The Useless Tree

Filial Piety: Only for the poor?

Two contrasting articles suggest how demographic and social-cultural changes in China are making it ever more difficult to realize Confucian virtues there.

First, we have a piece in The Economist that reports on the growth of nursing homes - or, old age homes; assisted living centers; etc. - in China, and how that growth reflects a cultural change in terms of expectations of how care of aging parents should be carried out.  One interesting point here is how religious, and specifically Christian, organizations are taking up the responsibility to create old age homes and care for the elderly.  So, Christians are doing the work of Confucians here... or, to be more charitable (a virtue for both Christians and Confucians), what we have here is a felicitous intersection of moral theories.  Whatever.  

The other, less sanguine, implication is that these sorts of facilities are costly.  And, even if public financing arrangements are available, invariably inequalities will emerge.  The rich will have more and better options; the poor fewer and meaner. 

To project forward a bit: it is rather easy to imagine the privileged class having an easier time paying someone else to care for their parents in a place other than their own homes - the American model, if you will.  In short, they will be able to buy their way out of the more strenuous demands of filiality, which might include keeping parents at home and being personally involved with their care. 

To be clear: I do not think that arranging care for elders at arms length is, in and of itself, somehow an immoral thing.  Quite the contrary, from my own personal experience, I very much understand the difficulties of managing the demands of modern life and the physical demise of parents. (NPR is running a series of stories on just this subject: Family Matters)  My first intention here is simply oobservational: China is subject to these same modernizing pressures and old notions of filiality and parental care are giving way to new realities and arrangements.

But I do want to make a critical point, and that is the same point I would make about elder care in the US: the poor should have reasonable access to good and affordable and secure care for the elderly.  We know this is a problem in the US.  And this story from ChinaSmack suggests that it is also a problem in China:

Filial Son Returns Home to Be With His Dying Father

It is a sad tale: a young man, Cheng Jilai,  from a poor family gets a chance to go to college but gives it up when he realizes his father is dying and there is no one to care for him at home.  It is clear that this family has few options because they have little money.  And so it falls to the son, in this case, to orient his life to the care of his father, a truly virtuous course from a Confucian perspective.  If the son had access to, and could have faith in, something like a nursing home for his father, he might be able to choose to continue in college.  But he doesn't have that choice.  He could simply abandon his father, a choice that would be widely criticized, and not just by Confucians.  He has to take care of his father.  He has to do the right filial thing.

Maybe I'm being a bit too harsh here.  Rich people who can afford good and comfortable nursing homes for their parents are also carrying out their filial duty: they are finding the best possible conditions for their parent's care.  Even if nursing homes are seen, by some, as inherently un-Confucian.  But the story of Cheng Jilai, the filial son whose poverty gives him no choice but to give up college and go home to care for his father, on the face of it, seems more true to the standards of Confucian filiality. 

And if that is true, we are left with a rather uncomfortable conclusion: it is only the poor who have to carry out a more traditional Confucian morality because the rich have the means to make other arrangements....

Godless Goodness

There is much to blog about.  In my weeks-long absence from this space - the result of nothing but distraction - I have regularly sent myself emails of articles and ideas to blog.  But it has taken some time to overcome inertia.  In any event, there are many and varied topics to take up.  But the one for today, for no particular reason, is a response to an interview with Alain de Botton (h/t Sullivan) on his new book, Religion for Atheists. 

I haven't read the book, but I will.  Sounds engaging.  The interview, however, gets at some interesting things.  de Botton is drawn to the question of ethics without religion; in a sense: can we be good without God?  He obviously believes we can - he presents himself as an atheist - but there are some intriguing issues along the way.  A few of the problems:

In my book, I argue that believing in God is, for me as for many others, simply not possible. At the same time, I want to suggest that if you remove this belief, there are particular dangers that open up – we don’t need to fall into these dangers, but they are there and we should be aware of them. For a start, there is the danger of individualism: of placing the human being at the center stage of everything. Secondly, there is the danger of technological perfectionism; of believing that science and technology can overcome all human problems, that it is just a matter of time before scientists have cured us of the human condition. Thirdly, without God, it is easier to lose perspective: to see our own times as everything, to forget the brevity of the present moment and to cease to appreciate (in a good way) the miniscule nature of our own achievements. And lastly, without God, there can be a danger that the need for empathy and ethical behaviour can be overlooked.

