East–West Schism

“ Remarkably, the East-West dichotomy, as if an invisible hand dealt the right cards, still persists to determine world affairs and history despite long and enduring phases of centrism, trials of expansion, colonialism and empire, alliances and ganging-ups, rivalry or false beliefs in superiority. What makes us think then that the disparity of East and West can be best explained by anything other than a law of nature? ”

“ The two ways of thinking in the history of civilizations are reflected in humankind’s approach towards ‘communism’ and now towards ‘harmoniousness’. The East is pursuing the story in an inclusive form; the West segregates the beliefs of different regions separately. The West does not identify itself with the “inclusive approach” and right now is ejecting the ‘harmonizers’, like the ‘communists’ before them, out of the Western ideological hemisphere. ”

“ Any reader knowledgeable in the history of thought will have noticed that pre-war Germany, in an incredible shift of paradigm later supervised by the Nazis, had cultivated upon their soil of a pure Apollonian Western culture the mindset of a collective, emotional, sexual, mystic, fertile, revolutionary Dionysian Eastern soul – with disastrous consequences for the well-being of Europe. ”

“ Because the human geopolitical situation is a mere extension of our physical and cognitive systems inherent in each of us, we have reason to believe that our societies will continue to be predominantly dualistic in the near future, with an integration-based Eastern hemisphere and an analytically-based Western hemisphere. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A discovery of revolutionary proportions in the evolution of culture: an entire civilization, the East, goes down a more induction-based path, arriving at universals; while another civilization, the West, goes down the exact opposite, a more deduction-based path, arriving at particulars? If that is what happened, it would constitute a discovery of great consequences; it would mean that Western superior history has been ideologically and methodically biased, if not inherently flawed, throughout the ages: The academic discipline of history is inevitably ideological in essence. ”

“ Similar to the German misery, this misery of Japan, too, was initiated by the careless communion of the inductive Eastern and deductive Western souls, causing untold suffering and pain. Fortunately, when Russian and Chinese souls adopted to Western-minded communism, they refined it in the last minute, calling it Stalinism and Maoism, yet look at what destruction and pity the communion of Eastern and Western souls still caused to their people. ”

“ As a consequence, in a Western dominated world no one could care less about “equilibrium is the great foundation of the world, and harmony is its path“ (Zi Si, Zhong Yong, 1) , “the function of rites (‘li’) lies in harmoniousness” (Confucius, Lun Yu 1;12) , or “to live with a culture is to understand that culture” (Laozi, 54) . It is indeed very difficult to conceive that today’s Obama, Sarkozy, Brown or Merkel would favor ‘oneness’ over ‘westernization’; most unlikely candidate of it all: the Chinese dream of ‘tianxia’ (天下, All under heaven) . ”

“ Accordingly, Western nations act as if they ‘own’ the globe, history, and all material objects. As soon as Asian nationals lay hands on any matters material or any theories about matters material, that very action is deemed a service to ‘westernization, as if there was a Western patent on matter and modernity. There are Western tourists in Singapore, Shanghai, Yokohama, who genuinely believe that every house, bank, pair of high-heels, traffic lights, newspapers, computers, trains or cars are a genuine extension of Western civilization. ”

“ 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”. ”

“ Russell’s analysis of China is completed by a promise, namely that the Chinese civilization alone has the power to easily supersede - economically and intellectually - all European states combined if only they adopt Western science to defend themselves against aggression but otherwise stay faithful to their own fine civilization (Russell, 1922) . For those who did not believe in China’s potential ‘other’ civilization, Russell had this warning:
The Chinese demand Western science. But they do not demand the adoption of the Western philosophy of life. ”

“ Indeed, after all the recent pre-emptive strikes on terrorists and failed states, the irreversible process of ‘westernization’ and ‘globalization’, the tiresome break with each and every civic code of mutual respect and non-interference in any nation’s internal affairs, and the desire to conquer nature and, if necessary, the traditional people and tribes that made a pact with nature – how can we not say that the deductive West is rejecting thoroughly, entirely the inductive Eastern notion of ‘harmoniousness’? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 rational, analytic, deductive Western Germans, consciously or unconsciously indulged into the spiritual misson to make Europe ‘coherent’, and ‘uniform’ – they wanted to easter-fy it. By doing that, by adopting the inductive Eastern ways, some historians believe German orientalism had “helped to destroy Western self-satisfaction, and to provoke a momentous change in the culture of the West: the relinquishing of Christianity and classical antiquity as universal norms” (Marchand, 2001) . ”

