What is the East Asian Cultural Ethos?

[rousseau]

If Western European society has been primarily focused on dualism, rationality, and individualism, I wonder what people would consider the main elements of the East Asian ethos to be?

Any thoughts?

 

[Underseer]

Uh, first of all, characterizing intellectual movements (such as the Enlightenment) is problematic because it is nearly impossible to get a large number of smart people to agree on anything. When we say the Enlightenment was characterized by moving away from the church, of course we're either talking about the preponderance of Enlightenment intellectuals, or talking about the works of intellectuals that had the most influence on society.

If trying to characterize all the smart people in a specific region and a specific time frame is problematic, trying to characterize the prevailing ideas of entire continents is even more problematic.

It might be more useful to narrow the topic to something more specific.

For example, a lot of the changes made in the live action version of Ghost in the Shell involved injecting a lot of very Western ideas into the story in a way that pissed off a lot of fans of the franchise.

They added all the typical "be an individual, and you can win once you find yourself and are true to yourself" stuff we normally see in Western action movies, which seemed so out of place in a franchise where there are lots of individuals who deliberately give up their individuality out of a desire to become something more or better than human. In a normal Ghost in the Shell story, people who deliberately give up their individuality or individual identity are not bad people who must be overcome by the protagonist, but an exploration of how technology might fundamentally alter what it means to be human, what it means to be alive, and what it means to be sentient. In the most famous and iconic incarnation of Ghost in the Shell (the 1995 movie),

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[ent]hellip[/ent]it was the protagonist who chooses to do this. With the antagonist.

 

[Underseer]

MovieBob's review of the Chinese action epic The Great Wall explores some of the ideological differences from a propaganda point of view.



Thanks probably to a demand from the Chinese government, Chinese movies tend to portray a ridiculous caricature of Westerners and specifically American attitudes about the relationship with the individual and society. MovieBob explains it better than I could, but I've seen similar themes in other Chinese movies.

Americans in Chinese movies seem to be unaware that it is possible to do selfless acts or even desirable to perform selfless acts, and need superior Chinese people to explain to us that it is both possible and desirable. I won't even mention the fact that Westerners on average give a higher percentage of our income to charities. Bleah.

 

[rousseau]

Uh, first of all, characterizing intellectual movements (such as the Enlightenment) is problematic because it is nearly impossible to get a large number of smart people to agree on anything. When we say the Enlightenment was characterized by moving away from the church, of course we're either talking about the preponderance of Enlightenment intellectuals, or talking about the works of intellectuals that had the most influence on society.

If trying to characterize all the smart people in a specific region and a specific time frame is problematic, trying to characterize the prevailing ideas of entire continents is even more problematic.

It might be more useful to narrow the topic to something more specific.

For example, a lot of the changes made in the live action version of Ghost in the Shell involved injecting a lot of very Western ideas into the story in a way that pissed off a lot of fans of the franchise.

They added all the typical "be an individual, and you can win once you find yourself and are true to yourself" stuff we normally see in Western action movies, which seemed so out of place in a franchise where there are lots of individuals who deliberately give up their individuality out of a desire to become something more or better than human. In a normal Ghost in the Shell story, people who deliberately give up their individuality or individual identity are not bad people who must be overcome by the protagonist, but an exploration of how technology might fundamentally alter what it means to be human, what it means to be alive, and what it means to be sentient. In the most famous and iconic incarnation of Ghost in the Shell (the 1995 movie),

Show

[ent]hellip[/ent]it was the protagonist who chooses to do this. With the antagonist.

To expand on the question a bit, it comes primarily from looking at examples of art from both Western and Eastern society, at large. I have a compendium of art from the Met in New York and it shows examples of masterpieces from all over the world.

The one thing I noticed was how striking the differences are between European and Chinese/Japanese/Korean art. Where European art is big, grandiose, spiritual, egoist, East Asian art seems to be more simple, essentialist, selfless. Less about God, Wealth, Power, more about secular spirituality and living the right life.

At least that's the impression I get from it along with my studying of history, and what interests me about it in particular is how the histories of Europe and East Asia evolved somewhat independently from each other. In a certain sense history had multiple worlds, and with as much as I understand about the West, I'm curious how the evolution of East Asian society differed, and how that has impacted the spirit of their culture.

 

[Sarpedon]

Looking at the Imperial Chinese art and architecture will cure you of that notion. That's all about power and ego. The Chinese scholar-gentry always had a rural, almost hermit type cultural bent, and the art they produced for themselves reflected that. Korean and Japanese art imitated that. Art produced for the court was quite different.

 

[rousseau]

Looking at the Imperial Chinese art and architecture will cure you of that notion. That's all about power and ego. The Chinese scholar-gentry always had a rural, almost hermit type cultural bent, and the art they produced for themselves reflected that. Korean and Japanese art imitated that. Art produced for the court was quite different.

