After yesterday’s post, it might be interesting to read the published version of one of Toynbee’s 1952 Reith Lectures.
His series was called The World and the West. It was on themes that would be developed in the eighth volume of the Study, which was published in 1954. The titles were Russia and the West, Islam and the West, India and West, The Far East and the West, The Psychology of Encounters and The World and the Greeks and Romans. Since the Reithian theme this year is China, let us have the fourth. It isn’t about China per se, but about China’s and Japan’s encounters with the West.
In the last chapter it was suggested that our Western way of life was more foreign to the Hindus than it was to the Russians and the Muslims, because the Hindu way had in it no more than a minute dose of the Greek and Jewish ingredients that are the common heritage of Islam, Russia, and the West. The Far East has still less in common with the West than the Hindu world has in its cultural background. It is true that in Far Eastern art the influence of Greek art is noticeable; but this Greek influence reached the Far East through an Indian channel; it came in the train of an Indian religion – Buddhism – which captured the Far Eastern world as the Graeco-Roman world was captured by a Judaic religion, Christianity. It is also true that another Judaic religion – Islam – which spread over the greater part of India by conquest, also spread over the western fringes of China by peaceful penetration. Thus the Far East, like India, had already been played upon by influences from our Graeco-Judaic world before it was assaulted by our modern Western civilization in the sixteenth century; but in the Far East these pre-Western Graeco-Judaic influences had been even slighter than they had been in India. They had been too slight to pave the way for the kindred Western civilization’s advent. And so, when in the sixteenth century the Portuguese pioneers of the Western civilization made their first landfalls on the coasts of China and Japan, they descended there like uncanny visitants from some other planet.
The effect of this first modern Western visitation on the Far Eastern peoples’ feelings was mixed. It was an unstable mixture of fascination and repulsion, and, at this first encounter, the feeling of repulsion finally prevailed. This sixteenth-century wave of Western intruders was thrown back into the Ocean out of which it had broken so unexpectedly upon Far Eastern shores; and, after that, Japan, Korea, and China each closed her doors and set herself, as long as she could, to live as “a hermit kingdom”. This, however, was not the end of the story. After the modern Western intruders had been expelled from Japan in the seventeenth century and from China in the eighteenth century, they returned to the charge in the nineteenth century; and, at this second attempt, they succeeded in introducing the Western way of life into the Far East, as by then they had already introduced it into Russia and India and were beginning to introduce it into the Islamic world.
What differences in the situation can we see that will account for the difference in the result of these two successive Western attempts to captivate the Far East?
One obvious difference is a technological one. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Western ships and weapons were not so decisively superior to Far Eastern ships and weapons as to give the Western intruders the whip hand. In this first round in the encounter between the two civilizations, the Far Easterners remained masters of the situation; and, when they decided that they wanted to break the relation off, their Western visitants were: powerless to resist. But, when the Westerners reappeared off the coasts of China and Japan in the nineteenth century, the weight was in the Western scale of the balance of power; for, while Chinese and Japanese armaments were then still what they had been two hundred years back, the Westerners had made the industrial revolution in the meantime; they now came back armed with new-fangled weapons which the Far Eastern Powers could not match; and, in these new circumstances, the Far East was bound to be opened to Western influences in one or the other of two ways. A Far Eastern hermit kingdom that tried to meet the new technological challenge from the West by ignoring it would soon see its closed doors battered in by Western heavy guns. The only alternative was to keep the Western intruders at arm’s length by learning the “know-how” of nineteenth-century Western armaments; and this could only be done by voluntarily opening Far Eastern doors to the new Western technology before an entry was forced by Western conquerors. The Japanese were prompter than the Chinese in opting for, and acting on, this alternative policy of holding their own against the West by learning how to use and make the latest types of Western weapons; but the Chinese, too, in the end, acted just in time to save themselves from India’s fate of being subjugated by a Western Power.
