The Useless Tree

Gender Convergence

     In an NYT article today, researchers say that men and women, in the US at least, are behaving more like one another:

Now experts who shared their latest research at a conference this month say that far from reverting to more traditional sex roles, women and men are becoming more alike in their attitudes toward balancing life at home and at work.

The gender revolution is not over, they say, it has just developed into “gender convergence.”

“The conventional wisdom is that ‘men are from Mars and women are from Venus,’ ” said Molly Monahan Lang, a sociologist at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. “On the contrary, we are from one small world that is getting smaller.”

 I suspect my wife would disagree, pointing to my deeply-inscribed, genetically-determined male inability to keep up with the laundry (I'm good at dishes, but laundry - yuk...).   But the researchers take account of that:

Of course, most people recognize that mothers are working more and doing less housework, and men are working less and doing more housework and child care than a generation ago — albeit still significantly less than women. But what much of the recent research has tried to tease out is more information on attitudes and desires.

And so far, the evidence points toward men and women having increasingly similar goals. When Teresa Aguayo and Frederick Moehn had their third child, Mr. Moehn took a six-month sabbatical from teaching music at Stony Brook University to care for the baby.

    I think child care is the key here.  My sense is that it is true that men - at least middle class men - have gradually come to take on more child care duties.  I see it in my colleagues here.  Some young, male faculty members now take paternity leaves - a reduced teaching load for one semester - in order to help out with a new baby.  When I came to Williams, eighteen years ago, that option was not available and the thought was not in the minds of most male workers here.  Thinking has changed, and men are taking more time to be with their children.

     To the extent that that is true, I think a modern Confucian perspective would approve.  I know: Confucianism has traditionally been used to enforce patriarchy and subjugate women.  But if you read Confucius and Mencius, you will notice a very strong imperative to fulfill family obligations.  Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that this requires men to involve themselves directly into the lives of their children (though they should not be their children's school teachers) and, given that standard, women have tended to be better Confucians than men. 

     Thus, if "gender convergence" means that men are doing more child care, then they are being better Confucians.  Hooray. 

     Taoists, too, would be happy with "gender convergence."  Gender is, after all, a socially constructed set of expectations, something obvious to Taoists.  The Tao Te Ching, in fact, can be read as an exhortation to men to let go of their macho posturing and accept the female elements of their nature:

The life-force of the valley never dies -
This is called the dark female.
The gateway of the dark female -
This is called the root of the world.
Wispy and delicate, it only seems to be there,
Yet its productivity is bottomless.

            - Passage 6, Ames and Hall translation

      And throw in a load of laundry while you're at it!

International Relations Lesson of the Day: Iraq is not Korea

     Josh Marshall picked up this doozy from Reuters:

President George W. Bush would like to see a lengthy U.S. troop presence in Iraq like the one in South Korea to provide stability but not in a frontline combat role, the White House said on Wednesday.

The United States has had thousands of U.S. troops in South Korea to guard against a North Korean invasion for 50 years.

Democrats in control of the U.S. Congress have been pressing Bush to agree to a timetable for pulling troops from Iraq, an idea firmly opposed by the president.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said Bush would like to see a U.S. role in Iraq ultimately similar to that in South Korea.

"The Korean model is one in which the United States provides a security presence, but you've had the development of a successful democracy in South Korea over a period of years, and, therefore, the United States is there as a force of stability," Snow told reporters.

     Josh makes a couple of the obvious points in rebuttal: Korea is more culturally and ethnically unified than Iraq, which is not unified at all; and Korea was embedded in a very different Cold War international context.  He also reminds us that US forces in South Korea, after the armistice of 1953, were oriented outward, to prevent an attack from North Korea; US forces in Iraq are currently engaged in internal civil war.  Big difference.

      I would add that this is just another reminder of how deeply and fundamentally incompetent the Bush administration is.  Remember when, back in 2003, they would regularly roll out the Japan and Germany comparisons to suggest that US occupation (we couldn't use that word then, remember) would establish democracy.  Well, Japan and Germany are long gone as analogies; so, let's try Korea.... pathetic.  What's next?  Viet...no, can't do that....  How about the Philippines?

