Logic and intuition, West and East, and the coming of Christ

Ok, so it appears like this to me:
First there were groups and tribes with more or less equal members. Then more complex societies started to form, often headed by a competent or charismatic person, and they were usually dictatorships based on slavery or, later, feudalism (with the exception of ancient Greece and Rome, which were complex societies with partial democracy). And finally, individualistic capitalist societies emerged in the West and collectivistic communist societies emerged in the East.


It is my suspicion that emphasis on the holistic perspective manifests as collectivism in social life, while emphasis on the analytic perspective manifests as individualism in social life. It makes sense to me philosophically and it's supported by the coupling of emphasis on analytic thinking and individualism in the West, and the coupling of emphasis on holistic thinking and collectivism in the East.

The crux of this biscuit is how the complex societies formed. In the middle east, there arose temple societies, in which a self-interested preistly caste ordered the activities of individuals to the benefit of all, but primarily to their own benefit. The system was so well recognized that there have been found "passports" with which the acolytes or priests of a temple in one city were provided to secure lodging and sustenance from the temples in other cities. The temple society is to what i referred when i opined that you were deluded into your "dictatorship" theory (it really is too facile, and you ought to understand human beings are just not that simplistic). Other societies are built up over time from familial and clan relationships. The Turks provide a good example of this. When they entered the middle east in the ninth century, they were known as Seljuks--and it is reasonably speculated that they named themselves after a charismatic and successfully competent clan leader of that name. Subsequently, the arrival of the "Mongols" ended all the old ruling arrangements, and an effective clan leader at the time of the first crusade, Osman, had left behind a competent and militarily successful clan organization which survived, and rose to supremecy--the Osmanli Turks, called the Ottoman Turks, based on the Arabic for Osman--Uttuman (which might be misspelled).

The Doric and Ionic Greeks were conquering bands of warrior tribes who imposed their rule on the existing populations, and devised "democracy" as a means of organizing the polity of the conquerors. It did not include the common people they had conquered, and Attic "democracy" at its height probably included no more than 10% of the adult males, most of them resident in Athens. The Romans seem to have been another self-organized society with two classes--Patres ("Fathers") and Plebs. The former were the families of the ostensible founders of the city, the latter were the members of the Latin and Hernican tribes who volutarily came to the city to provide the necessary labor. A third class, the Equites, or "knights," was created to fill an obvious need for a middle class. Your obsession with dictatorship leads you astray. The history of the Republican Roman empire is the story of the constant warfare, covert or overt, between the classes over the spoils of warfare and the wealth generated by successful conquest. The Principiate Empire might be described as a Dictatorship, but that is still not accurate. The office of Dictator was created by the Romans to fill the need for leadership in times of unforeseen emergency. The ordinary system was a very intricate construction of checks and balances to assure effective adminsitration while preventing any particular members of the Patrician class from seizing an absolute power (those boys simply did not trust one another, and with good reason). In the Principiate empire, the functions of the various city officers continued, but the effective administration was placed in the hands of a bureaucracy. The history of the cyclical Chinese dynasties is also always, at least eventually, the history of a bureaucratic class. Even these are oversimplified statements.

Feudalism as it was known in Europe was similar to but more complex than what the Doric and Ionic Greeks had done. In the case of Gothic Europe, the various Germanic tribes who overran the western portions of the Roman empire basically created a pyramidic hierarchical structure of interlocking loyalties to provide for local administration while assuring the sovereign funtions necessary to war and diplomacy at the highest level.

You gotta lose your fixation on "dictatorship."

I should note that in my never humble opinion, your final statement about capitalistic societies and "collectivist" societies is the purest horsiepoop.

Ok, so they were not dictatorships but various arrangements in which an elite minority ruled and exploited a majority.

Sometimes that was true (that's called oligarchy, by the by--and oligarchies may or may not "exploit" the majority, but it ain't axiomatic), sometimes it was monarchy, sometimes it was a temple society, sometimes it was feudalism (in which oligarcy and monarchy are far less relevant), sometimes it was bureaucracy, sometimes it was an oligarchic plutocracy.

