posted
The river of inter-civilisational relations: the ebb and flow of peoples, ideas and innovations
Brett Bowden
Third World Quarterly, 28:7, 1359 - 1374
The River of Inter-civilisational Relations: the ebb and flow of peoples, ideas and innovations BRETT BOWDEN ABSTRACT As a tool for understanding the world in which we live the study of the history of political thought is stunted because of a preoccupation with the Western canon as the history of political thought to the exclusion of other histories and traditions. This ongoing exclusion is itself facilitated by a deeply entrenched select reading of the Western canon; a reading that overlooks a tendency within the canon to not just ignore but suppress and dismiss the value of other accounts of history and traditions of thought. An opening of the Western mind to these assumed to be alien traditions of social, legal and political thought reveals that, in the global market place of ideas, these purportedly competing and non-compatible traditions of thought might in fact have considerably more in common than what sets them apart: thus opening the way for an authentic inter-civilisational dialogue that focuses more on cooperation and less on clashes. Rudyard Kipling’s poem, ‘The Ballad of East and West’ (1889), opens with the line: ‘Oh East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’. This memorable and sometimes misunderstood phrase has often been employed against Kipling to damaging effect. Irrespective of his meaning and intention the phrase is one that has stuck; with some people taking it literally and running with it. But throughout history East and West have met; how could they not? To many observers the various comings together of East and West are defined by a recurring or ongoing series of confrontations and clashes; from the 11th-century Crusades (1095 – 1291) through to the modern-day Huntingtonian ‘clash of civilisations’1 being played out in the Middle-East, Afghanistan and beyond. But this preoccupation with clashes and confrontations belies what East and West share in common and sidelines centuries of migration and mingling, peaceful co-operation, cultural borrowing and exchanges of ideas. John Donne’s (1572 – 1631) phrase:
‘No man is an island, entire of itself’,2 applies as much to any civilisation— Western civilisation and civilisations of the East included. While East and West have had their share of skirmishes and still have their differences, which in and of itself is not a bad thing, they have also influenced each other and borrowed heavily among themselves (and others) in the marketplace of ideas—literally for millennia, from Ancient Egypt onwards. This dimension of East –West relations is something that is overlooked, even denied, when many speak of the history and ongoing relations between peoples of the East and those in the West.With this in mind, this essay makes two general points. First, significant elements of the Western canon of political thought have denied both the contribution and the capacity of the East—and others—to add anything of value to the history of ideas catalogue. Second, contrary to that position the essay highlights some common intellectual ground and outlines the inevitable and unavoidable borrowing and exchange of ideas between the East, the West and other traditions of thought. Using highly topical and supposedly exclusively Western ideas such as democracy and toleration as examples, I demonstrate the general interconnectedness between what are purportedly competing and non-compatible traditions of political thought. Western thought and ‘continental chauvinism’ As Eric Wolf has pertinently asked, given that ‘there are connections everywhere’, such as those between East and West, ‘why do we persist in turning dynamic, interconnected phenomena into static, disconnected things?’. His musings on this question point to a long-standing and widespread misconception in the reading of history. Wolf continues: Some of this is owing, perhaps, to the way we have learned our own history. We have been taught, inside the classroom and outside of it, that there exists an entity called the West, and that one can think of this West as a society and civilisation independent of and in opposition to other societies and civilisations. Many of us even grew up believing that this West has a genealogy, according to which ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry, crossed with democracy, in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As Wolf aptly notes, such a narrow understanding of the genealogy of the Western tradition—and by default other histories and traditions of thought—is misleading; even dangerous in the wrong hands and minds. This commonly adopted and often warmly embraced evolutionary schema renders history as some sort of hierarchical ‘moral success story’, a tale of civilisation and progress, a race through time in which successive runners pass on the torch of progress and liberty. ‘History is thus converted into a tale about the furtherance of virtue, about how the virtuous win out over the bad guys’.3 In essence, the story runs along lines to the effect that the West has led this particular race from the start, and no other peoples, race, culture, civilisation or whatever have come close to theWest in the hierarchy of world civilisations.4 Norbert Elias has described this general air of superiority in terms of the very ideal of civilisation as expressing the ‘self-consciousness of the West’. Moreover, this consciousness ‘sums up everything in which Western society of the last two or three centuries believes itself superior to earlier societies or ‘‘more primitive’’ contemporary ones’.5 And, just as importantly, the West is seen as (eternally) maintaining its lofty position in the vanguard of progress and civilisation. This view of the West as insular, self-sufficient and boldly forging the way ahead on the path of progress and virtue is one that has been described by Robert Nisbet in his work on the idea of progress. ‘The history of all that is greatest in the West’, he tells us, that is, ‘religion, science, reason, freedom, equality, justice, philosophy, the arts, and so on—is grounded deeply in the belief that what one does in one’s own time is at once tribute to the greatness and indispensability of the past, and confidence in an ever more golden future’.6 But just as the idea and space we call ‘the West’ did not evolve in a vacuum, devoid of external influences, neither was it as homogenous and cohesive as this account suggests. It was not until around the 17th and 18th centuries that European cleavages began to ameliorate, slowly being replaced by a modicum of cohesion and solidarity, at least among Western European nations. Slowly and steadily the expanding entity we now call the West was incrementally forged by and through the exploring nations of Western Europe. And it was in relation to and by way of contrast with this creation that the non-European-cum-non-Western world and its inhabitants came to be known and described. At the same time the ‘civilised’ West also came to define itself in contradistinction to the ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’ beyond the horizon. This process is neatly captured by Friedrich von Schiller (1759 – 1805) when he writes: ‘A wise hand seems to have preserved these savage tribes until such time as we have progressed sufficiently in our own civilisation to make useful application of this discovery, and from this mirror to recover the lost beginning of our own race’. But these peoples painted an ‘embarrassing and dismal . . . picture of our [Europe/the