Ancient Culture, Philosophy, art. East versus West

[Timotheus]

First off I want to make it clear that this is not an attack on anyone or any organization.


I have always found it interesting that the East (China, Japan, SE Asia) have cultures that can fall back on aspects of ancient life that are much older than anything that we do the same with in the West.

One example that I find that really stands out is in the area of ancient medicine. Much to the detriment of tigers, elephants, and other animals of SE Asia there still exists a belief and use in some areas of ancient medicinal cures often based around ground up animal parts or plant extracts. Acupuncture is another ancient aspect of the East that dates back much further than anything of similar use in the West.

If find it hard to believe that ancient Spartans, Romans, Gauls did not have their own ancient cures based around plant and animal parts. One can only imagine what ground up animal part the Spartans might have thought could be used to increase virility in men.

So why this difference? Is it just a lack of interest in maintaining links to the past?

Or was it possibly something more definitive.?

Could it be the introduction of Christianity and its often hostility to anything pagan that so to speak wiped the slate clean? War alone cannot be used as an explanation since Ancient China was quite violent and Emperors often destroyed written evidence of past Emperors?

Do the goats of Greece thank Christianity that the now forgotten Spartan medicine of dried goat scrotum is forgotten (yes I made that one up) while the poor tiger is still poached in SE Asia because the link to the past is still there and thus powdered tiger penis is sold in medicinal shops to help "keep the yang up"?

What do you think? I cannot believe that similar medicine, philosophy, etc did not exist in the West like we know it did in the East.

[Eleatic Guest]

There is a whole armada of pharmaologists surfing through medieval libraries on the search for medieval herbal recipes. They would not do that if they did not thought it worth the expense of time.

[Carlton Bach]

I think this is largely a misconception inherited from 18th and 19th century authors who liked to see Eastern cultures as somehow 'timeless' (the same nonsense that gets the 14th-century Aztec Empire stuck in books on 'ancient' civilisations). The reality is that, despüite the myth of a 'revolutionary' way of doing things, much of our medical tradition, starting with its vocabulary, but going rioght through to the way certain treatments are applied or the drugs used or not used, goes right back toi the ancient world. This tends to get obscured because

- many writers misunderstand that 'Arab' medicine is really a further development rooted directly in the Greek and Indian traditions (themselves probably related) and think that medieval Europe somehow imported an whole new tradition and

- Western science writers tell a tale of revolutionary breaks with the past and create the image that people like Vesalius and Paracelsus created medicine anew.

Scientific medicine is different from the practices of Galen or Ibn Sina, but not as dramatically so as we like to think. At the same time, modern TCM or Ayurveda are a lot more different from Han dynasty or Vedic times than its practitioners like to believe. A modern Chinese practitioner has an array of pharmaceuticals asnd empirically refined treatments at his disposal that his ancestors could only dream of, but he does business on making his patients believe his art is just like the Yellow Emperor taught it before the dawn of the Zhou dynasty.

If you go away from medicine into the realm of philosophy, we have an even more direct link to the past. The entire Constructivist-Positivist debate goes right back to Plato. 'If at first you don't succeed...' is pure Stoicism. The idea that property is a right is Roman law (when you get right down to it, almost everything underlying our legal practices - both Continental and Commnon Law - is either Roman or gentile law). The prevalent assumption that man has a conscience, the belief that there are such things as good and evil, the concept os state and nation, peace and war, all have roots in antiquity.

European Christianity, incidentally, was not inimical to antiquity (though it was at times pretty destructive). Rather, in both its best and worst aspects, it grew organically from it (more specifically, one traditional strand in it). I think the tragedy of 'continuity' in the West is that a lot of it got tied to losing sides twice. First, the living heritage of antiquity was associated with the opponents of the Renaissance and Reformation, and then the resurrected spectacle of consciously antiquarian antiquity the Renaissance left us was embraced by the traditionalist, legitimist and totalitarian movements that lost the 19th and 20th century.

As an interesting aside, here in Germany we have a fashion for 'Hildegard-medicine', a dietetic and herbal regimen based on the teachings of St Hildegardis Bingensis. Now, dietetics and herbalisam are a hobby of mine and I have actually reasd her original writings (not easy to find among the profusion of health manuals using her name). Hildegard medicine is a perfect example of traditional legitimation of the kind that works in India, China and the Middle East: we actually have a fairly modern, reasonably well-balanced and healthy diet combined with harmless and sometimes effective herbal remedies that masquerade as 900-year old wisdom, but have borrowed only some aspects of the original. If modern medicine wanted to, it could make at least the same claims.

[Timotheus]

Thanks for the reply. So it appears that just as much is there in the west as it is in the east. The difference appears to be advertising. The Eastern cultures cherish their link to the past at a different level and thus really hold onto it almost as a "back in the good old days" manner.

[Epictetus]

Could it be the introduction of Christianity and its often hostility to anything pagan that so to speak wiped the slate clean?

Edward Gibbon may have thought this, to a point.

The acquisition of knowledge… may employ the leisure of a liberal mind. Such amusements, however, were rejected with abhorrence, or admitted with the utmost caution, by the severity of the [Church] fathers, who despised all knowledge that was not useful to salvation…

This indolent, or even criminal, disregard to the public welfare exposed them to the contempt and reproaches of the Pagans, who very frequently asked, What must be the fate of the empire… if all mankind should adopt the pusillanimous sentiments of the new sect?...

The primitive Christians were dead to the business and pleasures of the world; but their love of action, which could never be entirely extinguished, soon revived, and found a new occupation in the government of the church.

Edward Gibbon. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XV.

Basically he says that the early Christians were more interested in religion than in the arts, sciences and government. He does have a point, but it may be a little unfair. We have many Classic authors because Christian monks copied them, for example.