The Useless Tree

Ernest Gellner and Chuang Tzu

    Just back from a two-day jaunt to New York City.  We saw a Yankee game, a win for Wang Chien-ming!  But more on that later. 

     On the train I was re-reading a book I have assigned for one of my classes, Ernest Gellner's, Nations and Nationalism.  And I was struck this time by the ways in which modernity and modernization, in Gellner's telling, so fundamentally diverges from Chuang Tzu's view of the world.

     Gellner argues that in the pre-modern world (date it as you will) knowledge was context-specific, embedded in the particular circumstances of a person's social position and role:

In a traditional social order, the languages of the hunt, of harvesting, of various rituals, of the council room, of the kitchen or harem, all form autonomous systems: to conjoin statements drawn from these various disparate fields, to probe for inconsistencies between them, to try to unify them all, this would be a social solecism or worse, probably blasphemy or impiety, and the entire endeavor would be unintelligible. (21)

     Modernization, and especially industrialization, requires more standardized knowledge, based on the understanding that all things can be taken out of their context and analyzed in a manner to produce a single, unified language of science.  He invokes Hume to make his point:

Hume's philosophy is one of the most important codifications of this vision.  Its best-known part is his treatment of causation, which indeed follows from the overall vision and its central insights.  What it amounts to in the end is this: in the very nature of things, nothing is inherently connected with anything else.  The actual connections of this world can only be established by first separating in thought everything that can bet thought separately - so we can isolate the pure elements, so to speak - and then seeing what, as a matter of experience, happens to be actually conjoined to what. (23)

     This modern, scientific, analytic approach is diametrically opposed to Chuang Tzu's understanding, which can be summed up in the line: those who divide (i.e. analyze) cannot see.  Chuang Tzu rejects the notion that we can isolate things from their contexts.  He holds that the "actual connections of this world" can only be apprehended by considering the whole as a whole, not as the summation of artificially isolated parts.  Everything is inherently connected to everything else.  That is what Way is.

     Think about this:

There's nothing anywhere which is not "that," and nothing that is not "this."  If you rely on "that," you cannot see.  But if you rely on understanding, you can know.  And so when I say "that arises out of this, and this exists because of that," I'm describing the way "that" and "this" are born of each other.  Life is born of death, and death of life.  In sufficiency is insufficiency, in insufficiency sufficiency.  There is "no that" because of "yes this," and "yes this" because of "no that."  But this is not the sage's way: the sage illuminates all in the light of heaven.  Such is the sage's "yes this."

"This" is "that," and "that" is "this."  "That" makes "yes this" and "no that" the same, and "this" makes "yes this" and "no that" the same.  So is there a "that" and a "this"?  Or is there not a "that" and a"this"?  Where "that" and "this" cease to be opposites, you'll find the hinge of Tao. (22)

    Again, this is just a reminder of how deeply opposed Chuang Tzu is to the intellectual foundations of modernity.  And his opposition was, in its own time, extraordinarily prescient.  It seems as if he were speaking then precisely to the dominant scientific world view of today.  And maybe he is right.

Tu Fu and Aidan

     I'm out of town today, down in the big city.  Here's a poem I found by Tu Fu that touched my heart:

Thinking of my Little Boy

Apart still, and already the oriole songs
Fill warm spring days.  Changing seasons
Startle me here without you, my little
Sage.  Who talks philosophy with you now?

Clear streams, empty mountain paths, our
Simple village home among ancient trees...
In grief thinking of you, sleep: sunning
On the veranda, I nod off beneath blue skies.

Advice to A-Rod: Give up the Analysis

     For those of you who, like me, are Yankee fans, the tribulations of Alex Rodriguez are well known.   Here is a description from today's NYT:

 This season, he is batting .279 with 26 homers and 93 runs batted in, yet a closer look shows mediocrity.

Rodriguez has 49 extra-base hits. Players with more include Pedro Feliz, Mike Jacobs and Eric Byrnes. His combined on-base and slugging percentage is .871. Players with a better figure include Scott Hatteberg, Reed Johnson and Lyle Overbay.

Rodriguez also leads American League third basemen in errors, with 22. And after striking out 14 times while going 2 for 20 on the West Coast last week, Rodriguez is fourth in the league in strikeouts, with 125.

