Facing East
I
FOR centuries we in the Western World have been assuming that Western civilization was in every way superior to every other culture, and have been trying to force our ways of life and our standards upon the whole world. Religious missions, imperialistic conquest, and world trade have been handmaidens of our determination to make over all people into our image, an aim which has been infused with much altruism and pious zeal, however perverted by complaicent arrogance.
We did n’t invent this idea of racial superiority. All great nations have had it — Egypt, Greece, Rome, China. In more amusing forms it has cropped up quite as blithely in ancient Palestine and modern Rumania, in the tiny islands of Samoa and the Arabic tribes of North Africa.
But several things have reënforced the arrogance of the West and given it unique status. The theory of progressive evolution, taken over from biology into the social field, has provided a philosophic base for the belief in a natural superiority of modern — that is, Western — civilization, which is viewed as a final flowering of society, a culmination toward which all social change has been tending during the millenniums. Christianity, one of the few great proselyting religions, has consolidated our faith in a mission divine as well as human. Furthermore, a whole group of nations in Western Europe and America, rather than a single state, are unified in a common arrogance. And battleships and modern communications have given us a power and an opportunity to push our assumptions down the throats of the whole world with an effectiveness more devastating than anything heretofore known in history.
Our power has been so overwhelming, our efficiency so dazzling, our mechanical gadgets so fascinating, and our cocksureness so hypnotizing, that we have convinced not only ourselves, but unfortunately a considerable portion of the rest of the world, that we of the West are completely superior to all other peoples and all other cultures. Confused as to the elements of our own greatness, we have insisted on the superiority of the entire bundle of our modes of life: our religion, our morals, our competitive capitalism and world trade, our democratic political concepts, even our mechanical gadgets and our worship of routinized busy work. Hundreds of millions of very diverse people are to-day turning from their ancient characteristic folk ways to ape us in our trivialities as well as in our greatness. Women in the warm Pacific islands are wrapping themselves in skirts and dresses, young men and girls throughout the East are leaving their native dances and crowding into movie houses to gaze at the antics of oversexed females from Hollywood and to admire the gun play of Chicago gangsters; beautiful handmade tapa and batik are being supplanted by cotton prints from Manchester and Glasgow; leisurely communal farming is giving way to routine labor in sugar mills and factories, in pineapple plantations, in commercialized service to tea and coffee, tobacco and rubber. All elements of Western civilization are being avidly swallowed by the awestruck youth of the East with little realization of what they mean and with a devastating neglect of the beauties of their own arts and crafts, the dignity and expressiveness of their traditional ways of life.
Now, just as the whole world is accepting it, Western civilization begins to totter. The World War was more than a gesture toward suicide; it was the spectacular evidence of the impasse to which competitive nationalism and imperialism had brought the Western nations. The present economic debacle is no accidental or transient crisis; it is the culminative collapse of competitive capitalism, presenting the grotesque absurdity of want and privation not because of lack of food and goods, but, ridiculous as it sounds, because of too much abundance in all food crops, too great plenty of all products and supplies. Meanwhile democracy cracks and groans under the stress of real problems and is being rapidly abandoned in many of the Western nations. The old sureties in religion and morals and goals of life are crumbling.
During the period of its spectacular rise, the West had all the arrogance and intolerance of rapidly growing adolescence. We did not recognize any other civilizations. People were civilized if they were like us. In so far as they differed from the Western pattern, they were uncivilized, primitive, backward, savage. We sent out missionaries to convert the whole world to our religion, to save people from their sins of difference, to reform their morals to our standard. We undertook the political reorganization of Africa and the East as a duty, the white man’s burden. We ruthlessly seized in the name of God and of civilization the territory of the American Indians, the Australian blackfellows, and the Polynesian islanders. We took control of large parts of Asia and Africa and the Pacific, partly for our own gain and aggrandizement, but also in the sincere and complacent belief that the West alone possessed civilization and that its domination of the whole world, in the course of a manifest destiny, meant progress and enlightenment to people who before our coming had lived in darkness and were clearly backward.
