How to understand the new Asia

How to understand the new Asia

Asian Values Western Dreams: Understanding the New Asia;
By Greg Sheridan Allen & Unwin, NSW, Australia, 1999;
http://www.allen-unwin.com.au; 326 pages

JAKARTA (JP): Almost toward the end of Asian Values Western
Dreams, author Greg Sheridan confesses that we have come to the
end of our journey and yet we are still unable to state precisely
in a neat formula what Asian values are.

By way of consolation perhaps, he adds that greater minds than
ours, both Asian and Western, have tried to answer the same
question in the past with not much success. Why, then, that sexy
title, and why take the reader on a wild goose chase through more
than 300 pages? Once the fury subsides, the answer that follows,
that perhaps it is just to keep the debate over Asian values,
especially within Asia, alive, is of some solace.

The value of the book lies in it ability to frustrate and
fascinate at the same time. The entire exercise seems to be to
make the West understand Asia more in the hope that it will
preach less. Whether defined as just a rhetorical trick used by
political strongmen to justify their autocratic rule or
associated with hard work, respect for authority, close family
ties and social harmony, the fact remains that Asian values
exist, even if few are able to define what they are.

As an Australian of Caucasian origin, Greg feels that not
enough is known in the West of the fabulous diversity and genius
of the huge part of the human family that is Asia. He himself
can't get enough of it. Apart from marrying a Malaysian Indian,
he has been traveling back and forth to different parts of the
region for over two decades and almost pleading with people,
especially with Australians, to get to know Asia better.

"Australia is the one society of generally western derivation
that lives on the edge of east Asia and ought therefore to make
itself of all the western nations, by way the most expert on
Asia," says Greg, who to a great extent blames the intellectual
failures of the West in its policy responses to the Asian
economic crisis on the decline in area studies at Western
universities, especially American ones.

Greg calls for a new openness in the way the West thinks about
Asia. "They are going to have to accept some Asian categories of
intellectual and political life rather than always trying to fit
Asia into the neat prejudices and formulas of Western political
discussion. The world must prepare for the eventuality when
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Thai and Indian cultures
will have more weight in world affairs as their respective
national economies will have more weight."

He argues that there has been no examination of, say,
Indonesia or even Japan in a holistic way as integrated
societies. The study of each nation takes place piecemeal and the
conclusion is also there for all to see: Since nobody has studied
Indonesia nobody really understands Indonesia although the whole
world tried to fix the country when its economy collapsed. In the
long run, it is the people of the West who suffer most from this
lack of knowledge, Greg feels.

In a genuinely globalized culture the vast cultural treasure
houses of Asia have to be explored as well, and for such
exploration to be successful Westerners have to learn much more
about Asian values, or the way societies here are groping to give
expression to what they regard as their national genius, their
enduring, distinctive national culture, what is considered of
value and what people want to keep from their indigenous cultures
even in a rapidly modernizing context. This is one way Greg
defines Asian values.

He gives the example of founding president Sukarno, one of the
greatest formula makers of Asian values, who invented Marhaenism
based on a poor farmer called Marhaen. The philosophy was meant
to embody the concern of Sukarno and other Indonesians for the
fate of poor farmers and for the central position that such folks
should occupy in the nation.

Marhaenism is interesting as it represented an Indonesian
attempt to find an indigenous version of socialism, an attempt to
indigenize external values. That Marhaenism did not succeed in
practice is quite another story. It is because a good idea was
reduced to a slogan. And the fact that a mere slogan found it
impossible to capture values that are living, breathing, cultural
forces, too subtle, too slippery and above all too alive to be
imprisoned by a document designed by a government committee is
proof enough that Asian values not only exist but are on the
road, insists the author as if with the last drop of ink in his
pen.

Readers of course are welcome to take or leave this argument
at their peril.

-- Mehru Jaffer