Western Civilization: Two Faces

The current Western mechanized and modernized society is like a coin with two faces, one bright and radiant, the other ugly and dark. The bright face reflects its prowess in scientific discoveries, as it harnesses material forces to enrich human life and employ machinery to assist humanity. The ugly face, however, reveals its failure to wisely pursue peace. This failure has led it to focus on warfare, spending exponentially more on tools of destruction than on the infrastructure of peace and development.
In truth, the inability to reconcile these two needs, the need of the individual and the need of the community, has remained a flaw in social thought throughout all eras of human intellectual history.
The ugly face of modern Western mechanized and modernized society is its social philosophy, which falls short of reconciling the needs of the individual with those of the community. [These needs are] the individual's need for absolute individual freedom and the community's need for comprehensive social justice. Indeed, the inability to reconcile these two needs, the need of the individual and the need of the community, has remained a flaw in social thought throughout the history of human philosophy.
Even today, achieving this reconciliation remains the summit against which the glaring deficiencies of philosophical doctrines and intellectual frameworks are measured. It can be said that the unique virtue of Islam becomes most apparent, and utterly unmatched, when it is compared to other ideologies in addressing this lofty challenge.