To-day we are not nearly so selfsatisfied and sure of our complete superiority as we were during the mighty era of the West which drew to a close with the beginning of the twentieth century. We have become more adult in our thinking and our tolerance. We have discovered serious lacks in our ways of life and we have begun to observe elements in the lives of other peoples which seem to us satisfying and rich beyond anything in our Western experience.
This new attitude is not yet widespread. Most people in America and Europe still think of the rest of the worId as barbarous and backward. The Christian banner still waves over hundreds of thousands of zealous crusaders devoted to ‘the conversion of the world in this generation.’ England and America, still bearing rather wistfully the white man’s burden, are trying to introduce some semblance of democratic forms into India and the Philippines. Tourists and colonial officials are still shocked into sensual titillations at the deviations of remote peoples from our morals. Hitler and Madison Grant still cry urgently the Nordic credo. The great mass of patriotic citizens are still offended at the suggestion that anything nonWestern should be called civilization. An increasing number, however, of intelligent people the world over are less intolerant and self-satisfied than heretofore, more desirous of fundamental changes in social organization and human behavior.
In this time of disillusionment and change it behooves all peoples to hold on to the good from any civilization while they ruthlessly slough off the bad and the nonessential. In the present world, so closely bound together by modern communications, it is inevitable that the culture of every people should be influenced by that of others. In contemplating a new world made up of elements from various existing social orders, the first task is to differentiate the sound and fine aspects of the several civilizations so that the beautiful and useful mores shall be retained by their present adherents and emulated by others.
II
The striking characteristic of North America and Western Europe — the group of nations which for convenience we call the West — is a civilization built up deliberately by science and invention. The triumph of the West in the discovery and use of tools of all kinds is not yet fully appreciated, either at home or abroad. For some reason we are reluctant to take the pride in it to which we are entitled. Many of us are even apologetic, a bit ashamed of our mechanical advance. Yet it is our one great gift.
Western progress during the past two centuries in ferreting out the secrets of nature and in using the discoveries to bend natural forces to man’s service is staggering in its magnitude. The Industrial Revolution was nothing less than the setting of machines to do quickly and efficiently what heretofore had been accomplished by tedious, sweating, human labor. At one stroke machine manufacture freed man from a huge amount of animal toil and guaranteed an abundance of goods beyond the fondest hopes of previous generations. Scientific farming, together with the organized handling of grains and the packing of meats and the refrigeration of all kinds of perishable foods, provides, for the first time in history, enough food for everyone. Powerdriven looms offer abundance of clothes. Mills turn out materials of all sorts in terms of real world plenty.
Because of machine production, man is to-day in an entirely different position with respect to food and material needs than he has ever been in before. The age-old desperate struggle to find food enough and clothes and shelter enough for daily needs is ended, once for all. We may continue to have financial panics and depressions, but they come now from snarls in our distributing machinery, not from scarcity of goods. Any real lack of food and materials and even luxuries and toys need never haunt us again — unless, of course, we some day forget or repudiate the miraculous control of nature which science and machines have given us.
Western tools have not only brought in plenty; they have transformed the world. The stark fact is that steam and gasoline, electricity and the vibrant sense organs of the radio, have jammed the world together until America and Europe are immediate neighbors of Japan and Asia and Africa.
Western science in a single phase — medicine and its application in public health — has transformed men’s very lives. By use of the penetrating tool of scientific investigation we have searched out the causes of many of man’s bodily diseases, have found specific remedies for hundreds of the common ills, and developed means of preventing scores of the great contagions. Again we face a triumph only faintly realized even by the people who daily benefit by it. The life span, the expectancy of life which each of us may look forward to, has been lengthened in the West by more than two decades. And not only has death been thwarted, but daily health has been improved even more strikingly. Not only is life longer, but, to a degree undreamed of even a century ago, it is free of disease, robust . Fevers, plagues, pox, leprosy, hookworms and other intestinal parasites, to some extent the lung and respiratory diseases — these, which used to slay tens of thousands in a single stroke, which used to incapacitate millions for long periods of time, are all measurably under control; many are completely eliminated from all orderly and careful regions of the West.
