The twain shall surely meet

"Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet," said Rudyard Kipling at the turn of last century. But the day they meet, it shall surely be peace on earth. 

Every meeting of strangers is accompanied by misunderstanding and suspicion. Every misunderstanding is liable to end up in clashes. It is out of such clashes that the spark of truth appears. The clash of civilization is therefore a historical necessity not a thing to be avoided if the world is going to unite. 

What does the East really symbolize to our world? What is the Eastern mind made of? How does an oriental see the world?

The Eastern mind had down through the centuries been largely given to mysticism and a closer tie with a single powerful and zealous divinity. It has all the time been the producer of seers, sages, visionaries, divines, prophets and messengers of God. 

Believing in an absolute God with an absolute message had however its drawbacks. The most ruthless tyrants on earth lived in the East. No democracy had the chance to grow in such circumstances. The East had to wait for the epiphany of a less bloody God to start imitating him.

Besides, Eastern mentality is subtle, mysterious and crooked at times. Such frame of mind produced mystics and saints in the past who claimed to have known God following a personal search. They encapsulated him in their books and rituals and fought their less gifted brothers as infidels. Thus zealotry and fanaticism accompanied intolerance and injustice.

Three times the East knocked on the door of the west: When Darius King of the Persians tried to crush the Greeks. When the Moors invaded Spain and tried to proceed to France and when the Turks stood at the gates of Vienna. It is good the attempts failed as they did. The world was not ready for such a meeting of civilizations. The forces of history knew better than to proceed with an unbidden world meeting. 

What would have happened if the three attempts had succeeded? Would we have a Columbus, a Newton or a Shakespeare as we know them today? 

For the clashes of civilizations to produce good results, the opponents had to mature first. An untimely encounter might have produced disaster or sinister effects as those of the Crusades. 

Some might say that the Moslems had brought Greek civilization to the West and might mention Cordoba, Granada, Toledo, and Moslem savants of those days such as Averroes and Avicena. But much as these men contributed a lot to science, they were rather of an oriental cast. They didn't have the relentless searching mind and challenging make-up of the people of the West. 

The birth of real science should be associated with humanism: belief in the mind of man. Trust your mind rather than your heart was the lodestone of the West during the Renaissance and after. Really the mind and its reasoning power is God's greatest gift to mankind. 

The East can be likened to the heart of man, while the West is the mind thereof. The mind cannot work alone. Look what is happening to the world at present. Too much faith in reason is proving dangerous as too much faith in the heart is producing fanatics of all types. 

Scientific achievements came about because of the West's faith in man. The humanists of the Renaissance did away with the belief that man was a miserable and helpless child of God with an original sin that needed urgent salvation or else. The West however tended to subscribe to the idea that man was created free and that he could progress by depending on his intellect and skills: an idea wholly foreign to the Eastern mind. 

The Easterner thought that in obeying God and serving him blindly rested the meaning of life. If satisfying the divine proved difficult at times, he interpreted and distorted the word of his God to suit his pattern of life. He always found a way to cheat himself and circumvented laws to advance his schemes. This led to all sorts of rituals and sacrifices done to appease God. As long as the divine was bribed and satisfied, to hell with the people. And injustice abounded. It was to such cruel and unscrupulous leaders that these words were spoken by a prophet: what does the Lord require of thee, but to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly before thy God….

Now let's turn to the West (represented by Europe). 

What does the West really symbolize to our world? What is the Western mind made of? How does a Westerner see his world?

The Western mind began to separate from the East with the advent of Greek civilization. While the Easterner tried to find the laws of God and struggled to make sense of His unreachable wisdom, the Greek thinker focused his mind on explaining physical phenomena and searched to find the laws of creation and the universe. 

The East's zealous and no-nonsense God was replaced by the Greek's more reason-friendly and playful Olympian gods. The Greek gods loved philosophy and the arts, and were so 'democratic' that they did not find it degrading to come down from their thrones and intermarry with the common people. 

Believing in such demigods had however its drawbacks. It made mockery of divinity and led to all kinds of immorality that abased man to the level of the beasts of the field. With their minds given more to logical thinking than spiritual contemplation, the Greeks set the paths to materialism. 

The Greeks did of course establish political institutions that united them as city-states, but the solid foundations upon which the unity of mankind could be established were far removed from the thinking of even the most consummate of their philosophers. 

Besides, Western mentality is rational, analytical, adventurous, pragmatic and greedy at times. Such mentality produced Descartes, Kant, Columbus on one hand, and Hitler and Stalin on the other. As one Asian thinker has put it, Stalin and Hitler, with their refined art of killing and exterminating people, could only pop up in European minds and sprout in European lands. 

Nietzsche said the last word on behalf of his European compatriots when in a 'cosmic argument with God' he concluded that 'God is dead.'

When the West colonized the East, the clash of civilization did not take place. Asians either played dead or fought Western values through apathy. But the West overstayed its welcome and had to be kicked out. Western influence however had a longer role to play. The neocolonial battle kept on raging in the hearts and minds of the Oriental. With Islam used as ideology, the war took a different dimension. 

Gemal Abdel Nasser rose and presenting himself as a latter-day Mihdi, tried to turn the tables on the West. He failed. Then came along Sadam Hussein, a latter-day Nebuchadnezor or Saladin. He and before him Khomeni fought Western hegemony in vain. And last but not least appeared a savior in the person of Bin Laden, a latter-day Grand Caliph. Unfortunately, he had a bad start and his followers turned their backs on him. 

During all this time, people began to revise their world outlook. Polarized ideas began to disperse and in contradictions could be seen points of contact. 

The two cultural blocks are finally talking to each other. The time is ripe now to talk, for man has now come of age. 

Soon will the two cultural blocks merge into one and live in mutual respect and cooperation for the benefit of a civilized world. Let's keep our fingers crossed. 

Alas, some Westerners have, after the rout of the Talibans, started to talk about the final victory of Western values. Forget it. If that is what you think, remember that Bin Laden was created because he hated to live with defeat. Tolerance and justice have to be preached and practiced if the world is to have peace. 

Some Easterners keep talking about destroying the West and its hedonistic and materialistic values, and replace it with Eastern values. No way.