Cross-Cultural Studies in Curriculum

Eastern Thought, Educational Insights

Claudia Eppert, Hongyu Wang, Claudia Eppert, Hongyu Wang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781136792755
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume broadens the horizon of educational research in North America by introducing a comprehensive dialogue between Eastern and Western philosophies and perspectives on the subject of curriculum theory and practice. It is a very timely work in light of the progressively globalized nature of education and educational studies and the increasing

CHAPTER 1

“The Farthest West Is But the Farthest East”
The Long Way of Oriental/Occidental Engagement

David Geoffrey Smith

University of Alberta

Preamble

When the leaders of the neoconservative movement in the United States were planning their takeover of the U.S. government in the late 1990s, one of their primary fears was that“the idea of the West” was in serious jeopardy and in need of defense by any means necessary (Halper & Clarke, 2004, p. 94). Many factors undergirded this fear. The fall of the Berlin Wall had been a powerful semiotic event, a moment when a visible border dividing East and West in Europe lay in ruins. And Russia, with its ancient mystical Byzantine traditions deeply rooted in early Syrian and Persian spirituality, was now open to the West in new ways. The“-stans” of Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, etc.), now unprotected by the dismantled Soviet Union, exposed the proximity of China to the new Europe as part of a single land mass. The gross inefficiencies of the U.S.–Western European alliance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) during the Balkans War (1991–2001) revealed the full difculties of such an alliance ever operating as a unifed entity.

If Europe and America could no longer define“the West” in the singular way they had (basically since Christopher Columbus's landfall in 1492), then what remains of“the West” in the new global configuration of things? And if fear of the demise of the West is a preoccupation of Western political elites, what precisely is it that is feared? If it is“the East,” as the nemesis to the West's hubris, then what is revealed in the current fear is the erosion of what historian John Hobson (2004) has called“an iron logic of immanence” (p. 3) that inhabits the Western imagination through all of its historical, political, and cultural self-renderings.

The logic of immanence is the logic that most of us in the Western tradition have been inducted into since we were children. In response to the basic question of how the West rose to a position of global power, the answer is given in self-contained Eurocentric terms. The Euro-American nexus, we have been told, is constructed through an autonomous genealogy according to which, as Eric Wolf (1982) describes it,

Ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry crossed with democracy in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (p. 5)

As Wolf puts it, echoing G. W. F. Hegel, this rendering turns the very idea of history into a“moral success story” in which“the virtuous (i.e., the West) win out over the bad guys (the East)” (p. 5). What is missing in such an account, of course, is the multiple ways in which the very identity of“the West” is dependent, for its self-construction, on a vast history of relations with“the East”; that indeed there is no West without an East, and vice versa; and that the most fundamental requirement of a global age is a recognition of this fact so that a real conversation can begin about the necessary conditions of mutuality that will inevitably form part of all human futures.

In what follows I will try to trace many of the ways in which East–West engagement has been part of the human story since before the dawn of the first millennium of the Common Era. Largely, I limit the discussion to a kind of history of ideas, showing the deep inhabitation of the Western imaginary by oriental thought, sequent to the various forms of cultural exchange through trade and missionary endeavor. I do not engage the new scholarship that argues that indeed Asia was the center of the global economy until the 19th century (Frank, 1998; and, to a lesser degree, Abu-Lughod, 1989; Fernandez-Armesto, 1996); nor do I engage the kind of historical work undertaken by Hobson (2004) and others (Chaudhuri, 1990; Hodgson, 1993) who have detailed in unequivocal terms the multiple scientific and technological dependencies of the West on Chinese, Indian, and Muslim sources. All of this work, of course, will be of immense value in the future for teachers, teacher educators, and curriculum developers as a new kind of educational imagination comes into being as the result of it.

Indeed, the last remark points in an important direction, through a question concerning the relevance of this entire discussion. As one of my most challenging graduate students is always asking me,“So what …?” In response I say that the landscape through which the Western imagination has been shaped for the last 500 years is changing radically and inexorably. As Westerners, we need to“face our relations” much more than our exclusivist tradition has allowed us to do for the last 2,000 years, and this is not something to be feared. It is not to be feared because the“Other” is in us already, if only we could see it. Our received logics prevent this perception, so the pedagogical and curricular tasks must involve a critique of those same logics, with the very means for such a critique available precisely through what until now has been so aggressively silenced and repressed.

May what follows mark a small contribution to a new kind of conversation regarding who we think we are as a species.

