Westernization

“ Today’s de-Westernization is not only taken place in the obvious places like China, Japan, Russia, Korea etc., but also in the Middle East, Africa, and South-East Asia. Many people have serious doubts about the West, its intentions and deeply flawed views. ”

“ The fact is that the majority of Orientals, despite the considerable penetration of Western ideas and methods that has been going on for the last century, still love [Pg 95] their old ruts and hate to be budged out of them. They realize that Western rule furthers more than anything else the Westernization of their social system, their traditional manner of life, and they therefore tend to react fanatically against it. Every innovation imposed by the colonial authorities is apt to rouse the most purblind resistance. ”

“ The simplification of life, the decrease of "vital" demands, strips the arts and culture of the West of all efficacy and worth. To these men, whose longing was for the inner, spiritual freedom of man, Western progress, with all it connoted, was an abomination. We are not surprised, therefore, to find the Westernizers, the rationalists, strongly arrayed against them. ”

“ It constitutes the key-conception of historical progress, and is the very life of that highest stage of this which we designate and praise by the name of Western Civilisation. It is at the mental summons of this ideal, that the West as a stadium in historic progress emerges from the hoary and impassive East; and the entire history of the West as divergent from the oriental spirit, as the scene of energetic human improvement, the scene of the victory of man over Nature and over his merely natural self, has its controlling and explanatory motive in this ideal alone. ”

“ From the inferior value set on human life by the races of the East, we accuse them of barbarity: forgetting, that, owing to the absence of all analogy between our origin, races, and education, we are incompetent to appreciate their feelings, and the motives of their conduct, and have consequently no right to condemn them. If we abstain from taking our neighbour's life, we set also a proportionate value on our own: a native of the East displays, it is true, less veneration for his own species. ”

“ With a sort of periodic regularity it is the scene of a great movement, and from age to age the destinies of the race have seemed to hang upon its possession; and from time to time the attention of the world is concentrated upon this water-street between two continents. Under whatever name, the Oriental civilization has been a misfortune, and the Western a blessing to the border-land; and how narrowly has Europe, more than once, from Xerxes to Chosroes, from Omar to the Osmanlis, seemed to escape the torrent of Eastern slavery. ”

“ By a deliberate exercise of the will and an extraordinary effort of organisation, she became industrial without ceasing to be artistic; she adopted parliamentary institutions without abandoning her religious veneration for the person of the Mikado; she borrowed the military methods of the West without losing the chivalrous and fatalist devotion of her warrior-caste; and devised a Western educational system without disturbing the deep orientalism of her mind. It was a transformation almost terrifying, and to any Western quite bewildering, in its deliberation, rapidity, and completeness. ”

“ The people are so docile and so willing to adopt the manners and customs of Europeans, that the change might be easily effected by merely showing them that it was a question of morality and civilization, and an essential step in their progress towards an equality with their white rulers. ”

“ Attempts are made—well meant, no doubt—to foist that state of culture which the West calls “modern civilization,” or “civilization” pure and simple, upon the reluctant people of the Near and Far East. We are forgetful of the fact that these nations have had a civilization of their own, and that something more important is included in this forcible change than the change of a dress. ”

“ Distinctions of class, profession, or nationality, entering so largely into European life, separating man from man, lose their hold upon Europeans meeting in the distant East. The great [Pg 288] West, seen at that distance, becomes their common country; they are drawn together by the bond of common views, feelings and modes of thought which obliterate the artificial lines of nationality—nay, they feel for, and treat each other as only blood relations and brothers would in Europe. ”

“ After long centuries of isolation East and West had met, and fusion of thought and speech had begun. On the one hand stood western civilization, with its latest scientific inventions, its latest literary achievements and its latest artistic triumphs on the other stood eastern culture, effete and decaying, strangled in the grip of custom and tradition. The full force of modern thought had been let loose about the old ideals and the old beliefs, threatening to overwhelm them in its first impetuous rush. ”

“ When civilization reaches that goal, it turns toward corruption and starts being senile, as happens in the natural life of living beings. (Ibn Khaldun, 1377)
Treating cultures as living beings has been the scientific trend ever since Khaldun. Reading Western sociology today, we now have plenty of exciting – if not incredible - choices of a culture’s ‘rise and fall’:
“youth, growth, maturation and decline” (Spengler, 1917) ; ivilizations taking turns or going in circles (Ji, 2006) ; a masculine West vs. a feminine East (Garrison, 2000) ”

“ If therefore we are to discover in what form the destiny of the Western Culture will be accomplished, we must first be clear as to what culture is, what its relations are to visible history, to life, to soul, to nature, to intellect, what the forms of its manifestation are and how far these forms — peoples, tongues and epochs, battles and ideas, states and gods, arts and craft-works, sciences, laws, economic types and world-ideas, great men and great events — may be accepted and pointed to as symbols. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here, then, I lay it down that Imperialism, of which petrifacts such as the Egyptian empire, the Roman, the Chinese, the Indian may continue to exist for hundreds or thousands of years—dead bodies, amorphous and dispirited masses of men, scrap-material from a great history—is to be taken as the typical symbol of the passing away. Imperialism is Civilization unadulterated. 37In this phenomenal form the destiny of the West is now irrevocably set. The energy of culture-man is directed inwards, that of civilization-man outwards. ”

