East Asian Culture
Grant Schulz
East Asian History
Every culture in the world has its own set of beliefs and values that they value and practice to make up their culture. East Asian culture has been around for hundreds of years, so their culture has been around and evolving for a long time. They have many cultural ideas and values that are similar to ours, and they even help shape how we live today in Western Civilization. But, along with the similarities, there are many differences between the two cultures and the ways they think about life and the world around them. The first is the East Asian emphasis on context and social hierarchy compared to the focus on social equity in the West. In East Asian culture they had emperors and huge dynasties rule the land for very long periods at a time. They believed it was important to have very distinct levels of social class, with every level staying sincere to their duty to help make the society flourish. They believed if everyone stayed true to their social role it would be the most effective and helpful to their society. West culture, on the other hand, did not have set classes and believed in social equity. The idea that everyone has just as good of chance as becoming high in the social order at the start. Another difference between the ways these cultures thought is thinking of dualities. Such as things like male-female, summer-winter, square-round, active-passive, and good-evil. The difference between the two cultures is that in Western society, they treat them all as polar opposites. Something is either one or the other; they don’t go together because they are opposites. Shoppa states on page 10 that this way of thinking probably grew out of the Aristotelian penchant for categorizing through analysis, perhaps from the dualities on Manichaeism. On the other hand, East Asians see dualities as not opposites, but as two forces whose interactions create the changes in the world (Schoppa, 10.) The primary example
East Asian History
Every culture in the world has its own set of beliefs and values that they value and practice to make up their culture. East Asian culture has been around for hundreds of years, so their culture has been around and evolving for a long time. They have many cultural ideas and values that are similar to ours, and they even help shape how we live today in Western Civilization. But, along with the similarities, there are many differences between the two cultures and the ways they think about life and the world around them. The first is the East Asian emphasis on context and social hierarchy compared to the focus on social equity in the West. In East Asian culture they had emperors and huge dynasties rule the land for very long periods at a time. They believed it was important to have very distinct levels of social class, with every level staying sincere to their duty to help make the society flourish. They believed if everyone stayed true to their social role it would be the most effective and helpful to their society. West culture, on the other hand, did not have set classes and believed in social equity. The idea that everyone has just as good of chance as becoming high in the social order at the start. Another difference between the ways these cultures thought is thinking of dualities. Such as things like male-female, summer-winter, square-round, active-passive, and good-evil. The difference between the two cultures is that in Western society, they treat them all as polar opposites. Something is either one or the other; they don’t go together because they are opposites. Shoppa states on page 10 that this way of thinking probably grew out of the Aristotelian penchant for categorizing through analysis, perhaps from the dualities on Manichaeism. On the other hand, East Asians see dualities as not opposites, but as two forces whose interactions create the changes in the world (Schoppa, 10.) The primary example