Drawing Some Contexts

The fragment in the chapter title is from Henry David Thoreau (as quoted in Fields, 1981, p. xii) and it underscores how East and West are relative positional terms that eventually conjoin, given the circular, global nature of our planetary home. Similarly, whatever your site of origin on the planet, leave it, go in a single direction, and eventually you will end up where you started. These two observations—that“the farthest east is but the farthest west” and that to set out on a long journey can begin the process of coming home—in a very general way define what will be attempted in this chapter. I write as a Westerner, an academic formed in the traditions of European scholarship. But I was born in China, and over the past 15 years or so I have sought better comprehension of what a deeper appreciation of oriental traditions might mean for Euro-American self-understanding. This chapter is a product of that labor. As will be apparent, there is an emphasis on recovering the Eastern influences on the Western imagination, not so much the other way; that is, how the East has seen and responded to the West. (For an interesting recent treatment of that side of things, see Guo, 2002.)

If this is the age of globalization, not just in the somewhat parochial sense of global economic integration as in the perhaps more important sense of unprecedented cultural interfacings, then the question of what it means to“meet” another assumes special relevance. My suggestion will be that to truly meet or encounter another, individually or collectively, is to meet and encounter oneself, individually and collectively. It is a kind of homecoming that involves both pain and pleasure, loss and profit. Through every encounter we find ourselves to be different from what we were before the encounter. In a sense, the other is now“in” me, and I“in” him/her/them, and this mutual indwelling is not something that can ever be surgically rectified or“purified out.” This is very profound: because we are always constituted through one another, so in a sense we are the other. There is an ancient Hindu saying (in Sanskrit), “Tuam sat asi” (Tat thou art). To understand this can signal a foundation for ethics in global times.

Of course, it is a disturbing thought for the West, which is self-built as an edifice of difference to which all others are exhorted to aspire (but not really). To avoid the pain of deep encounter, the West raises the exhortation,“Our traditions of science, religion, philosophy and art have taught us what it means to be human, so if you want to be human, become like us. If you choose not to, then we have a right to destroy you, for the sake of our broader universal truth. And even if you do choose to be one of us, we still have the right to destroy you if we can. This is the law of life.” In its most current iteration, this is the doctrine of the U.S. administration of President George W. Bush, but the legacy goes back 2,000 years to Roman Emperor Theodorus who, reinventing earlier Jewish and Greek sentiments, declared that anyone who is not a Christian is a pagan—that is, heathen and unenlightened. Europe entered the Dark Ages as Christendom binarized truth from myth, faith became linked to empire, and a parochial history became mythologized as History (Harpur, 2004). To this day, people who stand outside what has become the Euro-American empire stand outside of History (Dussel, 1995, 1996; Wolf, 1982); and as we shall see, this is no small matter.

Setting the stage in such stark terms may seem uncreatively exaggerated until one looks around at the contemporary global situation and sees how deeply divided it is along racial, cultural, and economic lines, with the West, now through the American empire, controlling everything. This is sometimes called“the 20/80 problem” (McMurtry 1998)—that is, 20% of the world's population controls, through various administrative, military, and financial mechanisms, the other 80%. This situation is about to pass, however, as all things must; an older order is dying and a newer one coming into being. Asia, through China and India, is now assuming a more equal partnership in the global power nexus, ironically by occidentalizing their own economic policies; although, as we shall see, contemporary economic theory found some of its earliest basic assumptions in the orient, and until the 19th century Asia was still the center of the global economy (Frank, 1998). The point, though, as historian Michel Beaud (2001) has noted, is that today the world is suffering from“A-cracy: the inability of government to carry out effective action at the level demanded by the problems we are facing” (p. 330). As a species we are confronted with the question of how we shall proceed together as the master narrative of Western superiority gradually dissolves in the face of newly emerging processes of globalization. What shall be the basis of dialogue between the West and non-West, or, in the context of this chapter, between the occident and the orient? What way shall define our life together? How shall we search for it? These are some of the questions guiding the remarks that follow.

That such a book as this one is now entering the occidental conversation surrounding education and curriculum theory is an interesting development in itself. It speaks of the emerging willingness of the Western academy to entertain ideas from outside its own historical traditions, not just as exotica but as part of a new, serious interlocutionary partnership over matters essential to human survival. This is related, I suspect, to a certain dissatisfaction within the Western academy, and in the humanities especially. This dissatisfaction is not only a condition that is self-constructed through the self-enclosure of the humanities’ basic paradigmatic assumptions (see Dussel, 1995, 1996; Smith, 2003a, 2003b, 2005a, 2005b) but it is also a condition inflicted upon it by the new imperial money-circuited regimes of science and technology that are reducing the university to a tool of global capital (Slaughter & Leslie, 1999; Titley, 2005). Tat reduction assumes that science and technology are“value neutral” and hence can be delinked from any necessary critical discussion about everything else that deeply matters to human beings—religion, spirituality, philosophy, sex—except as those aspects can be made accountable to a calculus of wealth creation. Under the new dispensation, everything is indeed just a“thing” to be bought, used, or sold (Kuttner, 1999). Clearly, this is a completely inadequate axiological basis upon which any society or culture might meaningfully survive, and such current academic work as this represents at least one attempt to articulate alternatives that are more faithful to the full catholicity (from the Greek kata,“in respect of” + holos,“whole”) of human experience.

