to the whole of humanity, to the march of human civilization in general, rather than to any specific civilization. As civilizations rose and fell, humanity was moving steadily ahead on a course that transcended the fortunes of this or that civilization. Thus human history proceeded along two parallel courses simultaneously: the march of civilization and the evolution of humanity, and the values of progress owe their existence more to the latter than to the former. The failure to recognize that humanity is higher and more sublime than any civilization can only lead to racism and fanaticism. There is no disputing the fact that every civilization has drawn on the cumulative experiences of other contemporary or earlier civilizations and weaved them into the fabric of its own culture complex.

    Given the undeniable existence of a common fund of human experience, a “cumulative legacy” as it were, built up through the ages in such fields as mathematics and other applied sciences, how is this common legacy assimilated into human consciousness, which is the repository of values? If we admit that much of modern mathematics came from Ancient Greece, that modern music owes much to Aristotle, that the Latin-Germanic lawmakers based their codification on the principles propounded in the Roman Justinian Code, and if a great Egyptologist like James Henry Breasted found an undeniable link between the highest contemporary value systems and those in force in Ancient Egypt, which he called the 'Dawn of Conscience', we cannot fail to see that as culture ranks below civilization, civilization ranks below humanity.

    Students of history will find that all civilizations, whether ancient or modern, were based on the values referred to in Chapter Two. They will also find that when these values move from one civilization to another, they undergo a process of development and refinement which, on the one hand, represents the contribution of the host civilization to humanity and, on the other,   way stations on the road to developing these values further by elevating them to a higher plane and opening new vistas before them. This does not negate the fact that the contribution of some civilizations to this refining process has been greater than others. For example, by far the largest contribution to developing the contemporary values of work has been made by western civilization which, as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, provided a favourable climate for the refinement and consecration of these values. Still, the values of progress in general and the values of work (including modern management concepts) in particular have been developed over the ages by humanity at large and not by any specific civilization, even if the ability of the West to put them to optimal use makes them appear to be products of western civilization.

    The “humanistic” nature of these values is borne out by the fact that in the course of only one century, the twentieth, they passed over from an environment that was purely western to others which followed altogether different models of civilization, such as Japan and tens of countries in Asia and Latin America, which adopted these values as part of their culture complex and put them to use in fueling the engine of their remarkable economic growth. This proves that even if at one stage they took root and flourished in a western environment, they are, in the final analysis, human, not western values.