The Useless Tree

Summer School

One of the reasons I have gotten behind in blogging is my work with a summer program here at Williams.  I am the director of Summer Humanities and Social Sciences, which brings 18 in-coming first year students to campus for an early introduction to the rigors of liberal arts education.   This is the fourth year I will have taught in the program but this year I have added responsibilities for overseeing everything: student travel, student accommodation, curricular integrity, etc.  It takes some time, but has certain rewards.

     To start things off this year, I invited a philosophy professor to give a talk on the meaning of a liberal arts education.  He did a great job.  Essentially, his approach was virtue ethics - without ever using that term (Virtue ethics on the sly?)  He started by asking each student for an answer to the question "what is the purpose of life?"   He then asked each to suggest a characteristic or quality that might help achieve one's purpose in life.  And then went on to ask if such characteristics or qualities could be taught and learned, or whether they are simply inherent.  He led us, ultimately, to a mission statement for the college penned by a former president, Hank Payne:

Our mission it to nurture in outstanding students the academic and civic virtues, and the related virtues of character, in the intellectual tradition of the residential liberal arts college and in the context of the current and future needs for leadership in our society.  The academic virtues include the capacities to read closely, explore widely, express clearly, research deeply, connect imaginatively, listen emphatically, and the skills to do so effectively.  These virtues, in turn, have associated virtues of character.  One cannot research deeply without the virtue of perseverance.  One cannot listen emphatically without the virtue of tolerance and respect.  One cannot be committed to community life without the virtue of concern for others.  And so on.

    It all made me think of Confucius.  While I am certainly sympathetic to Payne's vision, I think a Confucian would be concerned that the process of character-building in it is a bit too indirect.   It may be true that learning to "listen emphatically" (what a nice way of putting it) can instill tolerance and respect.  But a Confucian would want more work.  To gain sufficient tolerance and respect one should, from a Confucian perspective, daily perform one's social duties: caring for parents, cherishing the young, welcoming friends and the like.  Virtue education must thus extend outside of the classroom; it must penetrate virtually every facet of our lives, every act we  undertake.  That's why it's hard to be a Confucian.

   Still, I think there is a certain Confucian resonance in Payne's words, and a certain compatibility between Confucianism and virtue ethics, as scholars much greater than me have amply argued.  

    I should also add that when my philosophy professor friend posed his first question - what is the purpose of life? - one student answered something to the effect of taking care of family.  I took note of the response: it suggests that the most basic assumptions of Confucianism - that our love of family can be a starting point for a broader ethical framework - is alive and well in contemporary America.  

    And that gives me something to build on.  In my class with these same summer students we are reading Mencius right now. 

Confucian Innovation

An interesting profile in today's NYT of John Kao, a renaissance man of sorts who now focuses his thinking and working of issues of innovation and entrepreneurship.  One thing that caught my eye was how moving between two cultures provided him with skills that would be relevant for his later professional life:

Dr. Kao, who is 57, was born in Chicago to parents who came from China for graduate study at Northwestern. Growing up in Garden City, N.Y., “I’d wake up in a Confucian house and go to an American elementary school and play baseball and go back to the Chinese house,” he recalled. “I had to figure out how to balance two very different cultural references.”    

Whatever Confucian influence there was seemed to cultivate his creativity.  That doesn't surprise me, though it does push against a common critique of Confucianism as a conservative mind set that discourages change and innovation.   Indeed, Confucius himself seems to say as much when he describes his sense of himself:

The Master said: "Transmitting insight, but never creating insight, standing by my words and devoted to the ancients: perhaps I'm a little like that old sage, P'eng. (7.1)    

      Of course, he was creating insight, many sorts of insights.  Perhaps the most significant was his insistence that political leadership should be determined not by hereditary claim but by moral accomplishment. 

      Another thing I noticed about Mr. Kao was this:

“What I had learned about behavior and the cognitive realm was incredibly relevant,” he said. Before long he had written dozens of the kinds of case studies that are the basis of the school’s teaching and had organized a course on entrepreneurship, creativity and organizations.

Many of his cases were about failures — individuals under pressure, partnerships unraveling, learning through trial and error and so on. Today, Dr. Kao says failure’s relative lack of stigma is “a unique aspect of U.S. culture” that does not exist even in countries like Singapore or Finland, both clients and both, he said, “relatively hip.”

