The Useless Tree

There Goes Pluto!

     After much wrangling, the International Astronomers Union has demoted Pluto from "planet" to "dwarf planet."  Does it matter what we call it?  Maybe not.  It brings Walt Whitman to mind:

When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged
   in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add,
   divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured
   with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

    Which, in turn, leads back to a couple of lines from the Tao Te Ching:

If you give up learning, troubles end (20).

The knowing are never learned
and the learned never knowing. (81)

    There is always knowing beyond our human learning.  We create categories and concepts in an attempt to explain the universe, the Way, but these ideas are partial and flawed.  If we focus too intently on individual things, the "planets" in and of themselves, isolated from their context by our human-made analytic frameworks, we risk blinding ourselves to how all things relate to one another in infinately complex and beautiful ways.

     Names matter less than presence.

This is Not what Confucius had in mind!

     A story from the BBC (original Xinhua story here):

China acts on funeral strippers

Five people have been detained in China for running striptease send-offs at funerals, state media say. The once-common events are held to boost the number of mourners, as large crowds are seen as a mark of honour.

But the arrests, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, could signal the end of the rural tradition.

Local officials have since ordered a halt to "obscene performances" and say funeral plans have to be submitted in advance, Xinhua news agency said.

The arrests, in Donghai county, followed striptease acts at a farmer's funeral, the agency said.

Two hundred people were said to have attended the event, which was held on 16 August.

The Beijing News said the event was later revealed by a Chinese TV station. The leaders of five striptease troupes were held, it said, including two involved in the farmer's funeral.

"Striptease used to be a common practice at funerals in Donghai's rural areas to allure viewers," Xinhua agency said.

"Local villagers believe that the more people who attend the funeral, the more the dead person is honoured."

As well as ordering an end to the practice, officials have also said residents can report "funeral misdeeds" on a hotline, earning a reward for information.

     Confucius tells us that when we honor elders, including our behavior at their funerals - especially our behavior at their funerals - we must be motivated by sincere reverence generated from deep within our hearts. 

     Drawing a big crowd with a strip tease doesn't quite capture what he was saying....

The Best Way to Care for the Aged: Put them to Work?

     Two articles in People's Daily raise some interesting questions when read together.

    First, we have "China expects communities to take more care of elderly people," which tells us:

China is encouraging communities to provide services for the elderly, as pressure grows on retirement homes and individual families.

"Community services can be easily organized in neighborhoods where residents have friendly relations and tend to help each other," said Guo Ping, deputy director of the China Research Center on Aging.

He suggested communities set up special teams to pay regular visits to the elderly at home, offering cleaning, laundry and medical care services.

 Which is made to sound like a culturally appropriate social benefit:

Deeply influenced by the traditional value that children should support their elderly parents and guarantee them a happy life, many Chinese seniors are reluctant to leave home and live in retirement homes.

However, with many Chinese families now having a "four parents, one couple and one child" structure, young people are shouldering a heavier burden supporting the elderly.

Experts recommend that senior citizens live at home and be taken care of by their communities. It is a solution that suits China's situation and its traditions.

      Perhaps.  But this may simply be putting a Confucian gloss on an unwieldy modern problem.  I have a sneaking suspicion that "communities" will be under the same kinds of economic pressure as "children" - people having to devote more time to work to earn enough to secure basic living necessities in a growing economy with increasing costs and competitiveness - and that this nice-sounding idea will not get very far in dealing with the exploding issue of China's aging society.  And that is the topic of the next article: "Who will support China's development in 50 years?"

     This makes Japan, with its rapidly graying society, a vision of China's future:

Researchers Cai Chuang and Wang Meiyan from CASS found that between 2000 and 2030, the average age of the labor force would also increase. It's predicted that in 2013, the number of workers as a percentage of the population will peak at 72.1 percent. But the actual size of the working population will peak at 997 million in 2016. According to UN estimates, the number of Chinese people of working age will gradually fall below the world average. These estimates indicate that China's outlook is not optimistic. China will lose its economic advantage of cheap labor in the near future.