My response, as usual, is conditioned by Daoism.  The first thing that strikes me is how, from that perspective, none of these really need to be problems.  Indeed, the sensibility of the Daodejing and Zhuangzi is precisely what de Botton is looking for: the individual is not at the center of things but submerged in an unknowable and constantly changing universe, the broadest understanding of "dao;" technology, since it is a human creation and therefore fallible, does not provide ultimate answers for the human search for meaning; our moment in dao is minuscule; and we should be careful not to impinge upon the natural unfolding of the experience of others in dao, which I see as a kind of empathy.

Daoism developed before and distinct from Christianity.  Its early development was not, as far as I know, influenced by Judaism or other forms of monotheism.  It assumed the existence of spirits and ghosts and, as it took shape in interaction with Buddhism as a canonized religion, came to accept the ideas of an afterlife: a heaven and hell.  But Daoism never seems to rely upon the presence of a singular god-like figure to provide moral guidance.  Dao does that, or, better, learning to follow dao will lead some to a better life (yes, I think there is an ameliorative promise in the early texts).  And there is a kind of idealism as well: peole will learn to follow dao, and that will infuse them with humility and simplicity and empathy.  Not all will follow dao; there will always be those who adore "twisty paths."   But that is just the human condition.  To believe in some sort of complete and ultimate perfectability is to ignore the imperfections of humanity.

So, the anxieties the de Botton describes are culturally specific.  And at some level he recognizes this:

Much of modern moral thought has been transfixed by the idea that a collapse in belief must have irreparably damaged our capacity to build a convincing ethical framework for ourselves. But this argument, while apparently atheistic in nature, owes a strange, unwarranted debt to a religious mindset – for only if we truly believed at some level that God did exist, and that the foundations of morality were therefore in their essence supernatural, would the recognition of his nonexistence have any power to shake our moral principles.

Implicit in that last statement is its opposite: that is, if we start with the assumption that God does not exist, and we shield ourselves from the powerful cultural currents that insist that he (it?) does, then our moral principles need not be shaken by the fear of the absence of God.  We can just get on with recognizing the vastness of dao, opening ourselves to its natural unfolding, and not infringinge on how others experience their place and time in dao.  Which could be the start of a moral life....

In yielding is completion.  In bent is straight. In hollow is full.  In exhaustion is renewal.  In little is contentment.  In much is confusion.

This is how a sage embraces primal unity as the measure of all beneath heaven.

Give up self-reflection and you're soon enlightened.

Give up self-definition and you're soon apparent.

Give up self-promotion and you're soon proverbial.

Give up self-esteem and you're soon perennial.

Simply give up contention and soon nothing in all beneath heaven contends with you.

It was hardly empty talk when the ancients declared in yielding is completion.  Once you perfect completion you've returned home to it all.

DDJ 22

Something Beautiful

I've been distracted, too disracted of late to blog or do much else besides the immeidate tasks before me.  I'll get back to it soon.  In the meantime, here's something beautiful...

Thinking about Nothing

In a punchy book review in Sunday's NYT, philosopher David Albert takes down physicist Lawrence Krauss:

Lawrence M. Krauss, a well-known cosmologist and prolific popular-science writer, apparently means to announce to the world, in this new book, that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Period. Case closed. End of story....

Albert is having none of it, rejecting the very idea that physics can explain nothing, or how the universe arose from nothing (which for me, and for Daoists, is an odd question: why assume the universe had to come from nothing?):

...It happens that ever since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, what physics has given us in the way of candidates for the fundamental laws of nature have as a general rule simply taken it for granted that there is, at the bottom of everything, some basic, elementary, eternally persisting, concrete, physical stuff. Newton, for example, took that elementary stuff to consist of material particles. And physicists at the end of the 19th century took that elementary stuff to consist of both material particles and electro­magnetic fields. And so on. And what the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all there is for the fundamental laws of nature to be about, insofar as physics has ever been able to imagine, is how that elementary stuff is arranged. The fundamental laws of nature generally take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of that stuff are physically possible and which aren’t, or rules connecting the arrangements of that elementary stuff at later times to its arrangement at earlier times, or something like that. But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all.