With the age-old fears of starvation or privation and of sudden death or disabling disease put into the background, man may proceed about the constructive phases of life freely and with confidence. With close contact established with all his world neighbors, man may engage in a profitable trade in goods and — if he is wise enough — in an enriching exchange of cultural values. Owing in no small part to the great gifts of Western tools, man begins to emerge from the ranks of drudging, faltering, isolated herds of animals into something approaching a divine heritage.
Unfortunately science and invention, so useful when applied to creative ends, may be turned with equal effectiveness to destruction. Gunpowder, explosives, poison gas, are among the triumphs of Western ingenuity quite as much as machine production and preventive medicine. These devastating arms have made it easy for the West to conquer the world; they also make it possible for the European nations to destroy themselves — as they nearly did in 1914 and as they seem determined to try to do again in 1934. Western civilization may kill itself by its own machinations unless intelligence and self-control keep measurable pace with ingenuity.
The accomplishments of the West — the fabrication of the great and intricate physical tools which magnify so greatly both danger and power — have been possible because we have developed intellectual tools so penetrating and effective as to enable us to probe the deep secrets of nature and to use our discoveries for practical ends. Language, concepts of precision, mathematical theory, science, have been elaborated to an exactness, an intricacy, and a universality of use quite beyond those known to any other civilization.
The intellectual tools not only give material power; they are in themselves an enlargement of mental scope. To use a universal language gives one immediate and enriching touch with the thought of the whole world. Mathematics is not only useful in measurement and computation; it gives opportunity for mental excursions into far-flung philosophy and speculation. The natural sciences give power and wealth; they also give an exercise to observation and interpretation quite beyond the meagre intellectual pleasures of primitive man.
Tools, both mechanical and intellectual, are the great achievement of the West. They are contributions worthy of one of the world’s most distinguished civilizations. They must be accepted and used by every society of the future which wishes to build upon the solid foundation of cumulative human achievement. They are our unique gift.
III
The mistake of many who insist upon the superiority of Western civilization is that they do not differentiate between its real and characteristic strength and other elements which are merely incidental, however conspicuous they may be on the surface. Zealots assume that everything in the West is by definition better than anything anywhere else. They confuse the unique features — intellectuality and invention, science, mechanics and organization — with nonessential elements which have happened to be present in the West at the time of her greatness: for example, the Christian religion, competitive capitalism, democratic nationalism, certain moral standards and social habits. These are not among our characteristic gifts. Many of them are not even successful in themselves. Their disappearance or change will not mean serious loss either to the West or to the world.
Christianity cannot be claimed as a Western contribution. It originated in the Near East as an outgrowth of Judaism and was affected in its forms and ideology by religions and philosophies not of Europe but of the East. Furthermore, the central teachings of the founder of Christianity have never been followed in Europe and America. Brotherly love without regard to race or caste, the Golden Rule, pacifism, humility, the abrogation of worldly goods and of careful planning for the future, communal sharing of goods and services — these, which were the cardinal teachings of Jesus, are directly opposed to just those things which the Western nations have founded their power upon: capitalism; armaments; individualism; disregard, even scorn, of one’s neighbor if he be of a different race or color; careful planning in all phases of life both of the individual and of the state; the accumulation of material wealth. It is one of the ironies of history that Christianity by a series of accidents should have become the professed religion of just those nations which by all their dearest practices were furthest from its teachings. The principles of Jesus are followed unofficially and unconsciously by many people the world over. They have never been accepted by the West and are not to-day a part of Western civilization.
Competitive capitalism, while it has been notoriously a feature of the West, has proved to be one of its weaknesses rather than a source of strength. The wealth of the West came from the tremendous new power over nature provided by the tools of science and mechanics, not from unrestrained exploitation strutting under the banner of rugged individualism. It is another of the strange accidents of history that a civilization whose characteristics were research and planning and organization should have allowed unplanned individualism to seize the spoils of its scientific advance. It required the absurd debacle in which the West now finds itself to show us that organized production, however abundant, can serve mankind effectively only through orderly and communally planned distribution. As the world moves on to a new order, the present unplanned, competitive, individual capitalism will disappear without any loss to the new plenty which has been ushered in by modern tools.