This, though, is not the whole story. For, while the technological ascendancy gained by the West over the Far East through a Western industrial revolution may explain why the Far Eastern peoples found themselves compelled to open their doors to the Western civilization in the nineteenth century, we have still to explain why they had been moved to expel their Western visitants and to break off relations with the Western world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This denouement of the first encounter between the Far East and the modern West is at first sight surprising; for, when the Westerners had made their first appearance above the Far Easterners’ horizon in the sixteenth century, the Far Eastern peoples had shown themselves readier to welcome these then quite unknown strangers and to adopt their way of life than they showed themselves three hundred years later, when the Westerners came again with the bad reputation that they had acquired on their first visit. Yet this second encounter, in which the Far Eastern peoples were decidedly reluctant to engage, ended in the reception of the Western way of life in the Far East, whereas the first encounter, which had begun with a welcome, had ended in a rebuff. What is the key to this remarkable difference between these two acts in the drama of the Far East’s encounter with the West?
The difference in the Far Eastern peoples’ reaction to the Western civilization on these two occasions was not arbitrary or capricious. They reacted differently because the challenges with which they were confronted on the two occasions were not the same. In the nineteenth century the Western civilization presented itself primarily as a strange technology; in the sixteenth century it had presented itself primarily as a strange religion. This difference in the aspect displayed by the intrusive Western civilization explains the difference in the reaction that it aroused in Far Eastern hearts and minds at its first and at its second coming; for a strange technology is not so difficult to accept as a strange religion is.
Technology operates on the surface of life, and therefore it seems practicable to adopt a foreign technology without putting oneself in danger of ceasing to be able to call one’s soul one’s own. This notion that, in adopting a foreign technology, one is incurring only a limited liability may, of course, be a miscalculation. The truth seems to be that all the different elements in a culture-pattern have an inner connexion with each other, so that, if one abandons one’s own traditional technology and adopts a foreign technology instead, the effect of this change on the technological surface of life will not remain confined to the surface, but will gradually work its way down to the depths till the whole of one’s traditional culture has been undermined and the whole of the foreign culture has been given entry, bit by bit, through the gap made in the outer ring of one’s cultural defences by the foreign technology’s entering wedge.
In China and Korea and Japan today, a century or more after the date at which our modern Western technology first began to penetrate these countries, we can see these revolutionary ulterior effects upon the whole of their culture taking place before our eyes. Time, however, is of the essence of this process; and a revolutionary result that is so clearly manifest to all eyes today was not foreseen by Far Eastern statesmen a hundred years ago, when they were reluctantly taking their decision to admit this foreign technology within their walls. Like their Turkish contemporaries, they intended to take the West’s technology in the minimum dose required for their own military security, and not to go beyond that. Yet, even if they had had some suspicion of the hidden forces that this mechanically propelled Trojan Horse held in ambush within its iron frame, probably they would still have stood by their decision to wheel it in. For they saw clearly that, if they hesitated to adopt this alien Western technology now, they would immediately become a prey to Western conquerors armed with weapons to which they would then have no retort. The external danger of conquest by some Western Power was the immediate menace with which those nineteenth-century Far Eastern statesmen had to cope. By comparison, the internal danger of being eventually captivated, body and soul, by the Western way of life as a result of adopting the Western technology was a more distant menace which must be left to take care of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
In fact, the adoption of Western technology has never come close to undermining the whole of Japan’s traditional culture.
Thus, in the nineteenth century, the adoption of a now overwhelmingly superior Western technology appeared to Far Eastern statesmen to be a legitimate risk as well as an imperative necessity. And this explains why, this time, they took something from the West which was so little to their taste. It seemed to be at any rate a lesser evil than the alternative of being conquered and subjugated by the Westerners whose weapons they were deciding to adopt as a policy of military and political insurance. On the other hand, the “Western Question” with which these nineteenth-century Far Eastern statesmen’s seventeenth-century predecessors had had to deal had presented itself in quite a different form.
In this first encounter with the West the immediate danger which Japanese statesmen had to parry was not the danger of seeing their country conquered by Western soldiers armed with irresistibly superior new-fangled weapons; it was the danger of seeing their people converted by Western missionaries preaching an irresistibly attractive foreign religion. Possibly these seventeenth-century Japanese statesmen had no great objection to Western Christianity in itself; for, unlike their seventeenth-century Western Christian visitants, seventeenth-century Far Easterners were not infected with the religious fanaticism which their Western contemporaries had inherited from Christianity’s Jewish past and were displaying, in this age, in domestic religious wars in their European homeland. The Chinese and Japanese statesmen of the day had been brought up in the more tolerant philosophical traditions of Confucianism and Buddhism, and they might not have objected to giving a free field to another religion if they had not suspected the Western Christian missionaries’ religious activities of having an ulterior political motive.
