THE MENACE

Not Arms Nor Policies

Profound Forces

Issue of East Against West

(Special, to "The Mercury," by Sisley Huddleston, Paris.)

(All rights reserved.)

"Oh, East is East, and West is West,
 And never the twain shall meet.
Till Earth and Sky stand presently
 At God's great judgment seat."

Between East and West there is a great gulf. One likes to dream of the solidarity of mankind, and to look forward to a time when human divisions will be erased. Yet it is hard to conceive the rapprochement of the Occident and the Orient. Never the twain shall meet, wrote Kipling. It may be that in one sense Kipling was right— that is to say that West and East will never understand each other. But it may be that in another sense, and in a more terrible sense, he was wrong, and that West and East will meet each other in the same manner as colliding trains.
 There is another sense in which the meeting of West and East can be considered—namely, in the sense of an interpenetration of ideas which may have disintegrating effects on what we are accustomed to call the Western world.
 The Chinese conflict and the Russian upheaval have turned men's attention to the great cleavage between the Occident and the Orient, for the events of China and of Russia interest us all vitally. Russia for all practical purposes must be regarded as essentially Eastern; and the great ferment which spreads from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean has lately alarmed not only the pure politician but the philosophical thinker.
 Paul Valery, a distinguished French writer, a member of the Academy, who expresses himself in somewhat obscure style and therefore is listened to only by the elite, once said that Europe, by which he meant Western Europe, that part of Europe which has been built on Latin-Greek traditions — is merely a little outjutting headland of Asia, and may be reabsorbed into the immense Asiatic world. One need not accept the pessimistic implication of such an epigrammatic statement, but that Western institutions are being attacked more seriously than they have ever been attacked before is apparent. And although the huge American continent and vast Australia, seem in some respects to stand aloof and afar from Western Europe, yet they are, as it were, the offspring, and the outposts of Western Europe, and must necessarily be affected by the strange phenomena we are now witnessing.
 Chateaubriand a century ago declared that the new danger was not the danger of an invasion of barbarians, but of an invasion of ideas. This is a profound saying. Innumerable hordes may not overrun the Western lands, putting them to fire and to sword, as in the dark ages of history. But a swarm of ideas may come out of the East and sap the bases of Western culture. So-called Communism, as it has manifested itself in Russia, is by no means the socialism of the German, Karl Marx. Bolshevism may have adopted some of his teachings, but in its essence, Bolshevism is peculiarly Oriental, and has affinities with the vague mystic doctrines of Asia.

POLITICS SHORT-SIGHTED.

Politicians must concern themselves with political consequences of the more immediate and perceptible kind, but behind these political consequences, which may be in themselves relatively insignificant, there are intellectual divergences which are beginning to affect the whole body of our social, our religious, our moral, and our mental life.
 It is this truth which Henri Massis endeavours to expound in a remarkable work which is entitled in its French form, "Defence de l'Occident." He tries to prove, with considerable success, that the Western world has been flooded, of recent years, with Eastern notions, which, whether bad or good, in themselves, must tend to shatter the foundations of European civilisation. It would be foolish to accept this thesis in its entirety, because Western though has for many centuries been impregnated with precisely the views which it is now pretended are being exported from the East.
 Nevertheless, one can go a long way with the author. One disagrees with him when he suggests that Kant and Luther are in contradiction with the Latin-Greek tradition; and one particularly disagrees with him when he argues that Protestantism, as such, has been borrowed from the East, and because it is opposed to Roman Catholicism is, therefore, a dissolving force. He overlooks the fact that the greatest of Western lands, including England and the United States, are predominantly Protestant, and are the leaders in the silent warfare that is being waged with Asiatism in all its shapes.
 Certainly, it is not my purpose to discuss Western religions, but it may be taken that Protestantism and Roman Catholicism are equally part of the tradition of the West, and equally erect that tradition as a barrier against the conceptions of the East. It is a pity that the author spoils his reasoning by taking up a narrow Romanist standpoint.
 Let us set aside this erroneous view. The case, then, becomes the stronger for a distinction to be drawn between the general conception of personality, and of order which prevails in the West, and the conception of mystic impersonality and vague confusion which prevails in Eastern philosophy and religion. One stimulates energy and enterprise. That is why the Western world has gone ahead. The other leads to nothingness, whether it be called Nirvana or Nihilism.
 One insists on the individual, sharply defined, but taking his place in the human hierarchy of a progressive society. The other washes out individuality to vanishing point, and is without a proper appreciation of social action and progress. Indeed, human action is in nearly all Oriental thought regarded as an evil in itself, and the striving which produces steady advance is taboo. The greatest good for the East is to revert to what is presumed to be the original condition of sheer oblivion. While the East yearns for extinction, the West struggles toward self-expression.

THE MATERIAL AND THE IDEAL.

Generalities are always in part false, but nobody who has studied the temperaments and teachings of representative Easterners and Westerners, can fail to see that these generalities have much validity. There may be exaggerations in Western civilisation. It may be criticised as having laid too much stress on mere mechanism, while Eastern civilisation can be criticised for rejecting the advantages of physical science. On the other side, you have a discouraging occultism with an acceptance of Pantheism, which necessarily destroys personal consciousness. On the other side, you may have a too complete separation of spiritual and material things.
 Nevertheless, the normal Westerner will not have a moment's hesitation in choosing. But the Russians have hesitated. Their tendency has always been to turn Eastwards rather than Westwards, but such mighty monarchs as Peter the Great, did their best to bring Russia into the Western world. They succeeded so far as the more educated classes were concerned, and those who came under the influence of the Court were definitely Europeanised. Yet the the number of Europeanised persons was always small, and they constituted a tiny European island in the midst of an immense Asiatic sea of uneducated and primitive peoples, who were given to superstition and pessimism. The Bolsheviks may have made sporadic efforts towards Europe, but on the whole, they have only succeeded in becoming less passive Orientals, and a spear-head directed towards the heart of Europe.
 But what of Germany. Such men as Keyserling indicate a similar destructive movement in Germany. Keyserling represents the negation of intellect, the triumph of occultism.
 Personally, I do not think Germany will succumb to Orientalism. The best observers believe that this country, which had the choice of becoming a bulwark against the East, or of becoming a ridge over which Asia might pass into Western Europe, has clearly thrown in its lot with the Occident.
 Germany has been whole-heartedly readmitted into the community of the Western nations—a wise step, having regard to the circumstances, which are not always sufficiently realised. But in Germany and in France, and in England, and indeed in most European countries, Bolshevism is at work as it is in China.
 The problem, it will be seen, is not a military problem, or even, in the common meaning, a political problem. It enters into the domain of the thinker, the philosopher, the artist, and the literary man, who has imbibed something of historical lore, and whose vision extends over large perspectives.
 Asiatism means a disaggregation of the human personality, a confused loss of being in non-being, an obliteration of social landmarks, a destruction of the hierachy of values, a decomposition and a drowning in the great evolutionary ocean of which the Karma regulates the tides which wash on the shores of the vast All of the Universe. Never was there a more formidable menace to the deep-rooted traditional Western civilisation.

Mercury (Hobart, Tas. : 1860 - 1954), Friday 26 August 1927, page 6