      I imagine the operative element of the Korea comparison is the "50 years" time frame.  Bush senses that getting Iraq right will take a long time.  50 years sounds about right, and that's just about how long we've been in Korea (actually it is more like 62 years - we landed there in late 1945 to take the Japanese surrender).   

     But notice what's missing: any sense of strategy.  What is the purpose of a long term commitment to Iraq?  Are we there to keep it "united" or will we accept and encourage a partition of some sort? (And can we even be the determining factor in such a transformation?)   Are we comfortable with a Shia-dominated government that is closer to Iran (which is what is emerging)?  How will we counter what has become the most challenging strategic error of the whole sorry episode: the fact that Iraq is now an exporter of global terrorists? 

      None of these difficult questions is being addressed by Bush in public debate.  He is incapable of facing the horrendous mistakes he has made; and so, many, many people continue to die...

      This passage from Mencius captures the current situation well - and with no misplaced comparisons to Korea!

Now the Yen emperor tyrannized his people, so you attacked him.  The people thought they were being rescued from fire and blood, so they welcomed you with baskets of food and jars of wine.  How can you justify killing elders and taking the young captive, tearing down temples and stealing sacred vessels?  The power of Ch'i was already feared throughout all beneath Heaven, and now you've doubled your territory without making your government Humane.  No wonder all beneath Heaven is us in arms.

Hurry!  Send out orders to release the old and young, to leave the sacred vessels where they are.  Consult the people of Yen, appoint a new ruler, and then leave....(2.11)

      Korea is not the future of Iraq.  Iraq is not Korea.  Somebody please give the president a history lesson.  Then, consult the people and leave.

The Tao of Losing

    As I have said before: I am a Taoist Yankee fan.  And it is in Taoism that I find solace for the current Yankee losing streak.  How about this passage from Chuang Tzu:

Birth and death, living and dead, failure and success, poverty and wealth, honor and dishonor, slander and praise,  hunger and thirst, hot and cold - such are the transformations of this world, the movements of its inevitable nature.  They keep vanishing into one another before our very eyes, day in and day out, but we'll never calibrate what drives them.  So how can they steal our serenity, how can they plunder the spirit's treasure-house?  If you let them move together, at ease and serene, you'll never lose your joy.  And if you do this without pause, day in and day out, you'll invest all things with spring...(75)

      To put it another way: we can only know winning by losing.  How much more significant the 26 world championships appear from the perspective of losing.  There is nothing automatic about winning, even winning so many times over so many years.  We will have our time of loss (and Red Sox fans will rush in to take advantage of our slump), but let's hope it does not run for as long as it did in the 1980s...

      So, if we look to the big picture, the vastness of Way, the unpredictability of its movements, than we will not lose our joy and we will invest all things with spring (remember how good everything looked at spring training?). 

     Tonight, after all, could be the start of a ten game winning streak.  Who knows?

      Jeter, by the way, takes a Taoist turn at the end of the story linked above:

“We need to get wins,” Derek Jeter said. “I’ve run out of things to say.”

    He's right, of course.  There is nothing to say.  All that is left is to let go of expectations and anxieties, live in the moment, see the ball and hit it...

UPDATE:  OK... so last night was not the beginning of a ten game winning streak.  Quite to the contrary, the Yanks lost in a most humiliating manner: an opponent stole home on them to tie the game....But Way is vast...it could shift at any momnet (tonight, please!)

This Just In: Mencius Is Right!

     The Washington Post reports today on recent work by neuro-scientists:

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

 The writers make the usual nod toward a prominent Western thinker:

Their 2006 finding that unselfishness can feel good lends scientific support to the admonitions of spiritual leaders such as Saint Francis of Assisi, who said, "For it is in giving that we receive." But it is also a dramatic example of the way neuroscience has begun to elbow its way into discussions about morality and has opened up a new window on what it means to be good.

     Now I like Francis as much as the next person.  We have a statue of him in the back yard, tucked under a birth tree surrounded by hostas.  But let's get Mencius into the story here, please!  The innate goodness of human nature is central to the Mencian perspective.  One of my favorite passages:

...without a heart of compassion we aren't human, without a heart of conscience we aren't human, without a heart of courtesy we aren't human, and without a heart of right and wrong we aren't human.  A heart of compassion is he seed of Humanity.  A heart of conscience is the seed of Duty.  A heart of courtesy is the seed of Ritual.  And a heart of right and wrong is the seed of wisdom. 