Democratic nationalism, yet another form which has grown up in the West with wide acclaim, is also proving itself futile and harmful. By its definition, democracy is government by the stupidist and least responsible. In practice it is the manipulation of these masses by crafty individuals or vested interests. Of course the masses cannot decide intelligently such abstruse questions as a proper national economy or adequate systems of education, health, and civic protection. Popular elections cannot be relied upon even to choose the right leaders to act upon technical matters, or to act honestly or effeclively on any public issues. The surprising thing is not that democracy has failed, but that anyone should ever have supposed that masses of people, stupid and futile in every thought and action, should by some miracle be able to show wisdom in the single important item of government.
In spite of excesses, the democratic movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have contributed a new respect for the rights of individual men. If a good deal of personal freedom can be retained while at the same time some device is found for installing an aristocracy of intelligence in government and wise planning in economics and social affairs, then the world will ultimately benefit from the West’s rather pitiful experiments in democracy.
Nationalism, which has had a vigorous growth contemporaneously with democracy, has also begun to show its hampering limitations. Nationalism, as we know it, is a recent growth. It is quite different from the Greek citystates or the empire of Rome; it has almost no relation to the loosely clustered feudal estates of mediæval Europe or to the ancient cultures which went under the names of Egypt and Maya and China, or to the religiotribal groups of Jews and Arabs.
When by accident a single nation spreads over most of a continent and embraces forty-eight sub-nations, as in the case of the United States of America, a unit results which is economically almost self-sufficient, though culturally related to many other groups. But when, as in Europe, small provinces develop into highly competitive states, there result economic separateness and political jealousy which lead to frustration and tragedy. Democracy, giving full play to the petty jealousies of inferior men, has helped to carry nationalism to its present extremes. In the modern world, so closely bound together by rapid communications and so interdependent in material wealth and intellectual advance, nationalism, at least in the extreme forms of a Balkanized Europe, is an anachronism.
As to the peculiar morals and social habits of the West, they are on the whole neither better nor worse than those which have existed in many eras under varying cultures. These mores are usually by-products of environmental factors.
We in the West, for example, have a rigid set of taboos in the matter of property rights. These are a function of our present devotion to private property and individualistic capitalism. They have little meaning in a communistic community. In American Samoa the wives of the United States naval officers complain that all Samoan servants are thieves, since they take food home to their family and friends. But when accused the Samoans are shocked. Immemorial custom in those pleasant islands has decreed that, if one knows of food and of a hungry person, he must at once bring the one to the other; to fail to do so is a crime, or at least a dereliction of duty. What is commanded by one set of customs is prohibited by the other. Neither custom has any inalienable moral status. Each is sound and moral under given conditions.
Our devotion to clothes is a natural result of living in a rigorous climate. But to suppose that the inhabitants of the South Seas or of Africa are immoral because they wear less covering or none at all is foolishness. In a region of sharply differing seasons and under a system of private property, one must plan and work and save for the future, and in doing so one is regarded as virtuous. In the abundant and communal tropics, individual hoarding is unnecessary and is regarded as an offense against society.
In many other matters the incidental or nonessential character of our habits is easily recognized by anyone who has not hopelessly confused custom with a mystical idea of sacred and inalterable moral law.
In one great aspect the habits and ideals of the West have been peculiarly deadening. Puritanism and industrialism have between them removed almost all enjoyment and richness from day-by-day living. Puritanism, with its emphasis upon a future heaven and its coolness toward the content of life on earth, has made enjoyment almost synonymous with sin. Industrialism has fixed our eyes on another heaven, — success, — also in the future, also to be obtained by sacrifice of the present. These two great forces of the modern West have done much to degrade our regard for art and expression and to make day-by-day enjoyment seem the shirking of a great life duty, the abandonment of the march toward heaven and success. They tend to make our lives routinized, dull, and barren.