He is aware that quantum physics poses a somewhat different understanding of the "elementary stuff," describing it in terms of relativistic quantum fields.  But, Albert argues, the same problem applies:

...Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-­theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields! The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.

Thus, Albert contends, we cannot explain nothing using relativistic quantum field theory.  

To press a bit further, it seems like he is saying we cannot explain nothing in reference to something.  That is, the purported nothing cannot exist without reference to something.  Nothing, then, cannot really exist independent of something and, therefore, the scientist's quest for explanation is rendered impossible, since the thing to be explained (the explanandum - in this case "nothing") cannot be analytically and temporally separated from the thing used to explain (the explanans - in this case "something").

I haven't studied that far into the philosophy of science to know if the explanation of "nothing" poses a fundamental problem.  From Albert I surmise that physics is inadequate to the task and that leaves room for religious and metaphysical speculations regarding nothing.  Nothing, perhaps, is the limit of science.

But it is territory where Daoism dares to tread, at least the Daodejing.  Think of this excerpt from passage 2:

All heaven knows beauty is beauty only because there's ugliness, and knows good is good only because there's evil.

Being and nonbeing give birth to one another, difficult and easy complete one another, long and short measure one another, high and low fill one another, music and noise harmonize one another, before and after follow one another....

That line - "being and nonbeing give birth to one another" - seems to get at Albert's point.  If we want to understand nothing, we can only do so by reference to something.  Passage 11 also suggests this sort of mutually constitutive relationship of something and nothing:

Thirty spokes gathered at each hub: absence makes the cart work.  A storage jar fashioned out of clay: absence makes the jar work.  Doors and windows cut in a house: absence makes the house work.

Presence gives things their value, but absences makes them work.

What is not there - the hole in the middle of the wheel; the emptiness in the center of the jar; the space within the house - gives definition to what is there.

And maybe that is the difference: scientists seek to explain, they want to analytically isolate things, declare one an antecedent and the other a consequent, and that's perhaps where a limit is reached when encountering nothing.  X might logically yield -X but -X is still framed in terms of X.  It is not really absence or nothing, which by definition would seem to be unrepresentable.  It is a negation.  Nothing is more than (less than?) negation. 

But this is a problem only if explanation is the goal.  If we are simply looking to describe, which is more in keeping with the correlative sensibilities of Daoism (and most classical Chinese thought) then there is less to sweat.  We can't explain nothing.  We can't really understand it.  We can only get a general sense of it in relation to something.  There is no certainty in our understanding of it.  And physics really can't explain it to us....

Bo Xilai: The end of elite political unity in China?

The news last night of the rather abrupt political demise of Bo Xilai has set the world of Chinese political analysts alight.  What can it mean?

I think this point is well taken:

For 20 years, says Peking University politics professor Zhang Jian, “there has been a basic consensus in the party … that factional struggles should never rock the ship. But the way the scandal unfolded and was managed may signal the beginning of the loss of that consensus.”

For those of us who were around in 1989, one of the key factors that fueled the massive demonstrations that year was the split at the very top of the Chinese political hierarchy, a difference of opinion on how to deal with the students in Tiananmen Square.  Roughly, Zhao Ziyang seemed to be seeking some sort of compromise, while Li Peng took a harder line. That difference ultimately led to the failure of the first deployment of military power in May and the eventual downfall of Zhao.  Since then it appears that everyone at the top of the political order, especially the Politburo, learned the same lesson: if they let internal differences spill out into the public they could face another crisis of 1989 proportions.

Of course, it is hard to know what really goes on in the inner sanctums of Beijing.  But Bo's sacking is certainly the most public display of high level political conflict that we have witnessed since 1989.  It might be that the post-Tiananmen consensus is breaking down.  China is a big place with various political actors looking to rise up the ladder of power and influence.  Bo was infamous for trying to create a more populist path upwards.  That has obviously failed.  But others might now want to exploit the opening created by his fall (he was widely seen as a leading candidate for ascension to the Politiburo Standing Committee later this year) to promote themselves or their political allies.  We could be in for a time of more overt, elite-level political tension.

It should be pointed out that the way this has been handled so far could suggest a kind of compromise.  Zhang Dejiang is said to be from the same faction as Bo - the "princelings," sons of former high level cadres.  The fix might be in for Zhang: he takes over this duty for now (running the massive conglomerate of Chongqing, for which he seems unsuited), and in return he will move up to the Standing Committee later this fall.  And, by some calculations, that might preserve a certain balance among various factions at the top ("Pincelings" v. Communist Youth League veterans v. regional interests, etc.). 

