Dialogue, debate or disagreement?

If it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who preached that the East and the West are inseparable, it was Rudyard Kipling who became famous for advocating the idea of their perpetual incompatibility. Today, the foremost characteristic of any East-West discourse continues to be a wrangle over a mutual cultural misunderstanding. The 'West', the East Asian studies scholar Martin Bernal has suggested, is as much a construction as the 'East' of Edward Said's Orientalism. Likewise, Victor David Hanson, the author of the influential book Why the West has Won: Carnage and Culture fron Salamis to Vietnam, wrote in 2002 that "the East continues to stereotype the West, with not a clue about its intrinsic nature." Hanson mockingly portrayed non-Westerners as baffled by a "mysterious Western paradigm – the freedom to speak freely". For Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma, Occidentalism, or the popular understanding of Western cultures, constitutes "a cluster of images and ideas of the West in the minds of its haters". They infer that what is really hated about the West by those who only know it from afar is its secularity and rationalism. But do such vague notions on either side really hold any water in today's globalised context?

Let us begin with the West and its vision of the East. Despite the extensive and constantly growing firsthand knowledge accumulated by the West about the non-West, far-away events, whether in Jordan or Egypt, in Guatemala or Kenya, still frequently come as a surprise to many Westerners. It is as if those who have been brought up within the orbit of Western civilisation, much as they may know about politics and economics, geography and anthropology, have not yet discovered the inner recesses of the non-Western mind, and thus are still groping for understanding. The West has always seen the East through Western eyes, never striving to see it in the eyes of the East. In a recent lecture, the forthright assertion made by Pope Benedict XVI that the central tenants of Christianity are unquestionably European was considered to be a logical extension of his advocacy of a robust rejection of Islamist-inspired 'terrorism' in Europe. He went on to say that this could be countered only by shoring up Judaeo-Christian values and contesting the over-secularisation of public life, the hallmark of the West. When he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict had despaired of the West's "hatred of itself". The West, he had observed, "no longer loves itself; in its own history, it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive, while it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure."