ON UNDERSTANDING ASIA

WORLD WAR II was barely over and the great recessional of the colonial powers had not yet begun when Yale's Professor F.S.C. Northrop published The Meeting of East and West, in which he flatly described that meeting as "the major event of our time." To a U.S. deeply preoccupied with a seemingly shattered Europe, that statement two decades ago appeared vastly exaggerated. Today few would question it. The problems, needs and challenges of Asia weigh ever more heavily on the Western mind. The East-West encounter will undoubtedly dominate the rest of the 20th century.

If he had not realized it before, Charles de Gaulle learned as much during his Russian tour last week. Admittedly, he was hoping to lay the groundwork for a European settlement. But as he flew to Soviet Asia and announced that he would later visit tiny Cambodia, the war in Viet Nam seemed to be a more urgent topic of conversation. The chief foreign-policy concerns of both America and Russia now lie in Asia. U.S. congressional committees and other forums heatedly debate the stability of Asian regimes, the aspirations of the Mekong Delta peasants, the nature of Buddhism. Understanding Asia has become an urgent task.

It has never been easy. Nearly 100 years ago, Walt Whitman, in his eccentric language, urged America to "eclaircise the myths Asiatic, the primitive fables." The myths and fables, the romantic dreams as well as the shrewd half truths of colonial times, firmly established a belief in the impenetrable differentness of Asia. The situation was not helped by the fact that Asia itself had produced strikingly little written history. Today growing numbers of Americans have firsthand knowledge of how Asians think and feel, act and react --even though such knowledge is always beset by the danger of oversimplification. Diplomats, soldiers, businessmen, journalists, teachers and technicians constantly contribute to the growing body of "typical" Asian experiences.

There is the one about trouble at a motor pool in South Viet Nam; American advisers are considered disrespectful because they give advice about such things as how to grease the engines and which oil to use without first praising the skill of the local mechanics. Moral: The key to Asia is "face."

Then there is the policeman in Malaysia who is asked how long it will take to get to the next village; he replies, "A few minutes," when actually it will take an hour and a half. Moral: Asians only tell you what they think you want to hear.

Another story concerns the foreman at a construction site who is mixing his mortar by hand although a new mechanical mixer is available. When an American technician asks why the mixer is not used, the foreman replies proudly: "I am one day ahead of schedule now, so why bother with the machine?" Moral: Asians have no sense of urgency.

The incidents are true. But how true are the interpretations and what do they prove about Asian attitudes and the Asian mind?

The Fiction of Entity

There is, of course, no such thing as the Asian mind--there are dozens. An Indonesian is as different from a Japanese as a Frenchman from an American. Generalizations never do justice to national differences, but in a kind of shorthand it might be said that the Chinese are practical, pragmatic and irreligious; the Indians are impractical, theoretical and vaguely religious; the Japanese are ritualistic, restrained, esthetic and authoritarian; the Koreans are undisciplined, imaginative and creative; the Laotians are sensitive, pacific and passive; the Vietnamese are sensitive, combative and active. When the great Indian teacher and writer Rabindranath Tagore visited China in the '20s, he declared that the Chinese seemed stranger to him than any people he had met in the West.

Yet if the notion of an entity called Asia is a Western fiction, it is a fiction that many Asians now support--to assert unity against the West. In South Viet Nam recently, a Japanese journalist was taken out on patrol. The Vietnamese captain of the patrol spoke neither Japanese nor English but managed to tell his guest through a U.S. interpreter: "You're an Asian. You can really understand us."

This was mostly wishful thinking, but not entirely; for all their fissiparous differences, most peoples of Asia do share attitudes and traditions that set them apart from the Western world--or, more specifically, from the modern world.

The Way of the Bamboo

The most pervasive Asian concept is harmony, particularly harmony with nature. In the vast landscapes, nature is an awesome thing, baking the treeless plains and flooding the valleys, drenching the jungles with monsoons, decimating populations with pestilence and plague. Life in this world has always been precarious. And the way to maintain it is the way of the bamboo before the wind--a graceful yielding.

This may look to Western eyes like abject submission; the Asian sees it as the only way to win. In Taoism, the symbol of strength is water, which conforms to the shape of whatever it touches yet in the end cuts its own path through rock. Jujitsu (literally, "give-way art") is the art of defeating an aggressor with his own strength.

