{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/wikisource_The_East_West_dichotomy_Chapter_15/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/wikisource_The_East_West_dichotomy_Chapter_15","id":"wikisource_The_East_West_dichotomy_Chapter_15","license":"Public Domain / CC-BY-SA (see source)","rights_basis":"wikisource_site_inclusion_policy","source":"wikisource","source_url":"https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_East-West_dichotomy/Chapter_15","summary":null,"tags":["Headers_applying_DefaultSort_key","Subpages"],"text":"Looking at \u2018World History\u2019 - on the one side the rational, incredible West who ends all other \u2018histories\u2019 and promotes the universal language, English, and on the other side the intuitive, incredible East who closes the historic circuit and integrates the universal language, English - in this century, the 21st, it is nevertheless the East who holds a considerable advantage: It is the bigger phenomenon.\n\nLet us make no mistake: communism and capitalism were made for scale and the masses, and scale and masses are now in Asia. So are numbers. So are the world\u2019s greatest challenges such as food shortages, pollution, environmental destruction, population explosions, youth bulges, and terrorism, all things literally crying out for more (global) attention. The bigger \u2013 or, as we talk about history, the greater the phenomenon a theory describes is, the greater that theory\u2019s becomes. In the past, great phenomena often happened in isolation and did not automatically call for global attention. For example, the intellectual output of India is legendary; her civilization is older than the Greeks (c. 3300 BC); India taught the West how to count; it conquered and dominated China, Korea, and Japan culturally (I am talking, of course, about Buddhism) for twenty centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border (Hu Shi [\u80e1\u9002], 1891-1962), it was the source of enlightenment for Europe, and the main source of German philosophy in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Similar, China during the early Ming Dynasty (1368-1421) accounted for roughly 25-30% of the world\u2019s GDP, while the combined GDP of the European nations was only close to 20% (Needham, 1963; Maddison, 2006; Spence, 2001). One could say then, that China and India had indeed been \u2018great phenomena\u2019. Once the \u2018potential\u2019 of those \u2018great phenomena\u2019, those two great Eastern giants, had echoed in the West, that indeed could have been one among the many important reasons why the small European states \u2013 with all their trials of Eastern expansion, colonialism, and imperialism \u2013 always seemed to have a greater interest in Asia \u2013 its technologies, wealth, land and resources \u2013 than it was the other way round, but this, of course, is just speculation.\n\nWhat is not a speculation is that Europe never turned enough attention to were it gets more complicated: the religious, ethical, and sociological wisdom of the East. Or better, that religious, ethical, and sociological wisdom that had been created by the East, which had not been created by the West. Today, times have changed and the great wheel of fortune has turned, and China and India and the other Asian states provide golden opportunities for theoretical innovations, the creation of new values, more than in any other part of the world (Lin, 2006). Thus, the 21st century is very likely to be the century of the \u201cChinese economist\u201d and the \u201cIndian computer scientists\u201d, both countries already producing more university graduates than the United States or Europe, which, of course, themselves heavily rely on tens of thousands of Asian graduates and those priceless connections these graduates will mean for the future competitiveness of the Western societies.\n\nHaving established that Asia, in this century, constitutes the greater phenomenon than Europe and America, why then should someone think that the Chinese culture or any other East-Asian culture is the sorry victim of westernization?\n\nOn the contrary, isn\u2019t it the case that not the West but the East is now nurturing World History? Where are today\u2019s Western politicians, historians, men-of-letters who stand up to the truth? \u2018World History\u2019 is becoming genuine not European, (let alone American, which is but an extension of the history of the Eurasian people). Are Western leaders afraid that their countrymen are not mature enough to face the \u2018other humanity\u2019, the East, unless they are assured it is an inferior one?