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Title: Good-bye to Western Culture (1930)Author: Norman Douglas* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *eBook No.: 0300291.txtEdition: 1Language: EnglishCharacter set encoding: Latin-1(ISO-8859-1)--8 bitDate first posted: March 2003Date most recently updated: March 2003Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editionswhich are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright noticeis included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particularpaper edition.Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check thecopyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing thisfile.This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictionswhatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the termsof the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online athttp://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html---------------------------------------------------------------------------A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBookTitle: Good-bye to Western Culture (1930)Author: Norman DouglasSome Footnotes on East and WestA GOOD while ago, as I was stepping into the train, a friend who hadcome to see me off put into my hands a book and said:"Have a look at this. Very rich, in places. Pure sensationalism, ofcourse; she wants to get herself talked about. I think you'll enjoyit. If not, just throw it out of the window."That is how I came to read _Mother India_, while the train crawledslowly through a level, dried-up landscape under the cobalt sky ofearly autumn. It was a drowsy afternoon; the corn had been cut longago, the country wore an air of exhaustion, and everything seemed halfasleep. And still we panted forwards, past white farmhouses and fieldsof yellow stubble, stopping at every station. _Mother India_ is afairly long book; this was a fairly long journey, hot and tedious."Pure sensationalism," it soon became evident, was not quite correct.If you poke your nose into unsavoury corners, the result is bound tobe more or less sensational. It struck me that the author hadperformed in business-like fashion her job of disembowelling old
 
Mother India, though some of her arguments, I felt sure, wouldcertainly be challenged--as indeed they were. In other circumstances Ishould have read it with greater attention (I did, later on).That railway carriage was not conducive to the reading of a book likethis. The heat, the proximity to objectionable fellow-creatures,children squalling in the next compartment, the screeching ofmachinery, the perpetual coming and going, the banging of doors, thewhistling: what a coarse, undignified mode of travel! Here we were,cooped up like hens in a basket; open the windows, and clouds ofnoisome smoke pour in; shut them, and you are suffocated. A mansitting opposite me was intent upon some newspaper article; I caughtsight of the heading "Indemnity." Indemnity--reparations; it was allwe could talk about then, it is all we can talk about now; an endless,unbecoming haggle.... And the red velvet seats, my pet aversion.Velvet in the brooding heat of August! Here was a sample of theunnecessary discomfort which we Europeans endure all day long in oneform or another; that railway trip, a trifle in itself, made meresentful against the Western world and its institutions, while thisbook, with every page I turned, took me further away from them andconjured up memories of a land where one feels more at ease. As I readthose disclosures, I could not help contrasting the two and thinking:What she tells of India is all very sad and unpleasant, but--but howabout Europe?Well, Europe has lost her smile. Moreover, she is growing smaller thanever; small and explosive and hectic--_balkanized_. An air ofparochial defiance broods over us, signalizing its presence byoffensive aggressions upon liberty. Life in this continent mustpresent considerable difficulties just now to a really conscientiousperson. They who make it their business to evade its laws andconventions whenever possible are on a different plane; they findtheir existence tolerable, and some of them--one, at all events--would not be sorry if it lasted for ever.* * *A FEW observations then scrawled on the margin of _Mother India_ havenow blossomed, or at least expanded, into the following footnotes. Thelong interval between the two events may suggest that the idea of thisbook was conceived, and again discarded. So it was. Why bother aboutthe state of Europe? Such tasks should be left to the qualifiedWestern enthusiast, the world-improver, the dreamer, the eternallyhopeful and eternally muddle-headed. Can the leopard change his spots?An occasional spasm of lucidity is all we may ever expect. Enlightenedindividuals crop up in the most unlikely places and epochs;enlightened groups of them are as common as a flock of whiteblackbirds. The world has grown not only older since Pericles; it hasgrown stupider.The reader will find no suggestion of remedies in these pages. I amnot the stuff of which reformers are made; rather than indulge in thatvariety of meddlesomeness I would sweep a crossing. Nine-tenths of thereformers of humanity have been mischief-makers or humbugs. I have nodesire to be added to the list. A man who reforms himself hascontributed his full share towards the reformation of his neighbour.Let Europe and Asia do what they please: good luck to them!
 
I observe, and pass on.* * *HERE they are, then--just a few footnotes, a few _asides_ that touchthe fringe of a great problem: East or West? The problem confrontsevery one of us and its solution is uncommonly easy. It is a matter oftemperament; it depends, to a large extent, upon whether a man likesto be flurried or not.You can be flurried in the East nowadays, and to within an inch ofyour life. I am thinking of modern Turkey, which last year, and duringa very brief visit, struck me as the most disagreeable place I hadever been in. And I perceive that Mr. Harry A. Franck (_The MoslemFringe_) has come to the same conclusion after a longer stay in thecountry. These poor devils have caught our European disease, and thesymptoms in both cases are identical. A political gale, involving theusual varieties of cruelty and murder, has subsided into a heavyground-swell of morality known as "national regeneration" which, likeother forms of regeneration, is accompanied by depressing phenomena:restrictions of liberty, police supervision, and all the bureaucraticinconveniences to which we Europeans are now accustomed. Mr. Franckhas had a good dose of this legalized persecution; he seems to havepassed a great deal of his time at police stations; he has studiedtheir newly-made legislation and does not hesitate to call some of it"quite insane."Will these young Turks be as straightforward as the old ones, asgood-humoured and gentlemanly in their manners? I doubt it, for suchfits of self-consciousness _en masse_ are apt to leave a scar. Theofficial drilling they entail saps those individual virtues which apatriarchal upbringing used lovingly to inculcate. Government bybureaucracy has a familiar flavour in the West; a nation of Orientalbureaucrats is something new, and a sight to make the angels weep, orlaugh.* * *A SIGNIFICANT little fact emerges on page 337 of _Mother India_ inregard to local epidemics like typhoid, namely, that the natives "fromlong consumption of diluted sewage have naturally acquired a degree ofimmunity." They have also grown fairly immune to their own poisons ofthe intellect which, imported into Europe by people who ought to haveknown better, swept over our continent in a devastating epidemic ofunreason called Christianity, from which we Europeans have not yetacquired immunity. This is a grave moral misdeed to be laid to thecharge of Mother India.Her scientific crimes are every bit as atrocious. Max Mueller in 1873was looking for an Indian inscription in which the cypher, the nought,an Indian invention, occurred for the first time. It would be, hesays, among the most valuable monuments of antiquity, "for from itwould date in reality the beginning of true mathematical science,impossible without the nought--nay, the beginning of all the exactsciences to which we owe the discoveries of telescopes, steam engines,and electric telegraph."
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