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The Pacific Mind
| Article
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19787 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1991 |
4,822 Words |
| Author
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Ninian Smart
Ninian Smart is professor of comparative religions at the
University of California, Santa Barbara; he founded Britain's
first major department of religious studies at the University
of Lancaster. He is author of The Religious Experience, Beyond
Ideology, The Phenomenon of Christianity, and other books. |
Perhaps the Pacific Ocean is a symbol of a worldview that may take an increasing grip upon the human imagination; it is one that seeks to combine insights of East and West with the pluralism and scientific outlook of modern societies. For if one sits on one of the crumbling and beautiful cliffs of the California coast, one can almost see across the blue expanse of the ocean the glimmerings of many ghostly forces: there is the rim of Asia, and there are, in the American West, new forms of science and experiments in living that have left their imprints beyond the narrower worlds of Silicon Valley and San Francisco. There are in the distance too the ghosts of islanders deeply dislocated by the whirlwind unleashed in World War II. In the new Pacific these forces can work together: Buddhism, Christianity, science, the search for lost identities, the pursuit of happiness, the wonders of technology.
There are so many factors in the cultures of the Pacific rim that help us to conceive of a new state of humankind. The ingenuity, discipline, and aesthetic sense of the Japanese, the great achievements of Chinese-dominated nations such as Taiwan and Singapore, the Korean resurgence, the innovations both in life and laboratory of California, the new patterns of the Soviet East, the democratic urges of Latin America, the dynamism of the South Pacific, the toleration of Indonesian Islam, the feel for the Pacific Way--all these impulses are hopeful.
Moreover, they are reinforced by East-West exchange. Consider how Japan has adapted to a liberal constitution, abjuring former military temptations; how China has begun to import elements of the Western market; and how the United States has absorbed some of the values of Buddhism and East Asia. So for me the newly emerging "Pacific mind" is a symbol of what can happen ultimately in the whole world--a cooperation and interchange between East, West, and the South.
Yet as we move toward the twenty-first century there are darker forces at work. The rapid social and scientific changes of the last decades naturally breed anxieties and, with them, backlashes against the novelties of our world. It is evident that ethnic and racial hatreds are widespread. Some of the conflicts are tragic in character: the bitterness between Palestinians and Israelis; the turmoil in India between Hindus and Muslims; the awful slaughter in Sri Lanka, with the Tamils and Sinhalese at war and the Sinhalese themselves decimated by populist uprising and government countermeasures; the conflicts in various parts of Africa, from Ethiopia and Liberia to Natal and the Transvaal; the civil strife in Northern Ireland; the
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