The Useless Tree

Charismatic Virtue

This is s post for my Chinese philosophy friends who might be able to help me understand just how Confucian exemplary leadership works.

Let's just stipulate up front: Confucians believe that the virtuous should rule and they should rule by means of the moral force of their conscientious and continuous performance of virtue.  They can't just ride on their reputations, though a well-earned reputation for doing the right thing is important.  They have to actually do the right thing, in whatever circumstance they find themselves or, failing to do the right thing, they must publicly recognize their failure and recommit themselves to doing the right thing and do it.  If the virtuous so rule, then, Confucians believe, political and social order will be created and maintained.  Something about the publicly observed actions of virtuous leaders will inspire those of lesser moral accomplishments to strive to better fulfill their social and familial duties.  And everyone lives happily ever after....

But a question arises: how exactly does this kind of exemplary moral leadership work?  How is it that the "little people" will follow the noble-minded?  Confucius does not want us to rely too heavily on law; rather, he believes in the attractive power of right action in and of itself. 

I want to suggest that Confucius is implying a kind of charisma that attaches to virtuous action, a kind of charismatic virtue.

By "charisma," I am thinking of these definitional elements from the OED:

A gift or power of leadership or authority...; aura. Hence, the capacity to inspire devotion or enthusiasm.

"Gift" may not capture the Confucian aspect here, drawn as it is from the Christian notion of grace, or gift from God.  But "aura" is helpful.  I think Confucius wants us to believe virtuous action creates an aura of sorts, and that in turn inspires a following: people will enthusiastically devote themselves to follow the virtuous leader.

We can see this suggestion of charisma in The Analects.  Here are two passages:

The Master said: "In government, the secret is Integrity [Virtue - de].  Use it, and you'll be like the polestar: always dwelling in its proper place, the other stars turning reverently about it."  2.1

子曰：為政以德，譬如北辰，居其所而眾星共之.

*    *    *    *

Asking Confucius about governing, Lord Chi K'ang said: "What if I secure those who abide in the Way by killing those who ignore Way - will that work?"

"How can you govern by killing?" replied Confucius.  "Just set your heart on what is virtuous and benevolent, and the people will be virtuous and benevolent.  The noble-minded have the Integrity [Virtue - de]  of wind, and little people the Integrity of grass.  When the wind sweeps over the grass, it bends." 12.19

季康子問政於孔子曰：「如殺無道，以就有道，何如？」孔子對曰：「子為政，焉用殺？子欲善，而民善矣。君子之德風，小人之德草。草上之風，必偃。」

Some translation points, first.  My default text is Hinton's (I know, not everyone prefers this...).  And he translates de - 德 - as "Integrity."  I like this in many cases (as does Victor Mair in his translation of the Daodejing), but here it is problematic.  So, we'll go with "virtue," which is often the translation of choice for de.  Notice, too, that Hinton translates shan - 善 - as "virtuous and benevolent."  Not bad, but it runs up against our rendering of de as "virtue."  Not to worry.  When I refer to "charismatic virtue," it is the de of the noble-minded person - 君子之德 - that I'm going for...

So, let's look at these passages.  The first one implies, on a modern reading, something like a gravitational pull (I know, Confucius himself was not thinking about gravitation... or was he?).  The North Star is the center of our universe (at least as we see it), and all the other stars are drawn to it, held in orbit around it.  In a sense, the pull of the polestar creates order for the others, which is why it is such an apt metaphor for Confucius.  And isn't that rather like charisma - some unseen force that attracts us to a person, that inspires us in some way.

The second passage also implies an unseen force, this time symbolized by wind.  But the notion of "virtue" - de - here is a bit more complicated.  It is specifically the virtue of the noble-minded person that generates the charismatic force that causes others to bend.  The virtue of the little, or common, people, enables them to yield, to recognize the righteousness of the morally accomplished leader and move where it takes them. Their virtue is to be open to the charismatic virtue of the noble-minded

Its that sense of an invisible, attractive magnetism or force that suggests something like charismatic virtue.

I'm not the only one who sees "charisma" in Confucian de (though I think it is an uncommon translation).  Robert Eno, whose marvelous on-line translations I have just discovered, also notes this connotation.  In his translation of the Analects he defines de as:

Virtue (de 德) – a very complex concept, initially related to the notion of charisma derived from power and gift-giving, developing into an ethical term denoting self-possession and orientation towards moral action.

Interesting: the connection to "gift," with its trace of the Western, Christian concept.  And I like the "self-possession," which gets back to "integrity" and the Daoist possibilities of the term.

In any event, while I think it is useful to think of Confucian de, at least the de of the noble-minded, as having an aspect of charisma, I also think we have to be careful to distinguish this from modern Weberian uses of the term. 

Weber's first definition of the term (in Part I, Chapter 3, section i.2 of Economy and Society) works fairly well from a Confucian perspective:

- resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him (charismatic authority).

But when he develops this idea a bit more )in Part I, Chapter 3, section iv.10) we run into a bit of trouble:

The term "charisma" will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional power or qualities.

The trouble comes with the suggestion that charisma attaches to some aspect of an individual's personality.   A Confucian understanding, I believe, would resist this, wanting instead to focus on actions as opposed to personal qualities.  Now, it may be true that noble-minded people who consistent perform right actions will have certain personality characteristics.  And those might be good to have.  But what matters most is not personality but action.  If a person has a good personality, but does not do the right thing, that person is not worthy of emulation, at least not until he or she does the right thing.

