Satirist C.N. Parkinson has turned sober, bidding farewell to the
bureaucratic tomfoolery for which he is famous. Now he savors the
past, present and future of East/West rivalries, and their
incestuous interrelations. For him, Asia and Europe are opposite
sides of the same mass, just as they are- so to speak, opposite
sides of one coin; heads it's the East, tails it's the West.
Parkinson of course uses no such mart-like metaphor; without a
murmur of acknowledgement to Vico's cycles, Toynbee's challenge and
response, Adams' thermodynamics, he sputters, sparks and splurges
through culture conflicts, rising and falling civilizations, class
consciousness as a generating force, etc. However the one world
assimilation is not in the scheme of things unless nature learns
not to abhor a vacuum; growth insures decay, resentment breeds
resistance, revolutionaries become administrators, and vice versa.
Still it is not all gloom and grim ineluctability. If we ask the
right questions, we can maybe prescribe the right geopolitical
preventive medicine to achieve peaceful co-existence. That's the
message. The burden of the book offers here and there valuable
visitations to the Greeks and Romans, Chinese and Indians, English
and Americans. It notes the interchange of techniques and
temperaments, the differing commercial and religious notes,
Occidental Individualism, Oriental universalism. It is
mellifluously scholarly- like gliding on a stream- and Parkinson
makes intricate ideas almost effortlessly easy. But ??ater one
realizes that there are vast oceans of other explanations and/or
explorations. (Kirkus Reviews)
The author reviews history from Sumerian days to the present
time to show that throughout its course, East and West have
alternately been dominant, the periodic decline of one civilization
creating a cultural vacuum that was filled by the adjacent rising
culture.
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