“ History speaks for itself: in the following 50 years, according to the United Nations, there were 118 wars (compared to 57 in the first half of the century) , not surprisingly most of them driven or fuelled by anti-Western sentiments, most notably the Cold War (1950-1989) . ”

“ Today the West is helpless and in disbelieve, starring at the (until now peaceful) rise of not one, recovering Russia, but more than eleven new players: China, India, and the nine Tiger States, plus the world’s number two standing superpower, Japan.
In order to understand the mechanics of ‘history’s darkest events’ caused by a inner-world, monstrous, deadly psychology, the communion of Eastern and Western souls, this concept, we have to talk again about Right and Tact. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Not to die in dying is to live on” (Kumarajiva, 2008) .
What then is the problem with Europe? Why don’t they unify, become ‘one’? I will argue, that in 2500 years of its history, there has never been the concept of ‘oneness’, and ‘harmoniousness’ in the European collective mind. Goethe said: “There are two peaceful powers in this world: Right and Tact” (Goethe, 1833) . And Gu Hongming noticed: “希伯来人的文明宗教教导欧洲人正义的知识,但没有教导礼法. (The Religion in the civilization of the Hebrew people taught the people in Europe the knowledge of Right, but it did not teach Tact (Gu, 1922) . ”

“ That’s a no-no in the Western world, where we expect the unwavering truth - and one truth only.
China in particular never made any great attempts of covering her own truths and her aim to hold up Eastern values and wisdoms (why should the East throw away its 5000 years of successful history and culture?) , and at the same time profit from the practicability of foreign learning; her ability to adopt herself, even if it meant aggressively copying from the Western others:
师夷之长技以制夷。
Study the foreigners so that you will have the upper hand over them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In Russia, in Greece, in Asia Minor—wherever the Orthodox Church still retains a hold on her children—one cannot help being edified by the piety, the zeal, the deep religious spirit of innumerable thousands who are not only ignorant of the cause of the schism that separates them from the Church of Rome but are also ignorant that they have even been in schism. Of those, however, who are acquainted with the origin of the Great Schism there are many who ardently hope and pray that it may soon be healed. ”

“ Based on its analytical, deduction-based approach and narrow views on the complexities of nature and history, the West lost its view on the holistic, long-term future relationships, consciously or unconsciously indulging itself with the uncertainties and often banalities of a postmodern, utterly deconstructed and individualist world. ”

“ What the German orientalists and politicians prior to 1938 suggested – leaning towards Eastern-inflected Mackinder’s heartland theory (1904) , Max Müller’s Aryan supremacy (1892) , and Nietzsche’s prophetic Übermensch (1885) - was that the Western hemisphere needs a domesticated super-race of Aryans in order to occupy Eurasia and counter the disciplined, ever increasing and expanding powers of the East hemisphere. Germany feared the rising inductive East, not the deductive West, of which it was already the most powerful culture. ”

“ Accordingly, in the same way as some cultures hold belief in one, many, or no gods at all, they also have different ways of perceiving the world and reasoning about it: Western civilization became analysis-based while the Orient became integration-based. ”

“ Appearances can make happy, indeed. What appears to the integration-based Eastern nations as a continuation of their own traditional search for ‘oneness’ and ‘harmoniousness’, that same process appears to the Europeans and Americans as the ingenious, creative deconstruction of the East, the processes of total ‘westernization’. ”

“ To conclude, the argument that East and West look at the same history albeit from different angles, is to be refuted: History is not localized, nor is it something hung out to be looked at. Quite the contrary, we have every reason to believe that the two hemispheres not only interpret each other’s history differently, but irreversible experience their very own history, and that the only way to experience one’s own history differently from the others or misinterpret the others’ differently, is an exclusive set of cognitive ability – the East is more inductive while the West is more deductive. ”

“ As a matter of perception, till today, the Western ways are universally associated with ‘war’, ‘aggression”, and ‘exclusiveness’, while the Eastern ways are associated with ‘peace’, ‘tranquility’, and ‘inclusiveness’; notwithstanding both hemispheres showing the tendencies to project their own psychological outlook onto the other. For the vast majority of Americans and Europeans, Asia is a place for all those fanatics, dictators, terrorists, and immature cultures. ”