Unfortunately, China's demand for labor will continue to grow for some time. It is the labor-intensive manufacturing and processing industries that have given China such an advantage in the world economy. Without labor, these industries will collapse. China needs a long time if it is to change its mode of production mode and as yet there haven't been any signs of readjustment.

In fact CASS's report says that there is no need to wait for the problem to actually develop, as it has already been anticipated. Since 2004, China's most vital development area, the Pearl River Delta, has experienced a shortage of labor. The Yangtze River Delta has also had this problem.

     So, we have two problems: taking care of old folks and maintaining the labor pool.  One answer seems obvious: put the old folks to work!  There might be even more problem squaring this with Confucian ethics, but, hey, necessity is the mother of invention (is there a Chinese saying for that?).

      At first, I thought this was just a goofy idea, a bad joke at the expense of Confucians.  But the more I think about it...

     With technology changing the nature of work more and more, why shouldn't we expect that older people, even those with certain physical limitations, have the capacity to maintain busy, productive work lives?  And why shouldn't we expect that many older folks might want to have some sort of job, something to keep them busy and earn them some money?  So, in fact, I think Mr. Guo should expand his horizons.  Why not an elderly training program to teach people how to use computers and the internet?  Why not an elderly call center?  It may not be cut-throat manufacturing, but it could be productive.

     Now, if only I could find a passage in the Analects that would justify keeping elders on the job (my books are in the office, but I'll see what I can come up with later...).

The Fame Motive

     In today's NYT we have this article,"The Fame Motive," which considers our desire to find personal validation in the attention of others:

Money and power are handy, but millions of ambitious people are after something other than the corner office or the beach house on St. Bart’s. They want to swivel necks, to light a flare in others’ eyes, to walk into a crowded room and feel the conversation stop. They are busy networking, auditioning, talking up their latest project — a screenplay, a memoir, a new reality show — to satisfy a desire so obvious it is all but invisible.

    I imagine other writers will have already pointed out that yearning for fame may well explain many of the blogs out there, and maybe I am guilty of it, too.  But I found the very last paragraph of the story to be an invitation to bring some Chinese ancients into the conversation.  The question here is: what happens when we do not find the fame we crave.  And the final response, in this article at least, is:

"I concluded that several things could happen, and one of them is to find another source of approval,” he [Orville Gilbert Brim] said. “That might be a great love, if you’re lucky. Or perhaps it is a deepening belief in God. But I think many people suffer with realization that they are not going to be famous and there’s nothing they can do to solve it.”

 Why suffer?  Why not listen to Mencius:

"The ten thousand things are all there in me.  And there's no joy greater than looking within and finding myself faithful to them.  Treat others as you would be treated.  Devote yourself to that, for there's no more direct approach to Humanity." (236)

    Validation and meaning do not come from others, from outside of ourselves.  They are rooted within us, in our innate capacity to figure out proper behavior in any given context, and our willingness to then enact that morality.  That is where joy is to be found: in knowing, to ourselves, that we have treated others with humanity.  No need for fame, then.

     Alternatively, of course, we could follow the Tao Te Ching (22): just give up on the whole fame thing altogether, and, in a way (so to speak!) you will be famous:

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.

Modern Love: Late-Onset Fatherhood

     Rand Richard Cooper has a nice piece in Sunday's NYT "Modern Love"column on being an older father.  He was 46 when his wife, nine years his junior, became pregnant with their first child.  Many questions popped into his head:

The belated father faces a daunting gamble. Will a baby indeed keep you young, open up some replenishing new vitality? Or will it do just the opposite? Will I have the energy to be an older father? The patience? The knees? In the unsentimental terms of evolutionary psychology, would becoming a father prolong my peak and delay my plummet — or, as a middle-aged man playing a young man’s game, was I merely setting myself up for an even bigger fall?

    He is especially attuned to the physical side of things.  And, in what must have been his worst nightmare, his body conspires against him almost as soon as the baby is born:

...Our very first day home from the hospital, fetching Molly a glass of juice in the kitchen, I bent over to take an ice tray from the freezer, when, wham! Someone kicked a dagger-toed boot into my lower back. I went down, ice trays flying. These were the same back spasms that felled me on the basketball court a year ago. I couldn’t get up, couldn’t even sit up. The pain was too intense.