Yea I've wondered about that. The same forces should be at play for each culture, so you would think that the basic elements are more similar than dissimilar.

Begs the question of how much impact philosophical divergence has had. Maybe it comes down to the practical impacts of relevant ideologies (e.g. Confuscianism vs Catholicism).

 

[Underseer]

Looking at the Imperial Chinese art and architecture will cure you of that notion. That's all about power and ego. The Chinese scholar-gentry always had a rural, almost hermit type cultural bent, and the art they produced for themselves reflected that. Korean and Japanese art imitated that. Art produced for the court was quite different.

Yup.

Another example of this is the famous samurai code.

If you read Japanese history, it doesn't take very long to realize that the high-ranking samurai (often translated as lords) stab everyone in the back as often as possible. It doesn't matter if you're a long-standing ally or a family member, if they can gain something from stabbing you in the back you get stabbed.

And that's how these things go, isn't it?

The lower ranking samurai are expected to adhere to the code and painfully kill themselves if they are not sufficiently loyal, while the high ranking samurai would feed their own grandmothers to a pack of rabid dogs if they can get a particularly amusing puzzle box out of the deal.

All of that emphasis on selflessness is strictly for the masses. What's the point of having dirty commoners at all if they aren't completely loyal and obedient?

And that's what bugs me about certain cultural attitudes about selflessness in Asia.

In America, racism is so obviously a narrative created by rich white Americans to subjugate poor white Americans. It's nothing more than a mechanism for keeping them in power and keeping poor white Americans from questioning anything. Many of the aspects of the concept of selflessness in Asian cultures strike me as being something similar: a narrative designed to keep a group of elites in power and to keep the masses from even questioning the elites.

You can't question the concept of white superiority if you're an American because that would mean admitting that you're not inherently superior by virtue of your beautiful white skin. Similarly, you can't question the cultural concept of selflessness because that would mean admitting that you're not inherently superior to those selfish Westerners. Don't question the comforting narrative that keeps that boot on our necks and keeps us from asking tough questions about the people wearing those boots.

 

[Sarpedon]

That's not exactly what I meant. What I meant to say that the Imperial Court and the Intelligencia formed two different and sometimes competing cultural modes. Looking only at the art produced by and for the Scholar-Gentry would have misleading results.

 

[Politesse]

East and West are nearly meaningless imperialist myths. I cannot think of a thing that could be said of "Eastern Cultures" that could not also be said of "Western Cultures" with equally varying degrees of accuracy. I am not saying that all cultures are identical, but rather that they differ on a much more local scale than that of a hemisphere or the supposed hegemony of Britain or China respectively.

 

[rousseau]

Could we not still delineate between the more essential parts of human nature, and the cultural development in the region? Surely there must be some qualities that make East Asian communities, as a whole, distinct from other parts of the world?

The obvious answer is to look to their historical philosophies, which focus on ceasing suffering, community, and social hierarchy/harmony.

 

[Politesse]

Could we not still delineate between the more essential parts of human nature, and the cultural development in the region? Surely there must be some qualities that make East Asian communities, as a whole, distinct from other parts of the world?

The obvious answer is to look to their historical philosophies, which focus on ceasing suffering, community, and social hierarchy/harmony.

It is the "as a whole" that I find dubious. I'm sure that the power structure in Beijing would like to imagine that the whole of East Asia and beyond is, or is about to be, a single unified cultural whole. Just as European elites would like to imagine that the "Western culture" of the great universities is identical to (or more pure and real than) the street cultures of Germany, America, and wherever else. But need we agree with them?

 

[Underseer]

If we're going to talk about differences between "the West" and the far East, the big difference comes from the Enlightenment.

In order for society to function, society needs to balance the needs of the individual with the needs of the group.

In traditional human arrangements, you get some kind of elite making decisions for the rest. This group benefits more from selflessness from the masses. The masses work to produce resources and the elites take resources from the masses. The people making the decisions benefit from a society that emphasizes the needs of the group over the needs of the individual as much as possible.

Somewhere in between the Enlightenment and decades of union strikes, the West came to the conclusion that if we shift the balance more towards the needs of the individual, the individuals would be happier and thus more productive, thus leading to benefits for the whole group.

Nations like China never had a functional democracy. They shifted from a ruling elites of nobles to ruling elites of pseudocommunist technocrats. Thus, they have resisted the push towards shifting the balance towards the individual. The balance must be towards the group as much as possible so that the wealthy elites can be as wealthy as possible.

It is noble for you to work many, many hours and ask for a bare pittance in salary in return. If you ask for shorter hours or more pay, you are being selfish. Don't be like those selfish Westerners with their 40 hour work weeks and ludicrously high salary demands.

Did I mention that American conservatives would like to eliminate minimum wage and stop requiring corporations to pay overtime past 40 hours? If you have a problem with this, they will call you a "taker" and accuse you of being "selfish." Sound familiar?