Culture Hacks by Richard Conrad

Author:Richard Conrad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2019-04-27T00:39:12+00:00

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132 Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure, 30.

133 Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure, 106.

134 Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 147.

135 Yutang Lin, My Country and My People, 117.

136 Yutang Lin, My Country and My People, 52.

137 Joseph Campbell, Sake & Satori, 293.

Section 3

Section 3: American Thinking

Chapter 22

22. The US and the Belief in Absolute Truth

The quintessential aspect of Western culture is the belief in absolute truths. Westerners look to fixed stars to guide their way through life. The Judeo-Christian belief system is based upon the idea of a single moment of creation. God said let there be light. On the seventh day he rested. Time has flowed forward linearly to today from that point and will flow forward linearly until the end of days. Western science says that time started with the big bang 13.8 billion years ago and that the sun at the center of our solar system came into existence 4.5 billion years ago. Time has flowed forward in a linear fashion from those events until today.

In both cases, there is a fixed starting point from which everything can be measured. Everything is absolute. Right and wrong, good and bad, truth and falsehoods are all determinable factors. In a linear-time universe, every person, every animal, every plant is unique. I find this orientation to time to be the biggest difference between the East and West.

The Eastern view of time is that it is circular. Universes are created from big bangs and big compressions or from Brahma opening and closing his eyes. Worlds are infinite. Everything has already occurred before and will occur again. With time moving in a circle, there are no fixed points from which to measure absolute truths. Everything is dynamic. In Japan, the year number resets to one every time they get a new emperor.

I want to delve into this subject because I feel many Westerners are unfamiliar with the philosophy of circular time. This difference in belief in linear versus circular time leads to two major cultural differences between the East and West.

The first is centered on the role of the individual. The second involves the conception of truth.

In an infinitely repeating world, there is nothing unique about me. My ego only clouds my perception of the eternal. I am here to play a role. This is completely at odds with the Western conception that we are all unique snowflakes and individuality is our defining characteristic. The attitude toward truth is also quite different in the East and in the West. With absolute truths in a linear-time framework, if my belief is correct, then your belief, by definition, must be wrong. In a circular-time framework, everything is relative, which means we may both be right. Truth would be dependent upon our perspectives.

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