Thorsten Pattberg

“ Finally, the spiritual East finally identified the material West as the sole competitor for everything that is worthwhile in life: culture, values, wealth and dignity. Yet, because of its inductive cognitive ways, the East could only perceive the West as the short-sighted, destructive force of millions of self-determined individuals who spread out and conquer nature and undermine the great harmony, constantly neglecting the oneness of all things, and dwelling in the minuscule particular. ”

“ As geography betrays us, on any Asian map of the world, the USA lies to the East. It is only natural to conclude that the only distinction between East and West that matters today, as I said before, is their different modes of thinking, and that, due to declining population in the West, a selection of Eastern people will (voluntarily or not) immigrate - not to conquer the declining West but to strengthen the equilibrium. And equilibrium it will be, for to reform either side’s civilization would mean, let us make no mistake, to discount that side’s history, beliefs, ancestors... ”

“ Despite the evidences of the “other humanity”, a civilization that went down the inductive path, ship after ship of enthusiastic but ignorant Western scholars set their sails for Asia, their eyes set on analyzing and deconstructing the hype and propaganda of ‘the exotic Other’, denying the existence of the East-West dichotomy, ignoring all warnings, only to discover the same old truth all over again: The East constitutes an entirely different type of humanity: it is holistic, non-analytic and spiritual – it is integration-based. ”

“ As for common sense, a people’s good intentions, or bad ones, are useless to interfere with scientific laws. If there is a scientific reason behind why the all-so powerful West never dies, yet on the other hand, no matter how many trials of conquest, colonialism, and intimidation, never turned the East into the West either; is there not a quench of realism in the idea to assume that the very dichotomy of East and West is essentially a natural trait of the human race? ”

“ The separation of knowledge from ethics, or let us say a ‘value-free knowledge’ is what most obviously distinguished the Greek/Hellenistic/European civilization from all the others. For the deductive West, everything in the universe can be considered a potentially usable object that must be studied and manipulated so as to serve ‘man and his cause’. This ‘man and his cause’, in the good old days of British Empire, meant, of course, the ‘British aristocracy and her cause’, but – during the European renaissance - had quickly turned into ‘Western man and his Western cause’. ”

“ The East and the inductive ways in which it excels are seen as the solution to humankind’s problems. If this world is truly to become a more stable, peaceful, albeit more complicated, ‘integrated’ place, a better place, as everyone now seems to believe it should, then the ‘integration-based’ 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! ”

“ Why had the evolution of cultures let to this equilibrium of the two great cultural systems, the occidental and the oriental one, the inductive East and the deductive West, with no third ever been invented? ”

“ Surely, there must be more wisdom than Western science in this world:
Perhaps in return for conquest, arrogance and spoliation, India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of the mature mind, the quiet content of the unacquisitive soul, the calm of the understanding spirit, and a unifying, a pacifying love for all living things. ”

“ Linguistic distance correlates with cultural distance - only if one has gone through the painful ordeal of mastering a foreign language will one understand and appreciate the foreign culture and its distinctive values beneath it.
Some feminists, and also men can be great feminists, have argued, that the whole image of ‘Asian playthings’ is the construct of an obsessive Western mind. But then, so is the stock market and French cuisine. No idea that has occupied so many minds over hundreds of years can be that far away from the actuality of human life. ”

“ Once these Asian technologies ‘popped up’ in the West, the European nations took their chances, developed the sciences, increased industrial output, perfected weaponry, boiled the noodle, and set out to conquer and divide the globe among themselves. Only then the West invented patents, copy rights and laws to ensure it would forever stay in power, cunningly assuming that – as I explained before - evolution, even the evolution of sciences, is a gradual, progressive development, and whoever ‘patents’ its beginnings legally owns its progress. ”

“ Then and before the Great Wars, who could ever possible unite all Europeans in order to face the civilizations of the East? The Englishman always knew what was Right, it was not Right for them to set foot on the continent, nor to aspire rule over Europe. In Europe, they made no great leaders either. ”

“ Meanwhile, after jointly winning the Great War in 1948, those self-exiled remnants of the European civilization, calling themselves the U.S.A., by now militarily and economically evolved into a European warrior-based culture, returned to Eurasia and essentially revived Europe, swept through this former cradle of capitalism, democracy and the free market economy, refined all theories, and build its military and cultural bases all over the place, yet with their eyes fixed on the perceived menaces from Asia. ”

“ The East is mind, the West is matter; The East is spirit, the West is substance; The East is inductive, the West is deductive; The East takes man and nature as inseparable parts; the West takes man as the conqueror of nature.
(Li Dazhao, 2006)
Li Dazhao’s observations are in line with how Western scientists generally perceive themselves and their abusive relation with nature: Only let mankind regain their rights over nature, assigned to them by the gift of God, and obtain that power, whose exercise will be governed by right reason and true religion. ”

“ Indeed, the huge transformation of Western key societies into fissiparous, multicultural hubs fits the equation of the East-West equilibrium as a global theory: Migration is in direct reciprocity, for the greater good, a strategy of mutual cooperation and – unconsciously, but we’d rather say voluntary – the natural response to any human demographic shortcomings on this planet. Without having to care about race, but this time only about culture, Western ranks are filled with an over-surplus of human capital from the East ”

“ After communism was ‘ejected’, and after the demise of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, that same process of ‘ejection’ is now taking place with ‘harmoniousness’, and all ideas about tolerance that go with it.
The West, despite all its patronization and sympathy for Asia, is fundamentally rejecting the Asian “inclusive approach” right from under our very eyes. The more of Asia is insisting on the universal of ‘oneness’, ‘balance’, ‘harmony’, or ‘integration’: “Our goal is a harmonious world!” the more those theories become hers, and hers alone. ”