So, I think Confucian charismatic virtue inheres in right action, not in specific personality traits.  if a person who is not known for doing the right thing, and who has a bad personality, conspicuously performs a virtuous act, that action would have a kind of charismatic power to it: we would all see it and want to do likewise.  For Weber, if an ordinary person, i.e. one without a charismatic personality, did something extraordinary, ti would not have the same power.

Not sure what this might mean for the famous problem, raised by Weber, of the "routinization of charisma" (it would seem, in the Confucian form, to be dependent on the encouragement and reproduction of right action, as opposed to the succession of individual rulers), but Confucian charismatic virtue is not existential but performative.

Perhaps, then, I should title this: Virtuous Charismatic Action....

Confucius as Contemporary Art

Not sure what to make of Zhang Huan's new exhiibtion at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, entitled, "Q Confucius."   All I know is what I can see on the intertubes.  From that limited perspective, however, it does not appear that the artist in engaging in a facile revival of tradition.  The big animatronic Confucius bust ("Q Confucius no. 2") is speechless: the Sage is not offering us his wise words.  Rather, he just looms there, quietly inhaling and exhaling, in a shallow pool of water, a hulking presence:

It looks a bit ugly to me.  But maybe that's the point: to make the myth more concrete, more imperfect in its embodiment.  Or perhaps Zhang is simply saying that, whatever we think of the cultural ideal, some aspects of Confucianism are always already present in Chinese reality.  He is inescapable.  Whether we engage seriously with his words or not, we have to confront his eternal recurrence.  On a more mundane level, one observer quips:

— the overall effect is like you’re intruding on Confucius’s spa time.

Equally unusual is "Q Confucius no. 6," a robotic Confucius that lurches about within a steel cage.  Apparently, on the day it opened, the robot was joined in the cage by nine live monkeys (not clear if they make any additional appearances).  The monkeys are said to have symbolized, "...the primitive desire in human civilization.  Are we to assume then, since they disappeared after the first day, that Confucius is a civilizing force?  I don't think Zhang is going for that kind of didaticism.  Just look at the piece:

 

This is not a representation of a smooth and lyrical process of civilization.  It is a jerky, almost violent, performance, suggesting difficulty and pain.  Maybe this interpretation gets at it:

Zhang's show reveals the impending struggles of China's people through the acknowledgment of a forgotten way of life. Definitive answers may still be unclear, but Zhang's show asks if the solution may lie in a reclaiming of the past. Zhang's work applies to more than just a specific people, but the entire planet as we strive to find meaning in a world that feels more and more disjointed every day.

But reclaiming the past may not be a "solution."  Confucius in the cage (one wonders if Zhang is alluding to Weber's iron cage) is not settled and comfortable. He thrashes about, armless (unable to hold on to anything), wordless, uncertain.  To me, this does not suggest Confucianism as solution but, rather, Confucianism as another site of struggle and confusion and unrest.  A supposed cultural golden age of the past cannot be reclaimed in the modern/postmodern present. 

How to lose a culture war

In a speech given last October, and published in a Party theoretical journal on January 1st (Happy New Year!), China's President, Hu Jintao, throws down the cultural gauntlet:

“We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration....  We should deeply understand the seriousness and complexity of the ideological struggle, always sound the alarms and remain vigilant, and take forceful measures to be on guard and respond....”

I guess he really didn't like that last Lady Gaga song...

But seriously, it is obvious what is going on here, and it is not really anything new for China or for anywhere else in the (post)modern world for that manner.

Hu is expressing a certain anxiety regarding the instability and fluidity of national cultural identity.  Rick Santorum is pretty much with him on this, except, of course, Santorum blames "liberalism" and "hedonism," instead of "Westernization," and also would find the primary source of the problem in domestic politics as opposed to "international hostile forces" (although those European socialists are pretty dangerous....).  But the rest of it - the fear of some sort of cultural corruption; the need for vigilance in protecting the most essential aspects of cultural identity; the cultural division of the nation; the nostalgia for a purer cultural past - it's all pretty standard culture warrior talk.  Wonder what Santorum would say if he realized he was down with the CCP party line....

The quesiton, then, for Hu and Santorum and anyone who thinks he or she can somehow stop cultural change is: what is to be done? 

For Hu the answer is top-down, state control of cultural production and exchange.  That is why they are banning inane TV shows and working hard to gain "soft power" for the PRC (big PDF!).  But this strategy will certainly fail, and it will fail because it misunderstands how "culture" is produced and disseminated.

First, let's just note that the term "culture" is problematic.  What are we including in it?  I think most uses of the term tend to idealize certain practices and ideas and traditions as being essential to certain cultural identities.  In China, "Confucianism" invariably is invoked when talking about "Chinese culture."  But we need to be careful. Culture is always and everywhere larger and more dynamic than any one referent (like "Confucianism") or time period.  Culture changes; indeed, culture is always and constantly changing.  What Chinese culture is now is not what it was in the time of Confucius, much less the time of Mao, or even the time of Zhao Ziyang.  We must be open to a definition of "culture" as what people are actually doing now.  And by that definition the Carsick Cars - a popular Chinese rock band - are as much of Chinese culture as Confucius.

With that understanding of "culture" in mind, we should realize that many, many cultural products and productions are created not by the state but within civil society.  Joseph Nye, the great guru of "soft power" reminded of this last year:

After my lecture at Beijing University, a student asked how China could increase its soft power. I suggested that he ask himself why India’s Bollywood films command far greater international audiences than do Chinese films. Does India have better directors and actors? When Zhang Yimou, the acclaimed Chinese director, was asked a similar question, he replied that films about contemporary China are neutered by the censors. I told the student that much of a country’s soft power is generated by its civil society and that China had to lighten up on its censorship and controls if it wished to succeed. But I also admitted that he would probably not find my answer very helpful.