In case it isn't sinking in yet, you have an unfortunate obsession with finding simplistic, one size fits all descriptions here. Such descriptions are not only useless in a careful examination of history, they are a hinderance. You need to approach history with an open mind, just as with any other intellectual discipline--but you're avidly trying to shoe-horn history into your ideological world-view, which makes you very much like a Marxist dialectic materialist.

I am looking for manifestations of individualism and collectivism in the world. When it comes to social systems, the differences between West and East regarding individualism/collectivism don't seem evident in history - until capitalistic societies emerged in the West and communist societies emerged in the East.

Setanta, you are obviously a specialist in history but psychological differences between Western and Eastern cultures seem to be eluding you. So take a look at this Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivist_and_Individualist_cultures

And I should also point to the work of Geert Hofstede, a Dutch expert on national and organizational cultures who made scores for over 60 countries on 5 cultural dimensions. One of those dimensions was individualism/collectivism and you can see the scores here:

http://www.clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-dimensions/individualism/

Not surprisingly, the highest scores on individualism went to the Western countries (USA, Australia, Western Europe), lower scores were given to selected Central/Eastern European countries, Middle East, India and Japan, and the lowest scores on individualism were given to Eastern Asian countries, including China, and Latin America.

You should see that collectivism is not just something imposed by the government but also a mentality that pervades cultures.

You should see that those who look for evidence of "psychological mentalities" will find it, if they look hard enough. If one wished to do so, one could claim that the temple societies of the ancient middle east were "collectivist." Don't let the "east" portion of that fool you, either--there is absolutely no reason to ascribe common cultural antecedants to "Mesopotamia" and China or Indo-China. Amerindians who hunted game animals using dead-fall or surround techniques were using what can be described as "collectivist." The activity of gathering sufficient naturally occuring foods such as grains, nuts or fruits to justify storage for the winter can be seen as a collectivist activity. If one reads The Sons of the Yellow Emperor, Lynn Pan, one gets a very good image of the capitalist success of the Chinese diaspora. Among both Europeans and Amerindians, ample evidence of "collectivism" can be found.

The point i am attempting to make to you, and which you are pleased to ignore, is that it is entirely possible that you, and the sources you cite, choose to see some great cultural divide between what you are pleased to call East and West. How do you account for that? Do you suggest that the cardinal orientation was the deciding factor? I suggest, once again (this gets tedious), that you either ignore, or are ignorant of, the particularism which accounts for these differences. By particularism, i mean the specific factors of historical development which gave rise to the cultures one examines, and which apply only on the basis of a particular historical sequence. I'll describe it in a subsequent post.

Set's winning, litewave. You should know I don't often admit that.

The first emperor in China to create a true pan-China empire was Huang-Ti, known as "the Yellow Emperor." In the third century BCE, he succeeded in conquering China, and putting it under a unified, bureaucratic administration which did not describe any of the dynasties which have previously been alleged to exercise imperial authority. The Shang, usually described as the first dynasty, in fact only made less powerful--but nonetheless powerful--"Lords" (clan leaders) tributary. The Shang did not exercise centralized administrative control, but were noteworthy because of the rise of urban culture. Huang-Ti laid China under tribute, and he effectively established the Mandarin, the semi-dynastic (in that son often followed father into the bureaucracy) bureaucratic class, as a central administration. His dynasty only lasted through the lifetimes of his son and grandson. After a tumultuous interregnum, his dynasty was succeeded by the Han.