West’s] own childhood’, for Schiller declared them the ‘barbarous remains of the centuries of antiquity and the middle ages!’7 As Oswald Spengler explains, the ‘Western European area’ came to be ‘regarded as a fixed pole, a unique patch chosen on the surface of the sphere for no better reason, it seems, than because we live on it’. Moreover, ‘great histories of millennial duration and mighty faraway Cultures are made to revolve around this pole in all modesty’. It is from and in relation to this select and privileged corner of the globe, and its successor the West, that all other peoples and events are ‘judged in perspective’8—politically, socially, morally, technologically. It is with this line of thought in mind that Martin Bernal asks us ‘not only to rethink the fundamental bases of ‘‘Western Civilisation’’ but also to recognise the penetration of racism and ‘‘continental THE RIVER OF INTER-CIVILISATIONAL RELATIONS 1361 Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution] At: 06:20 7 December 2007 chauvinism’’ into all our historiography, or philosophy of writing history’.9 Few of the West’s most important and influential thinkers—the Western canon—are innocent of such charges. What follows are a few select examples which highlight this less admirable tendency of Western social and political thought. The dark side of the Western canon One of the Enlightenment’s most distinguished thinkers, Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), is indicative of this kind of ‘continental chauvinism’ in his thoughts on history and progress. Kant wrote: If one follows the influence of Greek history on the construction of and misconstruction of the Roman state which swallowed up the Greek, then the Roman influence on the barbarians who in turn destroyed it, and so on down to our own times; if one adds episodes from the national histories of other peoples insofar as they are known from the history of the enlightened nations, one will discover a regular progress in the constitution of states on our continent [Europe] (which will probably give law, eventually, to all others).10 While this passage is more or less pregnant with ‘continental chauvinism’, privileging the role of Europe and its ‘intellectual predecessors’ at the expense of all others, the innate racism referred to by Bernal is most evident in Kant’s much less discussed Geography. David Harvey makes the legitimate point that just because ‘Kant’s Geography is such an embarrassment is no justification for ignoring it’.11 Today it is difficult to get one’s hands on the work, which is somewhat surprising given the cottage industry that Kant’s other more recognised works have given rise to. The following passage is drawn from a recent French translation: In hot countries men mature more quickly in every respect but they do not attain the perfection of the temperate zones. Humanity achieves its greatest perfection with the white race. The yellow Indians have somewhat less talent. The negroes are much inferior and some of the peoples of the Americas are well below them.12 Despite their many differences, for Kant’s compatriot Georg WF Hegel (1770 – 1831), the Ancient Greeks—as progenitors of the modern West—are also seen as central to the rise and dominance of the West over the East. Hegel writes: ‘it arises above all in the Iliad where the Greeks take the field against the Asiatics and thereby fight the first epic battles in the tremendous opposition that led to the wars which constitute in Greek history a turningpoint in world-history’. He continues: In a similar way the Cid fights against the Moors; in Tasso and Ariosto the Christians fight against the Saracens, in Camoens the Portuguese against the Indians. And so in almost all the great epics we see peoples different in Morals, BRETT BOWDEN 1362 Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution] At: 06:20 7 December 2007 religion, speech, in short in mind and surroundings, arrayed against one another; and we are made completely at peace by the world-historically justified victory of the higher principle over the lower which succumbs to a bravery that leaves nothing over the defeated. The conclusion Hegel draws from this is: ‘In this sense, the epics of the past describe the triumph of the West over the East, [the triumph] of European moderation, and the individual beauty of a reason that sets limits to itself’.13 On the non-Western world more generally, Ranajit Guha notes that, for Hegel, ‘A people or a nation lacked history . . . not because it knew no writing but because lacking as it did in statehood it had nothing to write about’.14 Hegel insisted that the only people ‘capable of history’ are those that ‘comprehend their own existence as independent, ie possess self-consciousness’. And, for Hegel, the means through which this is achieved is the state, or perhaps more accurately, statehood. Taking India as a non-European example, Hegel asserted that, by-and-large, ‘the diffusion of Indian culture is only a dumb deedless expansion; that is, it presents no political action’. Furthermore, he thought the ‘people of India have achieved no foreign conquests, but have been on every occasion vanquished themselves’. So, despite India’s acknowledged accomplishments in the arts and other arenas of achievement, Hegel concluded that: ‘It is because the Hindoos have no History in the form of annals (historia) that they have no History in the form of transactions (res gestæ); that is, no growth expanding into a veritable political condition’.15 The question for Hegel, and others, ‘is how far a nomadic people . . . or any people on a low level of civilisation, can be regarded as a state’.16 Given this, Guha suggests that in the 250 years or so between Herna´n Corte´ s’s conquests in the New World and Robert Clive’s arrival in India, the ‘bar was raised’ such that inclusion in ‘World-history’ shifted from ‘no writing, no history’, to ‘no state, no history’.17 This general line of argument has persisted for centuries; it is only too evident, for example, in Ferdinand Schiller’s mistaken claim as late the earlymid 20th century that ‘the peoples of India appear to care very little for history and have never troubled to compile it’.18 The result of such beliefs was that Europeans, particularly the British, have taken it upon themselves to compile such uneven accounts as that which was prepared by James Mill (1773 – 1836) and published as The History of British India in 1817.19 Despite never having visited India, Mill’s History relayed to European audiences a fundamentally mistaken image of Indian civilisation as eternally backward and undeveloped. Karl Marx (1818 – 83) and Friedrich Engels (1820 – 95), who claimed to turn Hegel the right way up in other arenas of thought, were no kinder to India in their many writings on the ‘oriental despotism’ found on the subcontinent. Neither Marx nor Engels was particularly kind to China either, as seen, for instance, in the commentary written by Marx after the first of the opium wars between Britain and China. Marx writes: ‘It is almost needless to observe that, in the same measure in which opium has obtained the sovereignty over the Chinese, the Emperor and his staff of pedantic THE RIVER OF INTER-CIVILISATIONAL RELATIONS 1363 Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution] At: 06:20 7 December 2007 mandarins have become dispossessed of their own sovereignty’. He further speculated that it seemed ‘as though history had first to make this whole people drunk before it could rouse them out of their hereditary stupidity’.20 A few years later, after the outbreak of the second opium