IV
Meanwhile other peoples have been working out satisfying ways of life of very different kinds. In the Polynesian Islands, in China and the villages of Japan, in the Malay Archipelago and in Africa, there are not the efficient tools of the West, but there is an astonishing amount of enjoyment and expression. In Java or Bali or Samoa, song and dance and drama have a large place in the life of everyone. There is less devotion to careful planning for the future, but much more delight in the present. Life in such places seems clearly understood, even by the simplest villager and farmer, to be something to be lived as it goes along. Success to them is not a remote achievement, but something to be realized every day. While the average man and woman in the East work much harder than any white man in Europe or America, labor is not worshiped as a goal in itself, but is regarded quite naturally as the price of food and shelter and decorous surroundings.
Art in the East is not the profession of a few, but the expression of all. Weaving, the making of tapa or batik, carving of temple ornaments or fashioning of simple implements for the home, are matters not only of utilitarian labor but also of creative joy.
Beauty and grace are ends in themselves to a degree almost incomprehensible in Europe and America. The ceremonial tea in Japan occupies hours and is invested with the most scrupulous attention to traditional conventions of courtesy and dignity; the arrangement of flowers is considered so important as to require an education as long and arduous as that we give to science or mathematics. In all the East, dancing and singing are not merely diversions, but accomplishments of high prestige. In Java the rice fields are tended with devotion not only for the purpose of a maximum crop, but in order that the fields themselves may be items of loveliness in a beautiful landscape. Consideration of the feelings of others runs through all of daily life. The courtesies due one’s fellows are elaborated throughout the East to such a degree that a breach of etiquette is regarded there with the same horror that we bestow upon a breach of contract.
It is hard to give in general statements a true picture of life in primitive communities or among the masses of even such highly developed Eastern nations as China and Japan. Much hardship and suffering run hand in hand with joy and beauty — just the hardships which naturally flow from the absence of scientific control over nature and from the lack of efficient tools. Disease cripples all of the East to an extent that seems terrible and inexcusable to persons who have begun to take for granted the recent progress of hygiene and public health in North America and Western Europe. Life is still a desperate hand struggle for the barest of necessities in food and shelter for many of these people. And the lack of such intellectual tools as a world literature and scientific knowledge and method limits mental scope and outlook. In spite of these harsh handicaps, even the common people of the East get an astonishing amount of joy and expression into life as it flows by.
There is a great deal to be said, also, for the economy which characterizes communities which we call primitive. The closely knit family clan and the communal village give an economic security unknown under competitive capitalism. It is true that fixed traditions and rigid taboos circumscribe action and tend to penalize individuality and initiative. But these compact units based on common labor and a common sharing of products offer calm security, an incentive to coöperation, and a fine arena for the development of talents, not so much for competitive gain or individual prestige as for the enrichment of the common life.
Partly because of communal living, there is throughout the East a reverence that comes from feeling oneself a part of the whole life process — rather than an enemy or competitor of other persons and other forces. A good deal of the expression in art and dance and drama is called out by the sense of close relationship with the gods and by a desire to please and honor the spirits or the forces which have fashioned nature and humanity. Of course a great deal that passes for reverence in any group is merely superstition and childish fear. But there is a modicum of authentic reverence that flows naturally from sensitivity to beauty, desire for graceful living, an economy based on mutual helpfulness and common sharing, and a feeling of kinship with the universal forces, most of which must always remain mysterious and all of which have gone into the creation of us.
