With the Eastern and Western traditions, which influence are you most attuned to?
Answers
Answer:
don’t buy into the idea of ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ traditions. I suggest you to read the classic ‘Orientalism’ by Edward Said: what we define as ‘Oriental’ or with the more socially accetable ‘Eastern’ are broad stereotypes, some of which positive (the wise far-eastern or Indian sage), most of them negative (the religious fanatic, the cunning Levantine, the imperscrutable and obtuse peasant).
I think that I belong to what is usually called the Western culture; a set of values (constitutional democracy, human rights etc.) that stems from classical Greece, Roman Europe, Judeo-Christian thinking and developed mainly in Western Europe and the United States (with later contributes from all around the world, such as Gandhi’s civil disobedience). But people who claim, on the basis of these achievements, a Western superiority, fail two understand three concepts:
the political and economical egemony of Europe (and European colonies such as the US, Australia etc.) has historical and geographical explanations behind an unprovable moral superiority (read ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ by Jared Diamond)
at the core of so called Western values there is the universality of ethics. By claiming superiority of an ethnic or a religious group you fall back to tribalism which is the exact opposite of said values
most important, democracy, human rights etc. were not born in European cultures in opposition to ‘Eastern tradition’ (as a certain narrative, obsessed with the battle of Poitiers, Kosovo polje, the Thermopylae, the siege of Vienna, insists), but by defeating our (I mean: European) own demons, such as totalitarianism, religious intolerance etc.