war, Engels derisively referred to ‘China, the rotting semi-civilisation of the oldest State in the world’. A nation essentially beleaguered by ‘overbearing prejudice, stupidity, learned ignorance and pedantic barbarism’.21 At around the same time Marx and Engels were speculating on the character of their neighbours in the East, Arthur de Gobineau (1816 – 82)— sometimes referred to as the father of ethnographic racism—was formulating a more substantial and ‘scientific’ set of ideas. Gobineau was convinced ‘that the racial question overshadows all other problems in history, that it holds the key to them all, and that the inequality of the races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough to explain the whole course of its destiny’. He concluded: ‘I convinced myself at last that everything great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth, in science, art, and civilisation, derives from a single starting point; it belongs to one family alone, the different branches of which have reigned in all the civilised countries of the universe’.22 That is, the white race, the privileged peoples of Western Europe. While thinkers of all persuasions have, to varying degrees, been dismissive of the contributions and capacity of non-Western peoples to add anything of real value to story of civilisation, some, like Eduard von Hartmann (1842 – 1906), have taken that general sentiment to extremes. In seeking to reconcile the thinking of Schopenhauer, Hegel, Schelling and Leibniz while speculating on ‘the improvement of the races[s]’, he claimed that human evolution takes place through ‘the competition of races and nations in the struggle for existence, which is waged among mankind under natural laws just as pitilessly as among animals and plants’. He concluded: No power on earth is able to arrest the eradication of the inferior races of mankind, which . . . have gone on vegetating down to the present day. As little a favour is done the dog whose tail is to be cut off, when one cuts it off gradually, inch by inch, so little is there humanity in artificially prolonging the deathstruggle of savages who are on the verge of extinction. The true philanthropist, if he has comprehended the natural law of anthropological evolution, cannot avoid desiring an acceleration of the last convulsions, and labouring for that end.23 Clearly, not all of racism referred to by Bernal is implicit; much of it is overt, all of it offensive. While the vast majority of us are repulsed by such extreme social Darwinian ideas, not so long ago they were reasonably widely entertained by what were supposedly some of the best minds of the time. This is just a small example of the continental chauvinism and implicit and explicit racism highlighted by Bernal as inherent to the Western canon; a body of work that is more-or-less constitutive of ‘Western civilisation’. A body of work and a civilisation that many thinkers have perceived BRETT BOWDEN 1364 Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution] At: 06:20 7 December 2007 and described as owing nothing to non-European or non-Western peoples or civilisations; peoples that John Stuart Mill (1806 – 73) described as being ‘backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered at its nonage’.24 But as Bernal has also noted, some 18th century European thinkers were admirers of the likes of Egypt and China as ‘positive examples of higher and finer civilisation’, with both ‘seen as having superior writing systems . . . and profound and ancient philosophies’. Their most admirable feature, however, was that ‘they were ruled rationally, without superstition, by a corps of men recruited for their morality and required to undergo rigorous initiation and training’.25 That is, contrary to Hegel and others, they were in fact selfgoverning. Swimming against the tide of ‘continental chauvinism’ One of the thinkers who contested prevailing orthodoxy was Edmund Burke (1729 – 97). Burke insisted that ‘This multitude of men [India] does not consist of an abject and barbarous populace; much less of gangs of savages . . . but a people for ages civilised and cultivated’. Looking to their history he acknowledged the existence of ‘princes once of great dignity, authority, and opulence’. Significantly, in contradistinction to Hegel and so many others, Burke noted the existence of ‘an ancient and venerable priesthood, the depository of their laws, learning, and history, the guides of the people whilst living, and their consolation in death’.26 Another 18th-century thinker, Voltaire (1694 – 1778), is even thought of as something of a Sinophile. This description is based, at least in part, on a passage in which he writes: ‘It is, in fact, in morality, in political economy, in agriculture, in the necessary arts of life, that the Chinese have made such advances toward perfection’. While on all other matters, Voltaire suggested ‘they have been taught by us [the West]: in these matters we might well submit to become their disciples’.27 In a more general sense, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744 – 1803) wondered: ‘Is not the good dispersed all over earth?’ Surely ‘it could not be encompassed by one face of humankind, by one region of the compass’. Rather, it is ‘dispersed in a thousand faces, ever changing—an eternal Proteus—through all continents and centuries’. In short, Herder questioned ‘why should the western extremity of our Northern Hemisphere alone be the home of civilisation? And is that really so?’.28 Naturally there is a number of perspectives on any given issue, rarely is it a case of black and white. That said, it is patently evident that the more open-minded views articulated by the likes of Burke, Voltaire and Herder— all for differing reasons—are in the minority. Thus it is equally clear that racism and continental chauvinism predominate across the history of Western social and political thought, irrespective of ideological positions held. In taking such a stance, Western thought has by and large denied or sidelined the relevance and influence of other traditions of thought on Western thinking. THE RIVER OF INTER-CIVILISATIONAL RELATIONS 1365 Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution] At: 06:20 7 December 2007 The pervasive nature of ideas and innovations: osmosis over monopolisation Contemporary thinking on interactions between East and West cannot help but be influenced by the general tenor of the Western history of thought on the issue of shades of civilisation or the degree of political, social and moral progress among different peoples. But not all contemporary thinking is influenced in the same way; some maintain that continental or civilisational chauvinism more or less reflects the reality of the situation, while others have questioned and challenged the Eurocentric view. However, for every Martin Bernal questioning the roots of Western civilisation and proposing an Afro-asiatic alternative, there is a handful of scholars arguing for the maintenance of the traditional and more widely accepted account of Western civilisation’s Greek heritage.29 Similarly, for every John M Hobson arguing that the ‘deceptively seductive Eurocentric view is false’, and that the ‘East (which was more advanced than the West between 500 and 1800) provided a crucial role in enabling the rise of modern Western civilisation’,30 there are a few, like David Landes, who insist ‘the historical record shows, for the last thousand years, Europe (the West) has been the prime mover of development and modernity’.31 Included in this camp is Charles Murray, who has followed up on Nisbet’s claims about