These four seeds are as much a part of us as our four limbs.  To possess them and yet deny their potential - that is to wound yourself...(3.6)

     In other words: we are hard-wired for moral empathy.

A Father Mourns A Son

    In today's Washington Post, Andrew J. Bacevich reflects upon the death of his son in Iraq.  The elder Bacevich is himself a military man, having served in the US Army in Vietnam.  His son followed in his footsteps and joined up for the US Army in Iraq, where he was recently killed.

    The father has long been a strong opponent of the war and his grief has brought him to question the efficacy of his political efforts:

I know that my son did his best to serve our country. Through my own opposition to a profoundly misguided war, I thought I was doing the same. In fact, while he was giving his all, I was doing nothing. In this way, I failed him.

     He is frustrated because the war drags on, well beyond the time when it has already been lost, claiming more and more lives of fine people like his son.  But he cannot blame himself.

      His responsibility was to make sure his son was well educated - and for a Confucian that would mean a moral education.  Then, he was responsible for offering his son the best advice that he could.  Should he have counseled him against joining the Army?  We don't know if he did or not.  But, whatever conversation that might have taken place, the son was ultimately responsible for his own decisions; he was his own man.   The father, perhaps, may have wanted to ensure that the son was taking action for the right reasons; he could not, however, control the son's action.

     And, obviously, Bacevich is not responsible for the war's continuation.  He has put forth strong arguments against it.  But Bush has not listened to these voices. 

      Bush is responsible for the war, its start, its unfolding, its terrible, terrible prolongation.  Bacevich did not fail his son; Bush failed him.

     Bush has failed thousands and thousands of young men and women and their families.  They have gone off to war to die or be gravely wounded, and they did so because they trusted that the President would not abuse their offer of service.  And that is precisely what Bush has done: he has demanded their sacrifice in a conflict that was not necessary and has no good end.  They have served dutifully and with distinction but Bush has failed them fundamentally, in the worst possible way for any President.

      As we mourn the fallen tomorrow, we must also remember the responsibility our leaders have for the needless deaths of so many loyal and patriotic people.

Tao Mitzvah

     We went to another Bat Mitzvah today, for a classmate in my daughter's seventh grade.  As a part of the ceremony we recited this poem/prayer:

Nature is God's niggun,
a wordless melody of unfolding life.
To awaken God we must hear the nigun.
To awaken God we must listen to deep silence.
Silence arises when thinking ceases.
If we would know God
we must quiet the mind,
cease the chatter that passes for knowledge
when in fact it only flatters the foolish.
We cannot live without words
but let us not imagine that words are sufficient.
As a symphony needs rest to lift music out of noise
so we need Silence to lift Truth out of words.

 The parallels here with Taoism are striking: wordless teaching, the limits of knowledge, quieting the mind...  A "niggun," or "nigun," is the wordless chant that accompanies the religious ceremony.  "Nature is God's niggun" - if we changed "God" to "Tao" this line would capture very well the sensibility of the Tao Te Ching, passage 43, Lau translation:

 Exterminate learning, and there will no longer be worries.

The most submissive thing in the world can ride roughshod over the hardestin the world;
That which is without substance entering that which has no crevices.

That is why I know the benefit of resorting to no action.
The teaching that uses no words, the benefit of resorting to no action,these are beyond the understanding of all but a very few in the world.

   The writer of the Taoist-Jewish poem/prayer is Rami M. Shapiro.  I think this is him.   I will write to him and ask if he has ever read the Tao Te Ching.  I am certain he has.

        Beautiful.

        Mazeltov!

Sun Tzu on the "Surge"

    Remember the "surge"?  The increase in American troop levels in Iraq that was meant to improve the security situation and allow for political consolidation?  Well, it seems not to be working:

More than three months into a U.S.-Iraqi security offensive designed to curtail sectarian violence in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, Health Ministry statistics show that such killings are rising again.

     This would come as no surprise to Sun Tzu, who understood that war-fighting was much more than simply quantities of men and munitions:

In war, numbers alone confer no advantage.  Do not advance relying on sheer military power. (9.45)

      Even though the Surge was preceded with verbiage about strategy and tactics, the sad truth is that there is no effective political strategy, and without a political strategy, the war fighting grinds on meaninglessly, only pushing off to a further date, at higher human cost, the inevitable withdrawal of US forces.