Culture, and especially cultural change, is driven by creativity, and creativity is not simply planned and executed by bureaucrats, whether state or corporate.  It emerges from workshops and theaters and garages, from within the minds of small groups of creative individuals.  

Hu Jintao does not get that.  He also does not get that a lot of what is created culturally will be bad, at least as judged by the standards of "high cultural" elite intellectuals and impresarios.  Rock and Roll, when it was first created, was seen as degenerate, even dangerous (I remember my father reacting to the Beatles when they first appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, shouting: "Apes, apes.") .  Now, of course, rock and roll is a completely mainstream cultural medium, an element of global popular culture.  

Culture can also be produced from the top-down.  States can sponsor artistic and academic work that spawns significant and popular cultural products.  But that is, I suspect, a lesser element of the broader phenomenon than "popular culture" or "low culture." 

Long story short: Hu wants to try to control culture, but in doing that he stifles it.  Yes, passage 29 of the Daodejing comes to mind here: "try to improve it and you ruin it.  Try to hold it and you lose it."  He wants to censor and manage from the top down, a move that will stifle the wider and more dynamic potential for cultural creativity within civil society.  He wants to blame the "West" for the inevitability of cultural change.  He wants to instill fear in Chinese people, fear of cultural change, in order to bolster the political power of the authoritarian regime.  He wants to deny that what many Chinese people are actually doing now is legitimately a part of "Chinese culture."  

And he will lose.  Because you can't stop cultural change.  You can't blame it on foreign bogey men.  You can't deny people their cultural expressions, even if they don't align with some ossified definition of "culture."  For example, here is a video of the Carsick Cars doing their now classic tune "Zhongnanhai" on this past New Year's Eve in Beijing (i.e. just as Hu's speed was about to be published).  A person who was there reported: "The doors to the club closed at 10:30 when there was a line of at least 200 people still waiting in the frigid weather to get in.  They had been in line for nearly two hours and many had said on various websites that they were taking time away from studying for final exams just to catch them." 

I would argue that this now counts as "Chinese culture:"

The Multiversal Dao

Seems like theoretical physicists have worked themselves into futility.  Or that, at least, is the sense that emerges from Alan P. Lightman's piece in Harper's Magazine, "The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith." 

The search for ultimate theoretical explanation of the universe has, essentially, hit a dead end.  Actually, it might be better to say it has reached point of infinite, and inexplicable, variation: the multiverse. In short, if I understand this correctly, in order to adequately account for the dynamics and development of the universe, it is now necessary to invoke the existence of an infinite number of other, alternate, universes, each with its own unique and self-consistent set of principles and parameters.  The total of all these universes is, then, the multiverse.  Lightman highlights the problems this possibility poses for science:

Alan Guth, a pioneer in cosmological thought, says that “the multiple-universe idea severely limits our hopes to understand the world from fundamental principles.” And the philosophical ethos of science is torn from its roots.....

Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science.

Science strives for explanation and calculation.  When it encounters what appears to be an inexplicable and incalculable problem it has failed in its most fundamental mission.  And that seems to be where physics is now.

Of course, none of this is surprising from a Daoist point of view.  Daoism tells us that our knowledge, indeed our language, will always be insufficient to capture the fullness and complexity of Dao (Way):

Longing to take hold of all beneath heaven and improve it... I've seen such dreams invariably fail.  All beneath heaven is a sacred vessel, something beyond all improvement.  Try to improve it and you ruin it.  Try to hold it and you lose it.... (DDJ, 29)

As Lightman points out, when science fails at cosmology, a door is open to religious interpretation, in this case "intelligent design."

If such conclusions are correct, the great question, of course, is why these fundamental parameters happen to lie within the range needed for life. Does the universe care about life? Intelligent design is one answer. Indeed, a fair number of theologians, philosophers, and even some scientists have used fine-tuning and the anthropic principle as evidence of the existence of God. For example, at the 2011 Christian Scholars’ Conference at Pepperdine University, Francis Collins, a leading geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health, said, “To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability…. [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles.”

This has never made sense to me, from a Daoist perspective.  Both the scientists and the theologians seem to believe in an absolute binary here: either there is a singular scientific explanation for the universe or there must be a god-like designer who planned out the minutia that makes our current reality possible.  Both abhor the notion of randomness.  Why is there so much anxiety about randomness?  Yes, the partiuclars of the universe, the very fine margins of the basic forces, are marvelously narrow; a very slight variation would have meant that life as we know it would be impossible.  But why shouldn't we believe that what exists now is the result of trillions and trillions of random events and interactions taking place over billions and billions of years?  

If we accept randomness we then require neither a multiverse nor a God.