In all periods of Chinese history, including the Xia, Shang and Zhou which came before Huang-Ti, rebellious lords, usually allied with militarily effective "barbarians" would eventually succeed in overthrowing the imperial authority--which was never much of an authority at all. After Huang-Ti, a cyclical pattern emerged, which is as much recognized by Chinese historians as by those in the West. A new, vigorous and at least semi-sinicized barbarian clan (such as the Han) would overthrow the imperial dynasty to their own benefit. Having seized the imperial authority, they would trade freely with the "outer barbarians," to the mutual benefit of all concerned. As the dynasty became more effectively sinicized, the Mandarins would increasingly assert their bureaucratic authority. The Mandarin were conscientiously literate and historical, assiduously keeping records and establishing precedents of policy. To determine policy, they made reference to the records of previous Mandarin administrations. The Mandarin were devoted to the "middle kingdom" view of China. Middle Kingdom does not mean between one geographic entity and another, it means the kingdom lying between heaven and earth. The Mandarin saw all of the world which was not China as a howling darkness of barbarian depravity. Therefore, in the middle period of dynasty, as the ruling dynastic clan lost its "barbarian" vigor, and came to rely more upon the Mandarin bureaucracy, the Mandarin would impose their historically authorized policies. This would reduce trade with barbarians to a "tribute" fair, usually only conducted on an annual basis, when the barbarians would provide horses (the most valuable commodity) and some raw materials (wool and food livestock most commonly) which the Mandarin were please to call "tribute," and the Chinese would provide certain amounts of bronze and silk, and other desired commodities, which the Mandarins were pleased to describe as "gifts." But this would mean a significant decline in the amount of consumer goods which the "barbarians" could acquire, and the pressure for military action to get what they wanted would result in increasing attacks on the empire, in the character of plundering raids. The Mandarin would respond with more calls for military colonists and the building of walls, and an end to all trade with barbarians. As each dynasty entered its senescence, the women and eunuchs of the palace would take over practical politics in the palace, and the Mandarins would be left to formulate and institute all policy--and this would inevitably lead to the complete exclusion of foreign exchange. The sinicization of the ruling dynastic clan would result in the loss of their personal military prowess, and the dynasty would be ripe for collapse in the face of ambitious clan leaders and military men. The first significant occurance of this was the three kingdoms period after the collapse of the Later Han. Therefore, capitalism would wax and wane in the cyclical dynastic successions, just as did all other major aspects of culture in China.

A new, vigorous and militarily-competent, semi-barbarian dynastic clan would eventually capitalize on the political chaos, and sooner or later found a new dynasty. The entire cycle would then be repeated. In the early stages, there would be a vigorous (and definitely capitalistic) foreign exchange, and relatively cordial relations with the barbarians. In the periods of political chaos in the interregnum between dynasties, appeals would be made for peasant loyalty by the recognition of "rights" of the peasants, to which they were expected to respond by filling levies for the armies of the warring parties. Therefore, both collectivism and capitalism can be found repeatedly throughout two millenia of Chinese history--to see only collectivism is an act of willful self-delusion.

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The Inca society of what we are pleased to call Peru was a unique social structure in world history. The Inca is the name of the ruler. He combined the character of an absolute autocrat (monarch), a high priest, and a living god on earth. He was considered to be the living avatar of the Sun on earth, suggesting the system derives from an earlier temple society which worshipped the sun. Inca society was organized on a basis which i have no doubt that you would describe as collectivist. Every able bodied man was guaranteed a minimum specified parcel of land, from which he was to derive a miniumum specified livelihood, remitting a minimum specified tributary contribution to the ruling authority. His wife and children were entitled to a specified share of food, clothing and shelter, and the community was required to assure its distribution. Widows were guaranteed a minimum specified livelihood from the community, and a widower was guaranteed child care for his minor children. Apart from agriculture, miners and rock quarriers were the only significant laboring class, and they were guaranteed a minimum specified livelihood based on a minimum required production from their trade. Couriers and porters were the final piece of the puzzle, and they enjoyed their own guaranteed livelihood contingent upon their pursuit of their profession. The aristocratic class also fulfilled the functions of a bureaucracy and a priestly class, and were responsible for assuring the administration of the "welfare" system of the state within the individual communities.

