CAN ASIANS THINK? by Kishore Mahbubani

I picked up a book by Kishore Mahbubani entitled Can Asians Think? Understanding the Divide Between East -- Steerforth Press, 2002. I don't know how I came across the book. I was googling something else in Amazon.com when it popped up, and I bought it.

I liked the anti-PC title, and thought, it's true: they can't think! Buddhism is so depressing because it actually seems to ask you to turn OFF your mind, as if that's a good thing. I bought it in the hope that Mahbubani would make fun of Asia, which at least within poetry circles seems to me to have an exaggerated importance, with Confucius and Lao-tse taking the rightful place of Jesus Christ and Martin Luther.

Mahbubani is a "career diplomat and native of Singapore," it says on the back page.

I always read books backwards, so I started on the last page (most authors build up to their main point, and I want to get right at that, and then scroll forwards in the book, to see how they're getting there). The last essay is a two-page piece entitled "The Ten Commandments for Developing Countries in the Nineties."

Commandment Number 7:

"Thou shall scrub the idea of Karl Marx out of thy mind and replace them with the ideas of Adam Smith. The Germans have made their choice. Thou shall follow suit."

(p. 191).

The book is refreshingly clear and simple to read, and he tries to remain brief. About Pol Pot and company, he argues that Cambodians liked him not because he was killing half of them, but because he was at least for Cambodia. The Vietnamese had expansionisticalalitarianesque ideas, and this meant that the Cambodians wanted someone who would save Cambodia. This made sense to me.

Mahbubani argues that the Asian can think, and that we ought to listen. But there are some big infrastructure problems. Myanmar for instance doesn't have a free press. The Protestant Revolution's use of the printing press has never made it to the East. Even China blocks many internet sites. Asia boasts many countries without a free press. Before our intervention in Afghanistan, we didn't seem to care that Afghan women couldn't read, or that Algerians had a bigger clampdown on freedoms than the Myanmarese.

Mahbubani believes that much of western journalism is exactly the opiate of the people. Not only does the western press (he lives in NYC) report kerfuffles rather than the "real news," but when they do go after the real news, they spend lots of ink on the president's choice of a new dog, or his wife's planting turnips with the cute kids, or years of ink on an affair by some candidate and his staffer, and Mahbubani actually cites Christ, "Let the one without sin cast the first stone."

He says the Philippines (among Asian countries) have in fact had the greatest freedom of the press, but they are still a backward country.

He said many western journalists backed the communist regime in North Vietnam, which led to a disaster for the people of South Vietnam. Journalists went nuts when Tiananmen Square took place, but said nothing while 50 million were killed in the Cultural Revolution. He said the western press depends on feeding frenzies where they all cover what the others are covering, once they sense money in a story.

We assume in the west that freedom of speech should be a guaranteed right, and that it is what makes us a better people.

But Mahbubani thinks the west is drifting into moral chaos and that our journalists are leading the way. Since the decline of church attendance in the 1950s "The United States has undertaken a massive social experiment, tearing down social institution after social institution that restrained the individual. The results have been disastrous. Since 1960 the US population has increased 41 percent while violent crime has risen by 560 percent, single-mother births by 419 percent, divorce rates by 300 percent, and children living in single-parent homes by 300 percent. This is massive social decay. Many a society shudders at the prospect of this happening on its shores. But instead of travelling overseas with humility, Americans confidently preach the virtues of unfettered individual freedom, blithely ignoring the social consequences" (97).

"Most Asian societies would be shocked by the sight of gay-rights activists on their streets. And in most of them, if popular referendums were held, they would vote overwhelmingly in favor of the death penalty as well as censorship of pornography" (79).

The book is an eye-opener. Mahbubani writes clearly and well. His essays have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Asiaweek, Terrorism, among others, and was originally published in Singapore.

The book isn't exactly what I had hoped for when I saw the jarring title. It's still a very good read that de-centers the western viewpoint and provides a rich and new perspective.