Confucianism's Problem with Modernity - a brief comment

I am reading Ernst Gellner's book, Nations and Nationalism for my class on nationalism in East Asia.  I have read this book several times (and blogged about it here and here and here) and I am quite aware of its limitations.  But I have not really mentioned here a brief couple of lines from Gellner that speak to Confucianism's modern fate (with all due apologies to Levenson...):

Doctrinal elegance, simplicity, exiguousness, strict unitarianism, without very much in the way of intellectually offensive frills: these helped Islam survive into the modern world better than do doctrinally more luxuriant faiths.  But if that is so, one might well ask why an agrarian ideology such as Confucianism should not have survived even better; for such a belief system was even more firmly centered on rules of morality and the observance of order and hierarchy, and even less concerned with theological or cosmological dogma.  Perhaps, however, a strict and emphatic, insistent unitarianism is better here than indifference to doctrine coupled with concern for morality.  The moralities and political ethics of agro-literate polities are just a little too brazenly deferential and inegalitarian for a modern taste.  this may have made the perpetuation of Confucianism implausible in a modern society, at least under the same name and under the same management. (78) 

hmm.....  no time to explicate this now - running to class - but think about it: does Gellner get this right?

Comments

[Carl]

Uh, Confucianism did survive into the modern era, no?

Arguably, Confucianism's religious flexibility has hurt it in certain ways—there are few (no?) Confucian fundamentalists who insist that we go back to doing the old time rites the way that there are fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists. Also, Confucianism seems to be only weakly proselytizing, so it hasn't spread beyond the Sinosphere (China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam). Still, it's hard to deny that it continues to have a strong influence on the shape of culture in those countries even absent any of the flashier displays of religious solidarity that you get in Islam and Christianity.

[Sam]

Carl, thanks for the thought...
Confucianism did not survive all that well in China. the twentieth century was rather rough; the Maoist period powerfully antagonistic. The revival that has happened in the past couple decades produces only a shadow of what it was in imperial times. Just about everywhere in East Asia its contemporary influence is mediated by strong materialist-instrumentalist economic and social incentives that attenuate is living significance.....

[SteveGW]

One of the problems that Confucianism might face (and it wouldn't be alone) is that modern (Western) moral thought is almost entirely dominated by the notion of rights and duties, and Confucianism, as a form of virtue theory, is not well placed to accommodate these ideas. So, in so far as the Chinese accommodate themselves to modernity, which is taken to include modern morality as part of the package, Confucianism will struggle to have real moral relevance. Lacking moral relevance its future may be to be reduced to the decorative or symptomatic cultural status of the Anglican Church in England - which embodies a certain stereotype of Englishness, but not the reality, and which can reflect moral changes without motivating them.