Daoism, I believe, indeed ancient Chinese thought more generally, is much more comfortable with randomness and inexplicability when it comes to cosmology and cosmogony.  Here's a quote from Fredrick W. Mote's little book, Intellectual Foundations of China:

The genuine Chinese cosmogony is that of organismic process, meaning that all parts of the entire cosmos belong to one organic whole and that they all interact as participants in on spontaneously self-generating life process... Needham, analyzing that Chinese model, calls it, "an ordered harmony of wills without an ordainer."  As he describes the organismic Chinese cosmos, it emerges to our full view as one in striking contrast to all other world conceptions known to human history.  It differs from other organismic conceptions, such as classical Greek cosmologies in which a logos or demiurge or otherwise conceived master will external to creation was regarded as necessary for existence.  And it contrasts still more starkly with the ancient Semitic traditions that led to subsequent Christian and Islamic conceptions of creation ex nihilo by the hand of God, or through the will of God, and all other such mechanistic, teleological, and theistic cosmologies....(15-16)

"Spontaneous self-generating life process."  No "Big Bang," no beginning, no end, just being and non-being, time and timelessness merging one into the other... In a sense, it is a resignation that we will never understand certain aspects of the universe.  And, in fact, we do not need to know certain aspects of the universe to live our lives now.  Instead of seeking a singular theoretical principle to guide us deductively, we can very well work from the ground up, inductively, in engaging the particulars of our existence.  Yes, theoretical physics can be fun (or so I'm told...) but we needn't take it so seriously.

For me, then, the interesting question is: why are people so nervous and afraid of randomness and uncertainty?

While I have no answer for that question, it is amusing that Lightman hits upon a metaphor that brings us back to Zhuangzi.  He writes:

If the multiverse idea is correct, then the historic mission of physics to explain all the properties of our universe in terms of fundamental principles—to explain why the properties of our universe must necessarily be what they are—is futile, a beautiful philosophical dream that simply isn’t true. Our universe is what it is because we are here. The situation could be likened to a school of intelligent fish who one day began wondering why their world is completely filled with water. Many of the fish, the theorists, hope to prove that the entire cosmos necessarily has to be filled with water. For years, they put their minds to the task but can never quite seem to prove their assertion. Then, a wizened group of fish postulates that maybe they are fooling themselves. Maybe there are, they suggest, many other worlds, some of them completely dry, and everything in between.

This brings to mind this passage from chapter 17 of Zhuangzi (Watson translation):

Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu were strolling along the dam of the Hao River when Chuang Tzu said, "See how the minnows come out and dart around where they please!  That's what fish really enjoy!"

Hui Tzu said, "You're not a fish - how do you know what fish enjoy?"

Chuang Tzu said, "You're not I, so how do you know I don't know what fish enjoy?"

Hui Tzu said, "I'm not you, so I certainly don't know what you know.  On the other hand, you're certianly not a fish - so that still proves you don't know what fish enjoy?"

Chuang Tzu said, "Let's go back to your original question, please. You asked how I know what the fish enjoy - so you already knew it when you asked the question.  I know it by standing here beside the Hao."

Hui Tzu, the logician, seeks to prove and disprove.  Zhuangzi, the skeptic, understands better the limits of knowledge, even his own.  So when challenged, Zhuangzi embraces a kind of perspectivalism: he knows what he knows based on his particular position in a specific context.  Writ large, that is what the fish in Lightman's metaphor also suggest.  We really can't know much beyond our circumstances, whether that is a universe or the River Hao.

Mao and Confucius

A nice little piece by Didi Kirsten Tatlow on "Mao's Spell and the need to Break It" in yesterday's NYT.  She focuses on Robert Bellah, the venerable sociologist of religion (see review of most recent book here), and his thoughts on the revival of religion and the prospsects for Confucianism in contemporary China.  Bellah sees Mao as obstructing the return of Confucius:

But according to Robert N. Bellah, one of the world’s foremost sociologists of religion, to establish true freedom through a societywide, ethical framework that is connected to Chinese traditions, the country first must break the tyrannical spell cast by Mao Zedong, who led the Communists to victory in the civil war in 1949 and ruled with an iron fist until his death in 1976.

This strikes me as a key issue in determining the extent to which Confucianism can come to have a significant cultural impact in China today.  To be clear: I am of the mind that China is not now a Confucian society.  It is too deeply ensconced in modernizing projects for something like a genuine Confucian ethic to have more than a marginal effect.  Clearly, there has been a certain social tendency to revive some aspects of the Confucian tradition to supply a deeper cultural meaning for contemporary life.  But that effort is limited by the powerful material interests and incentives that work to undermine a fuller expression and practice of Confucian ethics.

Bellah's point thus highlights another aspect of the problem, the political aspect. It is rather simple: Mao was not a Confucian, indeed he was a resolute anti-Confucian, and his continuing symbolic presence at the center of political life - right there over the main gate of Tiananmen - is a major obstacle to the renaissance of Confucian philosophy-as-a-way-of-life in China.  Bellah doesn't pull any punches:

“I think China has to face the fact that Mao was a monster, one of the worst people in human history,” said Mr. Bellah.

He compared China’s situation today to that of Germany and Japan after World War II.

“In a curious way, it’s like the war guilt of Germany or Japan. I think in Germany they’ve come to terms with it, whereas in Japan there’s almost a dramatic lack of any sense of responsibility,” said Mr. Bellah, who is also a Japan scholar.

“There is so much self-pity in China about the Western powers and the 150 years of imperialism, and about the Japanese aggression” of World War II, said Mr. Bellah. “And it’s justified in a way.”

“But God knows what Mao did can’t be blamed on the Westerners or the Japanese,” he said. “The Chinese have their own guilt, and it requires a complex symbolic, ideological and psychological change, and that’s hard.”

This is where Chinese nationalism runs up against Chinese tradition. To be true to the revived tradition, it is necessary to destroy an icon of modern nationalism.  My sense is that Mao will continue to win because he, and his historical legacy, is more important to the CCP than is Confucius.