It would be interesting to dwell upon the customs of the East in profuse illustration: the dignity of the fono in Samoa, that glorified combination of village parliament and social club where gossip and political action are carried on in the framework of traditionally elaborated ceremonial, while the teupo, the sacred virgin of the village, sitting between the posts of the open fale, mixes the non-intoxicating ava and pours it out to be passed with ceremonial stride and sweeping gesture by the attending young barefoot nobleman to each of the chiefs in the exact order of their prestige; the rice festivals in Java, where the harvesting of the nation’s food is invested with sacredness and drama, thanksgiving to the gods, and plays and dances which delight the eye while they review poignant episodes in the history of the race; the simple communism of a Malay or Polynesian village, where each one has his tasks of physical labor and his duties and privileges in ceremonial and public organization, where food and even houses and goods are in common, where rivalry is a sin and even the exhibition of superior ability is looked at askance; the scene at a Japanese shrine, where reverence has its finest exhibit, in simplicity, dignity, and devotion, where bands of school children from near-by villages or from far-distant parts of the empire march solemnly in their bright and variegated kimonos, clump-clumping along in their wooden shoes, with no disturbance to the white-robed priests or tattered pilgrims, while villagers as individuals or in family groups offer their simple devotions to an exquisitely beautiful natural scene, to the genius of the nation, and to the divinity which they feel as an essential part of all their life; the family clan in China, which holds together unchanging in poverty or wealth, which pushes forward its talented member at whatever sacrifice to his group of relatives, and which nourishes the weak and faltering of the family with a fierce and tenacious maternity; the ceremonials and festivals in the Pacific islands which precede and accompany even bloody wars; the homes in Japan, where even in the humblest hut there is the shelf for ancestral honor, at least one kakemono or scroll of simple beauty, at least one bunch of flowers or leaves in just the right place and with just the right arrangement; Bali, where the very business of life is expression, where guilds of artists have for generations occupied a single tiny village, — one devoted to silversmithing, another to carving or weaving or the making of batik, another to dance or the music of the gamelon, — art even being regarded not as an individual act but as a communal expression. It is impossible in a brief paper to do more than refer to the beauties of these other ways of life and to point out that, amid a wealth of variation, there are characteristic features which run through all that group of cultures which we call the East.
It is unfortunate that, with all the travel about the world these days, there is so little recognition of the beauties and excellencies of diverse peoples. Europeans and Americans especially travel widely, but with amazing blindness. Even many of those who reside for years in Eastern countries show no interest in the local folk ways, no capacity for appreciating items of another culture. Things alien seem simply queer and absurd. Deviations in social habits are dismissed as immoral, or at least quixotic. The typical tourist spends his time in a daily routine as nearly as possible like that he is used to at home, in petulant complaining about inconveniences — that is, differences from the home customs — which necessarily result from the foreign setting, and in thanking God that he and his people are not like these other strange humans he is viewing.
Furthermore, we in the West are naturally and properly shocked by the lacks of the East which are a part of the absence of science and mechanics: disease, poor housing and food, the drudging brute labor of hand industry, the absence of literacy and the other tools of wisdom. Appalled by the limitations of Eastern peoples in those elements in which we are strong, the average tourist or missionary or business man seldom thinks of inquiring whether these people may in turn be rich in just those features in which the West is poor.
On the other hand, it is easy to sentimentalize. In reaction against mechanical progress a tendency occasionally appears to overglorify all things of the East, to worship the primitive, to belittle everything Western and industrial. Both tubs and trousers are becoming terms of ridicule in certain esoteric circles. Any religion, no matter how superstitious and degrading, is declared by a few precious souls to be superior to Christianity. The most marvelous machines are derided as toys or decried as destructive to culture and personality.
The cult of primitivism is as badly out of balance as the arrogance of industrialism. Fortunately a few careful observers are seeing clearly both the excellencies and the shortcomings of the East and are interpreting them to an increasing number of persons in Europe and America.
V
Not all of the tools, of course, have been devised in the West, and grace is not the possession solely of the East. Many clever devices, such as gunpowder and the printing press, were invented in China long before the period of European supremacy; certain of the tools used in primitive countries to-day are as ingenious as any worked out by Western science. And certain parts of Western Europe and America are not entirely lacking in art and expression, though a shocking amount of our ‘recreation’ comes from attending performances of others, in concerts or moving pictures or athletic contests, rather than in spontaneous creative action by the great body of individuals themselves.
The achievements of various parts of the world overlap each other. Furthermore, individual differences appear among the several countries within each group. Japan, for example, geographically and historically a part of the East, has become one of the leaders of Western civilization in the development of science, mechanics, and organization, also in nationalistic imperialism. France and the Latin countries generally, in both Europe and America, are more Eastern in their expression and enjoyment of life than the Anglo-Saxon and Teuton peoples, and less Western in the matter of complete devotion to science and efficiency. In religion, while most of the East adheres to the easy-going and highly expressive cults of Hinduism, Buddhism, and various forms of ancestor and nature worship, there are large sections of the Near East, North Africa, India, and the westerly islands of the Pacific, which make of Islam a zealous proselyting religion quite as restrictive on the worshiper and quite as intolerant as anything known to Western Christianity. Incidental morals and mores run a wide gamut of variation, although they are on the whole more standardized throughout the West than among the Eastern peoples.
