Why does the West hate dragons while China nearly worships them?
Is this difference a triviality, or does it suggest something deeper?
Napoleon Bonapart is attributed with saying “Let China Sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.”
Like any culture, every culture is reducible. For the purposes of physics, a cow can be represented as a sphere of the same mass. If we tried to reduce China to understand its relationship with the West, how would we do it?
Family
If they could be said to worship anything, you could say they worship their ancestors. Chinese filial piety asks you “to bury them and carry out sacrifices after their death.” The elderly are honored while they’re still alive:
Han Chinese families throughout China have had certain traditionally prescribed roles, such as the family head (家長, jiāzhǎng), who represents the family to the outside world, and the family manager (當家, dāngjiā), who is in charge of the revenues. Because farmland was commonly bought, sold, or mortgaged, families were run like enterprises, with set rules for the allocation (分家, fēnjiā) of pooled earnings and assets… In Beijing, the whole family traditionally lived together in a large rectangle-shaped house.
The Western, and especially Abrahamic traditions don’t put family so highly, and we hardly appreciate this difference. In the Old Testament, the husband and wife are asked to leave their mother and father. Christ puts himself above family relations:
Anyone who loves his father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me; and anyone who does not take up his cross and follow Me is not worthy of Me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.
Although the Abrahamic tradition doesn’t condone disrespect of your ancestors, it also doesn’t ask for absolute obedience.
Ancestor worship makes a great deal of sense. Each person is the product of an unbroken chain of reproduction from the beginning of time. The fact of your own existence means your parents did something right; it also means that their parents did something right, and so on. And the desire to keep your genetic line going is very rational. The Han Chinese are the largest ethnic group in the world. Now contrast this to Westerners worshiping Christ, who was childless.
Dragons
More children are born in dragon years than in other years. In folklore, this dragon has aspects of every one of the 11 animals of the Chinese zodiac. The Chinese believe themselves to be descendants of the dragon. The new year is celebrated with dragons. Buildings are decorated with this creature.
In the West, the dragon is an enemy. The serpent tricked Adam and Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, and was forced to crawl on its belly. In the book of Revelation, the Whore of Babylon sits on the red dragon full of names of blasphemy. Medieval art depicted dragons being slain. In Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs terrorize the visitors. In a Q and A, Mark Zuckerburg feels bad for being called a lizard, and he also married a Chinese woman. Is this dragon phobia merely a folk fear, or is there more to it?
Why do the Chinese see themselves as ancestors of dragons? Maybe there’s a way in which people really are dragons. If you collapsed the time dimension onto the 3 spacial dimensions, then all people are snake-like:
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