The Middle-East is still heavily reliant on technology from the West. This can be seen at every aspect of Middle Eastern society from the keen uptake of the latest gadgets such as smartphones to the reliance on technology and infrastructure for their economic exports.
The following excerpt from a text by Nogueira sheds some light into the origins of the disparity between West and East which has much to do with the rapid industrialisation and urbanisation in Western nations. This technological change, which was readily accepted by Western cultures, influenced its culture and subsequently world politics.
“The distance between the worlds – West and East – was in fact considerable. The premises of life were different and, frequently, opposing. Existence was oriented to mutually exclusive or non-coinciding values. The social and moral stages of the one and the other were so disparate that a meeting [of the two] was not viable. To a rural and agricultural society, Europe was unexpectedly opening the doors of urbanism and industrialisation. To the patterns of an ancient feudalism, of a patriarchal matrix, in which the individual and the state were subordinated to the family, the West counterpoised the primacy of the human person and of the state organism. To a pluriform religiosity, partaking simultaneously of Confucian, Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic traditions, the West responded with a philosophy of Hellenic origin a religion with Hebraic and Christian roots. The millenary concerns of a developed culture dedicated entirely to literary forms of ethical and social content and impregnated with philosophical subjectivism were disregarded by the Western obsession with scientific invention, seeking control of physical factors and progress in the area of the natural sciences. For the cult of ancestors the West substituted a practical social humanitarianism. On the notion of personal obedience, which revered the wisest or oldest, the European superimposed a concept of organic discipline sanctioned by general law.”
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