Confucianism in the Service of Unfreedom

     Kevin Smith, aka The Weifang Radish, emails with a link to an article by  Edward Friedman, "Living Without Freedom in China."  Kevin is particularly interested in how The Useless Tree might respond to this passage:

The only way you can get anything done is through corruption. This creates a sense of no morality. But people want meaning in their lives. So there’s a tremendous religious revival. All over China, all religions are reviving. The Party fears it. How does it respond? It crushes Christian house churches, it doesn’t like Lama Buddhism, it’s careful about Hui Muslims, but beyond that, it’s pushing essentially its own state religion, a combination of Han chauvinism, in which Chinese worship the yellow emperor, and an authoritarian Confucianism. The state is building Confucian temples. The vision is that China is going to explain its extraordinary rise to its own people and to the world as the result of its unique ethical religion, its Confucianism. It’s going to spread Confucian societies all around the world, it’s going to teach everybody that China produces a better quality of people because it has this moral authority and all others are inferior. Confucianism is the only way to raise people, and the world is properly hierarchically ordered with Confucian Chinese at the center of it.

         Before commenting, I must state that Ed Friedman was my graduate school adviser and I have maintained a close and friendly relationship with him for over twenty five years.  Of course, I am happy to point out where I disagree with him, but my readers should be aware of our connection.

      That said, I think Ed is generally correct.  Reading through his piece, what I notice is his focus on increasing inequality and injustice in the PRC, and the continuing repression there.  These are hard realities that we all must face when discussing contemporary China.  His emphasis on the deep corruption of the party-state is necessary for an understanding of politics and society there.   And it is also true that party-state power-holders are fearful of heterodox ideas and ideologies (they even block foreign blogs!), an extension of their Leninist-Maoist (I know, there are deep antagonisms between those two variants of state socialism, but that is what PRC ideology is...) origins.  The revival of Confucianism is being used by party leaders to reconstruct a neo-traditional nationalism which can function as Ed suggests it might.   That is what nationalists everywhere do - think of those who espouse American exceptionalism or Japanese who deny the Nanjing Massacre....

     But what does all this tell us about Confucianism and what it might be in the modern world?

     First, it is true, and has been true since at least the Han Dynasty, that Confucianism has been invoked by authoritarian political leaders to confer a certain legitimacy on their rule.  That was the essence of the imperial system, it was done by the KMT when they tried to rule the mainland (see New Life Movement), and now, with the bankruptcy of Marxist ideology, the Communist Party of China is doing it.  The only remarkable thing here is the historical irony of a party forged in anti-Confucianism becoming pro-Confucius.

      It should be noted that Confucianism is not the only philosophy/ideology that has been used as a legitimating device for authoritarian rule.  Christianity was invoked to bolster Franco in Spain; Islam is now being employed to limit personal freedoms in some countries. And, yes, even democracy has been used to rationalize political repression: remember Mao's "people's democratic dictatorship"?

       The point, then, is not that these systems of thought are somehow flawed and prone to repressive politics but, rather, that any system of thought can be turned and twisted to the purposes of tyranny.

      There is another truth here: Confucianism has never been, and is not now, only a legitimating device for authoritarianism.  It has always included  humane and benevolent aspects that can be used for anti-authoritarian and democratic political projects.  Friedman mentions this later in the article:

In describing this Chinese rise and how I believe it has the potential of being a threat to freedom in an extraordinary way that we haven’t seen since the end of WWI, I am not trying to suggest that Chinese don’t care about freedom; people do not need a Greek-Roman Christian heritage to care about freedom. That kind of claim is parochially and culturally very narrow. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its beautiful preamble, is a Mencian document (Mencius is one of Confucius’ disciples). The word “individual” never appears in the document. The language was shaped by the philosophy of Mencius because one of the crafters of the Universal Declaration was a Chinese gentleman named P.C. Chang. Of course this is December 1948, the day after the Genocide convention was passed. The communists didn’t come to power for another year.

      I differ with Ed on the dangerousness of the China threat - I believe there are countervailing forces that limit Chinese power, just as they limit American power.  But I absolutely agree with him on two points: 1) Confucianism can, and has been, used in the service of human rights; and 2) freedom can be understood in a variety of cultural contexts; it is not a "Western" concept.

      But I would press a bit further.  It it precisely because PRC power-holders are trying to claim Confucianism for authoritarian politics that we, anti-authoritarians, should struggle to articulate the democratic and humane and non-repressive possibilities of Confucianism.  To those who would try to use Confucianism to enforce conformity and repress individual opinion and belief, let's just say:

The Master said: "Vast armies can be robbed of their commanders, but even the simplest people cannot be robbed of their free will."  Analects 9.26

      Confucian freedom - in which socially situated individuals are guided to right moral choices by the excellent examples of virtuous leaders in a non-coercive environment - is not precisely the same as American freedom or French freedom or Japanese freedom.  But it is freedom nonetheless, and no measure of authoritarian rationalization can destroy that fact.

Comments

[Chris]

I'm actually in the midst of working on a piece that deals with some of this (the notion of Confucian freedom) at the moment. On the one hand, it seems to me that a Confucian notion of freedom might be analogous to the kind Descartes discusses in the Meditations. There, Descartes argues that freedom is not the ability to act in an arbitrary way, but the ability to act in the right way. Thus, Descartes argues that our freedom increases as we bend our wills towards truth. Confucius' notion is not interested in truth, but appropriateness, but I think the structure is similar. Thus, instead of seeing correction from others as "interference" that robs you of freedom, the Confucian should see _non_ interference as robbing a person of freedom. Of course, this kind of approach does walk a dangerous line between authoritarianism and the benevolent use of power.

[Sam]

Chris,
This sounds quite promising to me. I do not really know Descartes that well (one class in college) but on the face of it his idea of freedom, as you describe it, does have a Confucian ring to it. I wonder if Daniel Bell (the younger) has made this comparison anywhere...

[Chris]

Sam,

I don't know Bell's work. Do you have a good book by him that I could grab from Amazon?

Speaking of book reading -- I mentioned to you a while back (in a post somewhere I think) that I would read Jullien's "Detour and Access" on the plane to China. I did. The first half of the book is very engaging. His thesis is a simple one -- that Chinese communication is indirect whereas Western communication is direct -- but his presentation is engaging. He does a good job relating these differences to philosophical assumptions about the world and about human relationships and masterfully shows how the are exemplified in politics, literature, philosophy and warfare. The second half of the book, with a few chapters, is not as engaging. Overall, a worthwhile read if you haven't thumbed through it.