And yet... the abruptness and publicity of Bo's fall might open the door to new, more divisive, political tactics at the top.  And if that happens, the lessons of 1989 may go by the wayside.

And still another possibility: Bo's fall is limited and the broader political damage thus contained.  Thus far, he has lost his leadership positions in Chongqing.  He is still a member of the Politburo.  Although it seems less likely now that he will be promoted to the highest leadership level of the Standing Committee, it may be the case that he does not fall any further politically.  Maybe he remains on the Politburo and gains some other sort of position, not as prominent as the leader of Chongqing, but neither as low as some prefecture in Qinghai.  Is the Chairmanship of the symbolically important but politically impotent CPPCC in his future?  Stay tuned.

Chinese politics, especially at the elite level, has been a rather staid and stodgy affair, at least since 1989.  Bo's fall has blown up the usually carefully controlled movements of the top leadership.  Whatever happens, it is safe to say that working out the succession of the Standing Committee will be more time- and attention-consuming for the denizens of Zhongnanhai than we might have thought a few months ago.  

It could be a time when China's top leaders return to reading Han Feizi, who warned:

The only reason the ministers do not assassinate their sovereign is that their parties and cliques are not strong enough. (40)

And:

It is hazardous for the ruler of men to trust others, for he who trusts others will be controlled by others. (84)

Confucius is Politically Bolder than Wen Jiabao

Chinese Premier,  Wen Jiabao, gave his last NPC press conference in his official capacity.  His term of office, and political career, is winding down.  Next year another, most likely Li Keqiang, will be in the seat, taking questions from the press...

The western press picked up on Wen's comments about the necessity for political reform:

Mr. Wen’s sole display of passion was reserved for the issue of political reform, a cause he said he would promote to his last breath. His advocacy has rendered him increasingly isolated within a top leadership that, if anything, has more stubbornly resisted tinkering with the system.

In what seemed a message to the next generation of Chinese leaders, he said that political reform had reached a crucial stage, and that stalling or retreating from change “offers no way out.”

“We must press ahead with both economic structural reform and political structural reform, in particular reform in the leadership system of our party and country,” he said. Otherwise, “the gains we have made in this area will be lost, new problems that have cropped up in China’s society will not be fundamentally resolved and such a historic tragedy as the Cultural Revolution may happen again.”

Among those problems, he pointedly noted, are increases in corruption and income disparity and a decline in the government’s credibility.

Although Wen may well be passionate about this idea, I must say we have heard all this before, and nothing has really come of it.  He has made comments over the years that suggest a possibility for political change, but, then, he either does not assert himself to get the job done, or he simply does not have sufficient power to do so.  Either way, and whatever his best intentions, the PRC political system continues to be impervious even to relatively modest political liberalization.

Interestingly, Wen also made direct mention of the Bo Xilai/Wang Lijun scandal.  Although the Financial Times's headline seems a bit overdone - Wen attacks party conservatives - it is unusual for backroom political issues to be br ought to light in such a public manner:

In a rare example of open criticism among senior Communist party officials, Mr Wen took direct aim at Mr Bo who has been tarnished by the revelation that his police chief and key ally Wang Lijun tried to defect to the US last month. Mr Wang is in custody and his case is under investigation.

But the "attack" is muted.  Wen simply says: “The current [Chongqing] party committee and government of Chongqing must seriously reflect on the Wang Lijun incident and learn lessons from this incident...”  Not really a major take down of Bo and Wang..

It's too bad Wen doesn't push harder.  Let's assume he want some kind of genuine political reform.  Let's say he is sympathetic to what seems be a more accomodating approach to dealing with political problems that emerged in Wukan, Guangdong province.  Let's say he really is concerned about countering the corruption that corrodes public institutions.  Why hasn't he used his position to press harder for such goals? 

He would find some support in Confucius, who is often presented as a defender of authority and hierarchy but who actually was quite will to challenge the powers that be if they were pressing society in the wrong direction, as here in Analects 11.17:

The head of the Ji family was richer than the duke of Zhou had been, and yet Qiu collected his imposts for him, and increased his wealth. The Master said, "He [Qiu] is no disciple of mine. My little children, beat the drum and assail him."

