East and West

As a young man in the 1970s, I left medical school in Seoul and took a job as a Foreign Service Officer in Paris. Immersed in a Western country for the first time, I was astounded by what I saw. Why were Easterners and Westerners so different in outlook? Why did Asia remain undeveloped and poor when the West was rich and developed? Why, in fact, were our civilizations so vastly different at all? I could not free my mind from such recurring questions. If we possessed differing abilities according to our race, then no further questions were necessary—everything could be attributed to biological destiny. But my four-year study of medicine convinced me that, as Homo sapiens, people of all races shared the same abilities and potential. Our differences must therefore derive from the variety of our interactions with our environment, which constitutes the context of our civilization. In search of an answer, my trips to Venice in the spring of 1975, and to Stockholm in the summer of that year, offered me a valuable clue: the sea, an open and expanding world. The West’s orientation to the sea was a marvel to the Eastern eye. From the Piazza San Marco in Venice, the center of the predominant Mediterranean naval power for many centuries, one can sail directly out to sea; from the stone steps of the City Hall of Stockholm, the origin of astonishing Viking expeditions, one can even dip one’s toes in the sea! I began to see, in this environmental condition, the impetus behind Western civilization. With such an intuition, I began to collect materials and insights to develop my theory further. Piece by piece, I assembled a great deal on the environmental contexts, historical development, and cultural manifestations of Eastern and Western civilizations, at the center of which Man, as a living organism, followed the ultimate biological principle: self-preservation. The essential point is that Western men, having mastered the sea, came to possess an "expansive" perspective on their relation to the world; Eastern men, on the other hand, confined to the continent, developed instead a "circumscribed" perspective. From these perspectives evolved diametrically-opposed guiding principles.