Ahh, this nice post could form the beginning of a great discussion for an evening between on the East and the West, spanning literature and technology, if the p

Ahh, this nice post could form the beginning of a great discussion for an evening between on the East and the West, spanning literature and technology, if the participants are enlightened (some people do tend to take things personally on these matters) and the wine is good. One discussion topic could be why Gutenberg's press had the explosive effect it had in Europe and not in China? Tyndale smuggling his printed bibles to England may be mentioned. Another, harder discussion, would be why such topics, i.e. "we invented X hundreds of years before you!" still entice people from the "East" and cause resentment. Not able to do that on this board, let me give you the following lengthy quotation instead, from Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book, (for me) his best work so far [I mostly used Maureen Freely's bad translation, made a few changes]. This is one of the best novels I know trying to analyze the "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet", which in a number of very few countries (Turkey foremost, but Russia, too, and some Balkan countries perhaps) has an indelible effect on daily life. <quote> Whenever I venture into the endless saga about what the West stole from the East and East from the West, I think this: If this realm of dreams we call the world is but a house we roam like sleepwalkers, then our literary traditions are like wall clocks, there to make us feel at home. So: 1. To say that one of these wall clocks is right and another wrong is utter nonsense. 2. To say that one is five hours ahead of the other is also nonsense; by using the same logic you could just as easily say that it’s seven hours behind. 3. For much the same reason, it is 9:35 according to one clock and it just so happens that another clock also says its 9:35, anyone who claims that second clock is imitating the first is spouting nonsense. A year before he attended Averroes's funeral in Cordoba, Ibn Arabi, who would write two hundrend mystical texts before his own demise, found himself in Morocco; it was during his sojourn that he penned a text inspired by the Al-Isra sura of the Koran. [...] Now, anyone who reads Ibn Arabi's account of his travels with his guide through the seven heavens and concludes, after noting that he was thirty-five years old at the time of writing, that Nizam, the girl of his dreams was right, and Beatrice wrong, or that Ibn Arabi was right and Dante wrong, or that the Book of the Israelites and Makan Al-Asra was correct while the Divine Comedy is incorrect, is perpetuating the first sort of nonsense I was describing. In the eleventh century, the Andalusian philisopher Ibn Tufeyl wrote a book about a child abandoned on a desert island; during his sojourn there he came to respect nature, the sea, the life-giving sustenance afforded to him by a doe, the certainty of death, the heavens above and the "divine truths"; but claiming that Hayy Ibn Yakzan is six six hundred years ahead of Robinson Crusoe or that, observing the latter describes the tools and objects in greater detail, that Ibn Tufeyl was six hundred years behind Daniel Defoe is an example of the second kind of nonsense. </quote> You can search Google Books to read Pamuk's interesting example for the third kind of fallacy.