When The Clones Come Marching In

Little Boxes from Asia

A beautiful day, the end of summer in downtown Columbus and I have an hour to spend until my friend is finished with her business. I must not have looked at the center of this town for years; whichever direction I turn to, I see new sky-scrapers already finished or still under construction. To me this sight is beautiful; these elegant structures represent my understanding of our modern Western world and its culture. And while the architectural lines follow the style of the present decade, every one has a uniqueness to it, they are all the individualistic product of the personality of the architect who did the design. Why did they make them all different? Why do the owners too want them all different, when it is so much cheaper to make them all the same?

On our way home, on I-70, we are driving past a new urban development, houses that are not cheap but are all identical. What a depressing sight and I hope that the owners have at least created some uniqueness in the interior, and when I say this my friend she sings this silly song:

This process of creating something new, something which has never existed before, gives me a tremendous sense of joy and pleasure, sleep and food are forgotten during these times; surely, every artist or scientist feels the same during these moments. For me, this is the feeling of being at-one with the Universal Creative Force.

The one thing that we in the West know best about God, the Universal Force, All That Is, etc. etc., is the fact that IT is creative and we are part of it. We also know that individuality, regardless if it comes with a Demanding Ego or a humble self, is the irrefutable prerequisite for being creative. This maybe the reason why we in the West, in our Christianity-informed culture, see God, not as a nameless mysterious force, but as the Creator, a person or individual. Maybe there is wisdom in our religion after all. It is a fact that a culture which does not value and nurture individuality will have only very few creative people.

A Japanese proverb says: The reverse side has also a reverse side, and when we look at nature, or into our own psyche, we know there must be a complementary force to this urge which leads us to individuation and to creation. There is no Yin without a Yang, a Taoist might say, and there must be a complementary drive which gives stability, uniformity and repeatability. In nature this is the force which lets the DNA, the genes of living things, clone themselves. The miracle here is not creation of new things, but the dependability of the copying process of the same structure over and over again. Apparently, it is this drive which the Asian people have taken for the formative element of their culture and their religions. One might wonder how their society, with this as their major goal, could ever change and evolve. Well, it didn't for thousand of years, but now we have a global economy with global information exchange, and combined with the Western believe that both should be available to all nations, something is happening. These Asians are as smart as we are; let me give one example of what's happening.

Just a few decades ago, my engineering profession invented the integrated circuit for the machines we call computers. These integrated circuits are something very important in history, they are the new Gutenberg-revolution of this century, (Marshall Mc Luhan,1964) To manufacture these new "intelligent books", you start out with many pages of gene-like micro-photographs with which you copy hundreds of circuits onto thin slices of pure silicon crystals. Just like printing books, this process requires a talent and expertise in cloning. We should not be surprised that a culture which specializes in cloning is much better at this type of manufacturing than we are. I would estimate that, while 80% of new designs for integrated circuits (the creative part) comes from the west, 80% of manufactured goods (the clones) come from the "Pacific-Rim" cultures. This was not seen very clearly ten years ago and many people were afraid that Japan would outperform us in everything. Well, they haven't. Their costly next generation computer project failed, and all new micro-processors, all new computer programs, in fact, nearly everything new in electronics has come from the West. (Then how come I am typing this little assay on a Toshiba Notebook computer which has a sticker that says Intel inside, a disk-drive which was originated by IBM, memory chips which were invented by TI, and has its programs from Microsoft; but for which most of the money I paid went to Japan?)

This, I was told, is an old Chinese curse, implying radically changing times. How appropriate a sentiment for a culture which has made uniformity and stability, harmony and sameness, peace and stagnation its major goal in life. These "interesting times" are coming for the Asian cultures, and indirectly for us too. The Pacific-Rim countries are now acquiring the scientific and industrial expertise of the West, while at the same time insisting on preserving their own cultural settings and values. As it shows up in the Japanese example, this only works partially; the creative element is significantly reduced by cultural biases. (Would that it also show up in the trade-balance, we wish.) Other Asian countries, such as China, are even less willing to accept anything from the West but the basic scientific and industrial concepts. This leads to conflicts with our Human-rights ideas, based on our believe in the rights of the individual, which for the East, to say it mildly, is just a romantic foolishness. Can the East 'have their western rice-cake and eat it too'? It will be very exciting to watch, as the Vietnamese Zen-master and poet Thich Nhat Hanh says in his book, Being Peace; he writes:

(Paraphrasing), Thich Nhat Hanh, you do not see that you are praying for the destruction of everything, for if your prayers were heard, all things would pass away. --- Fragment 43

And yet, I believe the answers for the future will come from a modern understanding of the 'complementarity' of all forces, the non-duality. Because, the world population is growing at an alarming rate of nearly one hundred million a year, we need the "thousand of years of expertise" of the Pacific-Rim cultures to "maintain and orchestrate the Mass", as Stephan Schwartz said, but for any 'non-dualistic-action' we need a deeper understanding than Buddhism provides.

The "important values" which Thich Nhat Hanh admires in our culture, the scientific way of looking at things, the spirit of free inquiry, and democracy, only developed fully after our culture had forced a break between worldly affairs and religion, in our Renaissance. None of the world-religions endorses forces which strive towards division and separation, ego and individuation, creation and conflict; but that's what it took to make our modern Western world. Are the cultural forces of the East, which strive to unify and equalize, subdue the ego and conform, desire eternal peace and stagnation and to "clone everything", really the 'complement' of an equal duality? A "Unity of Opposites"? Both forces appear essential for a modern culture, but answers are more complex than yes or no, because the conscious motivation 'to individuate and create' is a much later (advanced) human development than the drive 'to conform and clone'.