2. Axial ages.

At a certain stage in the development of a culture, there would appear a group of great thinkers trying to get rid of the shackles of mythology, explore the truth of nature and seek the ultimate value of life. This is when institutional culture changes to spiritual culture. It is the true beginning of civilization and the source of thought and philosophy.

Around 500 BC, an amazing coincidence occurred. Great thinkers appeared, as if arranged, in ancient Greece, Persia, India and China. Through observation, experience, reasoning and meditation, they all tried to explore supreme propositions such as the origin of the universe, the value of life, the significance of societies and the laws governing things. They gave different answers, but they all summed up important ideas in their cultures, forming philosophical systems vital for later cultural development. German philosopher Karl Jaspers calls this period the “Axial Age”. The most prominent results are the Greek system of thought represented by Aristotle and the Chinese system of thought represented by Confucius. Each became the spiritual core of a culture.

3. The juxtaposition of written languages.

Both Western culture and Eastern culture originated, in terms of language, from hieroglyphic symbols. The ancient Egyptians had over 700 hieroglyphic symbols, but later they moved from pictographic symbols to a more abstract way of expression. Abstract symbols were endowed with symbolic meanings. With further efforts by the Phoenicians and the Greeks, it became the early form of the Western Latin phonetic system. Westerners have superior ability for abstraction, partly due to their use of such a language system. In the East, faced with similar hieroglyphs, our ancestors also tried to transform and simplify them. They used pictographic symbols, giving pictographic shapes to sounds and actions, and combined different symbols to form new meaning. But abstraction was never accomplished. Great efforts were made by the ancient Chinese to create new characters, developing a huge language system of nearly 30,000 square characters. Unfortunately, the very original pictographic symbols were not preserved. The characters on tortoise shells, which we can see today, are results of transformation and change upon an even more primitive form. This makes it difficult for us to trace the early changes of language and to find the reason why the Chinese language didn’t develop into a system of abstract symbols, which might have put us on a similar track of thought with Western culture.

It should be noted that this divergence is no trivial matter. It is the key to the opposition of two different forms of thought in the East and West. As the Chinese language never really became a system of abstract symbols, the Chinese people are generally poor at abstract thinking. A typical example is the development of science and technology in China. Due to the lack of abstract symbols, ancient Chinese scientists, however rich and complicated there ideas were, had to use square characters for complex math demonstrations. Those who read Jiu Zhang Suan Shu (The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art), a Chinese mathematic classic, would know how our way of expression hinders abstract thinking.

In the age of information technology, scientists at home and abroad often despaired as to how to input and digitalize Chinese characters, a vital task in an era when a little keyboard may determine one’s fate. We had to either abandon the Chinese characters or be left behind by modern times. Fortunately, with the efforts of our scientists, this problem was eventually resolved.

4. The juxtaposition of beliefs.

In practice, people would be awed by the natural forces which they can’t understand but which have a huge impact on their lives. A natural response to their fear is the growth of worship. It is, to some extent, a form of submission to the pressure. Animalism is a part of human life in the history of culture. With the growth of abstract thinking capacities, human worship, which antagonizes mankind and nature, gradually evolves into human belief, which tries to harmonize mankind and the natural environment. The pressure from fear disappears and people start to feel protected since they think they’re in harmony with what they worship. There is no longer a “self” since they themselves have merged into what they worship. Belief and protection come at the cost of freedom. This is what is called conversion.

The change from polytheism to a monotheistic faith can be considered as progress. Polytheistic primitive religions gave way to monotheistic modern religion, which again shows western people’s capacity for the abstract. This didn’t happen in Chinese culture, which carries its primitive polytheism right into modern times.

The Conflict of Civilizations

Cultural differences lead to contradiction and controversy. When cultures become forms of civilizations, the differences between them can cause conflicts, which are then resolved sometimes by violence, sometimes peacefully, depending on the nature of the conflicting civilizations. In Western civilization, the earliest monotheism is Judaism, which has a history of nearly three thousand years. This is an important turning point in Western civilization. Christianity, which grew out of Judaism, was persecuted first by early Judaists and later by the Roman Empire. Finally, in 392 AD, it was declared the national religion by Roman Emperor Theodosius and gradually grew into a dominant religion in the West.

In comparison, Islam is a younger religion. Before Muhammad was born in 570 AD, the entire Arabian Peninsula was inhabited by loosely organized polytheistic nomadic groups. In his earlier years, Muhammad did business throughout the eastern Mediterranean and learnt about Judaism and Christianity. At 40, he created Islam and then established the Arabian Empire. His followers later expanded the religious empire to the Arabian Peninsula and large swathes of territory in Spain, North Africa, India and East Asia. An enormous Islamic empire was born.

In the birthplace of Western civilization, three monotheistic religions were born and coexisted. The essential characteristic of a monotheistic faith is the devotion to one omnipotent god. It is exclusive by nature and tends to consider others as heretics, which breeds hatred, violence and war in many cases.

Different monotheistic religions, if geographically isolated from one another and unrelated in economic interests, could possibly live in peace. The problem is that there was hatred among these religions from the outset, since all of them considered Jerusalem as home to their religious shrines. Hence ten Crusades, lasting for about 200 years (1095 -1291). This is the largest and longest religious war in human history, causing the death of millions. The holy city was soaked in blood several times.

The end of the Crusades coincided with the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. Geographical discovery enabled Christians to find more opportunities to spread their religion in a far larger geographical space. It also gave markets and colonies for the later development of capitalism. With the Reformation and later the Industrial Revolution, Western culture marched from reason to science and from industrialization to modernization. It was then promoted in the whole world as a universal value system. While making progress in its values such as human rights, freedom and equality, Western Christian culture also started to move toward religious toleration.

While Western civilization moved forward as a whole, Islam in some areas didn’t develop at the same pace. Some countries and regions are still suffering from extreme poverty, which breeds Islamic extremism. This becomes the deadlock of Western civilization in the new situation. “In the 1980s and 1990s, the mutual tolerance of the Muslim and Christian society declined sharply.” 911 is a result of this conflict. Ten years later, the problem remains unresolved. During this period, there is cultural regression in the West, in its attempt to tackle the conflict of civilizations.