   The big question circulating through New York, therefore, is: what to do?  How can A-Rod get out of his slump?  A-Rod himself is working hard:

Whatever fans think of Rodriguez, his effort is never lacking. To Rodriguez, who claims not to believe in slumps, the way to correct poor performance is more analysis, more work. But does he overthink a simple game?

“Sometimes, but that’s who he is,” said Reggie Jackson, the Yankees’ special adviser, who counseled Rodriguez in the clubhouse after a 1-for-5 game Sunday. “He does make things complicated, but that’s who he is, and that’s how he’s been successful. It’s very difficult to push back on his style.

   And maybe that is the problem.  He may be trying to hard, and the trying is getting in the way of the performance.  The analysis is clouding his natural instincts and talent.  If Chuang Tzu were a Yankee coach (wow, imagine that!), this is what he might say:

Just let your mind wander along in the drift of things.  Trust yourself to what is beyond you - let it be the nurturing center.   Then you've made it.  In the midst of all this, is there really any response?  Nothing can compare to simply living out your inevitable nature.  And there's nothing more difficult. (56)

     So, A-Rod, let it go.  Don't think about it.  Don't analyze it.  Just wander along on the drift of things - and the hits will come of their own accord.

Mencian Biology

     Richard Rorty reviews Marc D. Hauser's new book, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, in yesterday's NYT Book Review.   Rorty describes the book's project thusly:

Nazi parents found it easy to turn their children into conscientious little monsters. In some countries, young men are raised to believe that they have a moral obligation to kill their unchaste sisters. Gruesome examples like these suggest that morality is a matter of nurture rather than nature — that there are no biological constraints on what human beings can be persuaded to believe about right and wrong. Marc Hauser disagrees. He holds that “we are born with abstract rules or principles, with nurture entering the picture to set the parameters and guide us toward the acquisition of particular moral systems.” Empirical research will enable us to distinguish the principles from the parameters and thus to discover “what limitations exist on the range of possible or impossible moral systems.”

Hauser is professor of psychology, organismic and evolutionary biology, and biological anthropology at Harvard. He believes that “policy wonks and politicians should listen more closely to our intuitions and write policy that effectively takes into account the moral voice of our species.” Biologists, he thinks, are in a position to amplify this voice. For they have discovered evidence of the existence of what Hauser sometimes calls “a moral organ” and sometimes “a moral faculty.” This area of the brain is “a circuit, specialized for recognizing certain problems as morally relevant.” It incorporates “a universal moral grammar, a toolkit for building specific moral systems.” Now that we have learned that such a grammar exists, Hauser says, we can look forward to “a renaissance in our understanding of the moral domain.”

    Rorty believes that Hauser ultimately fails to make the psycho- biological case for "a moral organ."  The experimental science just doesn't seem to add up persuasively, for Rorty at least. 

    I have not read the book, but am just responding to the review here - I am not taking any position on whether Hauser has succeeded or not in his purpose.  What I do want to point our, however, are the resonances here with Mencius.

     Mencius famously believed that humans are innately good.  He did  not root this assertion in a sophisticated biological analysis - none then existed.  Rather, it was based on his observation and reason and, I believe, his hope and optimism about humanity.  His most well known example runs like this:

Mencius said: "Everyone has a heart that can't bear to see others suffer.  The ancient emperors had hearts that couldn't bear to see others suffer, and so had governments that couldn't bear to see others suffer.  If you lead a government that can't bear to see others suffer, ruling all beneath heaven is like turning it in the palm of your hand.

"Suddenly seeing a baby about to fall into a well, anyone would be heart-stricken with pity: heart-stricken not because they wanted to curry favor with the baby's parents, not because they wanted the praise of neighbors and friends, and not because they hated the baby's cries.  This is why I say everyone has a heart that can't bear to see others suffer. (55)

     Of course, Mencius is well aware that some people will do bad things and act heartlessly toward others.  This, he believes, is learned behavior.  People have to learn how to be bad.  We all start out with the same good, moral innate capacities.  He makes this comparison:

"...Human nature is inherently good, just like water flows inherently downhill.  There's no such thing as a person who isn't good, just as there's no water that doesn't flow downhill.

"Think about water: if you slap it, you can make it jump over your head; and if you push it, you can make it stay on a mountain.  But what does this have to do with the nature of water?  It's only responding to the forces around it.  It's like that for people, too: you can make them evil, but that says nothing about human nature." (198)

     Do we need psycho-biological confirmation of this idea?  Not really.  It might be better to put our money scientific and efforts into understanding what makes people evil.

