Navigating the Asian Future: from “Asian Thoughts”

1. Navigating the Asian Future: from “Asian Thoughts” Susantha Goonatilake Royal Asiatic Society Sri Lanka

2. Today: The Shift to Asia • Three hundred years ago, the dominant powers in the world were in Asia. • Thereafter, the West became dominant. • Today a process is under way whereby Asia will once again be the dominant player in the world. • This will have deep repercussions in academia, culture and knowledge.

3. The figures are impressive. • If the 19th C was British, the 20th the American, the 21st is shaping to be Asian. Already GDP of China is number two in the world. China would become the largest economy by 2038 and by 2040 India No. 3. Purchasing power parity (PPP) estimates has already placed China as number one. • And Asia as a whole, from East Asia through Southeast Asia to South Asia will be lifted up in the coming years.

4. Contrast: 2-3% growth rate in 19th C Britain, first industrial nation. • Smaller countries: • Singapore using niche advantages reached nearly a 15% growth in 2010. • And possibly indicative of her economic futures to come, Sri Lanka after over 35 years of a war partly induced by an Indian proxy invasion had in the last two peace years very high performances at its stock exchange - possibly the highest in the world.

5. Major impact on geopolitics of culture • These economic changes will have a major impact on the geopolitics of culture including geopolitics of knowledge. This presentation explores this aspect. • But the ability of the West to manage its relative decline is central to issues of culture.

6. "End of History" • The high point of the US was the fall of the Soviet Union and its aftermath as exemplified by the book "End of History" by Fukuyama. Echoing more serious "end of history" theses such as those of Hegel and Marx it was triumphalist propaganda at a brief moment. • Fukuyama wrote before the full rise of Asia was apparent and before the full backlash from the rest of the world on the US of the Neocons and Theocons onslaught echoing the US Bible Belt had begun.

7. Waging war for "democracy” • Ignoring dictatorships of its own ME client states the US set in motion the Neocon agenda to wage war for "democracy” in non-client states. It was helped by a new post-Cold War phenomenon, the adoption of "A New Policy Agenda” whereby Western funds poured into pseudo-political organisations, unrepresentative NGOs on the laudable agenda of democracy and human rights (delivered by unelected appendages of Western funds and often their embassies) .

8. US over extended • The military cost has been heavy. With less than 5% of the world’s population the military expenditure of the US is now nearly 50% of all other countries put together • The US has over extended herself financially and militarily in two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. With an internal financial meltdown, debt laden America was being kept afloat by borrowing from Asia. • There is talk of the Euro unravelling and with it the partial break up of the pan European dream.

9. Latin America • In Latin America the rise of new nationalist governments has eroded the once supremacy of the US. To tame North Korea, the West has to virtually beg of the Chinese. • Once overlords of Asia, Europe and the US are making realistic calculations to keep with changes and are now sending political and economic delegations kowtowing to Asian political and business leaders.

10. US financial hegemony challenged • The US financial hegemony that consolidated the Bretton Woods agreement after World War II, through the IMF and World Bank is being challenged. The G8 has been replaced by the G 20 and new acronyms reflecting the ongoing geopolitical changes such as Chinamerica and Chindia have emerged.

11. Soft power • The US and the West is in decline in relative terms and in spite of a preponderant military is unable to adequately undertake wars and keep the empire going. It however has soft power as an adjunct ally. • Soft power includes culture and it is this that we shall explore further.

12. West’s soft power to be rethought foundationally • Soft power slogans such as "land of the free" in the US national anthem or "Give me Liberty, or give me Death!" of Patrick Henry part of what has been called American "exceptionalisum". hide ugly realities. • One American "freedom“ is the "right to bear arms" as enshrined in the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

13. “Right to bear arms" • This “freedom” came from the bandit gun culture of early American settlers in their genocidal program to grab others’ lands. Today sorry remnants of the genocide of the First Americans have been herded into settlements and denied self-respect as reflected in pervasive drunkenness. • USA freedoms, rights and democracy were for most of its existence limited only to white settlers, actually to WASPS.

14. Soft power: propaganda and reality • Only in the early 1960s was the invisible ceiling for other whites broken when the Catholic John Kennedy became president overcoming much anti-Catholic sentiment. And only in the late 60s were Afro Americans even granted the formal right to vote. • There have since been advances in the US but even here one has to shift the propaganda from reality. Revealing is the comparison between the US and China designated as a land of the unfree.

15. Soft power myths: most imprisoned • In the US, one fourth of every Afro American youth is in prison. One in 11 Americans would in their lifetime spent some time in prison and at any given time one in 100 US citizens are behind bars. • More than 2 1/2 million Americans are in prison the highest prison population in the world. More significant, the US has 25% of the prison population of the world although it has only 5% of the global population. 