      Sun Tzu also has something to say to US military commanders:

If the situation is one of victory but the sovereign has issued orders not to engage, the general may decide to fight.  If the situation is such that he cannot win, but the sovereign has issued orders to engage, he need not do so. (10.18)

      Principled disobedience by military leaders can be a dangerous thing, especially in a democracy.  But it is painfully clear now that the only reason why the US presence in Iraq has not been scaled back is the vanity of Bush and Cheney.  We cannot "win" on the terms they have set out (a unified Iraq with "acceptable levels of violence").   We need to pull back, scale down, disengage from the "Surge".   At this point a US commitment to withdrawal would likely have a positive effect on the insurgency.   Bush won't do it.  Congress is too divided to get the job done (insufficient votes to override a veto).  But if the generals came forward and said "no more," if they were willing to sacrifice their careers for the national good, they would be following in the grandest tradition of The Art of War.

     Bush lost the war.

Confucius, The Cartoon

    You can't make this stuff up:

BEIJING, May 21 -- The China Confucius Foundation will award a 500, 000-yuan (about 60,000 U.S. dollars) prize for the winner of a Confucius' animated image selection.

     The selected imagery is to be adopted in a 100-episode cartoon TV play featuring the ancient Chinese philosopher and educator.

    It was reported the foundation has signed Thursday a contract on production of the animation drama with a media outlet based in southern China's Shenzhen city.

    The producer is to solicit the animated imagery of the sage from designers around the world.

    The animation will tell stories about Confucius’ life and the history of the Confucianism.

    Deputy Secretary General of the foundation, Wang Daqian, said the animation will provide a wider channel to increase the influence of the Confucianism around the world.

     Why in Heaven's name do they think we need a Confucius cartoon?  Will that really help encourage a serious engagement with, say, The Analects?  Or will it simply feed into pre-existing shallow distortions of his thought?   We do pretty well invoking Plato and Aristotle - not to mention the usual parade of modern Western philosophers - in a wide range of contemporary debates without an animated cartoon of any of them.  Or did I miss something?

      This is just another pathetic attempt to make money off of the Venerable Sage.  Notice where this is happening: Shenzhen!  The epicenter of wild and crazy capitalism with Chinese characteristics (don't get me wrong.  I like Shenzhen.  But I do not take it as a place where serious intellectual work is being done...).

       Here's what China Daily reports:

The idea of Confucius in cartoon has been welcomed by animators, Zuo Jin, president of the Shenzhen-based Shenbi Animation Co who first proposed the series, said.

"Potential buyers from the United States, Canada, the Republic of Korea, Spain and Israel have all expressed their interest," Zuo said during the ongoing third China (Shenzhen) International Cultural Industry Fair.

 It's all about the buyers.

       Another thing: why bother soliciting animations from "around the world"?  What are the odds that the head of the China Confucius Foundation would select a cartoon from Japan or Korea, or the US for that matter, as the "best animated image" of Confucius?  Nationalism will, I predict, win out.  And that's just one more way that this whole affair violates the spirit and letter of Confucius's writing. 

The Master said: "The noble-minded are clear about Duty.  Little people are clear about profit." (4.16)

Euthanasia in China

     A sad story in the LA Times yesterday about a severely disabled woman in China who is asserting a right to die:

Confined to a rusty wheelchair and unable to control her muscles below her neck, Li Yan seemed destined for nothing more than a short life of pain and hopelessness.

Instead, the 29-year-old with muscular dystrophy has been catapulted into the center of an ethical debate. Li, fearing that her disease eventually will leave her in a helpless state, used her blog in March to ask the National People's Congress to legalize her right to die.

"I don't want to live with my brothers and sisters-in-law after my parents' death, let alone go to an orphanage or welfare institute," wrote Li, a rosy-cheeked woman with plump lips who can't keep from breaking into a smile even when discussing her most morbid wishes.

     The article points out that public opinion in China seems to be overwhelmingly in favor of euthanasia in this sort of case, where an individual is making a well-informed and rational decision about her own life.  What is interesting to me is the lack of philosophical support for the pro-euthanasia position in the classical texts of Confucianism and Taoism.

