PKU6 VALUES and WORLDVIEWS Easternizing in Recent W Thought
COMPARISON TEXT: “Easternizing” in Recent Western Thought
Introduction:
Since its first modern encounter with the West, beginning with the Portuguese in the
early 1500s, China has undergone a long and intricate dance of fascination and
resistance in relation to the West. In its most recent phase, “Westernizing” in China,
though extensive, may still amount to only a relatively superficial manifestation of
cultural borrowing and assimilation. How can this be? After all, visitors to China today
see skyscrapers that outrival most modern Western cities; restaurants run by
McDonald’s, Starbucks, and KFC plus the latest model German cars – and traffic jams
to match.
The answer is: some such changes are culturally significant, most are not. If
Westernizing in China only shows up in McDonald’s fast food or Mercedes cars, it must
be understood as highly visible – but not necessarily indicative of important new
directions. In that superficial sense, China was very visible in 18th-century European
ceramics and decorative arts collectively identified as chinoiserie. European taste for
exotic imports allowed China to export an impressive quantity of goods, but its impact
on Western cultures was neither enduring nor significant.
From a comparative perspective, however, it is possible today to point to something
quite new: not a convergence of taste but a growing convergence between longstanding cultural assumptions. From this perspective, we can say that conceptual
distances between China and the West appear, over recent decades, to be diminishing.
But the reasons behind this phenomenon probably have little to do with Western imports
of Chinese artifacts or practices, such as traditional Chinese medicine or the use in
Western business schools of Sunzi’s book of stratagems. Rather, challenges arising
from within Western premises themselves have opened the door to fresh insights.
These often bear startling resemblances to ideas traditionally prevailing in China.
So far, these developments are not perceived in the West as Chinese in origin.
Perhaps that is just as well, since such a perception might encourage a reflex rejection
of “foreign influence.” Instead, these new perspectives result from one of the strengths
of the Western intellectual tradition: an insistent self-critical capacity that over time may
call any assumption into question. At present the net result is an emerging convergence
of Western with long-standing Chinese views of the world. In time these may encourage
collaborative action – desperately needed in response to the emerging ecological crisis,
the most pressing problem facing the world for this and generations to come [link: p 653].
To keep in mind as you read: If these research results represent a
Western trend, why has it not been recognized and publicized?
Text:
Compared to the mass importation of ideas and practices from the West to China,
those flowing the other way seem at times random and scattered. There are many
reasons for this, perhaps most powerful being the self-satisfaction of the West, built up
during its centuries of world domination. During that time, only a few in the West
recognized non-Western worlds as possessing valuable civilizations. Ironically, this very
Western hegemony was itself enabled by the four great inventions originating in China:
paper and printing, gunpowder, and the maritime compass [link: text]. But, until recently,
their Chinese origins were either unknown or else simply ignored.
In our own time, one can name practices imported from China that function in a
similar way: enriching Western life but not transforming it. One might cite the vogue of
taiji and other martial arts or for traditional Chinese medicine, particularly acupuncture
and to a lesser extent, qigong. TCM may have more impact over time; but so far it has
largely been associated with preventive medicine, a idea new to most Westerners (and
their insurance companies).
More important kinds of cultural interpenetration involve the way people think. In
Encounter 6.2 we have already glanced at two Western bridge persons who were
unusually open to Chinese phenomena: the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (18751961) and Joseph Needham (Li Yuese, 李约瑟, 1900-1995). During the 20th century, Jung
and Needham were explicitly working on interfaces between the Chinese and Western
traditions. But now more recent developments in the West may prove to be even more
influential, partly because they make no direct mention of China. Among the many
possible examples of recent Western thinking which seems to confirm ancient Chinese
wisdom, is that of the Higgs Boson/Field research that confirms energy as fundamental
of everything that exists [link: p 424]). In the following sections, we introduce three other
areas of overlapping perspectives, each drawn from three widely distant fields of
inquiry: social psychology, cognitive linguistics, and the philosophy of values. The fact
that similar modes of thinking show up in such disparate endeavors suggests an
emerging broader movement, not yet perceived as a trend.