The depth of the problem can be discerned in a China Daily op-ed from earlier this month.  Zhang Zhouxiang reports on Bellah's recent lecture in Beijing and reflects upon the revival of tradition.  He starts to wander into dangerous political territory (dangerous, that is, when confronting CCP censors) when he writes:

While many scholars claim Western traditions to be the source of the modern concept of rights and obligations, Bellah says that similar themes exist in Confucianism. "Confucius urged the exercise of power through li, not through punishments, which will only encourage the people to be devious."

An essential element in Confucius' social design, li is emphasized by Bellah as a rights pattern, a mutual obligation between rulers and subjects. While justifying the ruler's right to rule, li also requires him to do good to and take care of the ruled. The ruled are asked to maintain order, but they also have the right to choose another ruler if the covenant is broken.

The allusion here is to Mencius, who does not really put forth a generalized "right to rebel" but does offer an idea that the elite (ministers from royal families) have an obligation to remove a tyrannical leader.  But the way Zhang expresses it here - "the right to choose another ruler..." - is inching in the direction of democracy.  That's a fairly common move for certain readers of Menicus (I'm looking at you Kim Dae-Jung), and with a little interpretive help Mencius can be made consistent with liberal democratic principles (even if he was not a liberal democrat himself).  There is no one necessary political form that Mencian Confucianism must take, and an electoral system need not be contradictory to the spirit of the text.  But this is not the direction the Party wants to move.  Indeed, the Party continues to limit the protection of legal and civil rights.  

In the end, the Party is really not interested in li - 礼; propriety, ritual. Rather, it is more interested in li - 力; power, force, strength - and li - 利; interest, profit .  And these lis are not at all what Confucius and Mencius value.

Another Daoist Christmas

...And in honor of the day, here is my annual reflection:

I have blogged on a Taoist view, or my Taoist view, of Thanksgiving.  But what about Christmas?  What would a Taoist make of that?

    First, and most obvious, a Taoist would stand apart from the central function of the holiday: celebrating the birth of the earth-bound expression of a singular, transcendent God.  On both the question of birth and the question of God, a Taoist would have reservations.

    Philosophic Taoism does not recognize a transcendent God in the manner of Christianity.  God might be found in Taoism (i.e. we could read Him into Taoist texts), but God was not a part of the Taoist worldview in ancient times, and need not be a part of a modernized Taoism.  As to birth, the Tao Te Ching tells us that Tao (Way) encompasses both being and non-being; so, the passage from pre-birth (whatever that might be) to birth, and from birth to death, are not all that important. We (or the stuff we are made of) are still part of Tao even as we make these transitions.  That is why Chuang Tzu was able to get over the death of his wife fairly quickly: he realized that she had simply moved into another form along a ceaseless path of continual change.  Birth, then, need not be celebrated, and God need not be celebrated.  Not much room there for Christmas.

    But there may be one element of the Christmas story that a Taoist could relate to: the child in the manger.

     Taoism views the infant as closer to Tao than most adults.  As we grow, we fill ourselves with all sorts of human learning, much of which takes us away from our natural selves and catches us up in shallow social conventions.  The mind of an infant is empty, and it is precisely that sort of emptiness that Taoism strives for.  Thus, in passage 55 of the Tao Te Ching, we read:

Embody Integrity's abundance
and you're like a vibrant child

hornets and vipers can't bite,
savage beasts can't maul
and fierce birds can't claw,

bones supple and muscles tender, but still gripping firmly.   

    The child, in all of his innocence, cannot be harmed by human knowledge and practices, which are utterly alien to him.  The child, then, is something to celebrate.

    And the idea of a poor child, a child of meager means, born in a manger, resonates with the Taoist notion that the low will be high, the dark light, etc..  All the more reason to rejoice at the Christmas scene.

    But the purpose of Taoist rejoicing (which, in any event, would be circumspect) would not rest on the promise of the ultimate transcendence of the Christ child.  Rather, the child would be celebrated for his immanence; that is, in recognition that each thing holds within itself the fullest expression of itself and, under sufficient conditions of freedom, will grow into itself fully.   

    This may not be too far off the Christian message of the equality of all things before God, just without the God.  Chuang Tzu tells us that in Way (Tao)  everything "moves as one and the same."  Each thing has its place in Tao, its Integrity, and Tao is the perfect summation of all things.  Each thing thus deserves equal respect.  Furthermore, we should strictly limit our actions, lest they interfere with the integrity of other things.  The meaning and significance of each thing comes from within it.  We cannot improve upon anything and we should nothing that might dominate or impose our expectations on it. 

    So, it would be in that spirit - a cautious, respectful, inward-looking spirit - that a Taoist would celebrate the integrity and beauty of the child in the manger.

     Merry Christmas!

Kim Jong-il was not Confucian, Kim Jong-un is not Confucian

Heard the news today (oh boy...): The Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il, is dead.  Not much of a surprise really.  He had been seriously ill for a long time and had already set up his son, Kim Jong-un as a successor.  But such transitions are never wholly set in stone.  Get ready for some North Korean politics in the coming months...

I have a particular interest here, however, one that I have expressed on various occasions.  And that is: we should not look at North Korea as some sort of demonstration of political Confucianism.  Or, to put it more bluntly: North Korea is not Confucian.  I do this because, from time to time, we see in the press stories that construe hereditary succession of tyrants as some sort of illustration of political Confucianism.  This is wrong on several fronts.

