The Global Issue

The world expects important decisions from the Washington Conference, which is to take place in November. Although the Western powers have listed disarmament and the issues of the Pacific as a kind of program for this meeting, only the latter will be seriously considered at first, with the former being seen as a kind of moral decoration. For it is in the Pacific Ocean that the lines converge on which the attention of the powers on which the fate of the world depends today is focused: North America, England, Japan. If one examines the interests at stake, one will recognize their economic character as the truly decisive one. The parties want to come to terms on economic advantages; and they will disarm or rearm to the extent that these advantages make it necessary. They cannot do otherwise. For the way the individual states have developed, they must act as economic powers; and all other questions can only appear to them in the light that emanates from their economic motives.

But Europe and North America, with the way of thinking that their own historical development has given them, will encounter the most serious obstacles in Asia. What the South African minister Smuts said at the London Empire Conference seems significant to many. He said that in the future, political attention could no longer be focused on the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea, but would have to be directed towards the Pacific Ocean for the next fifty years. But the actions that will be taken under the influence of this view must clash with the will of the Asians. The world economy, which has been developing for about five decades, should continue to develop internally, should involve the peoples of Asia in its sphere in a way that has only just begun.

However, this will not be possible if other conditions for international understanding do not arise. It will not be possible to do business with the peoples of Asia if we cannot win their trust. But trust can only be gained to a certain extent on a purely economic basis. This will not be enough for what we have in mind. We will have to win the hearts and minds of the Asian people. Without this, all contact will be undermined by the mistrust of these people.

And in contrast to this, world issues of the greatest importance arise. In the course of the last few centuries, the Westerners have developed schools of thought and feeling that arouse the mistrust of the Asians. No matter how much the Asian may learn about Western science and the technical results of this science, it does not attract him; it repels him. If he sees his Asian fellow countrymen, the Japanese, leaning towards Western civilization, he regards them as renegades from true Asianism. He looks upon Western culture as something inferior to the inner riches of his own spiritual life. He does not see that he is lagging behind in material progress; he sees only his spiritual aspirations, and these appear to him to be superior to those of Westerners. Nor does he find the way in which they relate to Christianity to be sufficient to match the depth of his religious experience. What he now learns about this way of life, he regards as religious materialism; and the depth of Christian experience does not now confront him.

The Western nations will face impossible questions if they do not take this antagonism of souls into account in their world-political perceptions. As long as one regards this antagonism as a sentimentality with which the practical man of life does not concern himself, one will only work towards world-political chaos. One will have to learn to regard as practical impulses things that have so far only been regarded as the ideology of dreamers.

And the West could make this change of heart. So far, it has only developed the external side of its nature. It has achieved what the Asian does not understand and never will want to understand. But this external side arises from an inner strength that has not yet revealed itself in its uniqueness. This power can be developed, and then it will be able to conquer the achievements in the material world and add to them the results of a spiritual life, which for the Asian may represent values of the world.

Of course, one can say against such an assertion: In the face of Asian barbarism, the West has internalization, soulfulness, and indeed the “higher” culture. This is certainly true. But that is not the point. What is important is that Westerners can develop a deep soul, but their history has led them not to bring the soul into public life; the Asian may be childlike and even superficial in his soul, but he brings it into public life. Nor does the contrast mentioned here have anything to do with good and evil. Nor does it have anything to do with beautiful and ugly, artistic and inartistic. But it does have to do with the fact that the Asian experiences his feelings and his mind in his external sensual world, while the Westerner's soul remains inside when he surrenders to the world of his senses. The Asian finds the spirit by living sensually; he often finds a bad spirit there, but a spirit nonetheless. No matter how closely Westerners are connected to the spirit within themselves, their senses escape this spirit and strive towards a mechanically conceived and ordered world.

Naturally, Westerners will not adopt a spiritual way of thinking and feeling for the sake of Asians. They can only do so out of their own spiritual needs. The Asian question cannot even be the reason for this. But the material civilization of the West has reached the point where it must itself perceive its revelations as unsatisfactory, where its humanity must feel inwardly empty and desolate. The soul of the Western man must strive for the interiorization of the whole of existence, for a spiritual grasp of life, if it understands itself aright at the present moment in its development.

This striving is a matter demanded by the present situation in the West itself. It coincides with the necessary world-political focus on the East. And the West will continue to indulge in disastrous illusions about the great tasks of the time as long as it fails to realize that without the will to renew the soul life, further human progress is impossible. One can feel spiritual shame when one sees what the Asian calls his spiritual superiority.

And it is only deception when the Westerner absorbs the way of thinking of the ancient Orient as a spiritual good that he adds to his material acquisitions as a supplement. The spiritual content through which the Western man can make his science, his technology, and his economic abilities truly humane must come from the abilities that he can develop within himself. “Ex oriente lux” many have said. But the light coming from outside does not become perception of light if it is not received by an inner light.

Soulless world politics must become a spiritual one. Of course, the development of the soul is an intimate human matter. But the deeds of a person with an internalized soul life are links in the external world order. The commercial sense that the Asian gets to know about the European is rejected in the East; a soul that reveals spiritual content will inspire trust. It may seem practical only for the old ways of thinking to answer the question of how to make China an economic area that presents its results to the Western powers; but the truly practical question of the future will be how to communicate with the souls of the people living in Asia. World economy can only be an outer body for a soul that must be found for it.

It may appear to some to be rather ideological that a consideration of the times begins with the Washington Conference and ends with the demands of the soul. Yet in our fast-paced times, many of those who now live and spurn ideas may yet find that the denial of the soul will not prove to be a practical approach to life.