A call to rediscover open-minded curiosity
Print Edition
DEAR Wang Yong,
I want to tell you how much I welcomed, and agreed with, your lovely recent column on your visit to Lumbini, Nepal. (“Spreading seeds of compassion in dialogue among civilizations,” Shanghai Daily, August 11.) I especially liked this segment:
American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington is known for having coined the concept of clash of civilizations. Master Xuecheng disagrees.
“The world needs to guard against the preaching of a clash of civilizations,” he warns. “Humankind should cultivate a basic belief that civilizations connect… They all teach us to be tolerant, loving, compassionate and ready to help….”
He says it’s absurd and harmful to play up conflicts between civilizations while neglecting their connectivity, and to blame conflicts arising from an unfair distribution of power, wealth and income, as well as big countries’ lack of respect for smaller ones, on differences of civilizations or religions. He cautions the reader against a part of Western culture that, though conducive to great material prosperity, breeds human centralism and individualism with its focus on dualism.
“Human centralism and individualism permeate the human society, causing various global crises,” he points out.
In contrast, he notes, oriental cultures — not just Chinese culture — rarely espouse dualism in examining the world and humankind.
Yes! It is one of the curious things about Christianity as it evolved (not, I stress, the teachings or manner of Jesus himself) that it became very much a proselytizing faith that had dualism as a foundational principle. (Curious, when both the “religions,” such as they were, of the Greeks and Romans, the cultures that formed Christianity otherwise, were polytheistic and — in the case of the Romans, in particular — quite tolerant of the beliefs of others.)
It is false to believe that what we are faced with — in matters large or small — are choices between either or. Do we not learn from integrating, accepting what is proven or found to be better in order to modify our previous understandings?
How do we lose the open-minded curiosity of children and — so many of us — become such closed-minded, opinionated jerks?!
Greg Cusack, US.
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