Ancient Chinese Thought in Today's LA Times

    I noticed two op-ed pieces in the LA Times today (one is from last week), which capture certain points of Confucianism and Taoism.  Let's do the Confucian one first.

    Meghan Daum writes about the over use and evasiveness of the phrase "I take full responsibility:"

A person can, of course, be "accountable," "chiefly responsible" or (here's an idea) "the one to blame" when something bad happens. But somehow, "I take full responsibility," with its presumptuous bombast and its inherent oversimplification of the issue at hand, has become the preferred sentence of apologists everywhere.

....

The "full responsibility" phrase has been uttered with such astonishing frequency by people who mean precisely its opposite that it's become conversational filler, a throat-clearing noise so inconsequential that most listeners forget that they heard it as quickly as the speaker forgets that he said it.

     Confucius comes to mind here because what she is talking about is sincerity, or its lack.  People verbally take responsibility but then do not follow it up with their actions.  Instead of doing anything about their transgressions, they simply look for ever more inflated rhetorical flourishes.  This does not get the job done for Confucius:

Adept Hsia asked about the noble-minded, and the Master said: "Such people act before they speak, then they speak according to their actions." (2.13)

      Then there is a piece by Rosa Brooks on the neocon foreign policy fantasy.  She points out how Rove and Wolfowitz and Kristol and others, in all their hubris, believed that "reality" could be transformed by American power.  More specifically, they asserted that they could "create our own reality" by attacking Iraq and sparking a region-wide wave of democratization.  Of course, that reality is not what has emerged:

This week, for instance, saw the release of the latest National Intelligence Estimate, representing the consensus views of the nation's 16 intelligence agencies. The document offers a chilling account of the world we now live in: a resurgent Al Qaeda, a rapidly growing extremist Islamic movement, a rise in global terrorist threats and out-of-control violence in Iraq.

 Yet the neocons are half right: they did transform reality, only they made it worst, rather than better.  Reality (which we might translate as "Way" for Taoist purposes) mugged them.  All of which brings passage 29 of the Tao Te Ching to mind:

Longing to take hold of all beneath heaven and improve it...
I've seen such dreams invariable fail.
All beneath heaven is a sacred vessel,
something beyond all improvement.
Try to improve it and you ruin it,
Try to hold it and you lose it....

     Now, we can debate the extent to which reality is "beyond all improvement" (personally, I don't think so...), but it is incontrovertible at this point that the neocons grand designs have ruined it in Iraq and elsewhere.

Comments

[Mike Rambling]

Sam,

Your comments about the neocons reminded me of this quote from Stan Rosenthal's translation of the Tao Te Ching:

Achieve results but not through violence,
for it is against the natural way,
and damages both others' and one's own true self.

The harvest is destroyed in the wake of a great war,
and weeds grow in the fields in the wake of the army.

Congratulations on your site. I've just discovered it and look forward to browsing through it.

Mike Rambling