The East-West dichotomy/Chapter 20

Having seen that the East-West dichotomy is omnipresent in history, philosophy, demographics, religion, culture, ideology, even sexuality, let us now, in looking at the dialectis of dichotomy, expand its scope to more exotic fields such as physiology, geopolitics, and cognition:


 * Cerebral determinism

This notion is linked to human physiology. We observe, in most cultures, the grammatical division of nouns into masculine and feminine, and in all cultures, the semantic division of names and objects into male and female. It means that gender is an innate sense people have of themselves and others, including animals and objects. This is an example of our human physiology, the structure of our sexes, correctly corresponding to and portraying categorizations of things in the world we perceive. Next, we all are able to distinguish between matter and idea, in philosophy it is called Cartesian dualism (Cambridge Dictionary, 1999), which is an example of the intimate relationship between our mind and brain correctly corresponding and portraying categorizations of mind and matter in the world we perceive. Likewise, the ways we think about the world we perceive with respect to our categorizations of matter and idea, are causally determined or influenced by our linguistic system (Sapir, 1983). Since our physiology projects itself on the world we perceive, this makes me wonder whether our definition of an inductive East and an analytical West is another example of the structure of our cognitive system - the two cerebral hemispheres - correctly corresponding and portraying categorizations of the world we perceive, namely the East-West dichotomy.

The second notion I would like to bring forward is the argument of shared labor in a geopolitical context, not in a Marxist or Weberian sense to explain labor shared within a society, but for the labor shared among civilizations. The definition of East-West dichotomy (from Greek dicha, “apart”, and tomos, “cutting”) is a form of logical division consisting of the separation of the geopolitical map into two hemispheres, one of which has and the other has not in each case perpetually exhibited the tendency for analytically-based reasoning or integration-based reasoning. In any population, just as we may divide its members along a vertical scale into professional individuals and individuals who are not professionals (and each of these may be subdivided again), similarly we may divide cultures along a horizontal scale into analytical-based societies and societies which are integration-based. Because each side contains what the other side is lacking, East and West together form a whole that is imperfect without both of its parts. If we now come to see the division into integration-based and analytically-based civilizations as a form of specialization in ‘cooperative labor’ with specific tasks and roles well adjusted to increase efficiency and intellectual output of humankind, we could imagine a certain regulatory mechanism or ‘collective consciousness’ that shifts whole populations - voluntary or involuntary - into their respective geopolitical roles and provides them with specific tasks so as to serve the greater good of the whole. Ideas about a human ‘hive mind’ are not new to us, however the mere mentioning of any insect-human social familiars still causes confusion (Cooley and Rieff, 1983/2003). Not so long after Darwin, in his Origin of Species (1859) observed group strategies and social organization in animals, modern biologists and sociologists compare the kingdoms of ants (and occasional beehives) to human state-building and consumerism (Spencer, 1857; Hölldobler and Wilson, 1990, 1994; Weber, 1991; Marion, 1999). Philosophers tell us that there is a certain unifying moral force within society, psychologists talk about ‘conformity’ or ‘group identify’, as opposed to a society of total egoists and independent individuals (Cooley and Rieff, 1983/2003). If this is true in groups, why not in civilizations too: in order to be most productive and efficient, labor has to be shared. To my knowledge, no Western culture has ever produced anything like the works of Confucius, and no Eastern culture has ever produced anything like Plato’s ideals. The notion of the share of labor makes me think that the division of an analytically-based West and an integration-based East could be no coincidence in human evolution, but a collective behavior to fully exploit and develop all the cognitive capacities of the human race. Note that there is nothing in this world that is not shared by all humankind. It is just that the West grew up to excel at this, and the East grew up to excel at that and that all we should do is to bring it together in order to express all the knowledge.
 * The Theory of shared labor


 * Cognitive dualism

The third notion is derived from Dewey (1859-1952). In his book Quest for Certainty (1929), where he discusses the ‘doctrine of two truths’, the sacred and the profane, which in turn is derived from dualism. Dualism, in its simplest notion, is related to binary thinking, that is, to systems of thought that are two-valued: valid/invalid, true/false, good/bad or right/wrong. The doctrine of two truths however is more concretely engaged in the dualistic response to the conflict between spiritualism and science, the spiritual and the secular. Dewey sees all problems of philosophy derived from dualistic oppositions, particular between the spirit and the physical matter, but it is his conclusion that is most significant: Dewey proposes the rejecting of Hegel’s dialectical idealism (that recommended the synthesis of oppositions seen as theses versus antitheses) on the grounds that the whole (synthesis) is never the sum of its parts (thesis and antithesis). Conclusively, contradictions are universal: it is ‘either or’ or ‘both but incommensurable’, as for example ‘ebb and flow’, ‘Yin and Yang’, or as the Chinese-English saying goes: 鱼和熊掌，不可兼得 - You can’t have your cake and eat it, unabridged: “鱼，我所欲也；熊掌，亦我所欲业，二者不可的兼，舍鱼儿取熊掌者也” (Mencius, 11A,4). The study of the ‘other’ - Satre’s xenophobic masochism ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’, Habermas’ paranoid ‘Der Blick des anderen’, or the Indian philosophy of ‘Deshi-Pardeshi’ (Inhabitor vs. Outsider), the silly but deadly Communist-Capitalist game, all of them are simply saying: I am not you, and you are not me. So, what is the argument? Do we not all like to disagree, not because we hold the better reasons, but because we “can” disagree. Isn’t it our right so say, that “although ‘your’ country is made of gold, ‘I’ don’t like it!” “Do I not have the right to say ‘No?’ It was in structuralism, famously represented by Claude Lévi-Strauss, where one did not only organize human thought and culture into binary oppositions but attached hierarchies to them as well. For some reason in European history of thought, ‘rational’ is usually privileged and associated with men, while ‘emotional’ is inferior and associated with women. ‘Blond hair’ in Western cultures is privileged and associated to goodness, while ‘Black hair’ is inferior and associated to evil, and so on (Boon, 1972; Goddard, 1982). Is Mr. Lévi-Strauss right if one wanted to say that the ‘West’ is privileged and associated with ‘mastering the theories’, while the ‘East’ is inferior and associated with ‘mastering the arts’? Surely, cultural values and prejudices vary over time. What does not, is the underlying, psychological calibrated mechanism of all human reasoning: its cognitive dualism. To sum up, the above three notions demonstrate what seems to be a law of nature, namely that the East-West difference has been found consistently from the time of the Greeks 2500 years ago to our present day, and that it is consistent with assumptions about our anatomy, the cerebral hemispheres, the dual nature of our reasoning and the geopolitical concept of sharing labor (by way of collective consciousness) for the greater good and a higher efficiency in intellectual output. Because the human geopolitical situation is a mere extension of our physical and cognitive systems inherent in each of us, we have reason to believe that our societies will continue to be predominantly dualistic in the near future, with an integration-based Eastern hemisphere and an analytically-based Western hemisphere.