First, we cannot assume a simple historical continuity in North Korea running from the Confucian past to the Stalinist present (if I were to pick a single political term to summarize the NK regime, "Stalinism" would come the closest...thought Stalin had a bit of a problem with succession also...).  Korean culture now, especially North Korean culture, should not be assumed to be a revised expression of what came before.  The twentieth century, with Japanese colonization and horrible war and national division and modernization, is just too much of a disjunction.  There may be certain historical continuities but they would appear to pale in comparison to the events and institutions created in the past one hundred years.  Thus, contemporary North Korea political culture owes more to the dictates of the modern Stalinist state than it does to the values and principles of The Analects and Mencius.

Second, "Confucianism" when it is invoked in relation to North Korea, is often simply reduced to obedience to authority and respect of elders, especially older political leaders.  This is, of course, not what Confucianism is all about.  For a country to more accurately be labeled "Confucian," there would have to be an extensive and voluntary public enactment of Duty, as flexibly defined to suit particular social and familial situations, according to Ritual (the conscientious and constant attention to right action) to move toward Humanity (ren - 仁 ).  I don't see anything like that in NK, dominated as it is by the authoritarian, or even totalitarian, regime. 

Third, on the particular matter of hereditary succession, there is nothing particularly Confucian about this.  It is to be found in virtually every part of the globe at various historical times.  It is not the ideal form of political succession for Confucianism, which would champion something closer to a meritocracy based on virtue, as expressed in the story of Shun.  It is true that Mencius certainly accommodated his political thinking to the aristocratic society that surrounded him.  He warned us "...don't offend the great families" (126) and gave only royal ministers the duty of overthrowing a tyrant.  But these were compromises to the political realities of his day.  In the best of all Confucian worlds, hereditary succession would not be the primary mechanism for regime reproduction.

So, please, don't say North Korea is Confucian, or that the succession from one Kim to another is somehow consistent with Confucianism.

I have been looking at the press thus far this morning and I can report: so far, so good.  I have only found a couple of invocations of Confucianism, and they have been conditioned and qualified.  Take this, for example, from The Guardian:

In a country that, despite its communist doctrine, retains a Confucian respect for seniority, Kim Jong-un could have expected to give way to his older siblings, but reportedly emerged as his father's favourite after impressing him with his single-mindedness and leadership qualities.

This is a stretch: if the supposed "Confucian" expectation (choose older siblings) doesn't appear relevant under the circumstances, and in the context of "communist doctrine," why even invoke it?  

Or this from the National Journal:

There is a reason why the regime of the Kims survives while, all around it, the Soviet bloc disintegrated and the Chinese opened up and reformed. The North Korean regime's ideology, called juche, is often simplistically defined as Korean self-reliance and ridiculed in the West. But to the North Korean elites, juche is still a powerfully intoxicating brew of traditional Korean xenophobia and nationalism, Confucian respect for authority and utopian Marxism-Leninism. The party embodies all of these ideals--nationalism, filial respect, utopia. Exploiting this confluence of philosophies and experiences, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il created "an impermeable and absolutist state that many have compared to a religious cult," wrote longtime Korea observer, Don Oberdorfer in his 1997 book, "The Two Koreas."

Here's a question: why do people in NK "respect authority"?  Is it because they have some deep-seated traditional understanding of Confucianism?  Or is it because they have learned that if they challenge authority they are as good as dead?  I don't think you can simply assume the former when the latter is such a strong possibility.  So let's just avoid the facile invocations of "Confucian respet for authority."

To all my journalist friends out there: don't do it.  Don't make the lazy move to describe NK as "Confucian."  I'm watching, and I will call you on it.  Of course, if you want to dig a bit deeper and sort throught the historical disjunctions and show how something like "Confucianism" (which would have to be defined clearly as something more than simply respsect for authority or hereditary succession) may tell us something about contemporary NK, by all means do it.  But be ready for a critique...

Because saying NK is Confucian is pretty much like saying DR Congo is democratic...

UPDATE: This NYT piece gets it about right:

The only precedent is the last transition in the current ruling dynasty, when Kim Jong-il took over after the 1994 death of his father, Kim Il-sung. In that case, the son observed a three-year period of traditional mourning before formally taking over control of the nation, a move that reflects the regime’s odd mixing of the trappings of ancient Confucian monarchy with a 20th-century Stalinist cult of personality.

"Trappings" is about as Confucian as it gets...

Sunzi and Soft Power

I guess when you get quoted in The Economist you should post a link to the story.  And so, here it is: Sun Tzu and the art of soft power. (I don't appear until about 2/3 of the way down).

The gist of the piece is that China has been barking up the wrong soft power tree (so to speak) in its attempts to develop Confucianism into a soft power resource:

But Confucius is problematic. Mao and his colleagues regarded Confucius’s philosophy as the ideological glue of the feudal system they destroyed; and so attempts to promote him are vulnerable to the growing split in the Communist Party. In January, with great fanfare, the National History Museum unveiled a bronze statue of him standing 9.5 metres (31 feet) high in front of its entrance by Tiananmen Square. Three months later the statue was quietly removed. The sage’s appearance so close to the most hallowed ground of Chinese communism had outraged hardliners. They saw it as an affront to Mao, whose giant portrait hung diagonally opposite.