     Confucianism would tolerate euthanasia, but the decision-making process would be of the utmost importance.  For a Confucian, individual preference would not be sufficient grounds for such an action.  That is, the afflicted individual would not be recognized as fully autonomous and independent to decide whether to live or die.  Such a decision would have to include those people closest to the person wanting to die.  Thus, if the parents of the individual opposed euthanasia, then an active move to assist in the death of that individual would not be allowed.  Siblings, spouses, children and perhaps other close acquaintances might also have a certain moral standing in the decision-making process.  We are, in a Confucian perspective, social beings and thus determinations about the beginning or end of our lives must be made in social settings.

     Taoism would be less tolerant of the idea of euthanasia.  The distinction of "letting die" and "causing death" is key here.  Taoism, with its "do nothing" sensibility, would have no trouble refusing medical care and thus letting an individual who had a terminal illness succumb and die.  But a more active intervention that would cause death before it was "naturally" present would be resisted by Taoists: too much "doing".    Indeed, the very end of the Times story has a Taoist ring to it: although the disabled woman suffers in certain ways, there is a broader meaning and significance to her life:

Despite the outpouring of support, Li still says she'll dedicate what time she has left with her faculties intact to gaining the right to end her life.

On a recent afternoon, she signed on to her online instant messaging service linking her to 300 friends. A month ago, she had 15. Her sign-on name is a line from a Chinese poem:

"The fragrance of a plum flower is conceived in the bitter cold."

Its message: To suffer is to grow.

"I feel really close to this idea," Li said.

 That reminds me of a line from Confucius:

The Master said: "Only after the seasons turn cold can we truly know the resolve of pine and cypress." (9.28).

      That might not be sufficient solace for Li Yan, but it suggests that she has her place, as valuable as any other place, in Way.

It Was A Massacre

    Imagethief discusses (ESWN, too) the boot-licking performance last week of Ma Lik, leader of a pro-PRC political party in Hong Kong.  Mr. Ma stated, in remarks in Beijing, that we should not refer to the Beijing massacre of 1989 as a "massacre:"

"We should not say the Communist Party massacred people on June 4. I never said that nobody was killed, but it was not a massacre," Mr. Ma told a media gathering less than three weeks before the 18th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on protesting students. "A massacre would mean the Communist Party intentionally killed people with machine guns indiscriminately."

 It is inaccurate to refer to the killings of June 3-4, 1989 as the "Tiananmen Square Massacre," because most of those killed were massacred in other parts of Beijing:

The phrase "Tiananmen Square massacre" is now fixed firmly in the political vocabulary of the late twentieth century. Yet it is inaccurate. There was no massacre in Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3. But on the western approach roads, along Chang'an Boulevard and Fuxingmen Avenue, there was a bloodbath that claimed hundreds of lives when the People's Liberation Army found its path blocked by a popular uprising that was being fueled by despair and rage. To insist on this distinction is not splitting hairs. What took place was the slaughter not of students but of ordinary workers and residents - precisely the target that the Chinese government had intended.

 The crackdown, which likely killed hundreds of people (exact numbers are impossible because the PRC government does not allow honest analysis)  obviously qualifies as a "massacre" or "slaughter."

     As Imagethief points out, Mr. Ma has two purposes.  One is an attempt to falsely "rectify names."  In good Confucian style, Ma is trying to claim that the name "massacre" does not fit the reality of what happened in Beijing in those terrible days.  But he will fail in this because the truth is well documented and brave people, like the Tiananmen Mothers, work hard to keep the name "massacre" firmly affixed to the June 3-4 killings in Beijing.  Ma is thus simply a sower of insincerity - which might sound like a mild critique but it is, for a Confucian, a sign of deep and fundamental moral failing.

      Ma's second purpose is to align himself with those political forces in Beijing that seek to maintain limits on democracy in Hong Kong.  He argues that Hong Kong is "not ready" for democracy because the public there continues to mourn and remember the Beijing massacre of 1989.  His "argument" is, of course, a pathetic rationalization for authoritarianism, a transparent attempt to ingratiate himself with Beijing power-holders in the run-up to the 18th anniversary of June 4th.

     Hong Kong is certainly "ready" for democracy, on any socio-economic or political dimension that matters.  It is Mr. Ma who is not.