16. More prisoners in free US than in China • These figures are larger than the prison population of China with four times the total population of the US. • These dichotomies between myth and reality about democracy and freedom has a long lineage, in fact going back to the time of the Greeks the presumed fountainhead of Western democracy.

17. Civilisational fountainhead exposed • Only a few "citizens" had democracy in Greece while the bulk had none such. • Contrast with some Indian republics during the time of the Buddha, whose organization forms were transferred into the Buddha’s own order of monks - the Sangha - where decisions are made by a vote. The Greek myth as civilisational fountain head has been exposed by Martin Bernal as an invention of the early 19th-century to support the European imperialist project.

18. The Soft Shift to Asia: • The Asian economic shift is occurring with a global re-division of work. It replaces the earlier relocation of brawn work towards cheaper Asian countries (such as garment industries) • There is a new relocation of brainpower, and a shift in science and technology and academia towards the Asian cultural region

19. The Soft Shift to Asia: • This shift of science and technology to Asia is occurring amidst a shift in less measurable cultural spheres. The earlier hegemonic blanket of Eurocentricism is being lifted. • Thus some of the best novelists in English, the primary carrier of globalization, are today Asians. Designers from Hong Kong, Japan and now Malaysians set Western clothing fashions.

20. The global culture, it is a changing. • The changes are not just in the passing fad and the superficial. For well over 100 years at a more abstract level there had been inflows of Non-Western philosophical ideas into the West. • Thus South Asian influences, predominantly Buddhism, were noted by Dale as having had an impact on the American philosophers William James, Charles Moore, Santayana, Emerson and Irving Babbitt.

21. Psychology • In another discipline psychology, there have been major inflows in recent decades of Buddhist and Hindu ideas and practice. • The scientific validity of some of these practices has been recorded in standard Western academic publications.  Thus Buddhist mindfulness training finds an increasingly important place in such fields as cognitive therapy.

22. Higher practices in Buddhism and Hinduism • And in significant parts of the West meditation and yoga (actually the higher practices in Buddhism and Hinduism) have gone mainstream with millions of followers. • And on a more trivial note, today in Britain, once the land of the uneatable, the truly national dish is South Asian curry.

23. Fashionable • In the last decade it has become partly fashionable among sections of the Western glitterati to define themselves as Buddhist. • India has considered Buddhism as part of its soft power and so has China which pursuing this has held global conferences on Buddhism.

24. Border crossings in the social sciences • The broad question is, with the shift to Asia, can Asian perspectives on culture and knowledge emerge that would be as powerful as some of the Western ones. • A notable attempt to do this occurred when the first wave of Asian countries from East Asia began to reach high economic growth rates.

25. An attempt to incorporate Asian conceptual elements • Reminiscent of Max Weber evoking a Protestant Ethic for the rise of the West; a cultural factor was now invoked, a Confucian Ethic was invented for these predominantly East Asian countries.  • It was said that Confucian values of group solidarity and hard work had been the major contributing factor to the sudden upsurge of East Asian economies. 

26. Confucianism or authoritarian regimes? • But Confucianism had been there for 2,500 years without an industrial breakthrough. • Further, during the periods of their initial growth in the 1960s and 1970s these East Asian countries had very repressive and/or authoritarian regimes where labour dissent was not tolerated. 

27. Confucian ethic untenable • Soon, the East Asian countries were joined by another set, namely those of the ASEAN region such as Thailand,  Malaysia and Indonesia and later South Asia who have populations with  cultural traditions different from the Confucian one. • The Confucian ethic was as untenable as the original Weberian perspectives.

28. Max Weber • Weber used cultural factors to explain the rise of Europe and for the lagging behind of Asia • His views of Protestantism and in turn, those of other religions constitute an important part of his total system of social theory. In his sociology of religion, Buddhism also finds an important place. 

29. Significant errors of a basic kind of Weber’s Buddhism • Most of Weber’s sources of Buddhism, are from the Sinhalese sources which were translated to European languages in the late 19th and early 20th century. • But as I show in the paper there are   significant empirical errors of a very basic kind of Weber’s knowledge of Buddhism making his grand pronouncements untenable.

30. Buddhism a common cultural overlay • Before European influence in recent centuries, Buddhism was a common cultural overlay across most of Asia.  Buddhism has developed approaches in epistemology - guidelines for observation and coming to conclusions. • Are there elements within Buddhist epistemology which can give insights into social sciences as it locates itself in a confident Asia?

31. Much unusable cultural furniture • There is also outside these philosophical aspects of Buddhism, much cultural furniture - elements outside the observational realm such as gods and goddesses   • Yet outside such untenable cultural furniture, the observational and Buddhism’s philosophical essence could stand on its own. 