“There’s a saying in Silicon Valley,” he said. “If you haven’t gone bankrupt a couple of times you are not trying hard enough. It’s part of our national advantage.”

     The emphasis on failure brought Mencius immediately to mind:

We change only when we make mistakes.  We realize what to do only when we work through worry and confusion.  And we gain people's trust and understanding only when our inner thoughts are revealed clearly in our faces and words.  When it has no lawful families or wise officials within and no enemy threats without, a nation will surely come to ruin.  Then its people will understand that through calamity and grief we flourish, and through peace and joy we perish. (12.15)

      Failure is key to self-improvement: maybe that is a notion of Confucian innovation that was transmitted to Mr. Kao.

Doing Well v. Doing Good

An article in the NYT today looks into the question of the purpose of higher education.  Is it simply a matter of producing individuals who will go out into the business world and amass large personal fortunes, or should there be more encouragement of giving something back to society?   This quote seemed to summarize the issue:

As Adam M. Guren, a new Harvard graduate who will be pursuing his doctorate in economics, put it, “A lot of students have been asking the question: ‘We came to Harvard as freshmen to change the world, and we’re leaving to become investment bankers — why is this?’ ”

     Of course the first answer to his question is rather obvious: it's all about the money.  People want to get rich, they pursue careers that they believe will bring them lots of material wealth and stuff.  Our cultural revolves around the pursuit of wealth, which we so often mistake for the pursuit of happiness.  Not much surprising there.

        By chance, this story comes just as the president of my college, and a rather large entourage of administrative and development staff, are making a visit to China and Hong Kong and Taiwan.  One of the members of the trip stopped by my office the other day, wondering how Confucianism related to Chinese educational systems, especially the idea of a liberal arts college (which is what my school is).   I was, naturally, overjoyed by the question because so much of what I understand about Confucian education (and by that term I mean the ideas that come from the Analects and Mencius, not necessarily the institutional practices that emerged later and dominated elite-level Chinese society) is so very similar to the ideals of liberal arts education.  

       Let me mention two points in this regard.

      First, both classical Confucian education and modern American liberal arts pedagogy value exposure to a wide breadth of learning.  In Confucius's own time, he emphasized the "six arts" - ritual, music, archery, chariot-riding, calligraphy, and computation.   He expected the well educated individual to be familiar with all these areas but to be specialist in none.  Something like the old British notion of the well-rounded amateur.  Indeed, in googling around, I found an old article by one Rupert Wilkinson in the journal Sociology of Education (Vol. 37, No. 1, Autumn, 1963, pp. 9-26), entitled: "The Gentleman Ideal and the Maintenance of a Political Elite: Two Case Studies: Confucian Education in the Tang, Sung, Ming and Ching Dynasties; and the Late Victorian Public Schools (1870-1914)."   Here's the link, for those who can access JSTOR.  American liberal arts education is derived from the British ideal, and thus open to the same sorts of comparisons with ancient China.   Wilkinson notes that the ideal of the amateur animated education in both Imperial China and Victorian England. 

      The author also makes the important political point that higher education in both times and places - and I would add in contemporary American elite colleges as well - was (and is) all about producing and grooming a ruling class.  What I want to emphasize, for the moment, however, is the educational means to that end: exposure to a broad curriculum of various facets.  Confucius captures the notion of the well-rounded amateur well in Analects 9.2:

A villager in Ta Hsiang said: “Great indeed is Confucius!  His erudition is truly vast – and still, he’s lived without fame and renown.”   When the Master heard this, he said to his disciples: “What shall I be – a charioteer or an archer?  I’ll be a charioteer!”    

     Confucius is making a joke here.  He is laughing at the idea that an educated man should be so specialized in one area that he would assume a discrete title.  It matters none at all to him what his title should be; indeed, it is absurd to pick only one, so he just randomly assigns himself to be a charioteer.  His point, however, is precisely the opposite.  A man of truly vast erudition cannot be characterized by a single discipline.  

     And that is what is "liberal" about a liberal arts education.  It is all about exposure to a wide array of ideas and arguments and images.  It resists specialization and an overly narrow focus.  Its purpose is to broaden one's mind, to familiarize the student with many different facets of human experience and natural phenomenon.  A liberal arts education is not a business school; it is the living expression of the full range of human knowledge.

      There is a second point of comparison, however.  One that speaks more directly to the question of purpose. 