As regular readers of The Useless Tree (both of you) know, I have pressed this argument further, and anyone interested in just how far I press it can look at this post on "Why Confucianism will not provide 'soft power' to the PRC" 

I also think The Economist piece gets it right on Sunzi.  Generally, Sunzi is easier to integrate into contemporary modernist and post-modernist political and social practices.  Indeed, it has already been so integrated, as evidenced by its invocation in business and military and political and, even, dating books (I haven't read it - obviously - but I'm sure Confucianism will not produce a title quite like this: The Art of War for Dating: Master Sun Tzu's Tactics To Win Over Women).  This may seem frivolous but I think that "soft power" cultural resources have to be flexible and popular and fun to create the kind of "attractiveness" that the notion implies.  And, long story short, that is a big part of the reason why Confucianism is just not working as a source of soft power: it is too serious and demanding.  

But Sunzi, as the article suggests, poses a problem for the PRC's soft power strategy, because it does not project the image of China that Party propagantists want to project.  Notice these line:

Sun Tzu may have written about stratagems for warfare, but Huimin’s [in Shandong province] assembled scholars prefer to tout him as a peacenik. Their evidence is one of the sage’s best-known insights: “The skilful leader subdues the enemy’s troops without any fighting.” What better proof, say his fans in China, that the country has always loved peace?

Of course Sunzi is not a "peacenik".  He is a military strategist who believed that battles can be avoided if the protagonist has amassed such superior power and strategic positioning that the adversary simply recognizes the futility of a fight.  It is a very "hard power" calculation.  But the idea that China has "always loved peace" is a political and historical fiction inscribed into contemporary Chinese national identity, and it is a theme that Party and military powerholders find useful in propagating, especially to other regional states, like Vietnam and Japan, that are concerned with the growth of PRC military capabilities. 

Thus the paradox of Sunzi's "soft power:" the strategic vision of Sunzi is widely known and studied and respected, but it creates an image of China as a potentially devious, deceptive (remember, for Sunzi, war, and by Clausewitzian extension, politics, is all about deception) and self-interested power, not quite the picture Beijing wants to paint.  Better to have the avuncular smile of Confucius than the calculating glare of Sunzi...

And here, for posterity, is the textual equivalent of fifteen minutes of Economist fame:

Yet a closer look reveals Sun Tzu’s flaws as a tool of soft power. Chinese attempts to remould him as a man of peace stumble over the fact that his book is a guide to winning wars, avidly studied by America’s armed forces as it was by Mao. Sam Crane of Williams College in Massachusetts says that during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq he delighted in telling students attending his Sun Tzu classes (some of whom were preparing to join the army) that the “Art of War” advised that prisoners be treated kindly. But, he says, “I think the thing that makes [the book] universal in a grim way is war and competition. War is not a Western construct: the Chinese have been really good at war for a long time.”

The Commodification of Education

I'm a teacher.  A college teacher.  Every day, or just about every day, I am engaged in the dissemination and creation of knowledge.  I put dissemination first because, as a teacher, whatever knowledge I create is often (not always) bound up in the process of disseminating knowledge to, or provoking knowledge in, my students.  It's a good gig.

But it is not my job to get my students jobs.  I say this because, apparently, some people out there think that I, and my colleagues, should somehow be held responsible if our students do not get jobs.  This, at least, is the message in an op-ed by conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds (I usually ignore Reynolds as just another right-wing ideologue, but this argument requires some response...) (HT Sullivan) .  In regard to the growing problem of student debt, which I recognize as a problem, he writes:       

Student loans, if they are to continue, should be made dischargeable in bankruptcy after five years -- but with the school that received the money on the hook for all or part of the unpaid balance.

In other words, if students have not been able to find sufficient employment to pay off their college debt five years after they graduate, the school should be responsible for some portion of that debt.

This assumes that the primary purpose of a college education is to secure post-graduate employment and a certain level of salary and benefits.  But that is not the purpose of a college education.  The purpose of a college education is to further one's education, plain and simple.  What a student does with that education is not the responsibility of the teacher.  Confucius understood this:

The Master said: "I never instruct those who aren't full of passion, and I never enlighten those who aren't struggling to explain themselves.

"If I show you one corner and you can't show me the other three, I'll say nothing more.  7.8

Students, by these lights, must take responsibility for their education.  A teacher can, to use a different metaphor, open the door, but the student has to walk through.  If the student does not take the initiative, then learning will not happen.  Period.  And the teacher is not responsible for whether the learning actually happens or not.  We make learning possible, we cannot guarantee its accomplishment.  We can show one corner, but the student has to show the other three...

Similarly, what a student does with his or her knowledge (assuming he or she has gained some) after college is beyond the duties of the teacher. The teacher must strive to teach well but he or she is powerless to effectuate actual knowledge within the student or to shape the student's memory and use of the knowledge in the future. 

Now, it is true that higher education tends to provide people with intellectual skills that can yield relatively high earnings in the future.  But that is not our purpose, especially at a liberal arts college like the one that employs me. I never think about how my classes might be directly useful to jobs after college.  Indeed, when I teach ancient Chinese philosophy, my mind is far, far away from such instrumentalist concerns.  I am not producing a commodity that can produce a certain exchange value.  I am engendering an understanding of texts and ideas in and of themselves. 

Of course, colleges will, for recruitment purposes, endlessly promote the argument that a degree is an economically useful thing, leading to higher salaries, etc.  That same argument is used to justify high costs of college education.  And that's bad.  The materialist promotion of liberal arts is an effect of the broader society in which we are embedded, a society that demands that just about everything be justified in materialist terms.  I, for one, am happy to ignore all that, and simply assert that knowledge has its own rewards.  I am a fervent defender of the useless. And, yes, I know, it's easy to say that when someone is paying me to be, effectively, useless....