“ Isn’t it more reasonable to think that branches or sub-branches of history may die off, wither, break, become lost or forgotten rather than ‘to clash’? Surely, if the militant West wishes a clash (of civilization) , a clash it will be, albeit an uninspiring, unimaginative, and utterly useless one. This so, because the Western hemisphere still does not wholly appreciate the grand alternative and worthy goal of engaging the East based on mutual respect and towards an “inclusive approach”. ”

“ Looking at ‘World History’ - on the one side the rational, incredible West who ends all other ‘histories’ 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. ”

“ Western modernity is to be overcome by the Eastern religious mind.
While the vigorous deductive West had to occupy foreign terrain, build churches and spread the Gospel, the inductive East entertained certain passivity, albeit with a long-term holistic world view: We firmly believe, no matter how long it requires, the day will be with us when universal peace and the world of oneness will finally come true. ”

“ Even the slightest sign of a nearing of ‘wholeness’, ‘harmoniousness’ and ‘oneness’ is now reminding the West of its past ‘failures’ and ‘shame’ and thus, in the eyes of any analytical-deductive Westerner, must be avoided at all costs.
The final reckoning was considered only a matter of time, in Gandhi’s words, until that ‘other’, be it nature or man, in a most subtle manner strikes back on its tormenter and destroys the illusion of Western-sciences-only validity:
This [Western] civilization is such that one only has to be patient, and it will be self-destroyed. ”

“ About the ‘methods’, the ‘what’ and ‘how’, the ‘German Auschwitzes’ or the Japanese ‘Rape of Nankings’, there is so much written today, that I shall only add this jewel: against all the hypocrisy of Western educationalist about the unbelievable cruel methods used to annihilate one’s enemy, all those methods are the least difficult to comprehend for any serious student of history. ”

“ In the history books of ancient China, often still influencing the style and way of thought in today’s textbooks, there are: generalizations; generalizations; the thought that China is a single entity; more generalization; the idea that all Chinese think and feel the same; that all China is ‘one’, all people are ‘one’, all have ‘one’ moral code; and that ‘China’ pins itself and all of its history against the ‘Other’ barbarians surrounding China (Nolde, 1966, Huan et. al, 1997) . ”

“ Well, since it was European missionaries who pro-actively entered China and taught the Chinese, not some Chinese missions to Europe, and since the Western missionaries were believed to possess the religion of truth and analytical sciences, how was it possible that an atheist, non-analytical civilization like China nevertheless had developed into an intelligent, fully-functional society that in countless fields like art, agriculture, astronomy, economics, logistic, medicine and mechanics was more advanced than its European counterparts. ”

“ For the integration-based East on the other hand, what might be called ‘truth’ is given at any time (the ‘one’) and always justifiable through ‘being a part of the whole’. In other words, there are many truths, many more than the West can bear, and the mere existence of the more inductive East as an alternative a priori to the more deductive West qualifies it to provide a genuine, believable non-Western experience of history: history as a non-directional but time-less tangible realm. ”

“ The notion of the share of labor makes me think that the division of an analytically-based West and an integration-based East could be no coincidence in human evolution, but a collective behavior to fully exploit and develop all the cognitive capacities of the human race. Note that there is nothing in this world that is not shared by all humankind. ”

“ Today, virtually every piece of scientific and economical history has been tried on the Eastern people to demonstrate the - seemingly irrefutable - fact that the West was and (still) is the single most important and the only leading creative force of humankind. In fact, the only way for a person of Hindu, Arab or Chinese background to get some personal integrity in this world was to become westernized, study in Western universities, or work for a Western international cooperation. The East it seemed was never in the position to ask for anything, except for trouble. ”

“ To my knowledge, there is no equivalent of such spiritual – seemingly naïve - sense of unity in recent European history.
In contrast, Western societies, after a long history of assertiveness and expansion, so it seems, do not conquer anymore, they converge. While in the analytical-based West today it is inevitably the minuscule individual in multiculturalism (EU, USA, AUS, CDN, NZ) , in the integration-based East it is still the collective nation in numbers (China, Indian, but also Russia, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea, and the Middle East) . ”

“ Many of Eastern immigrants, including most of the Europeans themselves, believe that European culture has killed the Indians, developed slavery, colonized and exploited the Third World, brought war and misery to the human cause, and, in its most extreme form of expression: thus should be cleaned from the surface of the world, obviously not by war but by silent assimilation. ”

“ 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 “oneness”, and the key to it is kept in the East. ”

“ Same faithful Europeans who believed in God and the scientific ways, and – sensing a lack both of religion and science in China – assumed there had been no scientific advancement in China before the European arrival. Not quite a fair observation, as we know today. It is true that before the introduction of Western sciences, there had been indeed no need for foreign axioms. But that was simply because East-Asia had cultivated its own practical driven mathematics, primarily relying on induction and analogical reasoning. ”

“ Not that the U.S.A. or European nations do not have there own ideas about harmoniousness, far from it, they have various, often fragmentary, even conflicting ideas about it. They always have. After the ‘ejection’ of communism from the Western hemisphere, in the case of dialectical materialism, all major parties of Western capitalistic democracies quickly found their own ways to attend to and satisfy its people and to curb production and the accumulation of material wealth, and it all happened without turning human beings into submissive production units with no human rights. ”

“ The West, as I understand it, has been the victorious. That’s why Japan correctly joined the club after 1900 when defeating Russia, invading China, Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia, and in spite of being defeated in WW2 became the world’s second biggest market economy after the USA. In 2004, China finally challenged the West too by overtaking Great Britain in terms of GDP and became the 4th biggest market economy. With India surpassing Britain in 2010, is the West no more than a geographical entity? ”