       It was very much the intention of Confucius that education should produce morally better individuals.  He famously rejected the pursuit of profit and he equally famously promoted the ideal of Humanity: the daily conscientious effort to perform proper ethical acts in a way that cultivates the familial and social relationships that define any individual.   Education, in short, is all about learning how to do good.  Doing well, economically, is a distraction.  His hope was that the morally good would then rule, a hope that was regularly dashed by the harsh political realities of his own time.

     This sense of education as means of moral perfection is also a part of the American liberal arts traditions.  Granted, we do not, these days, talk about quite this way.  But I think there is still a fairly powerful, if often unspoken, assumption that liberal arts education at least has the potential to makes its students better people.   Poignantly, while looking around for sources for this point, I came upon a letter to the editor of the NYT, written by a former president of my college, Hank Payne, a man I knew and admired.  He died just this year.  Hank's letter, from 1996, had a title that Confucius would have loved: "Liberal Arts, by Definition, Teach Morality," Here are some his words, which resonate with Confucian sensibilities:

One cannot underestimate the deep moral importance of the intellectual and character virtues instilled when we do our centuries-old job right. Strengthening intellectual virtues -- such as the willingness to explore widely, the ability to test one's ideas against those of others, the capacity to listen thoughtfully, the strength to adduce reasons for assertions -- has a clear relationship to strengthening character virtues like honesty, humility, integrity and independence.     

    Ultimately, it is about doing good, not doing well.

Young and Restless in China

    Two nights ago I watched a great documentary on PBS, "Young and Restless in China."  The website for the program is really quite good.  It is possible to watch the whole thing on line, or to just select 10 minute or so segments (the whole thing is about two hours long).  It is really worth it.

    One of the main ideas that comes across, and one that links into my interests, is the cultural and psychological instability created by extraordinarily rapid economic and material change.  The film follows nine different Chinese people, from various social strata but all in their 20s or 30s, over four years as each experiences new opportunities in life.  Clearly, the process of individualization is a powerful part of each of their lives.  The new economy and society encourages them to develop their personal talents and interests and to strike out on their own, however much that may sometimes contradict family desires or interests.  One young woman rejects the arranged marriage her village-bound parents try to make for her.  But the tension between individual desire and family connection does not always produce and unproblematic personal liberation.  One of my favorite stories was that of Miranda Hong, a marketing executive, who, as the website describes, tries to "...to juggle home and work, the demands of her husband and her parents, and still find a place for herself."  It has a very American resonance.

      The film makes clear that the uncertainty and ethical fluidity of this period of rapid change in China have led many people to seek out new sources of moral guidance.   One fellow became a Christian.  Although it was not explicitly discussed in the documentary itself (or not, at least in the hour and a half that I saw), the resurgence of Confucianism and Taoism and other strands of traditional Chinese thought and culture can be explained by that same search for answers to the large questions of life.   The re-imagination of tradition is discussed in the "roundtable with China watchers" on the website the accompanies the film.  Here are a couple of excerpts:

Perry Link:

[The biggest issue facing the country now] is the problem of what ethical and social values to believe in. It is deep in Chinese culture -- in fact, it is coded into the very grammar of daily-life Chinese language -- that one should "be a person" properly. But what exactly does that mean?

In "traditional Confucianism," the basic duties -- of being a good father, a good son, a good ruler, subject, husband, wife, friend, etc. -- were pretty well known. That doesn't mean that everybody always behaved well, of course, but at least everybody knew the standards, could use the values as their own moral compasses and could count on the fact that other people also knew the standards, so that public criticism of someone else's misbehavior could rest on a common basis.

Modern Chinese revolutions aimed to "knock down Confucius and sons," and, after some decades of confusion, in the 1950s socialist values truly did take hold as new answers to the question of how to "be a good person." But the disasters of late Maoism -- the Great Leap famine and the Cultural Revolution -- turned people cynical about socialism, and the devil-take-the-hindmost moneymaking of the post-Mao years has made even the language of socialism utterly irrelevant to daily life.

Maureen Fan:

Of course, old values still apply -- going home for Chinese New Year and getting married to please your parents, for example. But the importance of these pulls is shrinking. A former researcher says society is now a fast-food culture: Many people are impatient, and if old values and traditions don't immediately pay off for them somehow, they will lose interest in that, too.

