Taiwan’s faith is a fundamentally different approach than Western religion, more aligned with earthly superficiality and materialism. The majority of temples, like the above one, are singular affairs, each a varying mash-up of Daoism, Buddhism, ancestor worship, and Chinese folk religion, all jammed with idols, icons, effigies, and other devotional objects. Faith is personal, malleable, and image-based, and most importantly, the connection between humans and their God(s) is very different6. Rather than humans seeking the transcendent Good by devotion to a powerful God, they believe in Gods that can be urged, nudged, and even bet on to satisfy their human wants and needs. Or, rather than building a City of Man to try and approximate the City of God, Chinese folk religions believe the City of Man can win over the City of God, with enough urging, offerings, and temples. That’s a very different relationship, devotional versus transactional, acceptance versus persuasive, even if sometimes the required “proper human behavior” overlaps.
I do believe there’s a direct connection between that lack of/different faith, and the intense Asian-style materialism I’ve now seen in Taiwan, Korea, China, and Hong Kong. In each I’ve seen/felt a pronounced spiritual emptiness, an unbound secular materialism that approaches pleasure-seeking narcissism, that has left me frustrated. The clichéd version of a cultural vapidness akin to gorging on cotton candy, and the collectible industry and its fetishization of the cute, is symptomatic of that.
[China] have a “just good enough” ethos that shows up most noticeably in their construction, where everything is less solid than it appears. This extends beyond the physical, and that “surface level is good enough” attitude makes China a simulacrum, so when you leave China, and land in Taipei, Seoul, or Hong Kong, you experience an unmistakable sensation of, “Ok. This is the genuine thing. It’s all more solid.”
[D]iversity is [the United States’] saving grace. We are a much less united country, with a lot more variations in how we live, how we think, and what we aspire to. The stereotype of the NE Asian countries as being largely uniform in thought, while an oversimplification, is certainly true relative to the US, and that makes the superficiality even more pronounced, and suffocating.
There’s another difference, which is that I believe we still feel bad about our materialism. We still have enough cultural memory of our far more sacred past (Protestant work ethic, civic virtue, genuine community) to recognize the emptiness we are embracing, even as we dismantle it. That tension, that guilt, the nagging sense something’s gone wrong, is largely absent in China, because the guardian class doesn’t allow it, or believe it. They’re building a society that embraces our worst tendencies, without any of our compensating doubts.