What qualifies as the biggest paradox of contemporary human life on this planet? Here is a very large question. Probably no single answer exists that the world's authorities would agree to, but everyone has a right to their own opinion. Moving frequently over the past thirty years between academic environments East and West, I have thought long and deeply about issues involved in cross-cultural paradoxes, and have come up with a personal best answer to this question.

Since World War II, in its focus upon industrialization, Asia has been absolutely obsessed with assimilating technologies, modes of thought, and views of reality which were dominant in the West from the late-17th until the mid-19th centuries. During the same postwar period, the popular subculture of the West has exhibited an equivalent obsession with assimilating the spiritual beliefs and practices of the traditional East. What's the paradox? many in the West would ask. The world has shrunk; we live in a global village; uniformizing technologies level cultural differences; a planetary mono-culture is in process of emerging; conflict will be reduced. Well, I doubt it, and the paradox I see is far more complex than merely that of overcoming Kipling's maxim about East and West remaining forever separate. First, the paradox stated boldly; then, the justifying arguments.

By the end of the 1850's, many of “The Great Books of the East” were translated into European languages. The content of these books had by then begun to profoundly influence the most creative of contemporary Western minds -- in every field of thought. There can be little doubt that the “Yellow Peril Hysteria” of the 1870's was a collective (unconscious) reaction to this Eastern makeover of the Western intelligentsia's group mind. The “New Physics” of Albert Einstein and Max Planck -- the Special Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics -- was born of the benefits which accrued to the West from assimilating thought of the traditional East. Creative minds were freed up by exposure to radically different philosophical views, and these minds subsequently made fundamental discoveries about the nature of reality. These breakaway discoveries were accomplished around the turn of the century: Planck's first paper on quantum theory was printed in 1900; Einstein's first paper on relativity theory was published in 1905.

The paradox: the East has spent the last fifty years trying to assimilate perspectives on reality which its own deep traditions played a major role in shattering fifty years before this assimilative effort began in earnest. This inexplicable behavior, I think, is the real source of Asia's creativity problem, not an undervaluation of the integrity of the individual mind, as so many Westerners like to believe. Asians stopped valuing their traditions -- actually, in significant measure forgot the substance of many of them -- and, thus, lost access to their own unconscious mental processes, the ultimate source of all creativity.

But the paradox is more elaborate than this: the ironies involved seem to serve a generations-long vengeance. The West has its creativity problem, too; one, perhaps, even more dangerous than that of the East. For almost a hundred years now, the West has resolutely refused to generalize insights about reality garnered from the New Physics into other fields: the social sciences, the arts, political theory, economics, and so on. Indeed, this effort was almost completely abandoned between World War I and recent years, those recent years having seen a few meager attempts made at the peripheries of some Western societies. Why this refusal, this abandonment? And at what human cost?

Most 20th century creativity -- fundamental breakthrough levels, thereof, not mere technological innovation derivative of such breakthroughs -- was concentrated into the century's first two decades. This world-cracking Western creativity was explicitly informed by active engagement with the traditional knowledge of the East. A few examples are offered here out of the myriad possible.

Many of the leading early figures in the New Physics were deep students of Oriental philosophy: the father of atomic theory, Niels Bohr, late in life fashioned a family crest for himself in which the Chinese tai chi symbol featured prominently as an indication of his philosophical commitments; Erwin Schrödinger not only made the study of Indian metaphysics a life-long endeavor, he wrote his revolutionary quantum wave equation while practicing Tantric Yoga with two of his female graduate students in an isolated mountain cabin in the Austrian Alps. These two men, and many of their contemporary colleagues, possessed personal traits traditionally attributed to the Eastern sage.

The great painter, Wassily Kandinsky, in 1912 painted probably the first purely abstract painting in the history of modern art. But before taking this revolutionary step, he, a practitioner of Indian yoga, wrote a book to justify the act. Titled, ON THE SPIRITUAL IN ART, the book reveals an enormous debt to Eastern thought. Kandinsky was a student and friend of Rudolf Steiner, who produced a huge corpus of literature interpreting Eastern thought for the West. Indeed, most major figures in the early history of 20th century Western painting were saturated in Asian philosophy and meditative practices, either directly or via mediation of the Theosophy movement of long-time Tibet resident H. P. Blavatsky. The list of those so influenced is a long one: Kupka, Jawlensky, Klee, Malevich, Marc, Mondrian, Feininger, Arp, Ball… and so on.

The same can be said for the history of Western music composition during the period, where Arnold Schoenberg, a close friend of Kandinsky, was the seminal figure. As if to magnify ironies of the age, during the period Schoenberg made his radical departure from the conventions of tonal composition, the two men, painter and composer living near each other in Vienna, exchanged roles: Kandinsky played music; Schoenberg painted. When the two resumed their rightful tasks, Schoenberg became so “superstitious”, he released his compositions only on astrologically approved dates. How very Eastern of him!