Daoist irony aside, while there is plenty of knowledge that is instrumentally useful, and that knowledge can be found in college curricula, we must be accepting and protective of knowledge - like ancient Chinese philosophy! - that is not useful.  If we were to descend into complete instrumentalism we would lose much that is essential to humanity.

Finally, exorbitant college costs are a major problem.  Prohibitively high tuition is an obstacle to learning, excluding good students from the opportunity to learn.  Confucius recognizes this:

The Master said: "I never refuse to teach anyone, not even those so lowly they come offering nothing more but a few strips of dried meat."  7.7

So, yes, debt-free financial aid must be more widely available.  This doesn't mean, though, that we should make colleges, and teachers, responsible for the post-graduate employment and salary of their students.  How about going back to the not so old idea of progressive taxation to support public goods like access to education generally?  I suspect Confucius, and especially Mencius, would be open to that idea.  Reynonlds, not so much...

A (slightly belated) Taoist Thanksgiving

My home computer is still on the fritz, so I did not have a chance to post this yesterday.  It is my annual (ever since 2005) Thanksgiving reflection.  It has special meaning for me, five and a half years after my son, Aidan's passing.  Wishing everyone a pleasant holiday time...

It is a perfect Thanksgiving morning here [2005] in Northwestern Massachusetts: a light snow, about 2 inches on the ground; a chill air; great conditions to be inside and cooking and eating all day.  Aidan and I are here by ourselves, however.  Maureen and Maggie are down in New York City, attending the famous parade.  So, we will do the whole feast thing tomorrow.  Today will be just about pie baking: I have a couple of small pumpkins to bake and make into a pie.  If I feel ambitious, perhaps an apple pie will follow.  That will make the house warm and comfortable.

     We are supposed to be thankful today, and I am.  But as I give thanks I can't help wondering: for what am I giving thanks and to whom?  As is my want, I fall back on Taoism to help clarify my thoughts.  And, through that exercise, I come to a somewhat startling realization: I give thanks for Aidan and his profound disability.  I know that sounds a bit bizarre - how could a parent be thankful for a child's disability? - but, as I think through it, I am happy to say that I am. 

   (For other parents thinking about disability, see this recent piece on disability; hap tip: Laura).

    First, let's think more generally about the act of thanksgiving.  In the Christian American context, that means giving thanks to God for all of the good things we have.  (We tend to skip over the bad things today; we focus on the good in order to balance out the bad).   What I like about this idea is the underlying assumption that we do not really control the course of our lives and we need to be humbly grateful for the good things that happen along the way.  I think that sentiment is consonant with Taoism.

   Of course, a Taoist (at least a philosophic Taoist) would not invoke a god figure as the ultimate controller of our destinies.  Rather, Way itself (Tao) is the all-inclusive, self-generating, continually unfolding complex reality that surrounds and shapes our lives.   So, a Taoist would recognize one's subordination to Tao.  But would a Taoist give "thanks"? 

     In a way (pun!), yes.  Although Chuang Tzu tells us that fully apprehending the uncontrollable power of Tao should lead us to let go of virtually all emotions ("joy and sorrow never touch you" 92), there is still room for gratefulness, even if gratefulness assumes a happiness for which to be grateful.  A Taoist can be grateful - and, indeed, can be happily enchanted - to witness or sense some small part of the wondrous richness of Tao.  This is not a function of education or age: even the smallest and weakest infant simultaneously absorbs and expresses a corner of Tao. Indeed, the immaturity and naivety of the infant is presented as the best state from which to experience Tao:

Embody Integrity's abundance
and you're like the vibrant child...
      - Tao Te Ching 55

     A Taoist, then, would give thanks, in the sense of recognizing and gratefully subordinating oneself to uncontrollable forces of Tao that shape our lives and produce the good (as well as the bad) around us.

     It is in that spirit that I give thanks.  And as I give thanks in that way (Way), with Aidan silently sitting next to me in his wheelchair, air rattling in and out of his tracheostomy tube, I am thankful for him in precisely the way that he is.  I do not regret his disabilities (this is not Regretsgiving Day, after all).  Of course, if I were some omnipotent divinity able to determine the conditions of his life, I would call a do-over and have him fully abled in all the ways he is not now.  But I am not omnipotent.  I am subordinated to Tao, and Tao moves as it will, with no heed to my desires or expectations.

     But can I be positively grateful for his disability?  Yes.  I can because I have come to see that his experience of Tao is just as valuable and worthwhile as any other experience of Tao.  He cannot speak or see or stand; but he can hear and touch and feel the warmth and love around him.  He takes in Tao and adds to Tao in his own, unique way.  I may think my own understanding of the world around me is greater or more significant than his, but philosophic Taoists would scoff at such arrogance.  It is, after all, the immature and naive infant who can "embody Integrity's abundance."  It is, after all, our human-created knowledge that can obstruct our view of Tao. 

    To be perfectly honest (and I have said this elsewhere), if I had a choice, I would not change places with him.  I am too used to and happy with my abilities to experience Tao that I would be loath to give them up.  But that might just be my own lack of understanding.  Yet, whatever my own hesitations, I can be fully grateful for him, in precisely the form he is.  It is he, as he is, who has fundamentally challenged my world view and opened up to me the serenity of philosophic Taoism.  It is he, as he is, who has had myriad good effects on the people around him.  It is he, as he is, who is a perfect expression of the wholeness of Tao in himself. 

     So, Happy Thanksgiving.  We are happy here.  We are thankful.  And among that many things I am grateful for today is Aidan and his profound disability.