The Wider Blame

COLLISION OF EAST AND WEST (352 pp.) --Herrymon Maurer--Regnery ($4.50).

Like a lot of other Americans looking back on a decade of U.S. frustrations and failures in Asia, the author of this book has been asking himself what went wrong. His answer: not just the blunders of a little clique in the State Department, though they proved to be tragic enough. Herrymon Maurer, for five years (1942-47) a FORTUNE editor and Asia specialist for that magazine, puts the big blame on the well-meaning, wrongheaded arrogance of the West in general. His Collision of East and West is a pithy, provocative account of how to lose friends and alienate whole peoples.

Cultural traffic, says Maurer in his main argument, is two-way traffic, but the highway of East-West relations was crosshatched with invisible barriers and mental roadblocks that only patience and understanding could have removed. In its dealings with the East, the West (especially the U.S.) has attacked the roadblocks chiefly with ill-based advice, condescension and moral harangues.

The Devil Theory. The roadblocks stayed put. A proud Japan chose to make war; a confused China floundered into the hands of the Communist undertakers. "In each country the United States set out to preach a doctrine of peace, freedom, and plenty; yet in each country it left a gospel of might, efficiency, organization, violence, and face." Stung by the unexpected, many Americans invoked the "devil" theory of history, i.e., villains sabotaged Uncle Sam's good intentions. Reading between the headlines, Maurer sees instead the serene profiles of two old Chinese sages of the 6th Century B.C., whom the West has never bothered to understand.

To Maurer, China is the clue to the Orient, and Confucius and Lao-tse are the clues to China. From Confucius stem China's social virtues: family piety, loyalty; from Lao-tse her moral values: Taoism, the philosophy of "Do Nothing," don't fuss, let nature take its course. It was Lao-tse who inspired such axioms as "There are thirty-six ways of meeting a dilemma and the best of them is to run away." To an Oriental, this represented the wisdom of the bamboo shoot which bends before the prevailing wind. To Westerners obsessed with slum clearance, sanitation and overall reform, it sounded like simple sloth. Faced with cultural mysteries, Westerners concocted superficial myths. The big myth about the Chinese: that they don't know how to "get things done." Upshot of such reasoning: Chiang Kai-shek's government was scuttled while otherwise hardheaded Westerners (e.g., "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell) sang the praises of Mao Tse-tung's "efficient" Communists.

Categorical Imperative. Vis-`a-vis Japan, there were variations of misunderstanding. The Japanese were "polite, industrious little people" until Pearl Harbor, brutal savages until V-J day, have been enthusiasts for democracy since. Warns Maurer: beneath surface "democratization" lurk the fixed feudal habits of centuries. A good Quaker by faith, and no Cassandra, Herrymon Maurer believes the West can retrieve its errors if it recognizes that "other persons . . . must be treated as ends in themselves, not as means to some other end."

In his introduction to Maurer's book, Chinese Scholar Hu Shih remarks that this concluding piece of wisdom is very close to Immanuel Kant's doctrine of the Categorical Imperative: "So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end in itself, never as a means only." It is also very close to the wisdom of the New Testament, which, says Maurer in effect, might make a better basis for a foreign policy toward Asia than the one the West has been using for a long time.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.