The Useless Tree

How John McCain is Not Confucian

     Over at his wonderfully named ("A Ku Indeed!" - which refers to a great and cryptic passage in the Analects: "a ku [sacred ritual vessel], not a ku, a ku indeed, a ku indeed," 6.25), Chris Panza (a fellow graduate of my alma mater, Purchase College) has a great post illustrating how Confucius would pretty much reject John McCain's notion of "straight talk."  I especially like this part of his analysis:

(A) Life is particular, people are particular, and so must  pedagogy be particular.

This point is the simple one. What Confucius is pointing out here is that different people need different things. In some cases, a straight answer might do the trick. In another, a more obscure answer might be what is called for. Perhaps, in the latter case, the student is lazy, and must learn to take an active role in his/her own education. If he/she is “looking for answers” only, then straight talk might not be the way to go. Essentially, the Confucian picture here is that we ought not to treat people in the same ways. Respecting a person and teaching them means respecting that they are individuals and so their differences must be taken into consideration when you are dealing with them. Using a “one size fits all” approach is not helpful.

 To appreciate fully how Chris gets to this point, and where he goes with it, you will have to, as they say in the blog business, read the whole thing...

Mencius in the News, Again (Even if Unnamed, Again)

   This headline jumped out at me today: "Is Do Unto Others Written Into Our Genes?"  And I immediately thought: Mencius would say "Yes!"

    The article centers on the research of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, especially his book, The Happiness Hypothesis.  There is much Mencian in the conversation, even if Mencius gets no mention in the article.  Here's how it starts:

Where do moral rules come from? From reason, some philosophers say. From God, say believers. Seldom considered is a source now being advocated by some biologists, that of evolution.      

At first glance, natural selection and the survival of the fittest may seem to reward only the most selfish values. But for animals that live in groups, selfishness must be strictly curbed or there will be no advantage to social living. Could the behaviors evolved by social animals to make societies work be the foundation from which human morality evolved?

      The Mencian idea of innately good human nature can be consistent with evolution, especially an idea of social evolution in which fulfillment of personal and social duties makes for stronger more resilient, and longer lasting, societies.  Of course, Mencius himself bemoaned the fall from morality of his own times.  But there is every reason to be optimistic, according to his thinking, about the continuing possibilities of human perfection:

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 and shove, 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. (11.2)

     It seems that it would not be too hard to develop an argument that holds that individuals respond to a positive social incentives for moral behavior, which can produce stability and predictability in a capricious natural world, and thus evolve toward greater and greater moral cooperation.  The water, so to speak, will eventually evolve in such a manner as to flow downhill.

      Haidt's argument seems to go off the Confucian rails, however, when he invokes religion as a key ingredient of the evolution of morality:

Dr. Haidt believes that religion has played an important role in human evolution by strengthening and extending the cohesion provided by the moral systems. “If we didn’t have religious minds we would not have stepped through the transition to groupishness,” he said. “We’d still be just small bands roving around.”

Religious behavior may be the result of natural selection, in his view, shaped at a time when early human groups were competing with one another. “Those who found ways to bind themselves together were more successful,” he said.

      Perhaps, in China, the foundations of morality were laid in the Shang Dynasty, which had a notion of the sacred that comes close to monotheistic religions.  But it is hard to ignore the moral evolution of the Zhou Dynansty, a time of transition away from a proto-monotheism toward a broader, more open-ended, less singular and objectified notion of the sacred, in the form of an impersonal "Heaven."  It is not clear to me, therefore, that we can simply sum this up as "religion."

      A Mencian counterargument might hold that, while religion was important for the evolution of morality in some socio-cultural contexts, in ancient China it was more a matter of a direct expression and development of moral intuition (which Haidt recognizes) with less reliance on the sacred, per se, and more emphasis on the social.  (I look forward to my recent commenter, Zoomzan, to weigh in on this.  I imagine he will suggest that for the ancient Chinese it was not that the sacred was somehow less prominent but, to the contrary, it was actually more present in everything, not simply reducible to a narrow category of "religion."  And that might be right...).  In any event, we need to know more about how Haidt is defining "religion" in all of this.

        In the end, however, Haidt comes to a formulation that has a strong Confucian resonance:

...He identified five components of morality that were common to most cultures. Some concerned the protection of individuals, others the ties that bind a group together.

Of the moral systems that protect individuals, one is concerned with preventing harm to the person and the other with reciprocity and fairness. Less familiar are the three systems that promote behaviors developed for strengthening the group. These are loyalty to the in-group, respect for authority and hierarchy, and a sense of purity or sanctity.

     "Purity" might be a stretch for Confucianism, but "sanctity" might work: if we think in terms of the secular as sacred, to borrow the phrase from Fingarette.