“The West Is WEIRD”
The larger perspective implied by these overlaps in thinking might well be
summarized in the phrase advanced by three social scientists in Canada’s University of
British Columbia in Vancouver: “The West is weird.”” Writing in 2010, they argue that
“behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and
behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western,
Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic [WEIRD] societies.” [Joseph Henrich,
Steven J. Heine, Ara Norenzayan, “The Weirdest People in the World?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences
(2010), 33: 61-135.] Studies by Western social scientists, they claim, “often implicitly
assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these
‘standard subjects’ are as representative of the species as any other population.”
Are such assumptions justified? Not at all. Their review of comparative databases
from across the behavioral sciences suggests that there is in fact substantial variability
in experimental results across different populations. More significantly, the authors
conclude that WEIRD subjects are unusual compared with the rest of mankind – in fact,
they are “frequent outliers.” In such diverse domains as visual perception, fairness,
cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning,
reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, these authors find that
“members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least
representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans.”
What these authors are explicitly challenging is the ethnocentric belief that Western
assumptions about psychology, motivation, and behavior may be used to generalize
about the behavior of all humans. They argue that Westerners are, in fact, the exotic
ones. But, being rich and powerful, Westerners have tended to regard their assumptions
as “universal” – and thus to dominate the discourse about how other people think and
live. Here is yet another reason why Westerners need to disengage themselves from
any automatic privileging of their ways of thinking about the world. In other words,
Westerners need to change their perspective: not only in the social sciences but
throughout all those disciplines through which intelligent observers seek to understand
and manage their lives.
Social Psychology
Take, for instance, a recent series of experiments carried out by Hajo Adams and
Adam Galinsky that demonstrate the impact on thinking of what one wears [“Enclothed
Cognition,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48 (July 2012), 918-925]. In a first experiment,
58 undergraduates were randomly assigned to wear a white lab coat or street clothes.
Then they were given a test for selective attention; that is, their ability to maintain focus
on a primary task while screening out potentially distracting secondary factors. Result:
those who wore the white lab coats made about half as many errors on trials as those
who wore ordinary clothes. In the second experiment, 74 students were randomly
assigned to one of three options: wearing a “doctor’s coat,” wearing an “artistic painter’s
coat,” or simply seeing a “doctor’s coat.” Then they were given a test for sustained
attention. Those who wore what they were told was the “doctor’s coat” – which was in
fact identical to the painter’s coat – had acquired heightened attention, spotting more
differences between superficially identical pictures. Those who wore the painter’s coat
or were primed with merely seeing the “doctor’s coat” found fewer discrepancies
between the images. Implication: for a doctor’s cost to influence your psychological
processes you have to understand its symbolic significance – and also to see it on your
body and feel it on your skin.
Conclusion: our minds are literally invested in what we wear. Clothes invade the
body and brain, putting the wearer into a different psychological state. But the effect
occurs only if you actually wear the coat and recognize its symbolic meaning: the
implication is that physicians tend to be careful, rigorous, and good at paying attention.
These experiments were conceived as part of a growing scientific specialization
called embodied cognition. According to the authors of this study, there is a huge body
of work in this field, demonstrating such varied correlations as how the experience of
washing your hands is associated with moral purity; how people are rated personally
warmer if they hold a hot drink in their hand, and colder if they hold an iced drink – or
how carrying a heavy clipboard will make you feel more important. In other words, our
thought processes are based on physical experiences as affected by associated
abstract concepts. And those experiences include the clothes we wear.
If these observations can be confirmed with non-Western subjects, it will show that
we humans think not just with our brains but with our bodies and our social stereotypes
as well. As Daniel Kahneman demonstrated in Thinking Fast and Slow (2011), humans
very often make up their minds paying little attention to what they should know rationally.
What is also important in these experiments is the new emphasis on not merely what
we think but how we think. Such an emphasis would come as no surprise in a Chinese
context because xin [link: p 437] has long described the human heart-mind as rooted in
intuitive, social responses. The Chinese view is well articulated by comparative
philosopher Wu Kuang-ming in On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic
(Leiden: Brill, 1997).