Singaporean Legalism

      A fairly new blog, A Serial Number on my Vote, has a nice post and some good comments that detail the parallels between PAP leadership in Singapore and classical Legalism (hat tip: Singabloodypore).  This adds more specifics to a point that has been made here and here.

     The author, KiWeTo, writes: "Now, it would seem far fetched that a 3rd century BC ( that's -300 years for those who have difficulty with ) would be relevant to Singapore society today."  To which the staff here at The Useless Tree would reply: No! It is not far-fetched at all.  In fact, there are many, many ways that the classic texts speak to us today.  And thank you, KiWeTo, for devling a bit deeper into the Legalist practices of Mini Lee and company.

Beijing Weekend - Not this weekend!

     I heard from my editor last week and he told me that they will not be running my column every week.  Seems that they have a number of other contributors and they want to run a wider variety of pieces.  That's life in the big city.  It's OK, though.  I still have a space there and I will take advantage of it when I can.  And I will post them here when they run.

Hurricane Katrina: Bush Lost the Mandate of Heaven

     Last year when Hurricane Katrina struck, I asked the I Ching if this meant Bush might lose the Mandate of Heaven.  The answer I received then centered on the actions that Bush might undertake.  Here's the key graph:

So, Bush must appoint the right person to address the long-term problems of hurricane recovery and that person must do the right thing by attending to the material and moral needs of the people.  If all that goes right, Bush will retain the Mandate of Heaven; and, by implication, if any of this goes wrong, Bush could permanently lose the Mandate.

 Everything centered on establishing the right leader for the reconstruction job.  That has not happened.  And, now, Katrina is widely seen as a key turning point in the demise of the Bush presidency:

"The sort of limited commitment that this president has to using federal power to ameliorate domestic problems registered powerfully in this Katrina episode," said presidential historian Robert Dallek. "It triggered Bush's downturn."

    So, the I Ching was right! Bush failed to act decisively and effectively after Katrina, and it has cost him.  The Mandate of Heaven has slipped away from him.  As the original reading said: "correct Dao does not function." 

Edmund Burke channels Confucius

    I am reading Kwame Anthony Appiah's book Cosmopolitanism.  It raises many good questions, though I am not sure it provides as clear a set of answers as I had hoped.  In any event, I just came across this quote he adduces from Edmund Burke (from Reflections on the Revolution in France):

...to love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.  It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind. (152)

     I was immediately struck by the Confucian sensibility here: building up our connection to humanity from our closet loving relationships outward.  "Father a father; minister a minister; ruler a ruler" - and that is how we get to Humanity.

      Just wanted to share that...

Why No Chinese Terrorists?

     Chan Akya has a notable piece in today's Asia Times, "Islam and the absence of Chinese terrorists."  Akya makes a culturalist argument, suggesting that deep historical forces, manifest in various elements of traditional Chinese culture, especially including Buddhism, explain why contemporary Islam gives rise to more terrorist activity than does contemporary China.

     This is an interesting line of inquiry.  But  the form that it takes in this article is, I believe, fundamentally flawed. 

     The major problem is that Akya is ascribing too much explanatory weight to ancient ideas.  For example:

Very similar to the schism that developed in Islam between Sunnis and Shi'ites is the one that developed in Buddhism in the 1st century AD.  Then, the arguments between the literal sayings of the Buddha and a theological expansion from those  sayings laid the ground for the evolution of Mahayana (Greater Wheel) Buddhism, which is the version that thrived in India and was later exported to China and Japan. The older, and arguably truer, form of Buddhism was thenceforth  cited as Hinayana (Lesser Wheel) and was primarily followed in countries such as Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Burma (Myanmar) and Siam (Thailand).

     After further discussing how Mahayana Buddhism interacted with indigenous elements of Chinese culture - Confucianism and Taoism - Akya returns to the idea that the earlier split in Buddhism is of central importance in understanding why terrorism is to be found in Sri Lanka and not in China.

    Much is missing here, like the twentieth century.  Or the broader historical process of modernization, which begins in earnest in China in the 19th century. 

    The China-Sri Lanka comparison is secondary to the China-Middle East comparison and, when considering the latter and the ways in which Islam has been interpreted by some to support terrorism, we really need to look at how more particular political struggles, shaped by the forces of economic and social change, have encouraged and allowed religious or philosophical systems of thought to be mobilized for violent purposes. 

