The Human Philosophy of the Orient vs the Occidental

Well, who might have thought? The Western world is reacting, thinking and expressing itself from the perspective of Western values, ideas, priorities and philosophy. Understandable. A little introspection might go a long way, however, to the realization that the society against which they are expressing their unhappy unease does not reflect their own. While values of human rights may be thought to be universal, they represent an issue that is not quite regarded in the same light in some areas of the world.

Regret that Egypt has fallen into dysfunctional chaos is understandable. Given the general atmosphere throughout the Middle East in the fall-out of an unusual year where the spring of 2013 brought a series of events to unfold that had their genesis in the turmoil of a previous year that swept through North Africa and the Middle East culminating in paroxysms of violence in Syria and now Egypt, but touching Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, a feverish infection of unrest and turmoil has resulted.

Outsiders view the wretched violence with the dismay of those who generally manage their own affairs with far less brutal emotion edging ultimately toward butchery on such a grand scale as has been seen in Syria, in Afghanistan and increasingly in Pakistan. The one-time pillar of Arab pride, the country that offered pan-nationalism as a cure for never-ending conflicts within the region, has now itself dissolved into a tsunami of conflicting demands.

Who might have imagined that when Iran's monarchy fell to the demands of a citizenship hungry for the end of an oppressive regime another, far more malevolent in its rigidly devoted adherence to a fanatic view of Islam would take its place? And, having done, mirrored in part what Saudi Arabia had initiated years earlier, in its puritanical, punishing view of Islam, as all-encompassing registrar and curator of human life in every corner of human existence.

The West laments their own longing forsaken by reality; the importation of a political diagram whose mechanics would bring neat and tidy democracy to an area of the world which has never rested comfortably in a neat and tidy manner among and between competing interests, where cooperation between conflicted ideas of nationhood, religion, ideology and sociology has always resulted in conflict; that reaffirmation of the heritage of war and violence triumphant.

If human nature is such that others learn by observing practices that produce enviable results, and themselves attempt to emulate those practises to earn those typical results, perhaps in time what was once called the Orient will come to more closely resemble the Occident. Imposing the virtues of democratic action as superior to the imperial entitlements of theocracies, monarchies and sheikdoms, resulting in a more just society and less ostentatious corruption may feed the ardour of humanitarians; it assaults the sensibilities of their targets.

Who resent the interference, resist the criticism, take pride in their own venerable customs and persuade those leaning toward them in the confidence of accepting understanding that the time and place for moral relativism is now, and all is forgiven - but please, and kindly please make more of a concerted effort to keep those excesses from full expression resulting in mass carnage.