Still, many young people seem, in the end, loath to offend their parents; for example, the many cases of gay sons or daughters entering into marriages of convenience to keep up appearances or give their parents a grandchild. Confucianism is making a comeback [in] schools, best-selling books and TV programs as people recognize the fragility of old-fashioned values, and yet many Chinese have no idea what Confucianism really is, reducing it in some cases to just a few of its tenets such as filial piety or loyalty.

     The question we are left with, then, and one that I have no easy answer to, is: what will contemporary Confucianism and Taoism therefore be in present-day China?  They cannot be what they were traditionally.  Chinese society and culture have changed too much for that.  It would seem that if they are to be relevant and meaningful in today's China they each have to be accommodated to the more individualized and personalized contemporary culture.  Otherwise the young and the restless will look elsewhere for meaning.

Barak Obama, Confucian Gentleman

In a Father's Day speech in Chicago today, the Democratic nominee said it straight:

“Too many fathers are M.I.A., too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes,” Mr. Obama said to a chorus of approving murmurs from the audience. “They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”

    This is not an issue for African American men alone.  All of us need to listen to this message, all of us need to ask ourselves how well have we done by our families, our children and our spouses, today:

“We also need families to raise our children,” he said at Sunday’s service. “We need fathers to realize that responsibility doesn’t just end at conception. That doesn’t just make you a father. What makes you a man is not the ability to have a child. Any fool can have a child. That doesn’t make you a father. It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.”

     Confucius would agree.  Happy Father's Day.

Learning Humanity from Same Sex Couples

A story a couple of day's ago in the NYT reports:

For insights into healthy marriages, social scientists are looking in an unexpected place.

A growing body of evidence shows that same-sex couples have a great deal to teach everyone else about marriage and relationships. Most studies show surprisingly few differences between committed gay couples and committed straight couples, but the differences that do emerge have shed light on the kinds of conflicts that can endanger heterosexual relationships.

    It seems that gender inequalities in heterosexual marriages can feed into unspoken resentments that attenuate and weak relationships.  And then, when arguments happen, those differences can worsen based on how men and women handle uncomfortable verbal confrontations:

“When they got into these really negative interactions, gay and lesbian couples were able to do things like use humor and affection that enabled them to step back from the ledge and continue to talk about the problem instead of just exploding,” said Robert W. Levenson, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

The findings suggest that heterosexual couples need to work harder to seek perspective. The ability to see the other person’s point of view appears to be more automatic in same-sex couples, but research shows that heterosexuals who can relate to their partner’s concerns and who are skilled at defusing arguments also have stronger relationships.

    That ability to see another person's point of view sounds like the approach to Humanity that Confucius urges on us:

...As for Humanity: if you want to make a stand, help others make a stand, and if you want to reach your goal, help others reach their goal.  Consider yourself and treat others accordingly: this is the method of Humanity. (6.29)

     In other words, we can only find ourselves through our relationships with others.   So, if we really want to develop ourselves to our fullest capacities, we must do so in concert with others; and that entails understanding not only ourselves in relation to others but also others in relation to us.

Modern Confucianism

    A good post over at Granite Studio by Jeremiah brings up a question I have posed here before: How modern can Confucius be?  Jeremiah is responding to a talk given by Daniel A. Bell, a philosophy professor at Qinghua.  Bell works seriously on what Confucianism can mean politically today.  One of the key issues is: can Confucianism provide a political-theoretical foundation for an alternative to Western liberal democracy?  Bell probes this issue by drawing out the communitarian elements of Confucian thought.  Jeremiah has some questions:

Finally, I felt as if Professor Bell, in his desire to counteract more extreme criticisms of China from Europe and North America, has set up a bit of a straw man. Yes, there are those in the United States who see American-style liberal democracy as a franchise suitable for all places and peoples, but most of the writers and researchers on China that I know do not fall into this category. Certainly I don’t. As I’ve said numerous times, I feel that there are certain reforms (free media, free speech, free religion, the right to assembly, and judicial independence) that would help consolidate and enhance the reforms already underway in China. But I fear Professor Bell may have, as the saying goes, ‘leaned too far to one side’ when he suggested on Tuesday that legal rights are not necessarily a primary prerequisite of development. His admonition that courts and legal proceedings are inferior to mediation and other more ‘civil’ means of solving disputes is both noble and certainly in keeping with the Analects and the Late Imperial tradition of Confucian Statecraft, but preferring to solve things through mediation does not obviate the need for legal safeguards to protect the rights of the people.

