West has not had a complete monopoly over these two human products.
And yet, I believe it is safe to say that basically the rich record of human experience in Asia is still being ignored by the Occident. The problem is not merely that we are satisfied with an extremely spotty and superficial knowledge of this sector of human experience, as compared to our much more comprehensive and profound knowledge of the West. The real problem is that we tend to regard Asian experience as merely a source for supplementary materials that can be used to confirm or possibly even amplify the solid truths about mankind already derived from the experience of the Occident.
We remain entirely parochial in our simple assumption that the Mediterranean world, that is the Ancient Orient and then Europe in modern times, forms the central core of human history and that all the rest is purely peripheral and ancillary in nature. We are so smug in this assumption that we do not even bother to state it explicitly. In this regard we are no better than the premodern Chinese, who, with certainly as valid reasons, simply took for granted that their civilization was the only one in the world. We are no more willing than the Chinese were a few centuries ago to recognize that other civilizations are as good starting points as our own for an understanding of men and their relationships with one another. The anthropologists and to a lesser extent the sociologists have in their own fields cracked this limiting cultural mold, but for the most part the general concepts and theories about human civilization that are used in the West, both by scholars and the general public, have been derived exclusively from Occidental experience, while the experience of Asians, in so far as it is used at all, is cited merely as supplementary evidence for these supposedly established truths.
Generalizations such as I have been making are of course far easier to state than to prove. All I can hope to do with my very limited knowledge and in the still more limited time we have before us is to give two or three illustrations from my own field of special interest, with the hope that these may suggest to you other examples in your respective fields which may help to substantiate my general thesis.
Since I am basically an historian who deals with East Asia, I hope you will forgive me for limiting my more specific remarks largely to historical theory and to this one part of Asia. For illustrative purposes, however, one geographic area is as good as another, and actually the field of historical theory, while sounding extremely remote and theoretical to American ears, lies at the heart of the most immediate and practical problems of Asia.
Asians realize that they are going through a period of cata-