32. "me" radically deconstructed • Unique among philosophies, Buddhism denies the existence of a self or soul. Through observation, the existence of a permanent abiding "me" is radically deconstructed in Buddhism.  • Buddhist observation breaks down the component, physical and mental factors that constitute the psychophysical personality.

33. Only a stream of becoming • Mental phenomena and the external environment are both in a perpetual state of becoming, changing from moment to moment, there is no individual, only a stream, a stream of becoming.  • These conclusions are obtained by observation of both the world outside as well as the internal world of mental phenomena.

34. Humans: change and process • Humans are in Buddhism a process, a collection of swiftly changing mental and physical processes.  A conventional empirical self is recognized as only a momentary crystallization of a process which interacts with the world outside. • The world, including the environment of other humans in which the individual lives, is itself changing and is in a state of flux. 

35. Buddhist epistemology: Change central • A foundational social sciences using Buddhist epistemology would have a platform of a changing observer to track, examine and come to conclusions about a continuously changing social field.

36. Changing social field • This social field would consist of continuously changing individuals, continuously changing groups and continuously changing classes. • The detailed outcomes of such a changed epistemological position cannot be discussed here. 

37. The sociological project could be reexamined • From such a foundational change ingrained epistemological approach the whole of the sociological project could be reexamined.  •  It would differ from the convention of dividing the world into a subject which cognises a social object from a fixed subjective platform which then comes to conclusions on the social world. It would not imply as absolute, a subject-object relationship.

38. Radical Reordering of the Epistemological • The Buddhist relationship between one self and the social other could be compared with the Ich and Du (I and thou) relationship of Martin Buber which had been proposed for sociological thought.  • Buber's central thesis was that social life was a dialogical existence, a relationship between pairs such as “I and thou”. 

39. “I” and ever-changing thous • In a Buddhist formulation the dialogue of existence is between a flowing and ever-changing “I” and a flowing and ever-changing thou or more correctly with sets of flowing and ever-changing thous.

40. Changed epistemology changed the natural sciences • Such changed epistemological positions have given rise to far reaching changes in the natural sciences. • A most notable example is the case of Einstein’s use of Mach’s position in epistemology (which incidentally had echoes with Buddhist positions) which changed the direction of physics and gave rise to relativity.

41. Radical Reordering of the Epistemological • Just like modern physics taking a Machian epistemological position changed physics and gave rise to a new way of looking at the dynamics of the material world, a similar foundational approach using Buddhist epistemology would change the perspectives on the dynamics of the social world.

42. An application • Exploring the effect of such a change would require much detailed reexamination of the changing social world from a changing observational platform • In the applied field such a Buddhist epistemological position could help solve some of the challenging ethical problems in the emerging technological future.

43. Radically Reconstructing the Body, Mind and Environment • Recent  developments from gene therapy,  stem cells to cloning and in the future, artificial genes and artificial chromosomes and humans augmented non-biologically through  say artificial intelligence  implants challenge some of  the basic assumptions about the human. • We are, or will soon be, constructing and reconstructing the human body and brain/mind, from new developments in nano technology, biotechnology and information technology

44. Social theory for new technologies • In this new world there are new ethical challenges not met before. • These problems are raised because these technologies change dramatically parts of the body and the mind. • The essential nature of the human is being intruded upon by these technologies.

45. Deep questions • Deep questions are raised by these coming developments. They intrude on ethics. • The ethics on which these issues have been hitherto discussed are Western ones, Hindu-Buddhist ideas for example have not influenced this debate. • [Except for a preliminary conference in Delhi in 2009 organised by me through the Anthropology Survey of India and Shanti Niketan]

46. Urgent challenges • Many such challenges rest on what it is to be a person in the very body and mind that is being changed and the nature of the self • Some recent approaches to the living world and the environment have utilized cultural elements from major non-Western philosophies as well as those of simpler belief systems eg Ecofeminism.

47. Continuous Change Is Central To The Emerging Human • Continuous change of the self and the person is the condition of the emerging human or as some say “post human” • A major cultural approach that has continuous change as its core is Buddhist philosophy.

48. Central Buddhist position • Both the human person, including his body and mind, as well as the environment he operates in, are not given or sacred in Buddhism but constructed and changing. • This approach has direct relevance to a future where both the human and his/her environment are constructed and reconstructed

49. Disclaimer In using Buddhist philosophy here, one need not accept all the unprovable cultural aspects of Buddhism such as gods and goddesses just as one does not have to believe all Christian mythology to use the philosophical counterpart of a Creator, namely a First Cause.

50. “Religion”, “Philosophy”, “Science”: S Asian and West • In discussions on bioethics, the fields of science, philosophy and religion intermingle. • But “religion”, “philosophy”, and “science” have different connotations from a South Asian - say Buddhist - perspective and a Eurocentric one. • Hence an explanatory aside is needed