Reflections on East and West

It’s another sea day on our way to Chennai (formerly called Madras) in India so I have had some time for reflection. I’ve been thinking about history, what it is, and what it is not. I am increasingly persuaded that the “adults” in my life, whether teachers or pundits or experts, have not told me the whole story. Maybe they didn’t know the whole story. However, on this world cruise I’m being reminded that the chain that goes back through Europe to Rome, to Greece, to Egypt, to Mesopotamia is really just half of the story. We were told that the area now occupied by Iraq was the “Cradle of Civilization.”

Oh, really?

This Viking world cruise has reminded me that we have documents and artifacts going back at least as far in time, telling the story of China, India, Africa, and even Polynesia. Maybe it’s true that we have not known about the Dravidian or Harappan civilizations for as long as we have known about Sumeria or Babylonia, but we do know enough to realize that there were advanced, urban, literate, highly technological cultures throughout Asia. There were military and economic events that affected as many people as the exploits of Alexander (was he really “Great?”) by kings and generals whose names we never heard. There were kingdoms and principalities in Cambodia and Africa and Guatemala unknown to us Americans that rivaled those of the Egyptian Pyramid builders. They studied hydrology, navigation and medicine and brought these to a level not attained in Europe until the nineteenth century. There were Polynesian navigators that make the travels of Herodotus and Odysseus look like weekend excursions. In the fifteenth century AD Columbus bumped into America by accident. However, in the eighth century BC Polynesian sailors were making regular, deliberate, repeated, planned voyages from Taiwan to the Marquesa Islands and elsewhere in the South Pacific. These same Polynesians had figured out how to live in a way consistent with the climate and natural resources in their environment—something that “Western Man” has not yet figured out how to do. Bamboo huts and coconut palm roofs are not primitive; in this climate they work. The materials are close at hand, plentiful and biodegradable. Such construction is not accidental; it is deliberate and purposeful.

We have been taught to think of the era after the fall of the Roman Empire as the dark ages. Yet if they were dark, they were dark only in Europe. During the “dark ages” Admiral Zheng He in China was building ships as large as modern ocean liners, and had established regular trade with every country between China and Africa. While European doctors were still bleeding their patients with lancets and leeches, Muslim physicians such as Al Razi were advising those caring for the sick not to use medicine if simple rest or a change in nutrition would suffice. He also taught that hygiene was important, and that no caregiver should do anything that might injure or weaken a patient.

I could go on. However, the point is that even the best educated among us have been told only half of the story. I doubt that the omissions were deliberate, but, nevertheless, I feel as though I need to start first grade again.

The older I get, the less I know. There’s a big world out there. For almost seventy years I’ve been looking at only the western half of it.Read more