Are the values of the West - freedom of speech, freedom of (or from) religion, the inherent and undeniable value of the individual, democracy, tolerance, individualism, capitalism, freedom to buck tradition - inherently superior to mainstream Eastern values, which restrict the above (Eastern societies being on the whole more communitarian than individualistic)?
Why or why not?
WRS
First you have to prove that “eastern values” equates to “[restricting] freedom of speech, freedom of (or from) religion, the inherent and undeniable value of the individual, democracy, tolerance, individualism, capitalism, freedom to buck tradition,” yadda yadda.
The OP strikes me as being based on a strawman.
Generalizing the values of a whole hemisphere of the globe is a little silly. The values of someone in Vladvastock are probably a lot different then the values of someone in Bombay. Yet they’re both part of “the East”.
You are being deliberately obtuse. This is about culture not longitudes. Unless a Chinese immigrant, a person in Vladvastock would supposedly be Russian and thus, like an Englishman in Peking, not part of what one would normally call “The East”.
Not deliberately obtuse, just exagerating to make my point. I really think that “Western” or “Eastern” culture is such a vague abstraction as to be meaningless without further deffinition. The values of Maoist and Confucian China are unlike each other, and those are unlike those of the New Delhi middle class, which are unlike those of New Guinea tribes people which are far from those of Japanese youth which probably (hopefully) share very little with the prominant Japanese culture during WWII. I would say all of these are part of “the traditional east”, but I don’t see any overreaching similarities between them, and they certainly have a lot of stark differences.
I think the view that eastern societies are more communitarian stems from the simple fact that they were more agrarian in recent times then were western ones. Since agrarian people tend to rely on family and community ties more, these values continue in some eastern societies, unlike industrial Europe and the US, where most families are more removed from the old farming towns and villages.
Sorry if I’m hijacking your thread, Sauron, but the moral of my story here is that I think to have a meaingful debate you need a much tighter deffinition of the two cultures you wish to discuss.
Ah yes, “Western Values”. Do you mean something like German values, circa 1938?
Or American values, circa 2003.
My personal opinion is that neither is superior to the other. If nations would live up to either set of values, then I wouldn’t much care which it was.
Any country that brought us the boardgames Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan, and Amun-Re can’t be all bad.
Marc
I’ll go out on a limb here and say that societies which value freedom of speech, religion, value the individual, the democratic process, capitalism, and recognizes that cultures change is superior to those that do not.
That’s just a personal and very biased view of mine. If we’re going to get into the meat and potatos of this discussion then I have to ask by what criteria are we deciding which is superior?
Marc
Of course by the same token, those cultures that provide community support, a social safety net, strong families, checks on unbridled capitalism, the support of socital traditions, etc. etc. are superior to those that don’t. In short, one needs a mixture of individualistic and communal tendencies, I wouldn’t want to live in a society that was dominated by one side or the other.
Actually Hitler explicitly said that he considerd Germany eastern.
Read The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton. The book is a classic and clearly explains the differences between eastern and western philosopies. Really, check this book out. It is not to long and is a blast to read.
Even as a generalization, saying that Eastern values restrict “freedom of speech, freedom of (or from) religion, the inherent and undeniable value of the individual, democracy, tolerance, individualism, capitalism, and the freedom to buck tradition” is both unfair and unhelpful. You could make an argument that Eastern values have this effect (although you would actually have to make an argument, not just present it as a premise), but it’s not as if all the great philosophers of the East decided that they wanted to suppress individual thought and freedom and designed a moral system with that specific goal in mind. If your whole understanding of Eastern values is some broad, negative stereotype, then of course Western values look better.
There was a similar thread posted about this time last year with about the same result.
But to clarify a bit about what is “West” and what is “East” perhaps a simpler comparison would be:
East vs West Berlin (circa 1946…)
Dominican vs Haidi
North vs South Korea
I had more but I can’t think of them at the moment. To me, those examples show why “Western values” are inherently superior.
Has a slight highjack, perhaps it would be fun to debate North vs South values? Whose values are superiour: Canada, US, or Mexico?
My understanding was that his whole movement – like the whole pre-Nazi tradition of radical German nationalism – considered Germany something “other,” a culture different from (and superior to!) the decadent capitalist-individualist cultures of Western Europe and the barbaric and/or Communist Slavic cultures of Poland and Russia. (Asian cultures did not even merit consideration.) From Modern Times by Paul Johnson (Harper & Row, 1983), p. 111:
But in Hitler’s plans, pursuing Germany’s “destiny in the East” did not mean allying with or learning from its eastern neighbors, it meant destroying and supplanting them.
Now that I look at this thread again, I realize that the OP’s generalizations about “Western values” are pretty far off the mark too. It looks a lot more like a summary of the American Bill of Rights than Western cultural values in general.
The West has a pretty bad track record when it comes to respecting freedom of religion – Catholics and Protestants haven’t even been able to get along with each other, much less the Jews. And as for tolerance and freedom to buck tradition, well, the West has hardly been a model in that regard either. Despite the Bill of Rights, we need only look back a few decades to see plenty of appalling institutionalized racism and sexism in the US.
That is not what he meant by Western Values. The Nazis abhorred democracy, freedom of anything and individual rights. They were a western nation, but didn’t have western values (which haven’t really been taken seriously on earth until after WW2).
There are some benefits to communal values over individualistic values.
(in theory) more social support and responsibility. There wouldn’t be an every man for himself/sink or swim philosophy in a society that valued the nation as a whole (or the world as a whole, if there is a nation that does that, offhand only some scandanavian countries seem to do this in practice). However westernized nations do this already, about 80% of tax money goes to infrastructure or ‘welfare’, both of which strengthen the nation. So perhaps that isn’t true.
Another benefit is that communal values may be better than crass individual on up manship values. Everyone trying to be the best at everything (best looking, best grades, best job, best income, etc) leaves tons of people discontent and unhappy with their semi average, semi above average, semi under average life. Communal values may not instill this desire to beat everyone at everything that western society does. In theory this would lead to less stress, less depression, fewer eating disorder, etc.
I’m pretty sure he was just generalizing western vs eastern values. Perhaps individualistic vs. communal values would be a better term for what is meant, but this thread has really gone off track.
Quite true. However, the Western societies are the only ones in history that have ever produced the ideas that church and state should be separate, religious freedom protected as a matter of principle rather than expediency, that tolerance and freedom are important values in and of themselves, etc. All other societies that now espouse those ideas learned them from the West. You won’t find such thngs defended or even mentioned in Confucius, the Koran or Hadith, or the Rig-Veda.
(It’s the same case with Marxism, of course.)
I would suggest that the freedoms and education inherent in western societies allow for a tremendous flux of ideas and attitudes as well as much diversification of subcultures.
The values of my fellow Canadians are nowhere near what they were 50 years ago. The cultural values of WWII Germany are impossible to discern today as well.
With the exception of several eastern countries like Japan and Korea that have adopted western values, I doubt you’ll see much change in attitudes towards the role of women in society, or tolerance at least for open gays.