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Duluth, MN (OpEdNews) December 13, 2010: With the ominous-sounding caption "The Final Conflict," the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW dated December 12, 2010, belatedly ran a review of Ian Morris' book WHY THE WEST RULES -" FOR NOW: THE PATTERNS OF HISTORY, AND WHAT THEY REVEAL ABOUT THE FUTURE, which was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on October 12th. But a speech writer for John F. Kennedy might have supplied the more vigorous caption "The New Frontier" to draw attention to this important book regarding the West and China.
Ian Morris (born 1960) is a Cambridge-University-educated historian, classicist, and archeologist who now teaches at Stanford University. His ambitious 750-page book is chock full of fascinating details. As is well known, it used to be said that the sun never set on the British empire of old. However, even though the sun has more recently set on the old British empire, educated English chaps have continued to take a big-picture view of the world, as Morris does in his book.
In any event, what a remarkably candid title Morris has given his book, WHY THE WEST RULES -" FOR NOW. When Diane Sawyer of ABC News recently visited China, she learned that there are more people in China today who speak English than there are in the United States. Hey, if millions of Chinese have learned English, isn't that a kind of cultural flattery of the West? As a result, Ian Morris' book could become a best-seller in China. Not that the Chinese today need any encouragement from Ian Morris.
However, many Americans today may need his encouragement to shift their attention away from murderous Islamist terrorists and away from Iran and away from North Korea and away from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to pay attention to China today.
In her reports from China, Diane Sawyer gamely said, "Game on!"
However, from the title of Ian Morris' book, it doesn't sound like he would bet on the West in the game against China. So perhaps that caption in the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW is best understood to mean "The Final Conflict [for the West]," not the end of all conflict in history. But as the understandably handicapped West fights the good fight against the underdog challenger China, when and how will the final conflict for the West occur that will then allow China to emerge as dominant and rule the world as the West rules today? We'll see.
Because of the West's enormous economic wealth today, we can liken the West today to Troy in the Homeric epic the ILIAD, but Troy writ large as it were. China today is like Achilles, Ian Morris is in effect suggesting. When I taught the ILIAD, I used to tell the students that the point of the story of Achilles is that if you are as rich as Troy, you had better have a big defense budget, so that you can defend your Troy against Achilles. Despite the obvious warning about an Achilles-like warrior, ancient Athens did indeed fall to a warrior who deeply admired Achilles as a role model, Alexander the Great. Will China one day defeat the United States as Alexander defeated Athens?
On those occasions when I taught both the ILIAD and the ODYSSEY in one course, I used to tell the students that the two Homeric epics offer us two metaphorical ways to approach life: We can understand the ILIAD as suggesting that life is like a never-ending war (Greek, "polemos" means war, struggle), and we can understand the ODYSSEY as suggesting that life is like a never-ending contest (Greek, "agon" means contest, struggle). The ancient Greeks who grew up listening to the Homeric epics were a remarkably contest-oriented people. They held annual athletic contests, including the Olympics once every four years. In Athens, they even held contests among tragedians and gave a prize for the best tragedy in each round of contests.
The ancient Greek contests were usually winner-take-all contests. The winners received all the honor. No honor came from finishing in second place. In short, like other Mediterranean cultures of the time, ancient Greece was an honor/shame culture, as was and is China.
We in the United States today certainly speak of honors (e.g., honorary degrees and other kinds of awards), and we routinely address certain elected and appointed officials with the title "The Honorable [fill in the person's name here]." But in the United States today, we do not have a strong sense of honor. Instead of speaking of honor (as in the expression "very honorable," "most honorable," and the like), we speak of prestige.
Nevertheless, perhaps the proliferation of broadcasts of professional athletic contests on television in the United States today can be understood as showing that some Americans are downright nutty about watching athletic contests, most of which usually result only in a winner and a loser (except for games that end in ties).
Plato and Aristotle referred to the psychological dynamism that is involved in the contesting spirit as one part of the human psyche, the part known in Greek as "thumos." This term is rendered in English as the spirited part of the psyche, as in our expression "fighting spirit." When we in the United States today speak of fight/flight/freeze responses, we are referring to the part of the psyche known in Greek as "thumos." The Homeric epics are deeply attuned to this part of the human psyche.
Unfortunately, patriarchy in Western culture has historically usually led to the comparative under-development of the thumos part of the psyche in many girls and women, even though there have obviously been exceptions such as Queen Elizabeth I.
Related Reading: Readers who are interested in Diane Sawyer's use of the expression "Game on!" should check out Johan Huizinga's book HOMO LUDENS: A STUDY OF THE PLAY-ELEMENT IN CULTURE (Routledge, 1949) and Walter J. Ong's book FIGHTING FOR LIFE: CONTEST, SEXUALITY, AND CONSCIOUSNESS (Cornell University Press, 1981). Because contesting behavior inherently involves agency, see the discussion of both agency and communion in David Bakan's book THE DUALITY OF EXISTENCE: AN ESSAY ON PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION (Rand McNally, 1966) and in Vicki S. Helgeson's textbook THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENDER, 3rd ed. (Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2009).
WALTER ONG'S ACCOUNT OF WESTERN CULTURAL HISTORY
Even though Walter J. Ong's family name is English (for centuries it was spelled "Onge"; it is probably related to the English name "Yonge"), he was born and raised and educated in the United States, even though he lived abroad, with the financial assistance of two Guggenheim fellowships, for about four years when he was researching his Harvard University doctoral dissertation. His ancestors immigrated from East Anglia, which is where Cambridge University is located, arriving on the same ship that brought Roger Williams to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631.
