Of course it is in externals that Westernization is most pronounced. The
Indian or Turkish "intellectual," holding Western university degrees and
speaking fluently several European languages, and the wealthy prince or
pasha, with his motor-cars, his racing-stables, and his annual "cure" at
European watering-places, appear very Occidental to the casual eye. Such
men wear European clothes, eat European food, and live in houses partly
or wholly furnished in European style. Behind this facade exists every
possible variation of inner life, from earnest enthusiasm for Western
ideals to inveterate reaction.
These varied attitudes toward Westernism are not parked off by groups or
localities, they co-exist among the individuals of every class and every
land in the East. The entire Orient is, in fact, undergoing a prodigious
transformation, far more sudden and intense than anything the West has
ever known. Our civilization is mainly self-evolved; a natural growth
developing by normal, logical, and relatively gradual stages. The East,
on the contrary, is undergoing a concentrated process of adaptation
which, with us, was spread over centuries, and the result is not so much
evolution as revolution--political, economic, social, idealistic,
religious, and much more besides. The upshot is confusion, uncertainty,
grotesque anachronism, and glaring contradiction. Single generations
are sundered by unbridgeable mental and spiritual gulfs. Fathers do not
understand sons; sons despise their fathers. Everywhere the old and the
new struggle fiercely, often within the brain or spirit of the same
individual. The infinite complexity of this struggle as it appears in
India is well summarized by Sir Valentine Chirol when he speaks of the
many "currents and cross-currents of the confused movement which is
stirring the stagnant waters of Indian life--the steady impact of alien
ideas on an ancient and obsolescent civilization; the more or less
imperfect assimilation of those ideas by the few; the dread and
resentment of them by those whose traditional ascendancy they threaten;
the disintegration of old beliefs, and then again their aggressive
revival; the careless diffusion of an artificial system of education,
based none too firmly on mere intellectualism, and bereft of all moral
or religious sanction; the application of Western theories of
administration and of jurisprudence to a social formation stratified on
lines of singular rigidity; the play of modern economic forces upon
primitive conditions of industry and trade; the constant and unconscious
but inevitable friction between subject races and their alien rulers;
the reverberation of distant wars and distant racial conflicts; the
exaltation of an Oriental people in the Far East."[76] These lines,
though written about India, apply with fair exactitude to every other
portion of the Near and Middle East to-day. As a French writer remarks
with special reference to the Levant: "The truth is that the Orient is
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