What the Japanese statesmen feared was that their countrymen whom these foreign missionaries were converting to Western Christianity would imbibe their adopted religion’s fanatical spirit, and that, under this demoralizing influence, they would allow themselves to be used as what, in the West today, we should call “a fifth column”. If this suspected design were to succeed, then Portuguese or Spaniards, who in themselves were not a serious menace to Japan’s independence, might eventually contrive to conquer Japan through the arms of Japanese traitors. In fact, the Japanese Government in the seventeenth century outlawed and repressed Christianity from the same motive that today is moving twentieth-century Western governments to outlaw and repress Communism; and it has been an element that is common to these two Western faiths – the fanaticism inherited by both of them from Judaism – that has been the stumbling-block in any Asian country in which Christianity has been propagated.
The fear was both that of losing one’s soul under the influence of a new religion and that of being undermined politically by a fifth column.
An aggressive foreign religion will, in fact, manifestly be a more serious immediate menace than an aggressive foreign technology will be to a society that it is assailing; and there is a deeper reason for this than the danger of the converts being used as “a fifth column”. The deeper reason is that, while technology plays only upon the surface of life in the first instance, religion goes straight down to the roots; and, though a foreign technology, too, may eventually have a deeply disintegrating effect on the spiritual life of a society in which it has once gained a footing, this effect will take some time to make itself apparent. For this reason, an aggressive civilization that presents itself as a religion is likely to arouse stronger and swifter opposition than one that presents itself as a technology; and we can now see why in the Far East, as well as in Russia, our Western civilization was first rejected and was then accepted at the second time of asking. In Russia in the fifteenth century and in the Far East in the seventeenth century, the Western civilization was rejected when what it was demanding was conversion to the Western form of Christianity; and it was no accident that its fortunes in the mission field should have veered right round from conspicuous failures to sensational successes as soon as its attitude towards its own ancestral religion had veered round from a warm devotion to a cool scepticism.
This great spiritual revolution overtook the Western world towards the close of the seventeenth century, when a hundred years’ trial of waging savage and inconclusive civil wars under the colours of rival religious sects had at last disgusted the Western peoples, not only with wars of religion, but with religion itself. The Western world reacted to this disillusioning self-inflicted experience of the evils of religious fanaticism by withdrawing its treasure from religion and reinvesting it in technology; and it is this utilitarian technological excerpt from the bible of our Western civilization, with the fanatical religious page torn out, that has run like wildfire round the world during the last two and a half centuries, from the generation of Peter the Great to the generation of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Perhaps, in looking for some explanation of the striking difference between the results of the West’s two successive assaults upon the Far East, we have stumbled upon a “law” (if one may call it that) which applies, not just to this single case, but to all encounters between any civilizations. This “law” is to the effect that a fragment of a culture, split off from the whole and radiated abroad by itself, is likely to meet with less resistance, and therefore likely to travel faster and farther, than the culture as a whole when this is radiated en bloc. Our Western technology, divorced from our Western Christianity, has been accepted, not only in China and Japan, but also in Russia and in many other non-Western countries where it was rejected so long as it was offered as part and parcel of a one and indivisible way of life including Western Christianity as well.
The almost world-wide dissemination of a technological splinter flaked off from our Western civilization since the close of the seventeenth century is impressive at first sight if we compare it with the virtual failure to convert non-Western peoples to the Western way of life in an Early Modern Age when our Western civilization was being offered for acceptance or rejection as a whole – technology, religion and all. Today, however, when the West’s bid to win the world has been challenged by Russia, we can see that our Western civilization’s apparent triumph on the technological plane is precarious for the very reason that has made it easy; and the reason is that this triumph has been superficial. The West has sent its technology racing round the world by the trick of freeing it from the handicap of being coupled with our Western Christianity; but, in the next chapter of the story, this unattached Western technology has been picked up by the Russians and been coupled with Communism; and this new and potent combination of a Western technology with a Western religious heresy is now being offered to the Far Eastern peoples and to the rest of mankind as a rival way of life to ours.