季氏富於周公，而求也為之聚斂而附益之。子曰：「非吾徒也。小子鳴鼓而攻之，可也。」

If public officials - in this case Qiu - are facilitating policies that spread injustice and inhumanity, they should be attacked, and one supposes removed from their positions. 

Too bad Wen is not as assertive as Confucius....

UPDATE: Maybe Wen was channeling his inner Confucius.  It now turns out that Bo Xilai has been removed from his posts in Chongqing.  Wow.  We'll see if he hangs on to his Politburo seat.... breaking....

How Confucian is the US?

I hadn't realized just how widespread the concept of "filial responsibility" is in American jurisprudence.  It turns out that 28 states have laws on the books that state that children are responsible for the care of their elderly parents.   A brief NYT post explains:

The rationale, which you can trace back as far as ancient Roman law, is that children have a duty to care for parents. The law sees this as a matter of ethics and reciprocity: Your parents took care of you as children; now it’s your turn to take care of them.

At one time, filial responsibility laws were far more common. As recently as the 1950s, 45 states and the federal government had them on the books. They began to erode during the New Deal, when the Social Security Act passed and the concept of government rather than familial responsibility started to take hold.

But 28 states still have filial responsibility laws: Alaska, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and West Virginia.

Sixteen of these impose civil penalties — they can come after your assets or income if you fail to support your parents. In the eight states where filial responsibility entails criminal penalties, a prosecutor could actually put you in jail. Four states take both approaches.

In Massachusetts, for instance, someone who “unreasonably neglects” to support a parent who is destitute or too infirm to maintain himself could face up to a year in prison plus a $200 fine.

Who knew?  As a Massachusetts resident. I guess I should be relieved that I did not "unreasonably neglect" my mother and her end of life care.  At the time, I was wholly ignorant of the law but struggling to do the right filial thing.  It would all depend, I imagine, on how the lawyers define "unreasonable neglect"...

The article goes on, however:  "But filial responsibility laws are very rarely enforced; 11 of the 28 states that have them have never used them."

"Filial responsibility," would seem to be more of a principle than a practice, at least in the legal sense.  And if that is the case, then the US is not a Confucian society (surprise!) because Confucianism requires that we actually perform our duties.

But in fact Americans, quietly and out of the media spotlight, do perform their familial duties.  A 2009 survey (pdf!) suggests that "caregiving" is very prevalent in the US:

In the past 12 months, an estimated 65.7 million people in the U.S. have served as unpaid family caregivers to an adult or a child. About 28.5% of the respondents surveyed reported being caregivers.

"Caregiving" here is defined as caring for an adult or a child with special needs, not routine child care.

So, maybe we are more Confucian than we realize.  Maybe "filial responsibility" laws are not enforced because most people most of the time do what they can to care for their family members.  Of course there are instances of neglect and abuse, and these must be attended to by legal authorities.  But for most of us it might be that this excerpt from Analects 1.2 rings true:

The noble-minded cultivate roots.  When roots are secure, the Way is born.  To honor parents and elders - isn't that the root of Humanity?

Breaking News! Zhuangzi is right: there is no human nature

Over at the NPR blog (ht Sullivan), Cosmos and Culture, Barbara J. King, biological anthropologist, tells us:

...I would assert that there is no set-in-stone human nature.

Anthropological studies show that humans respond with incredible plasticity to the social and environmental forces around us. As biological anthropologist and blogger Patrick Clarkin aptly puts it, our abilities for cooperation and conflict, love and hate are "triggered under given circumstances, facilitated or hampered by social conditions and structures."

For me, this immediately brought to mind a passage from chapter 5 of Zhuangzi:

"Can a person really have no nature, asked Hui Tzu of Chuang Tzu.

"Yes," replied Chuang Tzu.

"But if you have no nature, how can you be called human?"

"Tao gives you shape and heaven gives you form, so why can't you be called human?"

"But if you're called human, how can you have no nature?"

"'Yes this' and 'no that' - that's what I call human nature," replied Chuang Tzu. "Not mangling yourself with 'good' and 'bad' - that's what I call no nature.  Instead of struggling to improve on life, you simply abide in occurrence appearing of itself."