Second-Generation Cognitive Linguistics
Cognitive linguistics propose a fresh grounding for our words and ideas. In their
focus on words and word usage these concerns are linguistic, but cognitive in their
concern for how humans know and how they express what they know. George Lakoff
(Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley) and Mark Johnson (Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Oregon) in their Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) argue that our
ideas of things come not from direct connection with something outside us, as naïve
realism would like to believe. Nor are they grounded in something a priori in our minds,
as Immanuel Kant once posited. Instead our bodily experience of moving around in the
world, a process that starts with birth if not before, gives rise to words and our
understanding of them. What adults call space is something that all children discover
early on, as they experience moving around on some sort of horizontal plane. Even
before they have words to express that fact, they learn that things fall down unless
something holds them up. Such experiences allow them to think of things in terms of up
or down, hence to situate things on a vertical axis. Time turns out to be almost
impossible to conceive except in terms of something moving through space. Time is
required for something to move from one position to another. Once a person has
grasped the notion of time, it becomes possible to imagine it as frozen when something
does not move.
In short, Lakoff and Johnson claim that all our more complex ideas are composed
out of such basic experiences of the physical world. These are extended or combined
by metaphorical extension; that is, by projecting or mapping familiar characteristics onto
unfamiliar domains in order to make sense of them. For example, all children
experience what it feels like to stand straight and walk tall. Later on, this bodily
experience will allow them to think of what it might mean to be “morally upstanding.”
The larger significance of this view of language is spelled out by Mark Johnson in a
more recent book entitled The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human
Understanding (2007). In this view truth is a largely irrelevant notion in human terms,
because it can only apply to a limited range of propositions of a type that has been overprivileged in Western thought, especially in Anglo-American analytical philosophy. What
is more important, says Johnson, is meaning, a much larger and messier concept,
arrived at by extrapolating bodily experience into ever new domains. To make
something meaningful is, in Johnson’s terms, to connect it with one’s past experiences
and one’s ongoing concerns. In that way, things will make sense because one will have
established connections between different aspects of one’s life experience. Meaning,
then, is always individual and personal, though everyone will share many meanings with
other members of one’s home culture (and also some meanings with all other humans).
If we accept the embodied-experience origins of human understanding, there are
several consequences, none of which will seem surprising to individuals acculturated as
Chinese. One is that objectivity must be abandoned as a goal and as a criterion for
useful knowledge. In addition to the basic experiences shared by all children, each child
grows up in a cultural environment that will privilege certain metaphorical transfers of
meaning over others. In addition, there is no inherent limit to the number or the
complexity of the metaphors that humans may generate. Creativity remains possible in
each person’s evolving experience. In every culture there are individuals generating
new connections and extensions, writers and other artists prominent among them. Even
journalists and advertisers add new connections, some of which will survive to become
part of standard usage.
Values: Against Fairness
Similar reorientations of Western thinking apply in our third domain of overlap:
thinking about values. In 2012 Stephen Asma, who teaches philosophy and Buddhism
in Chicago, published an exemplary reassessment of “equality” as a Western value in
Against Fairness [University of Chicago Press]. Here Asma, seeking scientific confirmation
for what constitutes the most widespread of human impulses, pursues ethical matters
into far-flung disciplines usually reserved for specialists. In doing so, Asma is willing to
challenge central Western orthodoxies – even those values regarded as crucial to civil
society by most of his audience, regardless of their political loyalties.
Asma’s basic assertions show up, in yet another context, how exceptionally the West,
through its privileging of Enlightenment concepts like “equality,” has become “WEIRD.”
Equality is not promoted worldwide. Most of the world has a myriad ways of playing
favorites. Most people routinely expect to defend family against all comers. When
possible, nepotism is deployed: one expects and respects the inequalities involved in
hierarchies. Asma grounds these widespread practices as biological, citing recent
research on how bonding affects newborns, not just in various animal species but in
humans themselves. We humans are hardwired, he argues, to privilege intimate family
members and to build out from there as our lives become more complex, a view most
Chinese readers would find not merely congenial but “natural.”
In the West, while Enlightenment ideology enjoins us to treat everyone equally, our
deeper human instincts keep disrupting such egalitarian high principles. By testing the
utilitarian ethics familiar to us since the time of Jeremy Bentham [link: text], Asma replays
thought experiments that demonstrate just how ambivalent most Westerners remain on
issues such as equality. If, for example, in a crisis situation switching a streetcar to
another track would result in fewer deaths than not doing so, most people think they
would flip it. But if the only person to be sacrificed were in some sense precious,
reliance on a mere utilitarian calculus of numbers would begin to lose its potency. For
Asma, this research shows how we humans instinctively favor those closer to us over
those who seem more distant. In a direct confrontation, favoritism typically trumps
egalitarianism.