“Not now,” I thought. Not when Molly still had her stitches in, and needed to be resting with our baby. Not when I intended to wait on the two of them, hand and foot. I wanted to be the do-everything guy, and now I was going to be the do-nothing guy, bedbound for the next three days: an invalid, whose wife would have to bring him his medicine and carry his urine to the toilet in a bucket.

Lying there, I writhed in a misery that verged on despair. For 72 hours life had been serving up sweet joy and exaltation, but right now all I could think about was my failure as a father. I recalled years of boyhood sports fun with my own father — epic battles of one-on-one basketball, marathon tennis matches on hot summer days, followed by a race to the beach and a leap into the water.

 I had a similar experience.  Though not as "belated" a father as Cooper (I was 34 at the time), my injury came as Maureen was pregnant with Aidan.  I ripped my patella tendon in a volleyball game, landing me on crutches for six weeks during her sixth and seventh months.  I hobbled about after that for her eighth month.  Instead of my helping her, big daddy style, she had to take care of me.  It was terribly frustrating.

   But the physicality of things is not nearly the most important aspect of fatherhood.  From a Confucian perspective, what matters is not the bodily challenge of sports, but the ethical lessons of life.  There is no physical limit to fatherhood.  As long as one can be engaged in the moral education of children, teaching them to recognize and live up to their personal responsibilities and duties, then one can successfully perform the role of father.  It can be done from a wheelchair as well as on a basketball court. 

      So, for all of his frustration and embarrassment, Cooper needn't worry about what he calls "late-onset fatherhood."  He may, through his personal experience and maturity (assuming he has attained a certain ethical maturity) be better prepared than other, younger new fathers for the real challenges of raising a child.   Older might be better, though he still has to fulfill his own responsibilities and duties.  That is what really matters.

Baseball Fate

     I just have to take a moment to recognize a great moment in the storied history of the New York Yankees: a five game sweep of that other team from a northeastern city, a series reminiscent of the "Boston Massacre" of 1978:

More than 35,000 sad souls had shuffled out of Fenway Park by 5 p.m. on Monday. There were sea gulls circling the center-field bleachers then, but they might as well have been buzzards. In 75 punishing hours, the Yankees had pounded their rivals into little more than a carcass.

With relentless offense, stingy relief pitching and moxie, the Yankees swept the Boston Red Sox in a five-game series, taking the finale, 2-1, on Monday afternoon.

The Yankees, who trailed in the American League East by four games on the Fourth of July, now lead the Red Sox by six and a half games. It was the first five-game road sweep in the majors in 10 years.

    The historical references continue:

The Red Sox hadn't been swept in a five-game series since the Cleveland Indians did it in 1954. The Yankees swept Boston in five games in New York in 1951 and at Fenway in '43.

 In other words, it was one of the worst sustained defeats suffered by the Red Sox.  What are we to make of it?   That this is clearly the Yankees year, at least for winning the American League East title again?  Perhaps.  Though with 39 or so more games to go, the Yankees should not, and most certainly will not, rest on their laurels.

      A lot of good qi is working for the Yankees.  Fate, destiny - "Heaven" in the ancient Chinese conception - are all working for the Yankees.  Let's hope we can ride this thing all the way through the world series.

    And it seems that Joe Torre, the Yankee manager, knows how to stay on the right side of Heaven.  He allowed one of his pitchers to do the right thing:

[Yankee pitcher] Lidle was not even in Boston for the first three games. He watched on television in California, where he had flown for his grandmother’s funeral. Lidle threw to his brother, a former minor league catcher, to stay sharp, and re-joined the Yankees on Sunday.

 The man who won the last game today, Monday, had flown off to California to do the right filial thing for his grandmother and his family.  Torre, upholding Confucian standards of noble-minded, had allowed Lidle to be with his family at a crucial moment.

     And Heaven smiled on the Yankees.

     Go New York!

Beijing Weekend: Confucius is not a capitalist

     A little something this week on how Confucian thought relates to modern economic practice.  The China Daily web link is here.  Full text below the jump.