....

As usual, the above in the Hinton translation and there are some word choices that could be challenged, but I don't think those choices disrupt the general idea here.

Hinton uses the words "nature" and "human nature" for the character 情, qing, as in Hui Tzu's opening question: 人故無情乎.  More common translations are: "feeling;" "emotion;" "passion."  Thus, Legge goes with: "Can a man indeed be without desires and passions?"  And Graham settles on: "Can a man really be without the essentials of man?"  Although "human nature" is usually reserved for translations of xing - 性; or ren xing - 人 性;  I think Hinton's use of it here for qing is not off the mark. 

My sense of what Zhuangzi is talking about here is that he is rejecting the idea of an essentialist, continual, settled quality to human behavior, a human nature of sorts.  Our lives need not be determined by some a priori quality of goodness or badness, or passions or desires.  Rather we can and should simply respond to circumstances as they arise: "appearance occurring of itself" - ziran - 自然.

Or, as King says: "...humans respond with incredible plasticity to the social and environmental forces around us." 

Of course, Mencius and Xunxi would have something different to say on the topic....

A Confucian Critique of Santorum's Environmental Denialism

Rick Santorum, who somehow is being taken seriously by Republican primary voters, rejects the idea that global warming is a real phenomenon and that it is connected to human activity on the planet.  He castigated President Obama for having a "phony theology" that unscientifically accepts as dogma (I guess) that climate change is happening....

Where to start... Actually, the best place to begin a response might be a nice little blog post over at the National Catholic Reporter.  That's right, people who take Catholicism seriously -  not just certain selective points about abortion and contraception while ignoring the other stuff like torture - come to a very different conclusion on environmental issues:

But Santorum is a Catholic. Maybe he has never gotten further in his reading than Humanae Vitae. So I wonder if he is even remotely aware of Catholic statements on the environment. As recently as May 2011, a Vatican-appointed panel of scientists affirmed that the earth is indeed getting warmer, and urgent measures are needed to reverse the trend through a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, methane and other pollutants...

The writer then gets a bit cheeky: "Rick Santorum needs some basic environmental catechism."  To which one can only say: Amen!

I think Confucius, too, would find fault with Santorum's environmental denialism. 

Confucius would agree, in a conditional and limited manner, to at least one aspect of Santorum's position on climate change.  While not a "dominionist" orientation, which Santorum seems to be embracing, Confucianism would agree that humans have an elevated moral status in relation to nature.  For example, Confucius sees people as being more important than animals, as suggested in Analects 10.12 (which is sometimes numbered 10.11 or 10.17):

One day the stables burned down.  When he returned from court, The Master asked: "Was anyone hurt?" He didn't ask about the horses.

Animals matter less than people, morally, so there is no need to inquire about the horses.  We might expand this suggestion to argue that, if it serves the purposes of Humanity, then using natural resources is justified.  If there is a conflict between human moral good and the environment, the former could take precedence in many, though not all, cases.  Confucianism would thus countenance a more thoroughgoing human presence over nature than, say, would Daoists.

But that presence must be counterbalanced by a certain respect for the environment.  Humans should not wantonly abuse nature.  Indeed, Humanity requires a certain limitation of human action in nature, as suggested by Analects 7.27:

The Master fished with hooks, not nets, and he never shot roosting birds.

He calibrated his actions in accordance to what was required for the nature reproduction of the natural world.  If we add in here the Confucian ideal of material simplicity, symbolized by Yan Hui,  then we can see that the pursuit of Humanity can accomplished in a manner that is respectful of natural processes.

Fast forward to the globalized capitalism of the 21st century, driven by conspicuous consumption and rapacious destruction of nature.  A modern Confucian would look on the scene and say that our relationship to the environment is out of balance.  We are fishing with nets, not hooks, and shooting roosting birds.  The fact of global warming is well established, and it is "very likely" connected to human activity.  Contemporary Confucians would, I believe, accept these points of view, and they would see the link between environmental degradation more generally and materially extravagant human behavior.   There is, as I have argued before, a certain greenness at the heart of Confucianism.

To do full justice to Confucian environmentalism requires a lot more work than I can do here. But I think it is safe to say that the kind of anti-scientific, dogmatic, ideological environmental denialism demonstrated by Santorum as he panders for right-wing votes, would be frowned upon by a modern Confucian.

