Understanding the East

Nothing stimulates the creative mind more than trying to understand another culture than one's own. Especially for Western culture, experiencing the artistic expressions of non-Western cultures has always been a continuous stimulus. In these times, when Western colonialism is happily dissected and discussed in all of its dark aspects, it is often forgotten that knowledge of 'the other' has, in its fascination, always had the effect of enrichment of the West and especially, leading to the insight that under the surface of appearances, local customs, and a different history, humans are basically the same everywhere, with the same needs, longings, hopes and fears. This is not 'cultural appropriation' but honouring and building bridges, in the same way as the brilliant minds of the East have taken-on and assimilated so many achievements of the West.

However, the Western materialist and technological mindset has resulted in an inner emptiness, which made many people look towards the East, to find something of a spiritual fulfillment - in whatever form. The sixties of the last century saw thousands of desillusioned well-to-do people from Amerika and Europe journeying to India, to find guru's who could offer them something of meaning amids their empty affluence. And also vice versa: yoga and the Chinese oracle book I Ching found their way into the West where they were quickly incorporated in the developing culture of self-help and wellbeing, large industries farming the barren ground of Western loss of Self.

Never has access to other cultures been made easier than in today's 'global village', especially through the internet. One can virtually 'walk' in other places of the planet through the click on a button, and find resources of information of any kind. Of course this interpenetration also causes rubbing of differences and emotional perplexities concerning cultural identity: Western modernity cannot always easily be incorporated in non-Western cultures, and as we know, there are lots of aspects of this modernity which do not particularly contribute to culture, or are downright dehumanizing. (The problem of cultural identity in connection with locality, and the problem of Western universality I have tried to address in this article on Euro News:)

https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/10/the-two-layers-of-western-society-view

There has been, in the West, a long tradition of attempts to understand the mindset of 'the East', in the academic tradition of 'Orientalism'. The number of Westerners settling in China, India and other places appears to be increasing, as the other way around: Easterners finding their fulfilment in the West, on all levels, especially in science and culture (classical musicians from China, S.-Korea and Japan are already an entirely integrated part of Western musical culture). Yet, sometimes such processes bump into harsh misunderstandings - as is described in this interesting article from 2006 by Roger Scruton about Edward Said's bestselling manifesto 'Orientalism' which created such a stirr:

https://spectator.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/scruton0506c.pdf

One of the greatest cultures on the rise is India, which happens to have been the home of one of the world's most universal artists: Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). Anybody who reads Tagore's English poetry will find a subtle sensitivity comparable with the best of European poets, and an imagery suffused with an unorthodox spirituality as universally human as, for instance, the Western ideas of the Enlightenment. As a writer, poet, educator, musician and landowner, Tagore enjoyed a universalist education where Western and Eastern material found a happy confluence, never accepting high fences around cultures and showing in his universalist humanism and refined imagination and psychology how profoundly humanity is connected under the surface of outward form. He became very popular in the West after winning, as the first Easterner, the Nobel Prize in 1913 for his collection Gitanjali, which was soon translated and found enthusiastic readers all over the world. In the course of the last century, his standing in the West quickly faded: no longer fashionable in a modern world where Tagore's refined values of civilisation were considered irrelevant. But he has appeared to me as a wonderful example of a universalist artist and intellectual, while in the same time deeply rooted in his own culture, showing how different cultures and different sensibilities can be each other's complement and enrichment. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabindranath_Tagore