progress and the primacy of the West to supposedly ‘prove’ empirically that the premise is ‘objectively true’ by cataloguing the West’s superior inventory of achievements in science and technology, music, literature, the visual arts and philosophy.32 To counter this general argument one could highlight some of the East’s influences in the realm of ideas and innovations that were introduced to the West. To take just a few examples, Arabic/Islamic breakthroughs in the field of mathematics, particularly in algebra and trigonometry are critical early developments in the field and crucial to its development. The term algebra actually derives from the title of an important work written in 830 CE by al- Khwarizmı (c 780 – 850), Hisab al-jabr w’al-muqabala; the ‘al-jabr’ in the title was translated around three centuries later as algebra. By the ninth century many Muslim mathematicians and astronomers agreed that the Earth was spherical, not flat, calculating its circumference to a less than 200 kilometre margin of error. The Arabic/Islamic world also made significant advancements in health, hygiene and medicine; Zakariyya al-Razi’s (c 865 – 925) medical writings, for instance, were translated, reprinted and widely available across Europe, representing required reading for would-be Islamic and European physicians alike for centuries. Similarly Ibn Sına (also known as Avicenna, 980 – 1037), a Persian philosopher and physician—and an important interpreter of Aristotle in the Islamic world—wrote a one million word Canon of Medicine which was a key medical/physiology text for centuries in both the Middle East and Europe through 12th-century Latin translations. And it was a 10th century Muslim surgeon named al-Zahrawi (930 – 1013) who introduced to the world many of the surgical instruments that have become commonplace, including the scalpel and forceps. In 1206 a Muslim engineer named al-Jazari authored the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, in which he introduced a number of BRETT BOWDEN 1366 Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution] At: 06:20 7 December 2007 inventions, from combination locks to water clocks, including none more important than the crankshaft. The modern cheque also comes to us from the East; it is thought that in the ninth century a businessman from what we now call the Middle East could cash a cheque in China drawing on his bank in Baghdad. These are just some of the ideas and inventions that have their origins in the East; added to them are things such as quilting and carpets, gunpowder and the compass, chess and the three course meal. As with most contentious issues, particularly big ticket items such as those encapsulated in this debate, there are at least two—and often more—sides to the story, and just as many claims to the ‘truth’. What I think would or should now be accepted by most, irrespective of ‘who won the day’, if any one civilisation can make such a claim, is that East and West have met throughout history, have borrowed and learned from one another, and have made significant contributions to where we all find ourselves today. This much, at least, has been reasonably well catalogued.33 As stated above, no civilisation or culture is a completely isolated or self-sufficient island. Rather, for millennia there have been back and forth movements of peoples and exchanges of ideas, inventions and innovations between East and West and beyond. Who invented what is not or should not really be the key issue of debate; as with any idea or invention people borrow and redesign and rethink and improve on the original. That is how progress is made that spreads far and wide to the benefit of all: through the exchange and sharing of ideas and inventions, not through keeping knowledge and know-how in-house to the exclusion of others. Decision making by discussion: the non-Western idea of democracy By way of example what I want to do is take a concept that is thought of as central to the Western tradition of political thought and sociopolitical progress and to demonstrate that not all is as clear-cut as we have been led to believe. At the same time this example further undermines the persistent contention in the history of Western political thought that non-Western peoples are sociopolitically retarded and incapable of self-government. At present, as conflict rages in Afghanistan and Iraq, and as tensions simmer elsewhere, no concept is more topical and contentious than democracy and democratisation, particularly the exporting and imposition of democracy to places and cultures that are thought to be totally alien to the basic principles of democracy. Perhaps more than any other idea or concept, democracy is regarded by many to be a uniquely and exclusively Western idea. But is this really the case? The Western conception of democracy tends to emphasise the importance of democratic institutions and processes largely associated with Western liberal democracies, such as those in Europe, North America and Australasia. But democratic-like processes are also to be found in the histories of many non-Western peoples and places. Let us begin with a little background to illustrate that democracy and the principles underlying the concept are not exclusively a Western invention. The idea and practice of THE RIVER OF INTER-CIVILISATIONAL RELATIONS 1367 Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution] At: 06:20 7 December 2007 democracy is widely thought to have its roots in Ancient Greece around twoand- a-half millennia ago (c sixth century BCE). Oldest and best known of the Greek democracies is ancient Athens, a virtual city-state something like modern Singapore but considerably smaller. Recent discoveries, however, suggest that some rudimentary form of democracy or pre-democracy might have first emerged centuries earlier in the Late Bronze Age (c 1600 – 1100 BCE) around Mycenae in the northeast Peloponnese. Furthermore, relatively recent archaeological explorations suggest that the ancient Greeks might not have been the first to make use of self-governing assemblies. That honour, rather, probably belongs to the peoples of the East who once occupied the land that is modern-day Iran and Iraq. From there these early or predemocratic ideas of decision making by discussion spread towards the east and the Indian subcontinent and westward to Phoenician port cities such as Byblos and Sidon before arriving in ancient Athens.34 The point to be made here, and which will be outlined further, is that the ideas and ideals behind democracy are not the sole preserve of the Western world. On the contrary, they have a long and prominent history in the East, the West and beyond; with undoubtedly more than a little borrowing taking place between one and all. One of the inhibiting factors in giving the non-Western tradition of predemocracy the attention it warrants is that scholarship tends to focus on the state as the foremost evolutionary political institution, as Hegel, among others (contemporary scholars included), painfully makes clear. There is a saying, however, that all politics is local; and this is certainly the case for much of human history. Steven Muhlberger and Phil Paine make the point that the vast majority of ‘human government has been a matter of councils and assemblies’, often incorporating a reasonably significant proportion of the community, which adopts a ‘surprising degree of democratic procedure’. To put it another way, ‘humanity possesses a long history of government by discussion, in which groups of people sharing common interests make decisions that affect their lives through debate and