     This helps focus the question.  We can ask: does a politically modernized Confucianism have to accept fully institutionalized legal protections of individual rights?  You'll notice that I have smuggled the term "individual" into Jeremiah's formulation, but I think that is in keeping with the general thrust of his comments (correct me if I am wrong, Jeremiah).

      To push the conversation along, let me cut right to the point.  I will argue here (and I am open to persuasive counterarguments) that, to be relevant in a modern political context, Confucianism must recognize and embrace the notion of individual rights. I say this because the inherent dynamics of modernization press in this direction.  History, of course, does not move smoothly and unidirectionally.  Human agency of various forms can have real and lasting effects.  But if we look at Chinese history since, say, 1900, it seems fairly clear that, over the arc of that time, the idea of individuals endowed with inalienable rights, has become stronger.  I am influenced in this view by Merle Goldman's book, From Comrade to Citizen; and Kevin O'Brien and Li Lianjiang's book, Rightful Resistance in Rural China.

     It should be noted that Elizabeth Perry (warning, pdf file), among others, has pushed against these writers and argued that the Chinese notion of rights is different than the Western notion of rights:

...the meaning of “rights” in Chinese political discourse differs significantly from the Anglo-American tradition. Viewed in historical context, China’s contemporary “rights” protests seem less politically threatening.

    She has a point.  But even with that important caveat, I think the general point still stands: China has become more rights conscious in recent decades, and that consciousness in creating a more individualistic culture. 

      We can take the point a step further.  Individual rights consciousness in China has arisen not only from domestic sources of economic and political reform, but also from global cultural flows.  Globalization does not promote only cultural individualism, but its encouragement of cultural individualism is powerful.  

      Long story short: Chinese culture today - while not simply a clone of American culture - is more individualized than ever before in its history (I'll let the historians assess that statement!), and it exists in a global context that creates powerful obstacles against a return to anything like traditional communitarianism (I loved Jeremiah's quote from Jaroslav Pelikan: ”Tradition is the living faith of the dead, Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”)

       If all that is true - and I admit it is all debatable - then it would seem that any Confucian revival, if it is to be relevant to modern Chinese people or modern people anywhere, must compromise with the pervasive cultural, and increasingly political, individualism that exists in the world today.

      This is not to say that Chinese politics will inevitably look like American politics.  There are many ways in which individual rights can be legally protected in varying cultural contexts.  But it is to argue that, whatever Chinese politics becomes, it will hold within it more recognition and protection of individual rights than was the case in either imperial or Maoist times.  Will such an individualized and modernized Confucianism still be fundamentally Confucian?  I think it can be.  I think, in some ways, that is what Yu Dan is producing.  

    What a modern Confucianism can do, it seems to me, is not create a fundamental political alternative to individual-rights-based politics but, rather, to provide a critique of how we can understand what an "individual " is.  Confucianism highlights the social and moral embeddedness of individuals, and that is important to keep in mind.  But, even with that understanding, a modern Confucianism will be politically irrelevant if it cannot embrace the legal and political defense of individual rights.

Confucianism as a State Ideology? I Don't Think So....

     A good post over at The China Beat by Xujun Eberlein on contemporary Chinese Confucian thinker Jiang Qing (yes, the name has the same English transliteration as Mao's infamous wife).   Here are a couple of Eberlein's grafs:

In his books and articles on Political Confucianism, Jiang Qing calls for a restoration of Confucianism as the state ideology, as it had been in many dynasties. Further, he outlines a Confucian political structure strongly distinct from both Soviet-style communism and Western-style democracy.

Democracy is Westernized and imperfect in nature, Jiang Qing points out. If applied to China, a western style democratic system would have only one legitimacy – popular will, or civil legitimacy. Such uni-legitimacy operates on the quantity of votes, regardless of the moral implications of decisions taken. Since human desire is selfish by nature, those decisions can be self serving for a particular majority's interest. Because of this, Jiang Qing argues, civil legitimacy alone is not sufficient to build or keep a constructive social order.

