Alas...   
      
   Iain McGilchrist 'in The Master and His Emissary'   
      
   "I do not propose to deal in any detail with non-Western culture. Partly this   
   is a function of my ignorance; partly the scope of such a book would threaten   
   to be unmanageable. I also wonder if the same cataclysmic changes in the   
   intellectual climate are    
   really to be found outside of the West: I will have some reflections to make   
   towards the end of the book on hemisphere balance in Far Eastern cultures   
   which suggests that the two hemispheres enjoy there a better symbiosis than   
   they do in the West."   
      
   "But there may have been important shifts in other cultures, possibly    
   coincident, in some cases, with those in the West: Karl Jaspers certainly   
   thought there was a crucial shift in the way we see the world that occurred   
   not only in the West, but in    
   China, and India, at the same time that it occurred in Ancient Greece, between   
   about 800 and 200 BC. He called this a pivotal period, or Achsenzeit   
   (sometimes translated ‘axial age’), in world history, and in his The   
   Origin and Goal of History    
   identified common characteristics between some of the greatest thinkers of the   
   period, including Plato, Buddha and Confucius. 2 This was also the period of   
   Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, the Upanishads, and the Hebrew prophets. Similarly, some   
   of the developments    
   in the West have parallels elsewhere: with regard to the Reformation, one   
   could point to other times and places in which the visual image was   
   proscribed, and where there was a text-based, black-and-white, intolerant   
   fundamentalism, at odds with any    
   richer understanding of myth and metaphor: such tendencies form an important   
   part of the history of some other religions, including Islam. But there is   
   nothing like the extraordinary divarication of culture that seems to have   
   characterised the   
   history of the West – no equivalent of the Enlightenment, with its   
   insistence on just one, rectilinear, way of conceiving the world, and (because   
   there was no need for it) no Romanticism that aimed to redress it. As Max   
   Weber demonstrated in his    
   histories of Chinese and Indian culture, and of Judaism, it was only in   
   the West that unchecked, acquisitive rationalism in science, capitalism and   
   bureaucracy took hold. 3 ‘It is sometimes asked why the Scientific   
   Revolution occurred in the West in the modern era and not, say, in China, or   
   mediaeval Islam, or mediaeval    
   Paris or Oxford,’ notes Stephen Gaukroger, at the outset of his magisterial   
   exploration of the rise of science, and of the reasons why, in the West, there   
   has been a ‘gradual assimilation of all cognitive values to scientific   
   ones’. 4 He continues,    
   But it is the Scientific Revolution that requires explanation, not these   
   developments … [In those other cultures where there have been major   
   scientific advances] science is just one of a number of activities in the   
   culture, and attention devoted to it    
   changes in the same way attention devoted to the other features may change,   
   with the result that there is competition for intellectual resources within an   
   overall balance of interests in the culture… . [In the West] the traditional   
   balance of interests    
   is replaced by a dominance of scientific concerns, while science itself   
   experiences a rate of growth that is pathological by the standards of earlier   
   cultures, but is ultimately legitimated by the cognitive standing that it   
   takes on. This form of    
   scientific development is exceptional and anomalous."   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)