Western imagery abounds in conflict with the elements --man harnesses nature, tames the wilderness and conquers space. The Eastern mode, on the contrary, is to create a balance with nature and to identify even with nature's terrible aspects. India's mother goddess, giver of life, is also black and bloody Kali, the bringer of death and destruction. The West divides good and evil, and thinks evil can be destroyed--St. George killing the dragon, the Virgin crushing the serpent beneath her heel. The Hindus revere the serpent as the symbol of all nature, good and vile together. Asians generally are capable of believing that something is simultaneously good and bad, right and wrong, black and white--in a manner that drives the Western, Aristotelian, either-or mentality to distraction.

Asians are villagers, and the village always bowed before the procession of imperial powers as before natural forces --taxed, conscripted, pillaged but holding fast to the status quo by totem and taboo. Karl Marx sneered at "these idyllic village communities" as stagnant and "subjugating man to external circumstances."

In these organic microcosms, the Western concept of the individual, upholding and upheld by a written law, has no meaning at all; right action is a meld of custom and propriety demonstrated by the behavior of the sage. Written contracts are usually mere pieces of paper. "No Chinese would understand Shylock's claim to a pound of flesh in The Merchant of Venice," says Harvard Law Professor Jerome Cohen. "The important thing is human relations. You imply a lack of trust when you allow for disputes in contracts." If disputes arise, they are settled through face-to-face negotiations or through an intermediary, who will seek a compromise rather than a victory for the "right."

There is no single right in a harmonious world, nor are there rights in the Western sense. But there is no alienation, either; in a village culture, everyone is "in." Harmony demands that friction be avoided by elaborate sensitivity for others' feelings, which accounts for the importance of face. Courtesy has an esthetic value in the East that means far more than mere good manners do in Western eyes. Courtesy, in fact, is more of a virtue than honesty--hence the widespread acceptance of bribery and the sense of offended dignity when Westerners rail at the practice. It is impolite to ruffle another with one's own negative emotions; if one must refer to a recent bereavement, for instance, one does so with a happy grin, and officers arrested after abortive coups are often photographed smiling softly to themselves.

In business, speed is distrusted because it precludes those subtle soundings that make it unnecessary ever to say that devastatingly face-destroying word "no." The Chinese, Thai and Burmese have no word at all for "no"--leaving one to interpret from context, facial expression or some other nuance whether or not "perhaps" is a flat turndown.

The idea of harmony is socially authoritarian--it depends on the static society, in which authority flows downward from above. Status based on skill or achievement can only be disruptive in such a world. "What do you do?" is the American conversational icebreaker; "Who are you?" is what the Asian wants to know. The Indian caste system is only the most elaborate expression of this fact; caste and status are important everywhere in Asia.

The democratic process, difficult at best, is faced with special obstacles in Asia, where the West's unique concept of liberty under law is nearly incomprehensible. The idea of a political opposition is repugnant to a world in which consensus and unanimity rather than creative competition seem the only appropriate atmosphere. The Western practice of loyal opposition seems only further proof of Anglo-American cynicism and hypocrisy. For the existence of such political opposition presupposes the integrity of the lone individual against the group, a tradition that is nonexistent among Asians, who see the man with power as the man with the cosmic forces behind him--a man unwise to oppose.

The Distrust of Freedom

Those resonant watchwords of democracy--individualism and freedom--ring dissonantly in Asian ears. Individualism translates into Chinese as "every man for himself," and the word for freedom means "spontaneous uncontrol." To the Asians, it is an apparent paradox that these individualistic Americans--by their definition, the most selfish and egotistic of men--are so generous with foreign aid. Obviously, many Asians reason, they must have an ulterior motive.

Asians relate personally to others, or not at all. To the Westerner, touched "in the name of humanity" by the mere sight of starvation and suffering, the Easterner seems heartlessly unconcerned by the misery of those to whom he is not related by some tie. But to his family and friends, the Asian commits himself in a way that makes the American appear heartless. The thought of packing one's parents off to some old-age home or retirement colony is shocking to him.

How is it possible that with all this concern for harmony, Asia is constantly beset by eruptions of violence? It is a human paradox not too different from the fact that Christians, despite their love-thy-neighbor faith, have in the past turned wildly bigoted and cruel in defense of that faith--and sometimes still do. When "harmony" ceases to fit reality in Asia, when the harmonious social order is threatened or breaks down, fear erupts and leads to fury. The philosophy of harmony then provides no moral absolutes to check violence--particularly if it is directed against people not of one's own family or immediate community.

