TAGORE, ON EASTERN AND WESTERN CIVILIZATION
"We are asking ourselves everywhere in the East. ‘Is this frightfully overgrown [Western] power really great? It can bruise us from without, but can it add to our wealth of spirit? It can sign peace treaties, but can it give peace?'" In 1922, Tagore wrote "East and West," an essay that examines what principles anchor Eastern and Western civilizations and why exactly the West craves dominance over the rest of the world. Tagore pleads for mankind to remember that "man is a spiritual being" so that the peoples of the world may live and exchange ideas and culture wholly in peace.
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“The time has come when Europe must know that the forcible parasitism which she has been practising upon the two large continents of the world — the two most unwieldy whales of humanity — must be causing to her moral nature a gradual atrophy and degeneration.” "Possibly they ignore the fact that commercial and political cannibalism, profitably practised upon foreign races, creeps back nearer home; that the cultivation of unwholesome appetites has its final reckoning with the stomach which has been made to serve it. For, after all, man is a spiritual being, and not a mere living money bag jumping from profit to profit, and breaking the backbone of human races in its financial leapfrog." “But the reason is because the West has not sent out its humanity to meet the man in the East, but only its machine.” “Earnestly I ask the poet of the western world to realize and sing to you with all the great power of music which he has, that the East and the West are ever in search of each other, and that they must meet not merely in the fulness of physical strength, but in fulness of truth.” |