[MD] Northrop: The Meeting of East and West II

[Arlo Bensinger]

Another Chapter Two segment, with some inserts [mine] for clarity. I 
think this foreshadows the core of the romantic/classic ideas 
presented in ZMM. As John mentions, there is also a dialogue relating 
to Native Indian values versus European values (although 
interestingly Northrop traces the 'waves' of European influences in 
Mexico through Spain and France (and latter Russia), while the 
primary U.S. influences have been German, British and Dutch. So you 
have the same Indian/European dynamic, but with very different 
flavors in Mexico versus U.S.

"Moreover, because the concern in the West with the theoretical and 
the technological and the doctrinal [classic], it represents a value 
which the Anglo-Saxon and logically Latin cultures [romatic] need. 
But the present and the future as well as the past are on [the 
native, spontaneous expression of Mexican cutlure's] side. Rooted as 
it is, through Spain, in the Arabs of the Near East, and in the 
Buddha beyond them in the Far East, the course of world events 
bringing about a merging of the Orient and the Occident is also in 
its favor. We may be reasonably sure, therefore, as Justino Fernandez 
insists, that Jose Orozco has given expression to an aesthetically 
and emotionally ultimate, intuitively given component in the nature 
of man and of things, which deserves to be cherished not merely by 
Mexico but also by the rest of the world.

But this is not the whole truth nor the end of the story. For one 
cannot be impressed with Orozco's values [romantic] without being 
reminded of Rivera's also [classic]. The latter tells us with equal 
certainty and appeal that scientific knowledge through universal 
democratic education, freeing the minds of men to accept a more 
correct theoretical conception of the nature of things, and freeing 
their bodies from disease and drudgery by means of its technology 
applied to the nation's resources, is also one of the highest and 
most perfect human values. [Mexico's youth] have not been misled by 
Jose Orozco's unjustified, negative thesis that science and 
theoretical reflection destroy the human soul, any more than the 
Mexican's generally have not been misled by Diego Rivera's equally 
unjustified, negative suggestion that the aesthetic and religious 
interests of the colonial period are entirely evil.

Other considerations support their verdict. There is no 
incompatibility whatever between the intuitive, passionate, 
immediately apprehended aesthetic values which Jose Orozco conveys 
and the postulated, theoretical, and attendant technological, 
scientific values which Diego Rivera portrays with equal artistic and 
human appeal. The ancient Indian culture showed the Mexicans, as it 
now shows us, how a geometrically informed, aesthetically vivid, 
astronomically oriented art, religion, and agriculture can function 
together harmoniously and with human appeal.

The true relation between intuitive, aesthetic, and religious feeling 
and scientific doctrine is one of mutual supplementation." (Northrop)