A very interesting essay.
It seems to me that Platonic thinking has very little to do with present time Western culture, and that Plato was a much more profound, comprehensive and even paradoxical philosopher than is usually understood. It seems to me that the true culprit and originator of our railway-line thinking is Aristotle. Even more so because his philosohy was resurrected by Thomas Aquinas and the various Scholastics that were thus influenced by him.

Furthermore it seems to me that the person who has had the most influence on the essence and form of our present time culture is the monstrous John Calvin. His influence is very much alive and well in Puritan America with its dreadful double-minded attitudes to anything to do with the body and sexuality. But from a more humorous perspective the two philosophers that best epitomize the current American ethos are Beavis & Butthead - there allpied politics was graphically illustrated in the film B & B Do America.

Another "philosopher" who is now very influential is of course the benighted Ayn Rand, especially in the USA - think Ryan and the Koch brothers.

Which outfits and organizations loudly promote the railway-line thinking and "reason" of Aristotle, Calvin, Rand and B & B, especially here in the land of Oz? The IPA of course as is amply on display at their Foundations of Western Civilization website:

http://westerncivilisation.ipa.org.au

Check out the books on politics culture and religion published by Connor Court, the chairman of which is John Roskam. Most of them are worse than woeful, including the ones by George Pell.

Further evidence of the back to the past attitude, and the use of railway line reason, promoted by the usual conservative suspects occurred with the pope in his now infamous Regensburg speech when he called for the use of such reason as a tool to defend ourselves against Islam, to innoculate ourselves against various relativisms, and to defend/prove the presumed "truth" of the Christian tradition (in particular).

What is more the catholic church and its various cultural and political agendas is now effectively under the control of the same back to the past fundamentalists who specialize in very rigid railway-line thinking. I am of course referring to opus dei and similar rigidly patriarchal "traditionalist" outfits.

Which leads me back to the IPA Western Civilization website which contains a promotion of Robert P George who some people pretend is Americas most influential "conservative" christian thinker" - if that is so then the USA is in deep horse-manure trouble. George is of course an opus dei hack, as indeed are most of the people he associates with. What is more many of the right-wing think (stink) tanks (etc) that George associates with have very close associations with opus dei too. As indeed do some of the "conservative" members of the USA Supreme Court.

Without going into the intricacies of Chinese traditional thought, there are some major problems with Reg Little’s scenario.

*He several times refers to the “(Platonic) railway track thinking” of Western thought. He describes the Enlightenment as part of it. This overlooks the fact that the Enlightenment broke with the imposed Platonic railway tracks and rigid castes and freed human beings to discover truth in their own way, developing criteria for objective distinction of truth from untruth. It’s called science.

*Mao Tse Tung declared “let a hundred flowers bloom” . Democracy Wall came out of it, but calls for honest government appeared. Quickly the Peking thugs snapped: “We didn’t mean poisonous weeds”, closed the Wall down and arrested the dissentients. Back to the railway tracks, fellers.

*Unrest in pursuit of freedom to leave the tracks grew until the Peking thugs cracked down on it in Tienanmen Square. “Politics flows from the barrel of a gun” was the Confucian answer.

*Reg Little refers to the departures from Enlightenment values in the West – e.g. corporate control of the electoral process. Enlightenment values are in constant struggle with throwbacks, to which competition from Confucianism can be added.

*Learning of facts has been derided in the West as rote learning. Factual learning can be achieved using much better ways of internalising factual knowledge. Parroting ancient texts is not factual learning.

*China’s burst of internationally competitive economic success is not based on anything more complex than a cowed, cheap workforce forbidden to dissent or engage in trade union disputation. Nose to the tracks, you folks.

[PS: Bravo Daffy Duck – absolutely right!]

'The mainstream Platonic tradition of thought is particularly hostile to ambiguous nuance, holistic thought, intuitive insight and organic dynamics. Indeed, the values, doctrines and dogmas of contemporary Platonic thought have many qualities in common with the brainwashing caricatured by George Orwell in his novel 1984 about a tyrannical, totalitarian future, where all thought is dictated by an all powerful "Big Brother".'

A generalisation lacking any substantive evidence. Utter rubbish. Orwell's book focused on the Eastern European Socailism and would see a parallel in the modern day Chinese communist command society and economy.

To claim 'there is a dynamic East and South East Asian community, led by administrative and commercial elites shaped by a Confucian tradition of education and thought. This is consolidating its leadership in global education, finance, production and technology. rubbish.' denies the facts.

Most of the modern Chinese elites have western educations.

China's economy is a command economy which has over produced 20 years worth of housing at the current urbanisation rate of 1.5%.

China's strenght in trade comes from an artifically supported currency and vast sources of 'slave labour'. ie it's economy is artificial and will eventually collapse like all artificial command economies.

China simply supplies cheap labour and conditions that are exploited by western industry or China copies and follows western advances.

Western traditions have stood the test of time and are producing the current technological advances. I predict that will continue because the extrovert and outward focused western traditions adopt and adapt. That's our record.

China is introverted and self-focused it can never adopt and adapt and will be forever 'playing catch-up' while tied exclusively to the introverted and self-focused Cofusion traditions.

Thought provoking article. It will be extremely difficult for Westerners who have only ever known and lived in a Western culture to be able to dispense with instinctive attachment to their familiar type of thinking. With that comes little or neglible knowledge of all things non Anglo-American.

If all that life is about is success in the global economic battlefield, then the Nazi approach would do just as well, perhaps even better than the Confucian.