China and the West

Irving Babbitt. Democracy and leadership [ID D28813].
… In speaking, however, of Asia it is even more important than in speaking of Europe to make clear that one has in mind primarily civilized Asia, and civilized Asia at the top of its achievement… The great Wall of China is a sort of visible symbol of the separation between the two Asias. On the one hand is the Asia of Attila and Tamerlane and Genghis Khan ; on the other, the Asia of Christ and Buddha and Confucius.
The mention of Christ and Buddha (of Confucius as a typical Asiatic I shall have more to say presently) is hardly necessary to remind us that it is the distinction of Asia as compared with Europe and other parts of the world to have been the mother of religious ; so that if one were to work out a crucial and experimental definition of religion (and my method requires nothing less), one might be put on the track of what is specifically Asiatic in the Asiatic attitude towards life…
At first sight Confucius seems very unlike other great Asiatic teachers. His interests, as I have already said, are humanistic rather than religious. The points of contact between his doctrine and that of Aristotle, the most important Occidental humanist, are numerous and striking. One is tempted to say, indeed, that, if there is such a thing as the wisdom of the ages, a central core of normal human experience, this wisdom is, on the religious level, found in Buddha and Christ and, on the humanistic level, in Confucius and Aristotle. These teachers may be regarded both in themselves and in their influence as the four outstanding figures in the spiritual history of mankind. Not only the experience of the world since their time, but much of its previous experience may be properly associated with them. One may note as an interesting analogy that just as Saint Thomas Aquinas sought to combine the wisdom of Aristotle with that of Christ in his Sum of Theology, so about the same time Chu Hsi mingled Buddhist with Confucian elements in his great commentary.
Though Aristotle and Confucius come together in their doctrine of the mean, one should hasten to add that in their total attitude towards life they reveal the characteristic difference between the European and the Asiatic temper… It is perhaps not easy to combine such a far-ranging intellectual curiosity as that of Aristotle with the humility so emphasized by Confucius and other Oriental teachers… One does not need to be a Confucian to feel that a temple of Confucius would not be similarly incongruous. He was not, like Aristotle, a master of the them that 'know', but a master of them that 'will'. He was strong at the point where every man knows in the secret of his heart that he is weak. The decorum or principle of inner control that he would impose upon the expansive desires is plainly a quality of will. He is no obscurantist, yet the rôle of reason in its relation to will is, as he views it, secondary and instrumental…
While no sensible person would claim for the Far East a general ethical superiority over the West, the Far East has at least enjoyed a comparative immunity from that great disease of Occidental culture – the warfare between reason and faith. Buddha and Confucius both managed to combine humility with self-reliance and a cultivation of the critical spirit. They may, therefore, be of help to those who wish to restore to their lives on modern lines the element for which Asia has stood in the past, who believe that without some such restoration the Occident is in danger of going mad with the lust of speed and power. In describing the element of peace as the Asiatic element, I do not mean to set up any geographic or other fatalism. China, for example, may under pressure from the Occident have an industrial revolution (Hankow is already taking on the aspect of an Oriental Pittsburgh) and this revolution is likely to be accompanied by a more or less rapid crumbling of her traditional ethos with the attendant danger of a lapse into sheer moral chaos. The Occident, on the other hand, may not only reaffirm these truths in some appropriately modern way and with an emphasis distinctly different from anything that has been seen in the Orient…