The following paper was presented at Telos in Europe: The L’Aquila Conference, held on September 7-9, 2012, in L’Aquila, Italy.
We live in an age of History Wars.
Most of them are national in focus.
There is, however, one that touches on the issue of Western civilization, and that is the perceived conflict between Western civilization and world history.
Advocates of world history castigate Western civilization for pretending to be universal when, in fact, it is partial and prejudiced.
Perhaps Carl Schmitt would agree: more than ever before, we live today immersed within the spirit of technicity. Coined by Schmitt, the notion of the spirit of technicity serves the analytical purpose of allowing him to distinguish between the belief in technology and technology itself. Whereas technology signals the factual development of mechanistic progress and its link to natural science, the spirit of technicity, in Schmitt’s own words, is “perhaps an evil and demonic spirit, but not one which can be dismissed as mechanistic and attributed to technology” (141). 