A good way to understand the problem of the limits of Western intellectual paradigms is to examine the relationship between underlying cultural assumptions and their embodiment in various forms of cultural pathology. All cultures sufer illness, but different cultures suffer diferent illnesses; as well, similar illnesses are“suffered” differently in different places (Payer, 1988). In North America the most common diseases are heart attack, stroke, and cancer. Heart attack and stroke are the consequence of hypertension and stress (among other things); many cancers are the result of pollution of the food chain, for example, in turn a consequence of the corporate rationalization of agriculture. All of these have origins in assumptions about life. Primarily, life is seen as a matter of human control and domination, with the downside being an almost complete incapacity to“let go.” If accumulation and consumption define the“good life,” it is understandable that security and storage services are the fastest growing industries in the United States (Chandler, 2002; Hays, 1997), and obesity has become a great social concern (Gard, 2005). Within all of these understandings there is no place for emptiness, which is ironic because many lives feel empty even though they are so full. What the turn to oriental thought represents, then, on a very profound level, is a search for a way to creatively empty out so much of the accumulated baggage cultivated through the West's various philosophies of control.

Related to the above point, as contemporary academics in the Western academy, we work out of the inheritance of Immanuel Kant and the European Enlightenment of the 18th century. This tradition privileges critical thinking in the name of Reason, and its aim is emancipation from unthinking bondage to received knowledge and tradition and their institutional embodiments in the name of monarchy, ecclesia or, today, the state. The fruit is to be forms of knowledge that themselves are genuinely free of prejudice and self-will. The lived result, however, is a kind of“knowledgeism”—that is to say, a way of knowing that implies no connection between knowledge and knower. This is the logic of the“New Knowledge Economy” (Peters & Humes, 2003) and what Roszak (1994) has called“the cult of information.” Knowledge now requires no embodiment; it just is, in itself, a kind of independent cultural currency. So the lived feeling of much academic work is that it is disconnected from any necessary connection to“my” life and how I live. The emerging and thriving interest in Asian traditions in the West serves as a counterpoint to this tradition and its personally alienating qualities, because if Asian traditions have one thing in common it is that they are concerned with the Way of life as a whole, not just its rationalizable aspects. To gain attunement to this Way, knowing“the way of the Way,” is not just emancipating in the Kantian sense but is most profoundly a finding of Life—that is, the life that lives and breathes over, under, around, through, behind, above, and beyond anything we might say and do about it from our own inevitably limited perspectives of time and place. Of course, as will become clear, it is important not to romanticize Asian traditions or idealize them uncritically; it is valuable, however, to re-cognize them, to allow them to be seen and understood as relevant to the shared human situation.

If living the Way, then, is not just the end goal of seeking, but itself a manner of being in the present, this means that the end goal of education can never be knowledge in some independent and discrete sense, something to be accumulated for an anterior purpose such as status and other forms of social capital. Instead, the purpose of education is to learn how to live well, to be free of delusion, and to be attuned to the deepest rhythms of Life so that one is living Life according to its fundamental nature. If this sounds like mysticism, indeed it is, and for this there should be no apology, because it simply means that there is an essential unity to the whole of life that cannot be violated by human thought or action and that, indeed, to act on life as a projection of sheer will is a recipe for disaster on many levels.

Hindu and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: “The Sickness of the West”
• Preface: Openings into a Curriculum of the Way
• 1 “The Farthest West Is But the Farthest East”: The Long Way of Oriental/Occidental Engagement
• 2 Breathing Qi (Ch'i), Following Dao (Tao): Transforming This Violence-Ridden World
• 3 Fear, (Educational) Fictions of Character, and Buddhist Insights for an Arts-Based Witnessing Curriculum
• 4 Socially-Engaged Buddhism as a Provocation for Critical Pedagogy in Unsettling Times
• 5 The Gaze of the Teacher: Eye-to-Eye with Lacan, Derrida, and the Zen of Dogen and Nishitani
• 6 Shanti, Peacefulness of Mind
• 7 My Lived Stories of Poetic Thinking and Taoist Knowing
• 8 Engendering Wisdom: Listening to Kuan Yin and Julian of Norwich
• 9 Eastern Wisdom and Holistic Education: Multidimensional Reality and the Way of Awareness
• 10 Krishnamurti and Me: Meditations on His Philosophy of Curriculum and on India
• 11 Radical Times: Perspectives on the Qualitative Character of Duration
• 12 Hearing, Contemplating, and Meditating: In Search of the Transformative Integration of Heart and Mind
• 13 The Strength of the Feminine, the Lyrics of the Chinese Woman's Self, and the Power of Education
• 14 Toward a Confucian Vision of Curriculum
• Afterword: Teaching Along The Way
• Contributors
• Name Index
• Subject Index