The End of Asia? Redefining a Changing Continent

Equivocal words such as "Asia" inevitably create confusion. When Kristof asks why so-called Europe "discovered" so-called Asia rather than the other way around, he refers to Ming Dynasty China's notorious failure to follow up on the early fifteenth-century voyages of Zheng He. This is interesting but sinocentric. Asian Mongols and Turks had not only discovered Europe by the time of Zheng He's travels -- they had conquered great swaths of it, including the Balkans. India, the Asian country closest to the West and the likeliest candidate to "discover" it, had known both the Hellenistic and Roman worlds since the time of Alexander. By the fifteenth century, India was well into a millennium of intermittent, internecine struggle with Islam and was more closely linked to the power politics of the Mediterranean world than it was to events in China. In fact, Turkish economic and military pressures on Europe drove Western adventurers past the Cape of Good Hope to reopen the spice trade. And the struggle with Islam encouraged some Indian rulers to accept the European trading presence on European terms.

Kristof and WuDunn's problems with defining Asia and identifying a unitary course of Asian development underline a principal reason why it is so difficult to think or write clearly about the subject. Asia is not, as most of us habitually think, the complement or counterpart to Europe or even to the West. Rather, China and, with all due respect to Churchill, India are each -- in population, in cultural diversity, and in achievement -- civilizations on their own, equivalent to Europe itself rather than an individual European country. The illusion that they represent a single continental category is a byproduct of the Western ascendancy of the last two centuries, an ascendancy that temporarily made it possible to divide the world into "the West and the rest."

ABRAHAM'S GROWING FAMILY

The real analogue of Kristof and WuDunn's Buddhocentric Asia is neither Europe nor the West. It is something bigger and looser: the Abrahamic world. This world emerged from the triad of religions -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- that trace their roots to the Biblical patriarch and spawned the great secular ideologies of scientific empiricism, liberal democracy, and Marxism. Unlike the Buddhist and Hindu world views, the Abrahamic perspective sees nature as reducible to predictable laws and history as a process with a meaningful beginning, middle, and end. The Muslim, the Marxist, the democrat, the Baconian scientist, the Christian, and the Jew all share this fundamentally similar outlook on life.

Because the Western perspective focuses on the sibling rivalries between Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Jefferson, Bacon, and Marx, it too often overlooks the extraordinary spread of Abrahamism out of its native Middle East into nearly every corner of the world. Virtually every human culture that has encountered Abrahamic ideology has adopted it sooner or later. Asia is no exception. In the last 100 years, each major Asian state has embraced at least one Abrahamic faith. Consequently, every Asian society is today engaged in a fundamental effort to reconcile its increasingly Abrahamic outlook with its native culture.

Islam was the first branch of the Abrahamic family to put down deep roots in what Kristof and WuDunn call Asia, and now roughly half of the world's more than one billion Muslims live there. Thirty percent of the Indian subcontinent's population has accepted the message of the Koran. In contrast, although Christianity (the other missionary Abrahamic faith) appeared in the region before Islam, it failed outside of the Philippines to win significant numbers of converts until the last 125 years. Marxism -- a secular outgrowth of the Abrahamic outlook -- was one of the last to appear and the fastest both to rise and to fall. Its decay leaves an ideological vacuum in countries such as China and Vietnam.

Although one cannot now predict what will follow, it would be surprising if Marx's successor is not also Abrahamic. Liberal democracy, the reigning secular ideology of the Abrahamic world, was first planted in Asia early in the twentieth century and has blossomed even in countries such as Thailand, Japan, and India, which have proven resistant to the religious varieties of the Abrahamic way.

If "Asia" is adopting Abrahamic ideology, it never does so passively but always adapts as it adopts. It has also been profoundly affected by another product of the Abrahamic world. That, of course, is capitalism.

In accounting for Ming China's failure to follow up earlier exploratory voyages, Thunder From the East points to the relative weakness of greed as a social force in Asia. "The rich," writes Kristof, "tended to hoard their wealth in the form of gold or land rather than recycle it or invest in commercial ventures." Europe, by contrast, was "obsessed" with greed. This is a somewhat infelicitous way to say that mercantile activity in Asia remained limited by quasi-feudal restraints while Europe progressed to full-blown capitalism.

In effect, capitalism is simply another of the "ISMS" that have germinated in the fertile Western Christian seedbed of Abrahamic culture. "Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!" wrote the angry Marx. Capitalism has proceeded from and accentuated the dynamic, world-conquering nature of the Western Christian branch of the family of Abraham.

This set of social and economic behaviors has proven as aggressive and as penetrating in the economic sphere as most Abrahamic philosophies and religions have been in the ideological arena. Indeed, the endless multiplication and accumulation of capital -- as opposed to the accumulation of wealth for purposes of consumption -- has been the hallmark of the modern West.