THE INTERNATIONAL MIND

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22743, 1 June 1937, Page 8

THE INTERNATIONAL MIND

Few subjects nowadays have such urgency as the one upon which Dr. Koo has addressed the Rotary Club —the duty and difficulty of trying to be international in mind. Most of the ills from which the world is suffering at the present time have arisen from the prevalence of a rabid nationalism. Yet their cure, as is implied in Dr. Koo's thesis, is not to be found in a neglect of national differences but rather in a wise effort to understand them. The objective is harmony, not monotony ; co-operation, not reduction of all to an identity in which there is no longer any self-possession or inner culture. Dr. Koo is unaffectedly proud, and rightly so, to be Chinese ; he feels manifestly compelled, when dealing with problems of the East, to be loyal to the requirements and opportunities of his own country. But, in precisely the fashion he recommends to others, he has reached out further than national boundaries. Travel on a world-wide scale has contributed to his education and to his ability to serve his own people among others. A similar enlargement of outlook would go far to solve all the problems of peace and human welfare. Its benefit would not come by mere obliteration of every distinctive national genius. The cosmopolitan mind, vague and formless, cannot serve like the international mind, definite and charged with a sympathy that begins in realising the best in the national self. To discover and appreciate the various backgrounds of other people, as Dr. Koo has put the need, does not necessarily mean destroying appreciation of one's own. Each must have something to contribute if the whole is to bo enriched. The tragedy of this age seems to be that, along with the multiplication of means to know each other, nations have developed an exaggerated devotion to their own interests. There is reason as well as desire in the hope that this is a temporary phase.