       Two things come to mind here, by way of critique.  First, while it is true that certain institutions and practices of modern democratic politics can be said to have arisen and developed in something called "the West," it is not true that democracy is simply a "Western" thing.  "West" is as problematic a construction as "East" or "Orient."  It operates on too abstract a level of historical analysis to be very useful in analyzing and understanding political dynamics.  And it is as politicized as any other such generalization.  It is used by critics of democracy to link popular demands for more open and participatory politics with imperialism.  It thus frames Chinese or Vietnamese or North Korean democrats as unpatriotic (I do not mean to suggest that his is Jiang Qing's intention; but the broader discourse of "The West" creates this effect).   A further ramification of the use of "The West" is to distract attention away from historical and contemporary democratic practices in Asia (are Taiwanese not "Chinese"?  Are Koreans not "Easterners"?  Are Indians not "Asian"?) and also glosses over the history and current manifestations of anti-democracy in the "West."  Overall, a high cost to pay intellectually for a fatuous over-generalization. 

      But there is a second, and I think more important, point to be made here.  Jiang is calling for the establishment of Confucianism as a "state ideology."  This strikes me as impossible under contemporary conditions of a reformed and globalized China.  

     Today, China is increasingly multicultural.  By this I mean that the cultural expressions of Chinese-ness have multiplied rapidly.  Not that long ago, when I started studying China, it would have been absurd to use the term "Chinese rock and roll."  That musical form was obviously "Western" with no historical roots in China, something utterly alien to a Chinese sensibility.  Now, whatever one thinks of it aesthetically, Chinese rock is commonplace.  Chinese people play rock and roll, they express the genre in distinctly Chinese ways, and they add to the global repertoire of rock and roll more generally.  It is, at this point, absurd to assert that this is not a facet of contemporary Chinese experience.  We could make the same point about many, many kinds of cultural practices, from sports to theater to literature to visual art.

     The political implications of this Chinese multiculturalism include the impossibility of containing modern Chinese-ness within any single ideology.  Confucianism cannot serve as the singular state ideology because no system of thought or philosophy can so serve.  Confucianism can provide us with a unique perspective on modern issues but it cannot capture the totality of modernity.  Neither can socialism or liberalism (which is not, by the way, the "state ideology" of the US) or conservatism or whatever have you.  Globalization, which brings constant movement of ideas and cultural practices, makes this even more impossible.  

    Jiang's lament is familiar to many intellectuals faced with the instabilities caused by globalized cultural flows.  But instead of searching for an idealized stasis, which can never be established, it might be better to just open ourselves to constant cultural change.  Conservatives in the US must learn this same lesson.  We're all in the same global cultural boat, why not just go along for the ride....

That Theodicy Thing

       

      A good review in the New Yorker this week by James Wood, surveying the problem of theodicy - i.e. how is it that human suffering and evil can be countenanced by an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent God?  Wood embeds his theological points within a personal narrative of struggling with his own beliefs, tallying up the pros and cons of faith in God:

Theodicy, or, rather, its failure, was the other major entry on my debit side. I was trapped within the age-old conundrum: the world is full of pain and wickedness; God may be jealous but is also merciful and all-loving (how much more so, if one believes that Christ incarnated him). If he has the power to alleviate this suffering but does not, he is cruel; if he cannot, he is weak. I wasn’t consoled by the standard responses. Suffering is a mystery, I was told, as is God’s absence in the face of suffering. But this was what I was also told when prayers failed to make their mark: the old “incomprehensibility” routine. It seemed to me that the Gospels, central to my family life, made some fairly specific promises and laid on us some fairly specific obligations; yet that specificity could simply go on holiday whenever God himself seemed to have gone on holiday. (“God moves in mysterious ways.”)

     He ultimately rejects God, though he seems open to those who have not.  And this brings me back to Chinese thought, which is, unfortunately, not included in this or most standard Western recitations of theodicistic questions.  

     I have blogged about something close to this question before, what I called the "religion problem."   And I have made reference to the Augustinian invocation of free will in reflections on my son, Aidan.  So, my comments here will be brief.

     One approach to the problem of evil is simply never to bring God into consideration.  This does not have to be an anti-God position, a settled and militant atheism; rather, it can simply be a world-view that makes no reference to God.  Perhaps he is there, but we cannot see or understand him; and, most importantly, there are ways of coming to terms with the terrible things that happen without bringing him into it.   I have found and developed this orientation through my engagement with ancient Chinese thought.

      Of course, historically speaking, there were understandings of ghosts and spirits and super-natural forces that circulated around and through the minds of the people who wrote the classic texts of Chinese philosophy.  But the thought itself, at least as far as Confucianism and Taoism are concerned, can be understood without reference to god-like presences.  What matters more, in these ways of thinking and apprehending the universe, is an open acceptance of natural forces beyond our control and the vagaries of fate and destiny.

