The Uniqueness of Western Civilization
Ricardo Duchesne
Leiden: Brill, 2011

Review by Collin Cleary

5. What about the East?

The revisionists’ favorite non-Western people seems to be the Chinese. They tend to both exaggerate Chinese achievements, and to emphasize how the West has been dependent upon them (again, even where the evidence for this is slim). We have already seen how one historian has made a name for himself through his implausible claims about the Chinese share of world trade in the early modern period. And I have already referred to the absurd claim of another historian (Robert Temple) that it was really the Chinese who discovered Newton’s laws of motion.

Of course, when many of my readers think of accounts of Chinese achievements they will immediately think of Joseph Needham’s highly influential, multi-volume Science and Civilisation in China. This book is quite valuable in many ways, but the trouble with it is that Needham is so enamored of the Chinese he tends to exaggerate their achievements. Worse still are his unsubstantiated claims regarding the transmission of Chinese ideas and inventions to the West. One critic quoted by Duchesne refers to Needham’s account of the influence of China on the West as “heavily flawed on several counts, of which the most important are the absence of sources that even begin to point at transmission” (quoted in Duchesne, p. 173). Indeed, Needham would sometimes simply assert that such and such innovation made its way from China to the West and say “the details of the transmission are still obscure.”

For years it has been claimed by historians that since movable type was invented in China, it must have been transmitted from China to Germany, where it was picked up by Johannes Gutenberg. The trouble is that there is simply no evidence for this. The truth, of course, is that the West has borrowed many ideas and innovations from other cultures. But the West did not simply passively adopt these: we developed them, often to a point never reached, or even imagined, in their culture of origin. Further, as I have said already, the West’s openness to foreign ideas is one of its unique characteristics. And one could not find a better contrast to this than the Chinese themselves.

The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, who lived in China from 1583 until his death in 1610, characterized the Chinese as largely uncurious and complacent. He wrote that “The Chinese are so self-opinionated that they cannot be made to believe that the day will ever come when they will learn anything from foreigners which is not already set down in their own books.”[2] By contrast, Ricci himself – typical Westerner that he was – seems to have been quite open to learning from the Chinese. He translated a number of major Chinese works into Latin so as to make their thoughts available to Westerners. Indeed, as Duchesne notes (p. 243, citing figures like Montaigne) Europeans have always seen others as a mirror in which to assess themselves, both their virtues and their shortcomings.

Since ancient times, Europeans had had a burning desire to be able to visualize the entire world, and had produced many (increasingly accurate) world maps. According to Ricci, the Chinese evinced no such desire. Ricci writes that the Chinese “are grossly ignorant of what the world in general is like,” and that their maps were “limited to their own fifteen provinces, and in the sea painted around [them] they had placed a few little islands to which they had given the names of different kingdoms they had heard of. All of these islands put together would not be as large as the smallest of the Chinese provinces.”[2] Certainly, the Chinese had explored little of the world by the time Ricci encountered them — whereas, to state the obvious, Europeans had traveled all the way to China. From 1405 to 1433 Chinese fleets sailed seven times to the Indian Ocean (which seems to be about as far as they got). Rather than emboldening them to go further, however, around 1500 the Chinese made it a capital offense to construct a seagoing vessel with greater than two masts.

Ricci writes that the Chinese were astounded by European developments in mathematics, astronomy, and logic. European technology was also a cause for wonderment on the part of the Chinese (particularly European clocks). In particular he reports that they were impressed by Euclid. Ricci attributes this to the fact that Euclid provided demonstrations for his propositions, whereas the Chinese tended to simply accept propositions on authority. And this, of course, is one of the major differences between East and West. As Duchesne notes, Chinese philosophy (and “Eastern philosophy,” broadly speaking) is filled with self-effacing “sages” who claim to be nothing more than conduits for timeless wisdom. Their works are usually commentaries on classic texts, which are treated in a reverential and uncritical fashion. By contrast, Western philosophers have often begun by rejecting older ideas, and have introduced revolutionary new ideas.

Duchesne writes:

The West, I believe, has always embodied a reflective sense of self-doubt about what it knows and what remains to be known, a kind of restlessness that has been both destructive and productive of new literary styles, musical trends, visual motifs, and novel ideas. By contrast, the intellectual and artistic order of China has remained relatively stable throughout its history. (p. 194)

And he frames the contrast between East and West in this striking statement: “European actors were more dynamic in the higher degree to which they were able to reflect upon their actions and thus discursively give reasons for them. European actors were less passive or more reflective than non-Europeans in their acculturation to the conventions and beliefs of their society” (p. 92).

Indeed, the degree to which the Chinese revere authority is enough to make the most conservative Westerner cringe. But Duchesne discusses much else about Chinese culture that explains why it has never produced the sort of revolutionary innovations in science, philosophy, art, and technology that we have. For instance, in the China of old no separate profession or occupation of science existed. There was no real conception of pure science pursued for its own sake. Their style of scientific (and philosophical) thinking tended to be associative, and based upon the identification of analogies between things. (Think of the huge lists accumulated by the Chinese of things that are yang – men, a hot day, solidity, anger, etc. – and yin – women, a cold day, liquidity, passivity, etc.) Whereas by contrast Western science has striven to identify universal laws concerning cause and effect relations between tangible entities, based upon observation and experiment rather than a priori theorizing.

Furthermore, the vast, centralized, and all-powerful Chinese bureaucracy was not favorable to the flourishing of a scientific culture, which depends upon individuals who are able to act freely and independently and pursue their research without interference or fear of displeasing the authorities. (It is surely this lack of an independent scientific spirit, as well as their general cultural inertia, that explains why the Chinese did not industrialize along with the West in the 19th century.) To be sure, the West has gone through periods where freedom of thought was encumbered by church and state authorities. But our philosophers and scientists always rebelled against this authoritarianism, and it always proved unsustainable. The Chinese appear to be far less willing to rebel against authority, and in one form or another – whether Imperial or Communist – they have lived under an absolute authority for their entire history.

Indeed, the difference between the Chinese political-societal structure and that of the West could not be greater. But it is when we set China alongside other non-Western societies that the difference between the West and all the rest becomes particular striking. Duchesne writes:

In China, India, and Islam, in general, there were no countervailing powers because there was [in contrast to the West] no substantial distinction between the state and civil society; there was no aristocracy with special rights, no separation of religious and secular powers, no independent cities, and no parliaments where relations between the various estates of society were open for adjudication. It was in reference to the absence of a civil society that the category “oriental despotism” was used by Montesquieu, Marx, Weber, and Karl Wittfogel. (p. 227)

In attempting to deny the West’s uniqueness and give center stage to the achievements of non-Western cultures, such as the Chinese, the revisionists have inadvertently drawn our attention to the vast differences between the West and everyone else. The contrast is incredibly stark and dramatic. The West emerges as not just unique but remarkably unique.

But how do we define this uniqueness? Is there a common denominator to such Western phenomena as aristocracies with special rights, parliaments, separation between church and state, the pursuit of science for its own sake, a philosophical tradition distinct from religion, rebellion against traditional authority, openness to foreign ideas, intense self-criticism, and world exploration? In the next section, we will examine some attempts to define the spirit that is uniquely Western.

http://www.counter-currents.com/2013...zation-part-2/