How did science and medicine inspire a shift in global dominance from the West to the East in the twentieth century? How did this shift affect the economic progress and improve the historical and cultural reputation of the Eastern world?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: In the first half of the twentieth century, the intellectual hegemony of science reflected the global dominance of the West. All major new scientific initiatives came from Europe and America. The rest of the world could only endure this supremacy or attempt to imitate it. In the 1960s the pattern shifted. Non-Western countries, especially in east and south Asia, imitated Western technologies so well that they built up enough wealth to invest in their own scientific institutions. Western scientists began to turn to non-Western, and especially to Asian, traditions to help interpret some of the conflicting data their observations accumulated. The West rediscovered "Eastern wisdom," alternative medicine, and the traditional science of non-Western peoples. Other cultures renewed their confidence in their own traditions. Western scientists turned to the ancient Indian texts, the Upanishads, for consolation and insights, in a West disillusioned by the horrors of war. One of the momentous books of the twentieth century, Science and Civilisation in China, showed that, despite the poor reputation of Chinese science in modern times, China had a scientific tradition of its own, from which the West had learned the basis of most of its progress in technology until the seventeenth century. Indian scientists, meanwhile, had made similar claims for the antiquity—if not the global influence—of scientificthinking in their own country. In the 1960s, India became a favored destination for young Western tourists and pilgrims in search of values, including scientific values, different from those of their own cultures. By the 1980s, some Western scientists, dissatisfied with the terms at their disposal for describing the complexities of the cosmos that their work revealed, turned to Asian philosophies. Zen Buddhism and Daoist descriptions of nature provided some Westerners with models to interpret the universe that seemed to match scientific discoveries. Even in medicine, the showpiece science of Western supremacy in the early twentieth century, non-Western traditions gained ground. Westerners with experience of the world often came to respect and learn from the healers they met far afield. Meanwhile, in the West, traditional healing arts of non-Western peoples attracted big followings. Ethnobotany became fashionable, as medical practitioners discovered the healing plants of Amazonian forest dwellers, Chinese peasants, and Himalayan shamans. Scientists—led by anthropologists impressed by the knowledge of medicinal plants that the peoples they encountered in their work had— began to appreciate that so-called primitive peoples had a cornucopia of useful drugs unknown to Western medicine. Traditional medicine had never died out in India and China. In a remarkable reversal of the direction of influence in the late twentieth century, Western patients seeking alternative medicines turned to Indian herbalism and Chinese acupuncture, along with other forms of traditional medicine in both countries. Westerners began to travel to China and India to study herbal treatments, just as at the beginning of the century, Asian students had headed to the West for the medical learning fashionable in their day. Western demand for alternative medicine became an economic opportunity for Chinese and Indian physicians in the West.