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