    Ideas do not have political lives of their own, they are taken and used, and their meanings transformed, by political actors who seek power.

     In the case of China, if we were to ask why we do not find there anything similar to Islamic terrorist movements, the first things we should focus on are not the 1st century Buddhist schism, but the twentieth century revolutionary struggle for power and its outcomes.  Most immediately, the creation of the very highly centralized state apparatus, with effective reach into local communities, likely explains more of the absence of terrorism in China than does any ancient strand of thought.  Chinese society has, since 1949, been very closely policed and politically controlled.  Even peaceful political movements are quickly suppressed. 

     Moreover, that political centralization has been effectively tied to nationalism for decades now.  Many Chinese - most Chinese? - are proud of their country and are willing to accept the state's claims that political authoritarianism is necessary to maintain social order.  In short, there is no social "water"  to support the "fish" of an underground terrorist movement.  An al-Qaeda-like organization would thus be more effectively repressed by the state and by the society.

    Compare this to contemporary Iraq - which is essentially state-less - or Afghanistan under the Taliban, or Lebanon or Pakistan.  None of these places comes even close to the socio-political conditions of China, and they are major suppliers of terrorist foot soldiers.

     Another line of explanation, before we consider the effects of ancient ideas, is the broader experience of modernization - by which I mean the inter-related economic, social and political processes of urbanization, social mobility, industrialization, bureaucratization, secularization and so on.   China began to confront and be transformed by these changes in the nineteenth century and the process played itself out violently in the twentieth.  Some of the earliest anti-modernizing violence was, of course, performed by the Boxer Movement.  Indeed, the Boxers might be understood as a "terrorist" organization.

     Long story short: the first half of the twentieth century was incredibly violent in China: it was attacked from without and it was riven by civil war within.  In the midst of this there was plenty of "terrorist" violence, by Chinese against foreign invaders (in a classically asymmetric manner) and by Chinese against Chinese.  Indeed, a classic statement of the terrorist mindset can be found in Andre Malraux' Man's Fate.  Nothing in ancient Chinese culture limited or prevented wide-scale terrorist violence.

    Again, compare to the contemporary Middle East.  Although it is obiously a large and complex topic, I think that it it not too controversial to say that many places in the Middle East have not experienced, or are only now in the midst of, the tumultuous modernizing processes that China has already gone through.

    I could go on.  And I realize we could debate the historical interpretations endlessly.  But I am quite confident in this conclusion: the absence of terrorism in China today has more to do with the political circumstances of the twentieth century than it does with the religious or philosophical conditions of the first century AD.

    Confucianism and Taoism are, at base, pacifistic.  Buddhism is also, though the Japanese were able to turn it toward state violence in the early twentieth century.  These systems of thought generally support a rejection of terrorist violence.  But they are merely systems of thought and, as such, they do not determine such historical outcomes like the presence or absence of terrorist movements.  They have no force in and of themselves, but are given force by historical conditions and political activists.

Chuang Tzu on the "Eight Honors and Disgraces"

     Back in April I commented on the "Eight Honors and Disgraces" campaign in the PRC press. It is a throwback to old-fashioned socialist, and quasi-Confucian, ethical exhortation: a series of slogans meant to define public and political morality. 

     Well, while perusing Chuang Tzu the other day I found this passage, which seems to presage the "Eight Honors:"

When there's Tao, boundaries haven't yet begun being.  When there's language, the timeless hasn't yet begun being.  "Yes this" happens - and so being gets demarcated.  Let me tell you about demarcation: There's left and there's right.  There's relationship and there's Duty.  There's difference and there's division.  There's strife and there's struggle.  Call them anything - how about the eight virtues? (27)

 Of course, he is scoffing at the entire enterprise of distinction and division.  Categorization is, for him, meaningless: it causes us to lose track of the meaning of the whole of Tao.  So, the "eight virtues" is an empty label, a pathetic human attempt to put a name to an indefinable Way.  Here is how he clinches the point:

Hence, in difference there's no difference, and in division there's not division.  You may ask how this can be.  The sage embraces it all.  Everyone else divides things, and uses one to reveal the other.  Therefore I say: "Those who divide things cannot see."

 I wonder if the CCP propaganda people have ever read that?