\n\nChina had encountered numerous invasions, like the Liao (907-1125 AD), Jin (during Northern Song, 1115-1234) or Jurchen, Yuan (1271-1368) or Mongols, and Qing (1644-1911) or Manchus, yet she absorbed them all. India in the 10h century alone was invaded seventeen times by the Muslim Mahmud Ghaznavi and his successors, by the Mongol Empire in 1221-1327, and, starting from the 15th century onwards, by the Portuguese, Dutch, French and British. Both China and India have assimilated or spilled out each and every invader. Furthermore, Russia, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea, Myanmar, Indonesia - none of these places appears to me as if the West had \u2018taken over\u2019. Even Japan, that so-called American Geisha Ally (Shibusawa, 2006), is so entirely different in its religious, cultural, ideological and psychological appearance, that to call it a Western progeny is an insult to Japan, its long history and its people. Lastly, no Muslim or Arab state, not even the occupied Iraq or Afghanistan strike me as Western \u201ccolonies\u201d either, quite the opposite: many people thing it was Islam which brought down the US hegemony (by attacking the Twin Towers), and is Islam (and the Middle East) which is now felt as the next future force to be reckoned with \u2013 and, as an alternative cultural mode, it is certainly \u2018besieging Europe\u2019 (minorityinfo, 2008).\n\nWhat could be meant by this so-called westernization, if not the process of self-actualization of non-Western people and nations? No one would think about the West westernizing itself. The East is studying the ways of the deductive West and gets stronger; I ask: what did the West learn from the inductive East to get stronger?\n\nNot much, because it is not in their natures to switch roles easily. That particular, aggressively progressive element of the materialistic-driven \u201cWest in the East\u201d has always been hopelessly outnumbered, short-sighted: it either complied or else had to leave for good - \u2018good\u2019 as in \u2018de-colonialism\u2019. Naturally, the pattern has never changed and the destructive, dividing-and-conquering Europeans kept coming back, and they are still keep coming back today (if not in the form of the their latest version, the war-loving, self-righteous Americans), not with their swords and guns if not necessary, but with their pens and patents; all the same, the West is now all about the East: World History is now all about the great phenomena; World History is about the final universal \u201coneness\u201d, and the key to it is kept in the East.\n\nUnderstandably, there is a most delicate degree of difference between let us say the prophet tempting the disciple or the disciple tempting the prophet.; or: the human subjectivity deluding the world\u2019s objectivity or the world\u2019s objectivity deluding human subjectivity. Does not the East-West relationship, after its great derailment, facing a similar dilemma too? Is it not high time for a shift of paradigm, a \u2018copernican revolution\u2019 similar to that of Galileo in the field of astronomy and that of Kant in the field of metaphysics before? For 2,500 years of the East-West dichotomy, we were tempted into the belief that the human universe consists of the West at its core with all the other cultures revolving around this core. \u2018World history\u2019 worked that way.\n\nNow, after having compiled so much evidence in this little book, I am not so convinced any more about that Western core. From the Eastern point of view, the distant peripheral Europe and America had the historical sense of mission to manipulate the East \u2013 the core. In physics, the core is always the most passive, most unwavering element. Passive and unwavering is how the West perceives the East.\n\nBy the above definition, Europe and North America are understood as the active, peripheral forces revolving around whatever stable, passive and irremovable it is that occupies the core of the human universe - like the two hands molding a precious vase. However, the deductive West did not add any substance; it only formed, divided, conquered, ruled for a time, it invented thousand of new rules, new regulations, then did not know what to do next, it had no sense for Eastern substance and spirituality, and, alas, so bad the West was at human relationships, be it in form of missionaries, conquerors, soldiers, bankers or businessmen\u2026 the deductive West left its material imprints and emotional scars, but nothing that could transform the East into West.\n\nThere is a very active Western part\u2026 some Western nations recently fought tooth and nails on Eastern soil during the Cold War, and now the West is back again with thousands of business contracts and globalizing catechisms. Asia is indeed very busy, busy studying all those new theories and techniques from the various Western \u2018invaders\u2019, infinitively more so than the invaders could possibly learn or could possibly be willing to learn from the East\u2026 yet, all the same, it is the inductive East that attracts all these energies, all this Western attention. This pattern of the Western nations revolving around Asia makes me think that\u2026 it is the East who is at the core, one could say: the East, roughly since 1950, has not only become (again) the world greatest phenomenon, but has also, slowly, shifted to the center of gravity of World History. The East and the inductive ways in which it excels are seen as the solution to humankind\u2019s problems. If this world is truly to become a more stable, peaceful, albeit more complicated, \u2018integrated\u2019 place, a better place, as everyone now seems to believe it should, then the \u2018integration-based\u2019 East and the inductive ways are not only destined to play a greater role in all human and world affairs, they will also stand to that core!","title":"The East-West dichotomy/Chapter 15","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":1577}