consultation, and often enough by voting’. Of all the human beings who have ever walked the Earth, a large majority of them have lived in small agricultural villages. And of these untold millions of agricultural communities, both past and present, most ‘have employed some democratic techniques of government’ in their decision making and in choosing leaders. No matter what period or place in history one looks at, virtually all villages across time and space have made use of some form of village council system.35 Beyond Western political thought other prominent theoreticians and practitioners have taken up the cause that democracy is not an exclusively Western idea, contesting the notion that its roots are fixed solely in the Western tradition. It is argued, rather, that some measure of democracy, or decision making by discussion, has taken place in all corners of the globe among peoples drawing on all traditions of thought; including in the East. Anwar Ibrahim, the former deputy prime minister of Malaysia, for instance, takes issue with the suggestion that ‘Asian values’ based on Confucian ethics—which emphasises ‘filial piety, and, by extension, submission to state BRETT BOWDEN 1368 Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution] At: 06:20 7 December 2007 authority’—run counter to the very essence of democracy. On the contrary, he insists that this account ‘completely ignores another central precept of Confucian ethics, which . . . also emphasises the primacy of the self and the importance of self-cultivation in realising human potential and guarding against exploitation by the powers that be’. Anwar further highlights that ‘Islam has always expressed the primacy of ‘adl, or justice’. A concept he identifies as ‘a close approximation’ to the idea of freedom as defined in the West. Moreover, in this particular conception ‘Justice entails ruling according to the dictates of Islamic law, which emphasise consultation and condemn despotism and tyranny’. Anwar makes the further point that ‘the great jurist al-Shatibi (d 790 CE)’ eloquently articulated that ‘the maqasid alshari’a (higher objectives of the shari’a) sanctify the preservation of religion, life, intellect, family, and wealth’. All of these are ‘objectives that bear striking resemblance to Lockean ideals that would be expounded centuries later’.36 Before he became president of the Republic of Korea (South Korea), Kim Dae Jung noted that ‘almost two millennia before Locke, Chinese philosopher Meng-tzu preached similar ideas’ to those of Locke. Kim continues, in Meng-tzu’s ‘‘‘Politics of Royal Ways,’’ the king is the ‘‘Son of Heaven,’’ and heaven bestowed on its son a mandate to provide good government, that is, to provide good for the people’. If the king failed to ‘govern righteously, the people had the right to rise up and overthrow his government in the name of heaven’. Kim relates that, in Meng-tzu’s philosophy, the ‘people came first . . . the country second, and the king third’. Kim further highlights that the ‘ancient Chinese philosophy of Minben Zhengchi, or ‘‘people-based politics,’’ teaches that ‘‘the will of the people is the will of heaven’’ and that one should ‘‘respect the people as heaven’’ itself’. Similarly Kim points to Tonghak, a religion native to Korea, which ‘went even further’ with these Lockean ideals. Kim emphasises that there ‘are no ideas more fundamental to democracy than the teachings of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Tonghak’. Furthermore, he insists that ‘Asia has democratic philosophies as profound as those of the West’. Indeed, while Europe was still mired in feudalism, ‘China and Korea had already sustained county prefecture systems for about 2000 years’.37 As indicated above, China’s near neighbour, India, also occupies a prominent place in the prehistory of democracy, as it does in the present as the largest of all democracies. Commentaries and histories of the people and politics of the Indian subcontinent, such as those by James Mill, Hegel and Marx outlined above, generally characterise it as mired in and handicapped by oriental despotism. In contrast to these generally unflattering accounts, in the fifth and sixth centuries BCE, particularly in northern India, small citystate- like republics and regional federations were, in fact, relatively commonplace. The democratic flavour of ancient India is evident in its literature and records of the period, particularly religious writings known as Vedas and Brahmanas. The general right to self-government of any given group or collective was thought to be reasonably uncontested by the higher powers that be, and the decision making in these ‘communities was either THE RIVER OF INTER-CIVILISATIONAL RELATIONS 1369 Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution] At: 06:20 7 December 2007 oligarchic or democratic in ways recognisable to Greek visitors’. The principles of Buddhist egalitarianism were also ‘an important strand of social and political thought in the India of the day’. In essence, as Muhlberger and Paine explain, in ‘India, as in Greece, democracy—in the ancient sense—was commonplace’.38 Africa is generally tarred with a similar brush to that of India, a continent renowned for its authoritarian tradition based on kingship. Much of this ‘tradition’, however, is a relatively recent ‘invention’ introduced to the continent by European colonial powers.39 As elsewhere, much of pre-colonial Africa was home to ‘a latticework of decentralised farming villages and autonomous towns’, many of which were more often than not beyond the gaze of monarchical power. And just as elsewhere, many of these villages were run by councils of village elders or assemblies which tended to the dayto- day business of governing.40 The African continent is also home to a good example which runs counter to the suggestion that democracy is not compatible with non-Western peoples because of their emphasis on the group to the exclusion of individual rights and welfare. In Igbo culture the concept of chi represents the ‘sum total of an individual’s life history’, which imbues each and every person with a distinctive ‘behavioural personality’ and makes them ‘personally responsible and calculative in [their] life and actions’. Thus, for the Igbo the ‘individual becomes the last irreducible unit of responsibility who must originate and ‘‘automate’’ [their] own behaviour and guard it judiciously against all undue imitation and blind compliance’.41 These are the general principles and values of individualism that are synonymous with any standard account of liberal democracy, perhaps even libertarianism. The schema outlined above by Eric Wolf, that there is a widespread belief that a direct line can be traced from Ancient Greece, as the earliest of democracies, down to the USA as the most advanced experiment in democracy, is also a problematic contention. Setting aside the many qualms observers have about the state of democracy in modern America, there is also the contention that the Constitution of the USA, particularly the opening line, ‘We, the people’, draws on and borrows from the constitution of the native Iroquois peoples.42 More generally, the lawyer-cum-anthropologist, Lewis Henry Morgan (1818 – 81), observed that the Hodenosaunee or Iroquois Confederation’s system of government ‘was an aristocracy liberalised, until it stood upon the verge of democracy’.43 Even earlier, in speaking of the ‘Indian method of government’, James Adair (c 1709 – 83) noted that the ‘Indian method of government’ generally consists of a ‘foederal union of the whole society for mutual safety’. He further noted