In the nineteenth-century chapter of the story, we Westerners were gratified when we saw the Japanese and the Chinese, who had rejected our Western civilization in its religious version, accepting it in a secularized version in which technology instead of religion had been given the place of honour. The Meiji Revolution in Japan in the eighteen-sixties and the Kuomintang Revolution in China in the nineteen-twenties both seemed, at the time, to be triumphs for the secularized Western civilization of the Late Modern Age. But we have lived to see this secular Western dispensation disappoint us in both countries. In Japan it bred a disastrous militarism; in China it bred a disastrous political corruption; in both countries the disaster brought the régime to a violent end; and in China this failure of the attempt to acclimatize there a secular form of our Western civilization has been followed by a victory for Communism. What is it that has made Communism’s fortune in China? Not, so far as one can make out, any great positive enthusiasm for Communism so much as a complete disillusionment with the Kuomintang’s performance In its attempt to govern China on latter-day secular Western lines. And we may suspect that the Japanese too, if they were free to go their own way, might succumb to Communism for the same negative reason.
“If they were free to go their own way”. Japan had become an independent nation on April 28. Toynbee is lecturing in November. And even under the US occupation, the JCP (founded 1922) had been legal. No doubt he is suggesting that the Americans had made the flourishing of Communism in Japan impossible. For one thing, many Communists were opposed to the existence of the Imperial house, which the Americans had saved. But would Communism have taken deep root in Japan even if Japan had not been beholden to America?
The JCP had been the only political party that had opposed Japan’s involvement in the War – when it had been illegal. The Soka Gakkai movement of Nichiren Buddhists, which Toynbee encountered at the end of his life (see the Category here called An Ikeda sequence), had also opposed it.
Communism reached its peak of electoral strength in Japan in the ’70s. More than one person has pointed out that post-war Japan was in some respects already, without Communism, a functioning communist society.
In both Japan and China today there are two factors telling in Communism’s favour: first, this disillusionment with past experiments in trying to lead a secularized Western way of life, and, second, the pressure of a rapidly growing population on the means of subsistence – a pressure which, as has been noticed in the preceding chapter, is also a menace to the present Westernizing régime in India. The truth is that, in offering them a secularized version of our Western civilization, we have been offering them a stone instead of bread, while the Russians, in offering them Communism as well as technology, have been offering them bread of a sort – gritty black bread, if you like to call it so; but that is still an edible substance that contains in it some grain of nutriment for the spiritual life without which Man cannot live.
But, if China and Japan could not stomach a sixteenth-century version of our Western civilization with the religion left in, and cannot sustain life on a nineteenth-century version of it with the religion left out, is Communism the only alternative? The answer to this question is that, in China, and also in India, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, long before Communism was ever dreamed of, a different alternative was found and tried by the Jesuit Western Christian missionaries. It is true that this experiment came to grief, but it was wrecked, not by any intrinsic faults of its own, but by unfortunate rivalries and dissensions between the Jesuits and other Roman Catholic Christian missionary orders.
In China and India the Jesuits did not make the mistake, that they had made in Japan, of letting their preaching of Christianity fall under suspicion of being conducted in the political interests of aggressive Western Powers. The Jesuits’ approach to their enterprise of propagating Christianity in China was so different and so promising in itself, and is so much to the point today, that our discussion of the Asian peoples’ encounter with the West would be incomplete if we did not take into consideration the line which the Jesuits in China and India opened out. Instead of trying, as we have been trying since their day, to disengage a secular version of the Western civilization from Christianity, the Jesuits tried to disengage Christianity from the non-Christian ingredients in the Western civilization and to present Christianity to the Hindus and to the Chinese, not as the local religion of the West, but as a universal religion with a message for all mankind. The Jesuits stripped Christianity of its accidental and irrelevant Western accessories, and offered the essence of it to China in a Chinese, and to India in a Hindu, intellectual and literary dress in which there was no incongruous Western embroidery to jar on Asian sensibilities. This experiment miscarried at the first attempt through the fault of domestic feuds within the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church of the day, which had nothing to do with either Christianity or China or India; but, considering that India and China and Christianity are all still on the map, we may expect – and hope – to see the experiment tried again. The recent victory of Communism in China over a Western civilization divorced from Christianity is no evidence that, in China, Christianity has no future in a coming chapter of history which today is still below our historical horizon.
The World and the West, OUP, 1953