These artists and musicians clearly used their chosen mediums to investigate implications of the new world view which had so recently emerged, with such overwhelming force, within the field of physics. They did this by transforming the basic elements of painting, music, sculpture, dance, and so on, such that the change chosen metaphorically modeled some aspect of the new view of reality which physicists were demonstrating with their experiments. But such exploratory activities pretty much ended by the onset of World War I. Artists and composers came out of that war poised to enter their “neo-classical periods” and other such throwbacks. And not much, regarding generalization of the New Physics, has happened since then.

This is a great enigma of the 20th century. Did the creative of that “Lost Generation” see something that frightened them terribly? Something other than the First World War itself? The creativity actually waned before outbreak of the war. Could the object of fright have had to do with a deep cause of that war? If so, did the frightening thing have something to do with the Eastern influences on the New Physics and its new view of reality? I think so; I think very much so. And I ask: Can a civilization long persist whose fundamental view of reality has greatly diverged from the set of assumptions upon which its institutional base was built? Not likely. So some insight is needed into the specific aspects of Eastern thought that the New Physics most expresses.

During the 1960's, renowned scholar, Nguyen Khac Kham, undertook research that has direct bearing on the critical issues. While associated with The Center for East Asian Cultural Studies in Tokyo, he conducted comparative analysis of traditional rice ritual as performed in China, Japan and Vietnam. These were not the usual studies based on derivative sources; old documents in Han, medieval Japanese, and chu nom (a demotic script adapted from Chinese used to transcribe Vietnamese) were his research materials. Discussions with him regarding these cultural comparisons are fascinating and thought provoking, but, strangely enough, for the question at hand, a quotation from a French anthropologist which he became fond of during this period of research is most useful. Kham's English translation of P. Giran's original French (MAGIE ET RELIGIONS ANNAMITES. Paris: Challamel, 1912) follows.

…everything becomes confused and blended into one. The state of everything is essentially precarious. Their aspect is elusive and affords no hold for us to seize. This curious vision of the universe explains some beliefs which otherwise would be hardly conceivable. Each individuality being very badly defined, its limits are wavering, extensible. They do not confine within the individual himself but overlap him and encroach on his surroundings. Under these conditions, it is as difficult to discern the individual from the group to which he belongs as to discern him from everything that touches him or reminds of himself. With such concepts, we may understand that the universe must appear as an inextricable entanglement of reciprocal influences where persons and things, in a perpetual state of instability, become fused together while borrowing mutually their qualities. This idea of contagion, which is anything but scientific, is very common among the Annamese.

Even those quite familiar with contemporary physics may at this point be mystified. What does this quotation have to do with, say, quantum theory? First, look at the terminology. Giran, in this characterization of the Vietnamese animistic view of reality, anticipated the terminology of physics by almost half a century. Entangled states; spontaneous fusion at criticality; instabilities; non-simple identity; reciprocal maintenance; multiply-connected topology; collective behavior; cooperative phenomena; relative-state; non-local; fuzzy phase boundary; wavicle (the confused overlap of a wave upon a particle); infinite correlation length: each of these terms, taken from a recent textbook of quantum mechanics, is authentically evoked by the meanings Giran's choice of words were meant to convey. The two views of reality -- Vietnamese animism and quantum physics -- are in many respects the same view. And this view is fundamentally different from that which dominated the West between the late-17th and mid-19th centuries.

The nature of “identity”, as a metaphysical category of existence, is the question most at issue here. Atomic individualism is replaced in the New Physics with subatomic “fused states”, or “contagion”, to use Giran's anthropological term. This replacement was what Schrödinger's revolutionary 1925 quantum wave equation accomplished. And how metaphorically appropriate the form of yoga he practiced at the time of making this discovery! Serious attempts to generalize quantum principles into, particularly, the social sciences, economics, and political theory, which had transpired in early-Weimar Germany, were not only abandoned soon after Schrödinger's discovery, but have been actively resisted ever since.

The creative of the West foundered because they discovered something about reality that did not conform to their philosophy, and which, therefore, they could not well understand. The creativity problems of East and West are mirror images, and likely one cannot be solved without finding solution to the other. Vietnamese historical experience, not the least of which was deep exposure to the intellectual currents flowing through Paris early in the century, uniquely prepares the Vietnamese to address the ironies of this age and find ways to resolve its greatest paradox.

(The original Vietnamese version of this article, titled “Nhung Khac Nhau Trong Giao Luu Van Hoa Dong-Tay” was published in VAN NGHE, No. 18, Hanoi 1998.)

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