that the ‘power of their chiefs, is an empty sound’. For chiefs ‘can only persuade or dissuade the people’ by ‘force of good-nature and clear reasoning’. Adair continues: When any national affair is in debate, you may hear every father of a family speaking in his house on the subject, with rapid, bold language, and the utmost freedom that a people can use. Their voices, to a man, have due weight in every BRETT BOWDEN 1370 Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution] At: 06:20 7 December 2007 public affair, as it concerns their welfare alike . . . They are very deliberate in their councils . . . They reason in a very orderly manner, with much coolness and good-natured language, though they may differ widely in their opinions . . . In this manner they proceed, till each of the head men hath given his opinion on the point in debate. Then they sit down together, and determine upon the affair. Adair concluded that the Amerindians’ ‘whole behaviour, on public occasions, is highly worthy of imitation by some of our British senators and lawyers’.44 The general point to be made here is that, if we think of democracy more in terms of its essence being ‘decision making by discussion’, or the application of public reason, and less about institutions and formal processes, then democracy can and should be seen as something more than just a Western idea. On a similar note self-government and the capacities it entails are also not just the preserve of ‘civilised’ Europe or the West, but are common to virtually all peoples across the globe and throughout much of human history. Indeed, democracy, or decision making by discussion might even come to be regarded in a more universal sense, or as having roots across our broader world—in the West, the East, Africa, and among indigenous peoples. Conclusion The supposedly exclusively Western idea of democracy is just one key example of how ideas that are thought to originate in or ‘belong’ to one particular civilisation or peoples are in fact common to greater humanity. Another is the ethic of reciprocity, or the so-called ‘Golden Rule’, which is a fundamental moral principle common to virtually all our world’s major religious or cultural/civilisational groups. While it is expressed in a range ways, the essence of the ethic of reciprocity is captured in the phrase, ‘treat others as you would like to be treated’. A similar point can be made about the importance of human dignity and its prominent place in a plurality of cultural groupings. And, like democracy, the same can be said of the supposedly exclusively Western or Judaeo-Christian principle of toleration.45 For one reason or another conflict always seems to attract more attention than co-operation and what we have in common; nevertheless there is much to be gained by directing greater attention towards what Eastern, Western and other traditions of thought have in common and have shared and shaped together, particularly in the realm of ideas. In making this point I would like to borrow Will Durant’s idea that civilisation is a stream with banks, and that at times the stream is filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things that tend to attract our attention, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues.46 Like the story of civilisation, the story of inter-civilisational relations is the story of what happens on the banks. Anwar Ibrahim, for one, sees the positive work being done on the banks and recognises the opportunities presented to the current generation of thinkers THE RIVER OF INTER-CIVILISATIONAL RELATIONS 1371 Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution] At: 06:20 7 December 2007 and leaders when he writes: ‘For me, there has never been any doubt that our world [the East] and the West are compatible, and that this spirit of inclusiveness and pluralism will continue to be a source of inspiration in bridging the gaps between cultures and civilisations’.47 In a similar line of thinking the philosopher Paul Ricoeur suggested that human truth lies in the ‘process in which civilisations confront each other more and more with what is most living and creative in them’. He went on to suggest that human ‘history will progressively become a vast explanation in which each civilisation will work out its perception of the world by confronting all others’. But he thought that ‘this process has hardly begun’ and that it is likely to be a task thrust upon ‘generations to come’ to make better sense of. Looking back on the West’s history of relations with non- Western peoples and cultures, he was unsure of what would become of Western civilisation ‘when it has really met different civilisations by means other than the shock of conquest and domination’. In this regard he was compelled to ‘admit that this encounter has not yet taken place at the level of an authentic dialogue’. Ricoeur thought at the time that ‘We are in a tunnel, at the twilight of dogmatism and the dawn of real dialogues’.48 Since he wrote these words, momentous events such as 11 September and the subsequent war on terrorism, and even the riots that spread across his homeland France not long after his death have cast a shadow on this optimism. At the level of diplomatic and international relations, today I fear we are probably closer to midnight than to the dawn of an authentic dialogue between civilisations wherein exchange of ideas takes place in the true twoway (or multidirectional) sense of the word. The need for inter-civilisational dialogue and understanding has rarely been more urgent. That said, as with many momentous turning points in history, along with great challenges come great opportunities which must be seized by people operating at all levels. And in this regard there is good cause for hope. Gatherings such as the World Social Forum and similar events are doing their bit to facilitate and advance inter-civilisational dialogue. Similarly, and ranging from the level of individuals to larger collectives and communities of faith, each and every day multiple dialogues and exchanges of ideas are taking place; some of them face to face, many of them over the internet; all of them adding to and aiding the cause of shared understandings. As we engage in these dialogues-cum-debates or debates-cum-dialogues, we would do well to keep in mind a point reiterated by Edward Said in the Preface to the 25th anniversary edition of Orientalism: ‘Rather than the manufactured clash of civilisations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways’.49 Notes 1 See Samuel P Huntington, ‘The clash of civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs, 72 (3), 1993, pp 22 – 49; and Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, London: Touchstone Books, 1998. 2 John Donne, Meditation XVII, from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, 1624. BRETT BOWDEN 1372 Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution] At: 06:20 7 December 2007 3 Eric R Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982, pp 4 – 5. 4 See, for instance, JM Roberts, Triumph of the West, London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1985. 5 Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process, trans Edmund Jephcott, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, p 5. 6 Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, London: Heinemann, 1980, p 8. 7 Friedrich von Schiller, ‘The nature and value of universal history: an inaugural lecture [1789]’, History and Theory, 11 (3), 1972, pp 325 – 327. 8 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans CF Atkinson, New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1962, p 13, emphasis in the original. 