“ What have you done or would do better than this if you had today the world rule? Paint with all riot of hateful colors the thin skin of European culture,—is it not better than any culture that arose in Africa or Asia?"
It is. Of this there is no doubt and never has been; but why is it better? Is it better because Europeans are better, nobler, greater, and more gifted than other folk? It is not. Europe has never produced and never will in our day bring forth a single human soul who cannot be matched and over-matched in every line of human endeavor by Asia and Africa. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Every thing-become is mortal. Not only peoples, languages, races and Cultures are transient. In a few centuries from now there will no more be a Western Culture, no more be German, English or French than there were Romans in the time of Justinian. ”

“ Culture, the outgrowth of population, was first planted in the East; there it rooted and there it blossomed, and there humanity gathered its first fruits, but its ripened products have fructified upon its Western grafts. Westward indeed the star of Empire has made its way, and here on our Western Continent, under the ægis of our great Republic, under the influence of American liberty and freedom, it seems destined to reach its ascendant. ”

“ From Europe the movement will spread ultimately to the whole race. But the first step in its progress will naturally be to the inhabitants of our colonies, who, though politically independent of Western Europe, still retain their filiation with it. ”

“ These desires are the inlet of the restless discontent which we call European civilisation. When the ancient peoples, civilised or not, desire guns, whiskey, cotton goods, watches and lamps, their dependence upon Western civilisation is assured. Bound to the industrial nations, they toil in mines or on tropical plantations that they may buy the goods they have learned to want, and that Europe may live. ”

“ Many will ask, Whether, when the West was still savage, clothed in skins and living by hunting, we in the East had not been able to feed and clothe ourselves? When they fared forth merely for plunder, had we not evolved a political commonwealth? ”

“ While civilisation in the East succumbed and died out before the advance of races incapable of culture, it was welcomed in the West by races possessing the requisite capacity, which by their inborn force gave it new forms and indestructible bases for its outward existence. Nor have the nations and kingdoms arisen each from its mother earth, as it were in obedience to some inward impulse of inevitable necessity, but amid constant assimilation and rejection, ever repeated wars to secure their future, and a ceaseless struggle with opposing elements that threatened their ruin. ”

“ If the East has qualities and virtues that make for great strength, it is no less clearly lacking in other qualities and virtues that still find a home in the West. The Yellow446 Peril, so far from driving us to a cowardly despair, may and should have the effect of raising our courage, ennobling our ideals, up rooting our selfishness and purifying Western society. It may enable us to see that in some respects our aims have been false ones, and that our views of the essentials of progress and of civilisation must be partially modified. ”

“ Western civilisation, or rather Western ideas, and education had brought the natives of the Eastern Empire to such a degree of culture and enlightenment that the subjugated ones realised that they had become the equal of their masters long before the dawn of the twenty-first century. ”

“ Just as, while we are striving to found a new Europe in which the thought of the Occidental races shall be common to all, we wish each race, far from losing its character and forgetting its past glory, to bring what is most glorious and lay it on the common altar of humanity. ”

“ The law of nature is spiral, and inasmuch as Eastern civilization taught the people of the West, so Western civilization, which is based upon principles native to the East, will return to its original source. No nation can now remain shut up within itself without intercourse with other nations; the East and the West can no longer exist separate and apart. ”

“ That ancestor-worship can be introduced or reintroduced into an occidental country in the twentieth century is of course out of the question: but before we continue to devote human lives and vast treasure to the self-imposed task of uprooting it from its congenial oriental soil, would it not be well earnestly to consider whether our work may not be regarded by our own distant posterity as the most stupendous folly or as the gravest and most disastrous of errors ever committed by the nations of the West? ”

“ The analytical-based, deductive West increases its diversity, tendency for devolution and multiculturalism and is thus profiting from Eastern ‘overproduction’ of human capital that is required to keep Western culture breathing, while the integration-based East increases its ethnic dominance and geopolitical reach, forcing ever greater levels of peace, tolerance and harmoniousness upon the West. ”

“ For the vital, expanding nineteenth-century West to have deliberately restrained itself while the backward East blunderingly experimented with Westernism, accepting and rejecting, buying goods and refusing to pay for them, negotiating loans and then squandering and repudiating them, inviting in Europeans and then expelling or massacring them, would have been against all history and human nature. ”

“ Selection is no sooner made, cultivation is no sooner begun, and the first furrow turned, than he already finds himself a man of property. These are the advantages of Western emigrants and Western settlers; and they are such, certainly, as no country on earth ever before afforded to her citizens. This opportunity of purchase and settlement, this certainty of enhanced value, these sure means of immediate competence and ultimate wealth,—all these are the rights and the blessings of the people of the West, and they have my hearty wishes for their full and perfect enjoyment. ”

“ We have now followed the Europeans to every region of the globe, and seen them planting colonies, and peopling new lands, and everywhere we have found them the same—a lawless and domineering race, seizing on the earth as if they were the first-born of creation, and having a presumptive right to murder and dispossess all other people. ”

“ The superior strength and skill of the West are to-day generally admitted throughout the East, but in many quarters the first receptivity to Western progress and zeal for Western ideas have cooled or have actually given place to a reactionary hatred of the very spirit of Western civilization. ”