    Let's add this to the other contemporary confirmations of Mencius that have popped up in psychology and philosophy of late.  And we will give him the last word:

Mencius said: “In good years, young men are mostly fine. In bad years they’re mostly cruel and violent. It isn’t that Heaven endows them with such different capacities, only that their hearts are mired in such different situations. Think about barely: if you plant the seeds carefully at the same time and in the same place, they’ll sprout and grow ripe by summer solstice. If they don’t grow the same – it’s because of the inequities in richness of soil, amounts of rainfall, or the care given by farmers. And so, all members belonging to a given species of things are the same. Why should humans be the lone exception…(11.7)

Confucian Rap: Remember the Name

     This may seem a bit disrespectful - and I certainly don't mean it that way for either Confucians or rappers -  but I can't help but sense a Confucian overtone to this well-known song by Fort Minor (a youtube performance here; partial lyrics below, with some strong language):

This is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill
Fifteen percent concentrated power of will
Five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain
And a hundred percent reason to remember the name!

Mike! - He doesn't need his name up in lights
He just wants to be heard whether it's the beat or the mic
He feels so unlike everybody else, alone
In spite of the fact that some people still think that they know him
But fuck em, he knows the code
It's not about the salary
It's all about reality and making some noise
Makin the story - makin sure his clique stays up
That means when he puts it down Tak's pickin it up! let's go!

Who the hell is he anyway?
He never really talks much
Never concerned with status but still leavin them star struck
Humbled through opportunities given to him despite the fact
That many misjudge him because he makes a livin from writin raps
Put it together himself, now the picture connects
Never askin for someone's help, to get some respect
He's only focused on what he wrote, his will is beyond reach
And now when it all unfolds, the skill of an artist....

     It is Confucian, despite the profanity, in that it emphasizes the performative aspect of life over the reputational and materialistic elements.   You have to enact the "name" in order to rightfully claim the name.  You can't just live off the repute of the name; you have to live the name.  In this case it is about living up to the "code" of rapping.  It's not about money or status.  What is most important is being "real",  making the real music, connecting with the real audience, and cherishing real friends (or, in the lingo of the lyrics: "making sure his clique stays up.").   In other words, it's all about the rectification of names.  Here's The Man:

Listen, if names aren't rectified, speech doesn't follow from reality.  If speech doesn't follow from reality, endeavors never come to fruition.  If endeavors never come to fruition, then Ritual an music cannot flourish.  If Ritual and music cannot flourish, punishments don't fit the crime.  If punishments don't fit the crime, people can't put their hands and feet anywhere without fear of losing them...(13.3)

     Interestingly, when laying down this notion of name rectification, Confucius comes close to profanity himself.  When he first states how important rectification is, and his interlocutor suggests that this is impractical, Confucius rips him: Hinton's translation has the Sage saying: "You're such an uncivil slob;" while Ames/Rosement renders it: "How can you be so dense!"  He's telln' it....

       And notice how important the music is to Confucius, too.  Could we go so far as to say: It's all about reality and making some noise? 

 Maybe we could rename the song to: Rectifyn' the Name (it even fits the beat)....

I Think They Were Smarter...

    A nice post over at Granite Studio, riffing off some ideas from New Kid on the Hallway, about how we moderns might think people of the past were somehow less intelligent than us.  Both historians bemoan the tendency among their students, and many people out there all over, to think that people living 500 or 1000 or more years ago were just not as smart or wise as we are.  Jeremiah sets up the problem as a tension between "modern" and "traditional," how the construction of the idea of the modern, and modern progress, pretty much a Enlightenment idea with a specific historical context, tends to venerate the new against the old.  And then he brings the Tao Te Ching in!  He writes:

With this notion of historical progress so ingrained in our psyches. however, comes a dangerous slippery slope upon which we trod at our own peril. 

In some ways it reminds me of a line from the Daodejing 道德经:

When everyone in the world knows beauty as beauty, ugliness appears.
When everyone knows good as good, not good arrives.
Therefore being and non-being give birth to one another;

In historiographical terms, until there was a need to describe that which was "modern," there was no need to describe something as "traditional." Along with this division came an implicit value judgement, based in large part on western ideas of linear history and notions of material progress that traditional was bad and modern was good. This division gave birth to other--a perhaps even more awkward divide--between "civilized" and "backwards."

      The beauty here is that he is using an ancient reference to elucidate a modern/postmodern condition, showing just how smart those ancients could be, anticipating our problems centuries ago.

     I agree with Jeremiah that we should not romanticize the past:

Say it with me: people in the past were not somehow slower on the uptake, it's because we--in the present--get A LOT of help from the smart people who came before. And here I reveal my own slightly progressivist take on history. To borrow from P.J. O'Rourke, for those who feel that there was some magical time in the past when all was better, I give you one word: "dentistry."

 Technology and science are cumulative and progressive (but also horrifying and repressive when one thinks of the sad history of the 20th century) and that does make life better and easier for many - but certainly not all - moderns.  But in terms of understanding of the human condition, appreciation of beauty, philosophic capacity, and the like, there are ancients that are clearly much smarter than moderns.

      Take Chuang Tzu, for example.  He clearly understood the "problem of language," its inability to fully capture the complexities of reality.  For all of the emphasis on historical progress in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was not until the 20th, following Wittgenstein, that Western philosophers stopped and contemplated this problem, and took the linguistic turn.  Damn smart that Chuang Tzu...