9 Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, Vol I, London: Free Association Books, 1987, p 2, emphasis in the original. 10 Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view [1784]’ in Kant On History, ed Lewis White Beck, Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963, pp 24 – 25. 11 David Harvey, ‘Cosmopolitanism and the banality of geographic evils’, Public Culture, 12 (2), 2000, p 534. Kant sought an exemption from university regulations to teach geography and taught the course at least 49 times. By way of comparison he taught logic and metaphysics 54 times, ethics on 46 occasions and anthropology 28 times. 12 Imannuel Kant, Geographie (Physiche Geographie), trans M Cohen-Halimi, M Marcuzzi & V Seroussi, Paris: Bibliotheque Philosophique, 1999; quoted in Harvey, ‘Cosmopolitanism and the banality of geographic evils’, p 533. 13 GWF Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol II, trans TM Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, pp 1061 – 1062. 14 Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p 9. 15 GWF Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans J Sibree, New York: Dover Publications, 1956, pp 162, 142, 163. 16 GWF Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans TM Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958, p 213, para 331. 17 Guha, History at the Limit of World-History, p 10. 18 FCS Schiller, ‘Introduction’, in EH Goddard & PA Gibbons, Civilisation or Civilisations: An Essay in the Spenglerian Philosophy of History, London: Constable & Company, 1926, p vii. 19 James Mill, The History of British India, nine vols, London: J Madden, 1840 – 48. 20 Karl Marx, ‘Revolution in China and in Europe’, New York Daily Tribune, 20 May 1853, reprinted in Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, On Colonialism, New York: International Publishers, 1972, p 20. 21 Friedrich Engels, ‘Persia and China’, New York Daily Tribune, 5 June 1857, reprinted in Marx & Engels, On Colonialism, pp 120, 124. 22 Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur l’ine´galitie´ des races humaines, four vols, 1853 – 85, quoted in Frank H Hankins, The Racial Basis of Civilisation, New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1926, p 34. 23 Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of Unconscious, Vol II, trans William Chatterton Coupland, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tru¨ bner, & Co, 1893, pp 11 – 12. 24 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government, London: JM Dent & Sons, 1962, pp 73 – 74. 25 Bernal, Black Athena, pp 172, 25. 26 See, for instance, Edmund Burke, ‘India’, in Burke, Selections: With Essays by Hazlitt, Arnold & Others, ed AMD Hughes, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921, pp 111 – 127. 27 Franc¸ois Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, Vol I, London: A Lewis, 1849, p 265. 28 Johann Gottfried Herder, On World History: An Anthology, ed Hans Adler & Ernest A Menze, trans Ernest A Menze & Michael Palma, Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, 1997, pp 47, 41, emphasis in the original. 29 Bernal, Black Athena; Mary R Lefkowitz & Guy MacLean Rogers (eds), Black Athena Revisited, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996; and Martin Bernal, Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to his Critics, ed David Chioni Moore, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. 30 JohnM Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p 2. See also JM Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World, New York: Guilford Press, 1993. 31 David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, London: Abacus, 1999, p xxi. 32 Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950, New York: Harper Collins, 2003. 33 See for instance, John M Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation and JJ Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought, London: Routledge, 1997; Cyriac K Pullapilly & Edwin J Van Kley (eds), Asia and the West: Encounters and Exchanges from the Age of Explorations, Notre Dame, IN: Cross Cultural Publications, 1986; Lewis A Maverick, China: A Model for Europe, San Antonio, TX: Paul Anderson Co, 1946; Stanwood Cobb, Islamic Contributions to THE RIVER OF INTER-CIVILISATIONAL RELATIONS 1373 Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution] At: 06:20 7 December 2007 Civilisation, Washington, DC: Avalon Press, 1963; and Adolf Reichwein, China and Europe: Intellectual and Artistic Contacts in the Eighteenth Century, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1925. 34 John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy, London: Free Press/New York: Norton, forthcoming, 2008. 35 Steven Muhlberger & Phil Paine, ‘Democracy’s place in world history’, Journal of World History, 4 (1), 1993, pp 27, 32. 36 Anwar Ibrahim, ‘Universal values and Muslim democracy’, Journal of Democracy, 17 (3), 2006, pp 6 – 7. See also Chenyang Li, ‘Confucian value and democratic value’, Journal of Value Inquiry, 31 (2), 1997, pp 183 – 193; and Lee Teng-hui, ‘Chinese culture and political renewal’, Journal of Democracy, 6 (4), 1995, pp 3 – 8. 37 Kim Dae Jung, ‘Is culture destiny?’, Foreign Affairs, 73 (6), 1994, pp 191 – 192. 38 Muhlberger & Paine, ‘Democracy’s place in world history’, pp 34 – 39. See also Jagdish P Sharma, Republics in Ancient India, c 1500 BC – 500 BC, Leiden: EJ Brill, 1968; and Anant Sadashiv Altekar, State and Government in Ancient India, Banaras: Motilal Banarsidass, 1955. 39 See Terence Ranger, ‘The invention of tradition in colonial Africa’, in Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp 211 – 262. 40 Muhlberger & Paine, ‘Democracy’s place in world history’, pp 32 – 33. 41 Lambert U Ejiofor, Dynamics of Igbo Democracy: A Behavioural Analysis of Igbo Politics in Aguinyi Clan, Ibadan: University Press Ltd for the University of Nigeria Press, 1981, p 106. The Igbo are one of the largest single ethnic groups in Africa, scattered across western and central Africa, particularly southeast Nigeria. 42 See Charles L Mee, The Genius of the People, New York: Harper & Row, 1987. More generally, see Bruce E Johansen, Native American Political Systems and the Evolution of Democracy: An Annotated Bibliography, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. 43 Lewis H Morgan, The League of the Iroquois, North Dighton, MA: JG Press, 1995, p 126. 44 James Adair, Adair’s History of the American Indians, ed Samuel Cole Williams, New York: Promontory Press, 1930, pp 459 – 460. 45 Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Cf JC Laursen (ed), Religious Toleration: The ‘Variety of Rites’ from Cyrus to Defoe, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999; and Mehdi Amin Razavi & David Ambuel (eds), Philosophy, Religion, and the Question of Intolerance, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997. 46 See Will Durant in Life magazine, 18 October 1963. 47 Ibrahim, ‘Universal values and Muslim democracy’, p 5. 48 Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans Charles A Kelbley, Evanston, WY: Northwestern University Press, 1965, pp 283 – 284. 49 Edward Said, ‘Preface’, in Said, Orientalism, London: Penguin, 2003, p xxii. BRETT BOWDEN 1374
Posts: 2007 | From: Washington State | Registered: Oct 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Evergreen: "Indeed, democracy, or decision making by discussion might even come to be regarded in a more universal sense, or as having roots across our broader world—in the West, the East, Africa, and among indigenous peoples."
