Asian Culture

How did such a different way of perceiving the world come about? Professor Nisbett’s thesis is that, in the West, we are all children of ancient Greece where a strong sense of individual liberty, freedom, and free will developed. In China in place of the idea of each person in charge of his or her own life and free to act accordingly, the Chinese valued harmony, friends and family. While the Greeks engaged in debate to discover the truth, the Chinese were less interested in the discovery of truth through debate than preserving a harmonious interdependent social life. “The whole rhetoric of argumentation that is second nature to Westerners is largely absent to Asia.” Anyone reading The Nation and The Bangkok Post might be forgiven for dissenting from this sweeping generalization as debates over extra-judicial killings, land grabs, dam and pipeline construction disputes with local communities and other issues have been the subject of debate by columnists and editorial writers.

Professor Nisbett states that Confucius (551 to 479 BC) as the father of Chinese bequeathed to the East the Doctrine of the Gold Mean. Confucius believed that there was truth on both sides so deciding one side to be the winner and the other the loser based on a finding on a single truth was pointless. He also points out that a lack of curiosity was characteristic of China. They had little interest in the views or stories told by foreigners. This resulted as well in Easterners developing a strong loyalty to the inside group of friends and family and dismissing or distancing themselves from those perceived to be on the outside. The author contents that Westerners are less inclined to make big distinction between in and out groups. It appears to be more urban legend than truth. The tragic history of pogroms and genocide in recent European history belies this conclusion. The mass murders were carried out by “in-groups” against “out-groups.” And as bloody as this history is, it pales in comparison with the slaughter by primitive tribes where according to Stephen Pinker in The Blank Slate (2002) ten to sixty percent of males were killed in warfare.

One important explanation for the differences, according to Nisbett is in the way Easterners and Westerners acquire language. In the West children learn language by learning nouns. By learning nouns they learn categories. In the East, in particular China and Japan, children learn verbs at a much faster rate than their counterpart in the West. As for categorizations which comes from nouns, the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu is quoted as saying, “Classifying or limiting knowledge fractures the greater knowledge.”

As an example Nisbett reports, “An American mother’s patter might go like this: ‘That’s a car. See the car? You like it? It’s got nice wheels.’ A Japanese mother might say: ‘Here! It’s a vroom vroom. I give it to you. Now give this to me. Yes! Thank you.’”

As a result American kids grow up learning the world is mostly about objects and Japanese kids learning the world is about relationships. Another essential and revealing difference is that Eastern children are raised to see a context and start sentences with a context and topic while American children given they are learning a subject-prominent language focus on the object to the exclusion of the context. Along the same vein, Nisbett describes how Westerners see the self as the entity acting and responsible for the action. “Eastern languages are in general relatively nonagentic: ‘it fell from him,’ or just ‘fell.’” Not much room for responsibility in that way of seeing.

There are several gaps in Nisbett’s study. For example, he fails to address the Western notion of “conflict of interest” and the custom of Eastern officials who continue to sit on the boards of companies and organizations that bid for projects under the official’s jurisdiction. Nisbett, however, does recognize the essential link between notions of relationship and identity in the East. Where a Westerner would see a conflict of interest, the Easterner would see a strengthening of the relationship. It might be argued that “conflict of interest” is the Siamese twin of corruption. Dealing with corruption and the relationship to conflict of interest ultimately focuses on how to change a core feature of Eastern cultural value: that preserving and nurturing the relationship is everything.

Differences of perception occur frequently within the same culture and language group. Who can forget the day the O.J. Simpson verdict was announced? The TV report switched back and forth between two American audiences: one black with smiling face exploding in applause and one white looking sullen, depressed and confused. When employees of TPI learned of the recent court the decision to refer the issue of a new planner to the Finance Ministry, there were reports of shouts of joy by the employees. Newspaper photos showed glum faced, tight-lipped foreigners speaking into cell phones breaking the news to their bosses overseas. Given these images it is sometimes good to remember as Pinker writes that “Racial differences are largely adaptations to climate and humans, having recently evolved from a single founder population are all related.” What separates us is less race or an East/West divide but accumulated local wisdom of how we perceive outsiders – and how we go about protecting, tolerating, and learning from them.
Nisbett and his associates have carried a number of studies documenting the difference in how Westerners and Easterners perceive the world, and have evidence that the noun/verb difference in language acquisition is important in the habitual way each sees the world. The way Japanese students describe what they see when they look inside an aquarium is very different from an American student. Child rearing practices are thought to play an important role in the different way Eastern and Western child perceive the world. Whether it is one of a noun-based world of static objects lumped into categories or one where verbs and relationships starts with the home and culture of the child.

This brings us back to the premise that how we think is not all about language acquisition. Pinker presents compelling evidence that we are hardwired from birth to possess certain characteristics that form our personality, attitude and perception. Pinker points out that our genes shape personality traits as introversion, neurotic behavior, curiosity, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. But he also acknowledges that history, culture, and geography still matter. Ninety-five percent of the Chinese population is Han Chinese and their reaction with the outside world is different from that of England or Spain or Portugal with mixed population exposed to outside influences. Along with Confucius the other abiding difference is the Tao. And the Tao “is conceived as both is and is not.” But not only the Chinese divide the world into in and out groups. That is universal.

It is one thing to say we are all brothers and sisters under the skin. The reality is the identification is with a family and a family member is someone whom there is only one or two degrees of separation from a common ancestor. The East this notion of family is central to the way relationships, nationality, patronage and obligation are defined. Thailand like China, Japan and Korea see themselves as large extended families. Governments have been skillful in using the notion of family and expanding it to include millions of unrelated people. The gap between the primitive tribe of fifty members to nation-states with millions of people has been bridged by the structure of Eastern languages. What happens within the family is the business of the family heads. Thus it comes as no surprise that in the East that non-interference in the affairs of other states has been a central policy of ASEAN.

In the West, the law of non-contradiction teaches that a proposition cannot be true and false at the same time. The Greeks taught us that debate is the way to resolve the contradiction. The Zen Buddhist teaching “the opposite of a great truth is also true.” So perhaps, at the end of day, East and West, while they meet, but at the edges people on both sides of this line perceive the same event or thing in very different ways whether it is the truth, law, justice, or the contents of an aquarium.

The Geography of Thought is an intriguing, thought-provoking journey into the forces that shape the mind, and in doing so lights a candle. The Blank Slate, a vastly ambitious book of highly professional scholarship, illustrates the importance of evolution on how emotional and intellectual makeup, and how the superficiality of culture and language masks a fundamental sameness of our species. It is up to the reader whether he or she sees the light or the darkness, or, in the tradition of the Tao, is content with the notion that light and darkness can’t be separated because without one there cannot be the other.

About the Author: Christopher G. Moore has lived in Bangkok for the past 15 years. He is the author of 14 previous novels and one collection of interlocked short stories, books widely praised by reviewers in Asia, Europe and North America.