      "Way" and "Heaven" best summarize such a godless orientation to the world around us.  "Way," of course, is both undefinable and defined in various particular ways.  Here is a passage from Chuang Tzu and a short comment I made in an earlier post:

"The Tao [Way] has its own nature and its own reliability: it does nothing and it has no form. It can be passed on, but never received and held. You can master it, but you can’t see it. Its own source, its own root – it was there before heaven and earth, firm and constant from ancient times. It makes gods and demons sacred, gives birth to heaven and earth. It’s above the absolute pole, but is not high. It’s below the six directions, but is not deep. It predates the birth of heaven and earth, but is not ancient. It precedes high antiquity, but is not old. (Chuang Tzu 87)

     "Instead of the certainty of a singular source of truth, Taoism asks us to open ourselves to the multiplicity and vastness of Way.   There may be a kind of "order" to Way, but it is not an order that we can define concretely or apprehend completely.  Instead of searching for neat answers, we just have to accept our inability to comprehend Way.  Surrender as opposed to mastery is called for."

      That is one Taoist way of letting go of the search for precise and comprehensive answers to the questions posed by theodicy.  Yes, bad things happen.  But many of them are out of our reach.  People will, at times, do horrible things to each other.  They always have and, most likely, they always will.  Acceptance of that history and likelihood does not relieve evil doers of responsibility - they are, after all, violating Way - but the recurrence of evil should not surprise us.  The question is less a matter of "why would God let this happen?" than it should be "how can people be dissuaded from performing bad deeds"?

       Confucianism  is very much here-and-now and people oriented.  It is all about cultivating our better angels (in a much more extensive and specific manner than Taoism), in hopes that the "evil doers" among us will either be brought over to the side of Humanity or will be punished and limited in their ability to harm others.  Again, no reference to God or a transcendent divine power is necessary for a Confucian response to evil.

      Bottom line: if you find yourself caught up in conundrums of theodicy, just let it go.  There are answers to the problem of evil, effective answers that tell us why bad things happen and what we can do to heal ourselves and prevent future malevolence, all without the unresolvable problem of God's role and responsibility. 

Still Here

     Sorry for the relative blog silence of late.  Between grading (which I am still finishing), preparing for a summer program that I am directing, and doing some family stuff for the Memorial Day weekend (traveled to Staten Island, NY for a gathering of in-laws), I have been getting behind in posting.  Maybe it is the three year lull - I will be celebrating a three-year blog-versary later this summer.  In any event, I'm back and will apply myself with increased vigor.

     Here is something I noticed the other day, a review of a book written by a friend, Danlel A. Bell's China's New Confucianism.  I haven't seen the book yet, but have read some of the previously published essays it is based upon.  Here is an excerpt from the review:

At the core of Bell's book is his speculation on the long-term effects of the Confucian revival. China under Mao assumed a Legalist policy (strong state sovereignty, harsh laws) that helped restore its global footing. One reason Mao's brand of Marxism worked was that it incorporated elements of Confucian self-criticism, emphasizing that "demands should be directed at oneself before being directed at others." But as the gulf between rich and poor widens and social-justice issues such as the chaos in Tibet threaten the Communist Party framework, "new left" intellectuals envision the eventual replacement of Marxist ideology with something like a Confucian socialist republic. China's drive toward economic growth may be fueling political control, Bell notes, but "hardly anybody really believes that Marxism should provide guidelines for thinking about China's political future." What next? "It is not entirely fanciful to surmise that the Chinese Communist Party will be relabeled the Chinese Confucian Party in the next couple of decades."

     I would just add a couple of points.   First, I'm glad to see him peg Mao as a Legalist.  It may seem obvious to those who follow Chinese history, but it is a point that needs to be made.  I would not want the current Confucian revival in China to produce a "Mao as Confucian Gentleman" narrative.  Second, while it is true that Marxist ideology has clearly declined, it is still a bit difficult to imagine that the Communist Party would, in the near future (let's say 10-20 years) explicitly embrace a Confucian political identity.  Some sort of nationalism is the more likely ideological turn - it is easily within reach of the regime, it is a common move for governments all around the world, and it would not require the kind of explicit philosophical revision that an invocation of Confucianism would necessitate.  Think of all those Chinese women who would ask if a "Chinese Confucian Party" was going to return to the historical subordination of women? 

     In any event, I am going to order Daniel's book today.