Exploration of another culture can enable us to see more clearly how not to sacrifice human warmth and grace.
An Indian story that parallels the Oedipal myth reveals quite a different attitude toward femininity. Again, it is myth that provides psychological insight into a cultural attitude. The Hindu sacred scripture the Mahabharata dates from about the same period as our Old and New Testaments; it is three times their combined length. A small segment of the Mahabharata, the story of Nala and Damayanti, offers us another perspective on the balance between masculine and feminine values. The characters in the Mahabharata manage to safeguard the principle of femininity and relatedness somewhat better than our Western heroes do.
A word of caution: I do not present this Eastern culture as superior to our own; but we can learn about the feminine from it. Failure to develop technologically pushed Indian society toward economic and environmental crisis. But it has maintained a valuation of human relations that greatly surpasses that of Western society.
Traditional India refused to adopt any technology that, directly or indirectly, would endanger human relationships and feminine values. Assembly-line techniques, relocation of families to cities, breaking of family ties by sending the wage earner to a distant workplace—such practices were viewed as too dangerous. To safeguard the feminine values, India sacrificed industrial progress. No traditional Indian would challenge this choice.
In Western culture, we encouraged industrialization but failed to safeguard our relationships, both among ourselves and with the world around us. As a result, we are in great danger of destroying relational life, just as India is in danger of being engulfed by poverty and famine. The threat to the Indians’ sense of relatedness grows as they abandon their traditional ways and adopt Western attitudes. The horror stories one hears of the breakdown of relationships in modern India often seem attributable to their espousal of Western ways.
History will have to provide a verdict on who has served humanity better—the materialistic West or the relationship-oriented East. Probably the only intelligent verdict will approve that endeavor which serves both masculine and feminine values and safeguards the value of each.