Taoism is not Corrupt

    I just found an article at the Asia Times that discusses government corruption in India, China and Indonesia.  An interesting comparison, but it had this rather bizarre paragraph:

Culturally, the Taoist framework of self-maximization has much to do with corruption in China. In contrast with the Confucian principles that call for officials to act for the common good, Taoism recognizes the need and right of individuals to act for their own benefit. This allows Chinese people to accept the need for officials to enrich themselves, and,indeed, many see the richer as more successful. This is why corruption is quite open and direct; you can almost predict what any particular activity will cost.

    The only way I can understand this assertion is that the author is extrapolating from the religious Taoist practice of life extension, searching for medicinal means to prolong health and life span.  But the interpretation fails, utterly.  The author has obviously never seriously read the Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu or Lieh Tzu.  If he (she?) had, he would know that Taoism is not about selfishness.  It is not about "the need and right of individuals to act for their own benefit."   Let the Tao Te Ching say it (passage 22):

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.

 The point here is to give up the conscious pursuit of self-interest, which will allow the real "self-interest" of finding one's natural place in Way to become manifest.  Using a public office for personal material gain - which is how corruption is usually defined - is very far from this ideal.  A  person looking to give up self-promotion and self-esteem would, first, eschew political office and, second, not be interested in material pleasure.  After all, "things rare and expensive make people lose their way." (TTC, 12).  The  Asceticism of Taoism is well-known and well-established.

    This whole thing just strikes me as cultural misinterpretation at its worst.

Save the Brothel!

      China Daily reports that officials in Hunan are debating whether or not to preserve an 18th century brothel building:

The brothel, built in 1733 in the ancient town of Jinggang, Hunan Province, is teetering on the verge of collapse and the local government is under pressure to make a decision on its historic value.

Changsha Evening News has reported that the authorities have held meetings to discuss its fate and most officials support protection of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) building known as Hongtaifang.

But many locals are protesting, arguing it should be demolished as it represents the worst aspects of China's feudal society.

     On the one hand, there are those who see the building as representing the seamy side of Chinese culture:

Xiao Yisheng, a retired teacher from Zhongnan University in Changsha, capital of Hunan, said the brothel was a place where women were humiliated. Its restoration could be seen as promoting prostitution, which is illegal in China, said Xiao.

 On the other hand, there are preservationists who call for a more comprehensive remembrance of things past:

Chai Xiaoming, an official with the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, told Xinhua that "it's irrational to think that protection of the brothel means approval of history's injustices."

"The aim of protecting historic relics is to make people aware of history. Many relics with negative associations are well preserved in China," he said.

 I'm with the preservationists on this one.  It is better to keep the full range of historical experience before us, all the better to appreciate ancient realities.  Historical China was not a Confucian paradise, where all males were well mannered gentlemen sitting around reciting poetry and taking care of their parents.  It was a complex human society, riven by immoral as well as moral pursuits.  Indeed, keeping the brothel will give us a better understanding of just what Confucian moralists were up against.

      And I especially liked this passage:

A commentary under the name "Zhifan" in Shanghai-based Jiefang Daily said historic fact should be acknowledged and respected.

"Protection of the terracotta warriors and horses doesn't mean we look approvingly on the atrocities of Qinshihuang, who ordered the construction of the giant mausoleum for himself," the author wrote, adding that the preservation of the brothel should not be seen as an endorsement of prostitution.

     Exactly!  Qin was a horrible man, whose brutality came to dominate the land.  But, whatever his faults, we must remember him through his relics, all the better to appreciate the terrible human costs of authoritarian government.

     So, save the brothel!  It obviously does not have to be a brothel now.  Make it a teahouse and let the tourists pay to see the old architecture.  I would.

Mencius on Airport Security Screening

    Story in today's NYT: "Faces, too, Are Searched at U.S. Airports."

    Mencius: "Nothing reflects the person so well as the eyes.  The eyes won't hide the evil in a person.  If a person's heart is noble, the eyes are bright and clear.  If it is not, their eyes are dark and cloudy.  To hear a person's words, look into their eyes - then they can hide nothing." (133)