I was struck recently when watching Jordan Peterson’s dialogue with Peter Kreeft, when Professor Kreeft mentioned by analogy the Romeo and Juliette story as an equivalent in some real sense to Christ’s call to discipleship. Then, more recently, I have come to consider the Asian experience of religion, excluding the levant region, as more typified by the experience of arranged marriage as the equivalent to their religious mindset. It seems to me that this is the real cultural deadlock between East and West is not necessarily a desire for expansionistic militarism in the East, which it seems to me is more a surface issue affecting world politics, but rather the Chinese have recognised the need to defend the rightful place of parents in the romantic space, a place that feels threatened.
It is this issue, it appears to me, that is providing the emotive thrust behind the militaristic posture of the Chinese Communist Party as it presents itself today – because it is a struggle for the existence of East Asia as fundamentally Asian in its religious outlook. There are so many cultural incursions within East Asia – most stridently lead by the Japanese. Moreover, this is happening within a context where the Japanese are not wholly to be trusted, at least as far as the Korean and Chinese are concerned – what with the unresolved experiences of World War II.
I take as a guru in this regard the former Jesuit Father General, Adolfo Nicolas, who spent most of his life in Japan and the Philippines, despite growing up in Spain. For Nicolas, East Asian philosophies should be given just as much weight in Christian attitudes toward Asia as Greek philosophy did for the Christians in Europe. East Asian philosophies are much more dedicated to laying out aspects of reality that have to do with the ‘Way’ we practice our faith and learn to be better people. Nicolas, who died in May 2020, believed that European missionaries to Asia over the last few centuries preached philosophies of ‘truth’, which did not meet well with the local populations. For a more accurate delineation of what Christianity has to offer the East, Nicolas would have us lay aside our European attachment to philosophies of truth and embrace a more open and respectful approach to Asian philosophies as equally valid.
My belief would be that East Asian anxieties regarding their place in the world would be somewhat lessened if Western thought leaders were less eager to sell their learnings from the East as in competition with Western best practice and rather try to approach such learnings without the need to justify, explain or make up for the lack of scientific or religious consensus behind these albeit foreign practices and methods of health and spirituality. There is a tendency in Western thought to draw up lines to distinguish and cordon off areas of knowledge that lie beyond accepted practice and understanding. This has necessarily meant the appraisal of foreign methods toward health and spirituality as a threat. Because of the legacy of colonialism, however, Asian attitudes toward Western health and religious practice has been far more submissive and beyond the cultural pale. There is perhaps a continuum upon which Asian nations stand regarding how far the Western narrative has won over the population – with nations closer to Japan as a rule being more culturally Western in their practice of health and religion even. The Japanese would not see it this way, perhaps – with ‘modern’ being the word they would prefer over ‘Western’, and maybe this perspective has some validity.
Yet the reason Japanese would prefer the term ‘modern’ over ‘western’ is, not disregarding the obvious level of investment Japan has in the modern world, is that this issue of bringing Asian philosophies and ways of practicing health and religious faith into the accepted practice of Western societies without the ‘rebellious’ label they are often afforded (by practitioners as much as by enemies of the practices mind you) seems too far to achieve. There are countries in Europe that still practice arranged marriage. It seems to me that even if Asian thought leaders were to take up the Romeo & Juliette attitude towards religious faith to a greater degree, it would take many hundreds of years for such ideas to gain traction culturally. In the mean time, political skirmishes, such as that around the Taiwan straits currently, appear here to stay.