Posts: 2007 | From: Washington State | Registered: Oct 2006
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Bottom line, "the West" is an identity and entity is a fiction that was created the thinkers of the "West" as in inheritors of the Western Roman empire in order to justify their conquest over the rest of the known world. This "thinking" produced a body of scholarship and intellectual pursuit that turned history on its head and put the LAST people to become civilized on a pedestal as the BASIS of civilization itself. Europe did not originate "civilization". That civilization originated and flourished long before Europe in India, Africa, the Americas and Mesopotamia long before Europe could count is something that is beyond debate. Therefore the history of civilization in Europe is one of inheriting characteristics from OLDER civilizations in "the East", with Greece in particular being especially influenced by peoples from Asia Minor (modern Turkey), Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. These FACTS make it no mystery as to the flow of civilization from East to West, except in the minds of the aforementioned "Western" thinkers, who created their fantasy historical framework in order to reinforce world economic, military and political domination.
The bias and outright nonsense called "western" history can be seen in how they deny and omit Egypt in many areas of scientific endeavor. In Egypt you have the oldest representations of medical and surgical instruments, tombs of self described physicians going back to the old kingdom and papyri that describe medical conditions going back at least to the Middle Kingdom. On top of that you have the use of linen gauze and ointments as treatments, which we know about from mummies, that show the use of bandages and casts from an early period. Yet "the West" feels that medicine as an organized science did not originate until the Greeks.
quote: We know from mummified bodies that dental surgery was practised from early times; some have teeth extracted, and an Old Kingdom mummy of a man shows two holes beneath a molar of the lower jaw, apparently drilled for draining an abscess. The discovery in a grave at Giza of a body with several teeth wired together suggests that dental treatment was already well advanced in the Old Kingdom. Sesa's tomb at Saqqara (known as the "doctor's tomb") shows the manipulation of joints, while the "physician's tomb", that of Ankhmahor (also at Saqqara), shows an operation on a man's toe and the circumcision of a youth. Ebeid points out that this was practised on boys between six and 12 years old, and adds: "all criteria indicate that female circumcision was never practiced in ancient Egypt."
Ancient Egyptians delighted in the birth of a child and babies were probably breast-fed into the subsequent pregnancy. The Kahun and Ebers papyri outline the treatment of gynaecological problems and recommend a birthing-stool for delivery either in a squatting or kneeling position. They also describe how to induce labour if necessary, cut the umbilical cord and care for the new-born child.
Cancer, it appears, is not a disease of modern civilisation. There is a paucity of evidence of its incidence in ancient Egypt; nevertheless, some indication of tumours does exist from early times right through to the Ptolemaic period. Ebeid points out in his chapter on surgery that the ancient Egyptians used the scalpel, "and a heated knife or cautery for extirpating the tumours, taking care so as not to bleed afterwards". He quotes Ebers Papyrus 872 which reads: "This [i.e. tumour] is a swelling of vessels, a disease that I treat... then you must perform for it a knife-treatment, it (the knife) is heated in the fire...".
Many areas of science and medicine seem ready to accept something that general "Western" historians do not.
Posts: 8895 | Registered: May 2005
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posted
Since I neither have the time nor patience to be reading all that (end of the school semester for me )
Can Evergreen or someone else create a short summary or synopsis of topic article?
Posts: 26252 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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posted
Europeans create this East-West dichotomy as if there were actually a "West" to begin with and Europe had civilizations comparable in antiquity to those of Africa and Asia, and gives to Western Europe in particular a tradition that it never had until it appropriated Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Arabic learning during the Renaissance. Worst of all, it takes Africa and African influence on Greece and the "Near East" completely out of the picture, so that it remains outside of history per the Hegelian fantasy, and of course puts Egypt in "the East." But what exactly is the East? There are too many different peoples, civilizations, ethnicities, language families, cultures all placed together under that umbrella term. Egypt is not a part of the East. "East" and "West" are two directional terms that have been essentialized so that "West" means "rational" and "objective" and whatever else Europeans want it to mean, while East means the polar opposite of whatever term Europeans choose. Note how the writer talks about the Igbo but not about African Egypt, instead using that nebulous term, "East." He barely mentions the more controversial aspects of Bernal's work, the ones that really got Lefkowitz kicking and screaming. Ah well. You can only expect so much. Posts: 140 | From: USA | Registered: Jan 2006
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