Unification Sermons and Talks

by the Reverends Eby

Easterners vs. Westerners

Lloyd Eby
January 6, 1999

Question: I do believe that westerners are more internal and religious than the easterners in the UC. They have strong consciences and righteousness. Their virtues are individual qualities - honesty, courage, integrity, etc. and it is from these spectacles that they view the Oriental's strong personal loyalties and sense them to be immoral. Similarly, the oriental, whose major virtues are all relationship connected (loyalty, filial piety etc), considers the westerners lack of loyalty as immorality.

Although what you write here is literally true (each side sees the other as immoral), I found it to be highly objectionable and even ethically repugnant.

The problem is your implicit acceptance of the notion of ethical equivalence between the two sides. It's like those people who, during the Cold War, held to ethical equivalence between the Western and the Communist blocs, or those who suggest that, because both sides committed atrocities, there was an ethical equivalence between the Allied and Axis powers.

In fact, in WW II and the Cold War, although each side committed some atrocities and each side could correctly point out ethical lapses and failures in the other side, the two sides were absolutely not ethically/morally equivalent. The West during the Cold War, and the Allies during WW II, despite egregious lapses, were the ethically good side, and the Communists and the Axis powers were the ethically wrong (evil) side.

So it is with this problem of the difference between the foundation-of-faith western world and the foundation-of-substance eastern world. Faith is always a good. Unity is a good only when it arises out of a good source and is focused on a good end. For example, I just finished watching Raise the Red Lantern and re-watching The Godfather. In both those cases there was great stress on and faithfulness to family and group unity, tradition, and suppression of the individual in favor of the good of the group. But those were both evil groups/situations.

Bertrand Russell, for another example, wrote that his grandmother gave him a Bible; she had written the verse "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil" on the flyleaf.

The Chinese Confucian system was, on the whole, an evil system. Shinto is, on the whole, evil. It was the adherence to groupism that allowed the rise and expansion of Nazism and Japanese militarism. It was the West, especially the Americans, with their underlying Protestant individualism and ethics that twice pulled the Koreans out of what would otherwise have been annihilation (WW II and the Korean War).

Thus, these two sides are by no means ethically equivalent. The eastern adherence to group loyalty and unity is a positive evil, except in the very rare cases when it has been focused on a divinely given impetus and toward a divine goal.

The western adherence to individual faith and individual achievement is nearly always a good.

So, although it is literally true that each side accuses the other of being immoral, the eastern accusation against the west is almost entirely wrong, while the western accusation against the east is almost entirely correct.

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