Confucianism is not a Religion

Now, there's an attention-grabbing headline.  It seems almost arrogant to so directly claim a clear answer to the rather complex question: is Confucianism a religion?  But I put it up there to insert myself into the perennial debate, which has been rekindled in the blogosphere by a well written piece by Peter Berger, sociologist of religion.

Berger comes down on the side of Confucianism as religion.  He does not do so rashly.  He recognizes that much of Confucianism is essentially secularist: there is little to no explicit invocation of a God or gods as creators or exemplars of moral virtue.  Rather, as is so often stated, Confucianism is a "this-worldly" philosophy, a moral theory that seeks to train people in the here and now to do the right thing and become, themselves, the enactors and symbols of propriety.  There is little, if any, concern for cosmological origins or after lives.  At least this is the case for the pre-Qin texts.  A couple of passages from The Analects get at this geist:

The Master never spoke of the supernatural, violence, disorder, or gods and spirits.   7.21

***

When Adept Liu asked about serving ghosts and spirits, the Master said: "You haven't learned to serve the living, so how could you serve ghosts?

"Might I ask about death?"

"You don't understand life," the Master replied, "so how could you understand death?" 11.12

I know just citing Analects passages does not put the question to rest.  There have been impressive analyses over the years contending that Confucianism functioned as a religion in Chinese society, even if it did not fulfill certain definitions of "religion."  And there are ways that Confucianism might be made into or used as a religion historically in China.  So the larger issue is complex.  But, at the end of the day, I find the main body of "Confucianism" to be something other than a religion.

For me the key issue is the de-emphasis on God/gods.  While the early texts presume a spirit world, they just don't make very much of it.  The spirits of our parents matter, but larger transcendent god-like spirits are not really important.  Indeed, in urging us to "serve the living" Confucius seems to be saying that we should not allow propitiation or adulation of spirits get in the way of our immediate earthly duties.

For Berger, the thing that tips the balance in favor of an understanding of Confucianism as a religion is the notion of Heaven - tian, 天 :

....However, there is one classical and rather central Confucian belief that, I think, is unambiguously religious—that of tian, usually translated as “heaven”. It is not theistic, although gods are associated with it. Rather, it is a cosmic order, supernatural in that it transcends the empirical world, over which it presides and with which it interacts. It thus serves as the necessary, ipso facto religious foundation for all the secular virtues propagated by Confucian teachings. It seems to me that this religious character of tian is most clearly expressed in the notion of the “mandate of heaven”: A ruler has this “mandate”, the basis of his legitimacy, if he rules in accordance with the moral rules governing relations between him and his subjects. If he does not so rule, the “mandate of heaven” will be withdrawn, his rule becomes illegitimate and his subjects have a valid reason to disobey or even overthrow him. The distinctively Confucian institution resulting from this idea was that of the “imperial censors”—officials at court with the express duty to reprimand the emperor if he strayed from correct ritual and moral behavior. I take it that this did not happen very often: Emperors, in China or elsewhere, do not take kindly to being reprimanded.

The notion of tian, drawn from early Zhou times, suggests a rather diffuse sense of fate and destiny.  Whether it is "transcendent" or not is not really a settled issue - Hall and Ames famously assert that Confucian thinking is more a matter of immanence than transcendence.  But even if we accept a kind of transcendence in tian, it is still not at all clear that we can say that tian "presides" over the empirical world.  Yes, fate and destiny can shape human lives, but that does not necessarily lead to a kind of predestination or "intelligent design."  Tian, and a Confucian sensibility, fit just as well with a secularist, modern, scientific cosmology, as Frederick Mote suggests, citing Carl Jung approvingly:

The ancient Chinese mind contemplates the cosmos in a way comparable to that of the modern physicist, who cannot deny that his model of the world is a decidedly psychophysical structure.

Mote goes on to give the great line from Needham, who describes ancient Chinese cosmology as providing: "an ordered harmony of wills without an ordainer."

So, I guess the question for me is: is it a religion if it has no ordainer?  If its secularism is more pronounced than Berger suggests, is it something more of a lived moral theory than a religion?  Of course it depends on the definition of religion being used but if Confucianism, with its avoidance of God/gods, is a religion, perhaps we should ask: is socialism a religion?  Liberalism?....