The Inca commanded an effective and efficient administration which allowed him to extend the area of social and military dominance of his society. Immediately before the arrival of the Spanish (i do mean immediately, Atahualpa had just returned literally a matter of days before Pizarro arrived), the Inca had quelled a rebellion. Rulers of Tahuantinsuyo (the proper name of the Inca empire) had traditionally passed their title on, with the property of the clan divided between all surviving sons and the widow. Huayna Capac would have been succeeded by one of his sons, and the system would have avoided civil war by the seizure of the title by the most vigorous and effective son, whose assurance of the division of property would obviate rebellion by his brothers and his mother. But Huayna Capac and his son whom he was grooming for the succession died, along with a great deal of the army, from an epidemic disease (thought to be smallpox), and the son Huascar seized the imperial authority, and arrested Atahualpa. Atahualpa escaped, raised an army, and defeated Huascar after a three year civil war. He was returning to Cuzco with his victorious army when he encountered Pizzaro. Pizarro had a few more than 200 Spaniards, and Atahualpa viewed them with contempt. But Pizzaro managed to ingratiate himself, seized the Inca, and then murdered him. The late war had served to destroy the imperial leadership, and it was not until much later that the Tahuantinsuyo rose against the Spaniard. Pizzaro, although an illiterate former swineherd, was no dumby, and he had installed the puppet Inca Tupac Huallpa, and it initially seemed to the people that nothing much had changed--collectivism does not offer effective remedies to such a situation, if the members of the collective are satisfied that they are getting what they need to survive. Eventually, a brother of Tupac, Manco, rose against the Spaniard, and enjoyed initial success against the Spaniard, isolated on their wide-spread haciendas, and using horses and Spanish weaponry. The rebellion was doomed, however, as the Tahuantinsuyo traditions made it appear to the people as though this were yet another dynastic war, and they stood aside. The brothers Pizzaro managed to hang on in Lima, and eventually received the support they needed to reconquer the country.

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From this, it should not be assumed that all South American tribal socities were necessarily collectivist, nor that it was the most effective system. Huayna Capac (Atahualpa's father) had followed in the footsteps of his father, Tupac Inca Yupanqui, and had attempted to conquer what we know of as Chile. Although initially successful, taking the Pacific littoral to the immediate south of his territory, Tupac had been checked at the southern end of the brutal coastal desert which it was necessary to cross to reach the rich lake country to the south, where modern-day Santiago is located. He pushed into what is now Argentina, but his forces were handed a signal defeat by the Mapuche tribes to the south in the lake district. His son, Huayna Capac also attempted to overrun the Mapuche--and failed. The Mapuche were a semi-nomadic, semi-pastoralist society in the stage between hunter/gatherer and settled agricultural society. They were also fiercely independent and militarily effective. Their defeat of the Tahuantinsuyo was no fluke, and did not rely entirely upon the devastating effect of crossing the coastal deserts. Tupac had established an outpost on the northern edge of the lake district, from which neither he nor Huayna Capac were able to quell the Mapuche. The Spaniard arrived in the mid-sixteenth century, and waged a vigorous and brual war against the Mapuche--and they also failed to subdue the Mapuche. Eventually, at the end of the 18th century, Ambrosio O'Higgins became the governor of Chile, and through a policy of peaceful coexistence and trade with the Mapuche, he brought peace to the nation, and Spanish settlements gradually expanded with careful diplomatic adjustment with the Mapuche.

The Mapuche are a tribal group of the Araucanians, who also inhabited what we call Argentina, and from whom in part the gauchos are descended, and the Araucanians in what is now Argentina also stopped the Inca advance, and later long and successfully resisted Spanish encroachment. Ambrosio's son, Bernardo O'Higgins, is often called the liberator of Chile. Unfortunately, he hadn't his father's sense, and the governments of the newly established and independent Chile took on the destruction of the Mapuche by heavily arming the settlers and subsidizing constant warfare. Eventually, the Spanish-speakers were able to drive the Mapuche into marginal lands, but they never succeeded in destroying them.

Because the Mapuche survived, we know a great deal of their traditional society. It was organized on a familial and clan basis, with local chieftans who acknowledge no higher authority, excpet in time of war, when the clans would unite as tribes, and fight under a war leader--whose authority only extended to military command and only endured for the term of the emergency. The clan leades only exercised authority in matters of common interest requiring abitration. The similarity to the structure of the pre-Christians German tribes as described by Tacitus is striking. We can therefore see that among Amerindians along the Pacific littoral of South America, both collectivism and individualism thrived and were successful, each in its own sphere, and neither warranting a description as supremely effective.