Western individualism stems largely from the Judeo-Christian concept of a direct relationship between the individual soul and God. This idea is generally missing in the East, where man relates to the divine, if at all, not in terms of I-Thou but of we-It. Hindus have a vast choice of specialized deities. Above these rides the all-encompassing impersonality of Atman-Brahman, with which the individual believer hopes to be joined as a drop of water is joined to the sea. Buddhism, at least in its older Hinayana form, is a do-it-yourself effort to achieve enlightenment and the end of suffering, minus metaphysics or the idea of God. Confucianism, which underlies the culture of both China and Japan, is less a religion than a code of propriety. Islam, prevalent in Indonesia and Pakistan, is closer to the Judeo-Christian tradition, but Asian influences and the weight of Islam's own fatalism also tend to submerge the individual.

What virtually all Asians today have in common is a desire to see their civilizations modernized. But not, they insist, Westernized. Asia wants to capture the secret of Western wealth and power--technology--without necessarily adopting Western ethics and social organization. The great question is whether this separation is possible.

Industrialization need not involve private capitalism, as Soviet Russia has demonstrated, but it can scarcely succeed without many Western attitudes. Modern industry requires a measure of individual initiative, self-reliance, risk-taking. It requires a belief in progress, in the reality of the material world. Instead of a fixed order, it needs a fluid system in which people can rise through merit. It does not necessarily require democracy, although Edwin Reischauer, U.S. Ambassador to Japan, points out that it must have literacy and mass communication--which usually lead people to demand more participation in their government.

Modern industry also must have social and economic units far bigger than the family, the city or the region. It requires education not as a means of imparting fixed dogma but as a process of training the mind to seek its own answers. In short, the secret of Western success is not merely technology, but the Promethean or Faustian spirit.

Japan is the only Asian country so far that has met the challenge. In the 19th century, it made a dramatic decision to modernize and had the advantage of starting from a fairly advanced feudal base. The Japanese have developed a truly industrial society within many of the old forms. A working democracy coexists with a profound need for authority and group action, a consumer economy with esthetic frugality (one picture hanging at a time, in contrast with the Western collector's crowded wall). Industry is paternalistic and feudal--hardly anyone gets fired or quits--although that is beginning to change.

China long resisted modernization and is now frantically catching up, at immense cost. Communism, a Western ideology, substitutes struggle for harmony but at the same time plays on ancient Chinese traditions, notably the submission of the individual to the state. Says David Rowe, Yale professor of political science: "The Chinese Communists have reverted to some of the worst things in the history of Chinese civilization: super-elitism, perversion of education into indoctrination, conspiratorial politics." Yet the older forms of Chinese despotism were apt to be lax, since the country was too vast for tight control; the Communists, thanks to modern communications, are far more thorough.

The Western Offer

India represents the third major attempt of the traditional Asian mind to come to terms with the modern world. Industry has begun to change the country, "has even begun to instill a sense of time and punctuality--here and there. In the fall of every year, Hindu workmen decorate their workshops and literally worship the god in their machines. But the machine does not require worship; it requires hard work, precision and comprehension. Sensing a lack of these, many Indians are pessimistic about the future. "Everyone is' waiting for the Americanization of India," says Essayist Nirad Chaudhuri, "but what they are going to get is the Hinduization of industry." Such critics fear that modernization is by no means inevitable; a thin, progressive upper crust might continue to live side by side with a vast, impoverished mass.

Writes Robert Sinai in The Challenge of Modernisation: "None of these societies have ever known what spring is; they have never experienced the sense of refreshment and renewal . . . Lacking a sense of sin and therefore of rebellion, Asia never produced its own Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment. In Asia man has always been willing to lose himself in something immense, in a horde or in a dynasty, in a pyramid or a nirvana. Asia never found what Europe discovered--man--individual, selfconscious, expansive; seeking, acquiring, and tormented."

Asia may not be able to accept this view of man, or may not want to, or may try to bend it to its own ways. Indeed some Westerners fear that "individual"' and "expansive" man is losing ground in the West itself. But this view is essentially what the West has to offer Asia in its present state of revolutionary change. On the response made by the Asian mind--the many Asian minds--depends much of the future.

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