In taking on Western beliefs that presently enjoy iconic status, Asma shows great
intellectual courage. As, for example, when he writes: “Christianity tells us, ‘God so
loved the world that he sacrificed his only son for us.’ It may be pious and mystically
beautiful to sacrifice your son for others, but it’s also transcendentally bad parenting.”
The studied irreverence here is not gratuitous. Asma is here deliberately taking aim at
the transcendental perspective so crucial to seminal thinkers such as Plato and to
Westerners ever since. In doing so, Asma tests the divine family as if it were any other
family. He asks, How good is the care that a family gives to the child it brings into the
world? Does consciously sacrificing that precious child make for good models of
parenting – or for any other intimate human transaction?
The goal of this clearly contrarian argument is clearly not to remake Westerners as
Chinese. Asma takes a wider view, aiming to show the degree to which egalitarian
ideology in the West, particularly in the USA, needs to be contested as inconsistent with
a wider and deeper understanding of humanity. As everyone in Western society knows
from experience, equality of opportunity can never guarantee equality of outcomes.
Hierarchies exist in all enterprises, although their existence may, by many Westerners,
be simply denied. Acknowledging such realities can free Westerners from all kinds of
contemporary hypocrisies and ineffective social and political policies. Freed from such
ideologies, we humans can then get on with the really challenging business of learning
how to live together [link: ecological crisis, p 648].
Although Asma does not invoke Asian social models, what is identifiably Chinese
here involves his style of reasoning. Time and again, Asma moves away from abstract
principles to a grounding in the details of actual situations: a pragmatic impulse that
helps us become conscious of just how complex and often contradictory our own
Western values may become when we try to put them into practice. By stepping out of
certifiably WEIRD values into a larger world perspective, Asma’s study reinforces the
commonality of all humans. These tend to belong, as he points out, not to the West, but
to the Rest. Thus in a guanxi culture, so typical in Asia, all relations are deemed
personal, as embedded in specific situations. Asian children learn this early; in China,
as we have seen, most Chinese parents start early and strongly to enjoin obedience
and respect [link: xiao, p 146].
Comparative Perspectives on “Easternizing”
From these examples it is possible to say that Western thought – out of its own
internal self-critiques – is in the process of generating ways of looking at things that tend
in some instances to run remarkably parallel to long-established Chinese views. In the
other direction, “Westernizing” as perceived in China tends to be highly visible. In China
public awareness of “Westernizing” encourages both debate and nationalistic resistance
against what seems to some people an excess of imported ideas and practices. On the
other side, the “Easternizing” of the West is more subtle and indirect – if only because it
takes place outside a public consciousness of cultural importation. Since this is a trend
neither widely perceived nor debated, it might in the long run have even more impact,
precisely because such views do not activate reflexes of resistance. It is to be hoped
that, insofar as the new perspectives gain credibility, the West will become more open
to abandoning its self-righteous assumptions that its own civilizational constructs apply
universally. Perceiving that the West is WEIRD is a necessary step in that direction. A
further step would involve an enhanced recognition of the legitimacy and worth of nonWestern civilizations, particularly that of China.
Of course, all cultural convictions are contingent on the civilizations which generate
and support them. In the end, there is no ground which allows one civilization to claim
inherent superiority as compared to others. Each is the right civilization for its own
people, given their origins and trajectory through time. Hence, the appropriate ground of
interaction between two disparate civilizations is mutual recognition and respect, leading
to negotiation and compromise – just as the Chinese tradition has long affirmed [link:
Zhao Tingyang, p 631]. The implications for our time of ecological crisis provide the focus of
the following document.
Study questions:
1. What difference does it make whether imported ideas are identified as “from
foreign origins” or not?
2. Given that all cultures lean toward ethnocentrism, is it realistic to hope that the
West will treat Chinese civilization more respectfully as time goes on?
3. Will economic hard times tend to bring the two civilizations closer together or to
push them further apart? What about ecological issues?
4. How crucial is learning about another civilization in granting it respect? Is there a
possibility that it would lead only to further self-congratulation as to the values of
one’s own world? Give examples to support your argument.
Excerpt from Comparing Civilizations: China and the West (Shanghai: Fudan
University Press, not yet in print), Encounter 6.2