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The philosophical heritage of both Abrahamic religions and the Greeks relies heavily upon dualism. The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) see the world in dichotomous terms--good and evil, light and dark, black and white. The Greeks were also prone to impose this dualism upon the world by description--it is an easy, simplicstic way to see the world, and avoids all sorts of difficult exercises necessary to see the world more accurately. Just because one is pleased to see the world in such terms, does not make it so. It can be shown that in all regions of the world, at all periods of history, both collectivism and individualism were evident, and that these cultural artifacts both thrived and failed. That one cultural imperative or the other seems to have prevailed in any particular region is simply a product of historical particularism, in which the sequence of events left that cultural imperative apparently supreme. Your "East is East and West is West" dichotomy is more apparent than real.

And those who look for differences in social structures throughout history will find them too. I already told you that in more distant history there doesn't seem to be evidence in social systems for individualistic-collectivist divide between West and East. That divide in social systems came in relatively modern history, with the rise of Western capitalistic systems and Eastern communist systems. Yet you keep pointing out details about various ancient societies. The modern-history situation of the world is unprecented. The Earth is populated by several billion people living in the Western bloc with highly developed individualistic philosophy, science and technology or in the Eastern bloc with massively applied collectivist philosophy and with massively spread non-materialistic mystical heritage. The fact that there is no obvious rational explanation why this is so contributes to your readiness to dismiss it.

You obviously didn't study international human resource management; Geert Hofstede's work is taken seriously there.

Yet, the "Eastern bloc" (which is not "Eastern" at all by the definition to which you initially refer) has abandoned a collectivism which you have never satisfactorily demonstrated was widely embraced by the people who were subject to it, and have embraced capitalism. If one looks at societies which are "Eastern" in the sense to which Kipling alluded, those societies as well seek capitalist prosperity.

You have never satisfactorily explained why anyone should believe that "Eastern" socieities are or once were organically prone to the collectivism which you allege, nor effectively dismissed the contention that such collectivism were imposed from above. In fact, you acknowledge that there is no obviouis rational explanation why it were so, and i see no reason to assume as much. Once again, you ignore historical particularism, which readily accounts for the brief period of ideological collectivism imposed in China and Indo-China, and in the "Eastern bloc," which both historically and politically is taken to refer to the member nations of the Warsaw Pact--all nations in the European "West." An emphasis should be laid on the words "brief period of ideological collectivism," which is why it is useful to look at the historical antecedants.

At all events, what you speculate is obvious about what i may or may not have studied is meaningless, and the very title of your thread, with its reference to the coming of Christ beggars your attempt to escape the failure of your thesis by now claiming that "distant history" is not relevant. Your initial post attempts to ground your thesis with references to the coming of the putative Christ, to Hinduism, to Taoism and to Buddhism. Do you allege that those were not parts of "distant history?" You dance no better than you expound.

I don't talk about West and East in a strictly geographical sense, although geographic tendencies are obvious too. It's mainly about culture. So Australia is part of the cultural West and Cuba is part of the cultural East. (But I don't understand why you referred to Warsaw Pact nations as European "West"; that makes sense neither in cultural nor in geographic sense.)
In my initial post I did say market economy and democracy are spreading in the East. And Eastern philosophies and social solidarity are spreading in the West. The mutual interaction and enrichment between West and East during globalization is part of my theory. However, the former communist countries are not embracing capitalism in its original form (free market with minimal government) but a mixed economy with a relatively strong state intervention. This mixed economy or social democracy is widespread in Western Europe too, and even in the USA the days of laissez-faire capitalism are long gone.


Cultural studies and holistic philosophies indicate a collectivist mentality in Eastern cultures. I admit there were communist leaders who led the masses and there was also suppression of dissent, but mass collectivist mentality could provide a fertile ground for the establishment of communist systems. I also don't rule out that collectivist mentality may have been strengthened by these systems.


