The West and the East

Abstract

The developments described up to this point relate particularly to Western culture. The question is whether the observations would also apply to Eastern cultures and whether there is a larger coherence between the cultures on both sides. ‘East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet’, Kipling wrote in 1889, but it appears he was wrong. Currently, according to UK sociologist Colin Campbell,¹ there is an ‘easternization’ of the West going on, with the West continuously adopting more elements of Eastern culture. The emergence of, for example, the New Age movement and the increasing interest in Eastern spirituality and yoga could be expressions of this fact. At the same time, there is also a large increase in the number of ‘unaffiliated’ spiritual people. These developments, incidentally, are expressions of B2 values, rather than those belonging to A2, and may be regarded as the new project identity — values which, in current A2 postmodernism, are already presenting themselves from the (subsequent) spiritually/non-materially oriented B2 worldview. The most important element, however, is that the typically Western ‘one truth’ assumption (on the left) is slowly being replaced by diversity or ‘value pluralism’ (on the right), which is more in line with Eastern value orientations.