Sacredness and universal values

In the early 1990s, a fierce East-West debate arose over whether or not the economic success of Asia was due to Asian values of hard work, fealty and paternalistic government, largely attributable to Confucianism, Islam, Hinduism and other Asian cultures. The debate faded when the Asian financial crisis cut back the hubris on both sides, and especially after the triumphalism of the West was shattered by the Great Recession of 2007-2009.

There was a subtle shift when Francis Fukuyama published the book “The Origins of Political Order” (2011) in which he began to look more carefully at whether or not the Western liberal democratic model was necessarily the default model of future global social evolution. Fukuyama was of course famed for his earlier book, “The End of History” (1992), which trumpeted the triumphalism of the Western liberal democratic model after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

However, as the Asian economies powered ahead after 2007, a new strand of voices began to be heard. The debate shifted toward questioning whether or not Western values are truly universal and how different cultures or civilizations coexist within the dominant Western model.

Prominent among the Indian critique is an important book by Rajiv Malhotra, whose “Being Different” (2011) argues that India differs significantly from the West, specifically American culture. This is because her Dharma tradition (incorporating Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism) offers a diversity of culture and beliefs that differs radically from the Judaic-Christian origins of Western culture.

On the other hand, the Chinese response, as expounded by Fudan University professor Zhang Weiwei, is that within China, there are two views on China’s development. One is that to be modern, China must adopt universal values. The other is that China must find its own path based on its own cultural traditions. In his book “The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State,” Zhang argues that China is the only country that “amalgamated the world’s longest continuous civilization with a huge modern state.”

He debated with Francis Fukuyama (Chapter 6 of his book) over whether or not the rise of the middle class in China would give rise to universal values shared by middle classes elsewhere. Fukuyama felt that there would be universal values, whereas Zhang thought otherwise.

A brilliant piece of recent research by Nanyang Technological University professor Chiu Chi Yue on cultural mixing suggested that Zhang may be right. He studied why the Chinese consumer public objected to putting a Starbucks coffeehouse ― a symbol of modern middle class ― in the Forbidden City. He realized that individuals tend to categorize values into three pockets ― business, social and sacred. Most people tend to be pretty relaxed over business activities, but they can get offended if social behavior intrudes into personal space. However, over things they consider sacred, the reaction or rejection can be very high, even to the point of violence.

Within each culture, there are icons, institutions or things considered sacred, defined as something timeless and supremely meaningful, which may require sacrifice of individuals, if necessary in terms of life.

Basically, people do not mind cultural mixing in business and social elements, but when they sense that there is foreign contamination in what they hold as sacred, they will resist, expel or combat it.

Chiu’s work suggests that if different cultures hold different things sacred, there can be no homogeneity in values. There are some universal values, but not all values are universal ― diversity is the spice of life. But this does not mean that genes, beliefs and ideas do not mix, become hybrids and form new cultures. Society and civilization adapt to cultural and genetic mixing. Too much inbreeding creates genetic and social fragility and ultimate decay, whereas openness to new ideas and innovation, however strange, create rejuvenation.

To claim that one faction is superior to another takes only one side of life’s many contradictions ― the competitiveness side that is simultaneously creative and destructive. Competition suggests that there is only one No. 1. On the other hand, Eastern philosophy realizes that sustainability requires both good and evil ― opposites ― to coexist.

In contrast, Western thinking originating from the Judaic and Christian beliefs starts with one God and one ideal unity. For every problem, there is a single unique solution. Its scientific approach is to break the whole down into parts for more detailed and specialized examination, knowing more and more about less and less. At its most extreme, it creates a micro-specialist who cannot relate the parts to the whole.

But life is all about interconnections with and interdependencies on each other to form an ever-changing whole.

The recent failure of neoclassical economic models is the best example of how crises cannot be explained by models based simplistically on “rational behavior.” Eastern holistic thinking is fuzzy, contradictory, often nonlogical and nonlinear ― but it is founded on long human experience and pragmatism, and is adaptive to change. On the other hand, any theory, however elegant, is based on limited information and experience, and is by definition incomplete and flawed.

From the perspective of macro-history, first elaborated by French geographer Ferndinand Braudel, Chinese-American historian Ray Huang and others, the mixing of civilization moves in different time scales. History and civilization must factor into consideration different disciplines of geography, sociology, economics, politics, physics and biology and today climate change. Our natural environment has been drastically changed by human excess consumption, and we either adapt, cooperate or fail.

Hence, the common factor that unifies East and West or North and South is that technology and climate change is affecting us all at Internet speed. As Keynes brutally recognized, in the long run we are all dead, but those who live must survive and avoid mutual destruction. Change is the only constant. 

By Andrew Sheng

Andrew Sheng is a distinguished fellow at the Fung Global Institute. ― Ed.

(Asia News Network)