Major ancient religions and philosophies obviously influence even today's cultures. I just said that in distant history the social systems don't seem to manifest an individualist-collectivist divide between West and East. I'm not sure why it was so. Apparently, the divide came with industrialization, with the need for more complex organization of economic activity. The industrialization impulse originated in the West and West embraced it with capitalist organization. The East responded with communist organization.

Well, i'm obviously not going to convince you that you are taking a simplistic, dualistic approach, and whoring history to make a case.

You are obviously not going to convince me that i can't see the historical forest for the trees.

You have a nice life, don't bother to write . . .

Here's some articles that refer to academic research of differences between Western and Eastern cultures:


http://www.cic.sfu.ca/forum/ting-too.html


http://www.nacada.ksu.edu/Clearinghouse/AdvisingIssues/East-Meets-West.htm


http://www.umich.edu/~urecord/9900/Aug14_00/7.htm

You have a diatribe by someone whose discipline is listed as communications.

You have an unsubstantiated statement by a member of the faculty at the University of Texas at San Antonio, the web site of which says that she has a BA in English, and an "MRH" from the University of Oklahoma.

You follow this with a diatribe from someone at the University of Michigan with a degree in "Social Psychology."

Not a single credential in ethnology in the group, no historian, and not a shred of substantiation, nor even supported illustrative examples from any of them, who otherwise simply make statements from authority.

One assumes you are convinced. It may or may not surprise you to learn that i am not.

By the way, that last diatribe, issued by the news service at the University of Michigan, was entitled:

East, West cultures may see things differently, says ISR researcher

I have underlined the operative word in that title. It hardly constitutes a ringing endorsement of your thesis. I am not surprised, however, that you did not include it in your cut and paste job.

To get down to brass tacks, you have advanced a thesis, but you have not proven it. I have advanced a great deal of information which explains why i don't believe it. I am not obliged to disprove this thesis. You have the burden of proving your thesis. So far, you have not done so.

"MHR" means Master of Human Relations or Resources. I would say that communication specialists, human resource management specialists and social psychologists have a lot to say about cultures. Hofstede's pioneering cultural research involved over 100,000 people and is a classic topic in international human resource management textbooks.


Wow, and how did you find out about the title? Perhaps you clicked on the link I left in my post? Yes, the article is about experiments and studies which suggest that Americans and East Asians see things differently.

I've found an article about another similar experiment carried out by Nisbett and his colleagues from University of Michigan more recently. This time it was with Chinese and American students:


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4173956.stm

The focus of Easterners on the whole is not surprising when we also see their collectivist mentality and Asian holistic philosophies that emphasize interconnectivity of all things and whose goal is to achieve extinction of the ego and oneness with God/everything (nirvana, moksha, satori).

I knew what MRH meant, joker--and simply because these folks have a lot to say on the subject is no reason to assume they know what they're talking about. All you provide is the speculation of academics in disciplines without traditions for providing solid evidence in support of their publications. But here's the heart of the matter:



Just like the very dubious sources which you offer in support, you have a new age hippie spiel to offer, and without substantiation. In the end, though, the clue is the forum in which you post this, and the unsupported contention you make that your version of a few religious credos bears you out--Spirituality and Religion. What evidence do you have that it is reasonable to suppose that the majority of people in "the East" adhere reliably to the version of religious doctrine which you present here? What evidence do you have that none of this can be said about anyone in "the West."

Altogether, this is a very poor job on your part, and bears little resemblance to the teeming squalor which is much of Asia. I've been there, stayed there a long time, and visited several nations there. Have you? Basically, you're making it up as you go along, and your descriptions don't match reality.

Litewave, if you were correct, orphans from dissimilar societies would not conform to their adoptive parents' mentality.

I wonder what would constitute "solid evidence" for you.


Those are Eastern religions and philosophies. Some people adhere to them more and some less, but they are widespread there.


Why not? Children are malleable.