East vs. West

East vs. West

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

A very good friend of mine invited me to one of his religious training classes one time. He is zionist in his loyalty to his particular Christian denomination, which is admirable, so I thought, What the hell. He wants me to go, I’ll go, out curiosity if nothing else.
The instructor was a talented teacher, but I disagreed with his argument, although I didn’t say anything.
He told us of how the Eastern ways of thinking were better, more respectable, more intuitively sound than our Western ways of thinking. He elliptically touted the superiority of the East over the West by using the example of a tree. According to him, in the East, when one wants to know about a tree, one does not cut it down and rip away at it, examining it under a microscope. In the Eastern culture one goes up to the tree and gently feels its leaves, smells its blossoms, sits under its cooling and refreshing shade.
So goes the way of the East.
On the other hand, the Western way of doing the same thing is very different. In the West, said the instructor, they begin by cutting the tree down. Then they strip away its bark, clip its blossoms and put them in a press. They saw the tree’s bole, rip free its branches, tare at its flesh, and otherwise decimate it, getting at its ‘guts,’ laying its blood and tissue on a slide underneath a microscope; the Western way of understand how it works. He didn’t put it quite like that but that was clearly the implication.
At first glance, the Eastern way seems profound, enigmatic. One might be tempted to see it as sagacious. However, upon reflection and serious analysis, I found that whole philosophical approach to be fatuous and, in my humble opinion, far short of even being competitive. Please understand, I am not knocking Eastern philosophy, nor am I celebrating Western philosophy. I would simply like to point out what we can confidently know about both.
Now, I don’t really have a problem with the guy’s flowery, soft-gloved petting of the Eastern culture, nor do I have a problem with his Texas Chainsaw Massacre cannibalistic view of the West’s culture. But I do have a problem with the implication that the Eastern way is the better way.
The Eastern way is, without a doubt, not even in the same class as the Western way.
I say that not from an emotional loyalty to my own Western understanding, but rather from my loyalty to logic and reason, supported by facts.
Using logic and reason, let us examine the respected instructor’s example of the tree. If we sit under a tree, and we smell its blossoms, and we marvel at its beauty, what have we learned? We’ve learned that it smells nice, looks nice, and gives shade. That’s all well and good, even profitable. Those bits of knowledge are quite rewarding but they do not actually tell you anything about the tree, beyond the three things mentioned above. If you want to know more about the tree, such as its biology, ya’ gotta’ go to the knife.
I’m sorry, but if you want to know how the circulatory system of the field hare works, you’re gonna’ have to get bloody. That’s just the way it is. God could have had all of His creatures covered with see-through skin…but He didn’t.
Now to the facts.
1. Who came up with electricity? 2. Who gave us modern medicine? 3. Who gave us the industrial revolution? 4. Who gave us our modern day agricultural techniques, introduced advanced tools and machinery making it possible to feed many times more people than ever before? 5. Who gave the world The United States of America, the greatest, most generous and altruistic nation in the history of humanity, a nation that stopped Hitler, ended Communism, and abolished its slave trade?
There is one answer to all these questions and it isn’t the East. In fact, in the East, most are still struggling to feed their children, are still fighting tribal wars, and are still practicing the horrors of slavery (for those of you on the left, the answer is the West).
So go ahead, sit under that tree. But when your child needs penicillin or insulin to save his little life, or your country has a crisis with its Presidential elections and not a single shot is fired nor a single life is lost, or you go to your refrigerator and complain because you only have leftover lasagna and five different kinds of meat and cheese to choose from, be thankful that someone from the West was there to cut down that tree.

Keck