In spite of all these variations, it is possible to differentiate one great group of countries which are essentially a part of Western civilization, and another group which for convenience are referred to as the East. And while there are diversities among the cultures and their component peoples in matters of religion, politics, economics, and social customs, the characteristic division is between the tool civilization of the West and the devotion to expression and the arts of living of the East.
VI
The purpose of this paper is to pose the question of what may come next in world civilizations, not to elaborate the solution. But a few indications of the trend flow naturally from the analysis we have been making.
The strengths of the West and the East are opposites; the weakness of each is the absence of just what the other has so successfully developed. The East lacks tools; the West has inadequate capacity for expression. The average Westerner can make a living, but he is puzzled about how to enjoy life; the average man of the East can enjoy life fully enough, but he has a hard time making a living.
An exchange of cultural gifts would seem the self-evident answer to the needs of each group. Of course, recognizing the value of elements in another culture is just what people usually will not even think of doing. And even if they should overcome their deep prejudices against the ‘immorality’ of the customs of an alien people, it is at a great price that individuals deviate even slightly from the pattern of their group, and it is inordinately difficult for groups us a whole to assimilate elements of another culture without destroying the whole fabric of their own civilization. Nevertheless, there are many indications that we are right now at the brink of radical change and that swift revision of customs and ideals may come in both the East and the West.
In the West, because our machines quickly supply the needs which formerly had to be worked for throughout long hard days, leisure not only is possible, but is being forced on us by business codes and government statutes in order that what labor still remains necessary may be divided among the greatest number. The glorification of work, which has been a feature of Western civilization for centuries, is giving way before the new economic situation. If it is no longer honorable — or even permitted by law — to work as hard and as long as possible, our whole idealism must change and the use of leisure must come in for a part of the attention and honor which formerly went to industriousness. By necessity the West is being forced to do something about expression and enjoyment of life as contrasted with our previous complete devotion to making a living. It looks as though, in spite of our prejudices, we must begin to emulate those things which the East does so well.
The East, at the same time, is becoming aroused to the value and necessity of tools. Smarting under the domination of Europe and America, the great nations of Asia and the tribes of Africa and the Pacific islands are determined to acquire our force in arms and our wealth of machine production, scientific farming, and hygiene. Probably because of the spectacular evidences of our power, Eastern people have pretty generally recognized the strengths of Western civilization. While they have not always been wise in sorting out the essentials in the miscellaneous bundle of our customs, they have on the whole seen, maybe more clearly than we, that tools were at the root of our greatness. Japan, for example, with a ruthless intelligence, has seized upon our science and mechanics, our intellectuality and ingenuity, and has calmly neglected our religion and the extremes of our political forms and social habits. Other countries have not yet been equally wise or equally successful in emulating the West. But to-day throughout the world there is an increasingly clear understanding of the unique source of power among the Western nations, an increasing determination to acquire our mechanical and intellectual tools.
In a world closely bound together, in which all parts are in intimate touch with one another and in which there are great discontents among almost all groups, cultural exchanges may occur swiftly, and of a magnitude never before known. As the shift takes place, it is highly important that we clearly recognize the great qualities of each cultural group and see to it that these are retained and enlarged and enriched. It will matter little if change or abandonment comes to the transient and unessential features. But it would be an intolerable loss to the West and to the world if there were any falling off in the use or further development of tools which make possible an abundant leisure and give life a substantial base from which it may, if it will, stretch outward and upward. Equally the world will lose a rich heritage if there is any recession in the arts and expression, the devotion to grace and courtesy, the sense of community and divine dignity of life, which flower so abundantly in the East. Can an enriching exchange in these great cultural gifts take the place of the present powerful barrenness of the West, the present expressive poverty of the East?