     Of course, not all ancients were smarter than us moderns, but some of them obviously were, and many of them, most of them I would argue, were just as smart as us.

Learning About Lin Yutang...

    ...that's what I think I will have to do, after reading this piece in today's NYT:

Born in China at the end of the Qing dynasty, the son of a Presbyterian minister, Mr. Lin had a Western education in Shanghai and earned graduate degrees at Harvard and the University of Leipzig. He settled in Beijing, where he taught English at the National University and wrote urbane, bantering newspaper essays on contemporary Chinese culture.

The 1920s were a time of political agitation and forced side-taking. Mr. Lin initially aligned himself with the revolutionary impulses of the day, but simultaneously probed China’s deep past. After experiencing Communist political harassment in Beijing, he increasingly took the ideologically disinterested middle way of the Taoist scholar as his model. He became both a critical traditionalist and a skeptical modernist, a description that can be applied to many Chinese contemporary artists today.

     I have his translation of Chuang Tzu, which I have consulted over the years, and a copy of one his US best sellers, My Country, My People, which I haven't read.  A vague awareness of his political presence in the 1930s flits across my mind, absorbed perhaps from some left-wing criticism of him.  In any event, I have not encountered this other book:

“The Importance of Living” appeared, and its antimaterialist, pro-leisure message was an instant hit with anxious, overachieving America. The book was on the New York Times best-seller list for a year; it still has fans.

 Anti-materialist and pro-leisure: sounds promising...

    Here are a couple of links on him: 1) from the UMASS Warring States Project, which is quite sympathetic; and 2) a piece from Hong Kong, which views him as an early globalization cosmopolitan; and 3) a couple of PDF files of his daughter's biography of him, part 1 and part 2.

       That should get us started.  One question might be: was he the Yu Dan of the early twentieth century?

Joe Zawinul, Taoist Sage

    Joe Zawinul died two days ago.  His band, Weather Report provided the sound track of my college days.  "Birdland," however overplayed it may have become, is a joyous piece (you can hear it at the NPR site here), as was "Teentown" (which you can hear here - scroll down.  I do not know if he ever read or thought about Taoism, but he had a Taoist sensibility about him.  He crossed lines, blurred boundaries, mixed up rock and jazz in ways that frustrated purists but which created and extended new and marvelous sounds.  He just followed the tunes wherever they took him, regardless of preconceived categories.  And he wandered across social barriers as well:

In the 1960s, playing in Cannonball Adderley's band, Zawinul penned his first hit: "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy." Pianist Herbie Hancock became friends with Zawinul right around the time Adderley's quintet recorded that tune. He says the composition surprised him.                        

"For a white Viennese boy to write a tune that's that black is pretty remarkable," Hancock says. "He just captured the essence of the African-American heritage, just the statement of melody and feeling of that song. Clearly, in some past life, Joe must've been black."

    Clearly.  But I think he also was attuned to the music of Heaven, as Chuang Tzu has it:

Sounding the ten thousand things differently, so each becomes itself according to itself alone - who could make such music? (18)

      Joe Zawinul and Weather Report could.

Tiger Woods, Confucian Gentleman

    The golf great does the right Confucian thing:

ATLANTA (AP) — Tiger Woods is skipping the PGA Grand Slam of Golf in Bermuda, saying Wednesday he wanted the longest break of his career to spend time with his new daughter.

     He obviously does not need the money, so he is foregoing the chance of enhancing his fame a bit.  He is giving that up to live his family commitments.  The Sage is smiling.

Qin Shi Huangdi Was A Bad Man

     It seems that a group of terra-cotta warriors are making the trip from Xian to London, to be exhibited at the British Museum.  A rather breathless article in the New Stateman (hat tip, CDT) sets the stage:

"The First Emperor was able to dream on a scale that no one else has ever dreamt," he [Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum] says with a boyish breathlessness. "No one else in history has tried to create a life-sized parallel universe in which he will rule for ever. So much of what modern China is can be seen as a direct consequence of what that man did. There are very few historical figures who changed the world in such a way that we are still living with the consequences."

 Yes, but...and a rather large "but" it is....Qin was responsible for enormous crimes against Humanity, and I mean that in the Confucian sense, as the article rightly points out:

...before his death he ordered the mass burning of history books and the execution of their authors. Nearly 500 Confucian scholars are said to have been buried alive for some long-forgotten failure to please the emperor; others were castrated.

    We must always keep that context in mind.  However impressive the terra-cotta soldiers are, they are the product of a power-crazed, megalomaniac who forced thousands and thousands of people to slave away at the creation of an underground army that would protect him in the afterlife.  He destroyed large swaths of Chinese culture - the texts of the hundred schools of thought lost to the world forever.  He left much in his wake, but he erased and ruined much as well.  I'm with Mencius, who presciently wrote before Qin:

When Confucius said "Whoever invented burial figures deserved no descendants," he was condemning the way people make human figures only to bury them with the dead.  (7-8)

     By those lights, Qin really, really deserved no descendants.

Confucian Facebook Friends

     So, a couple of weeks ago I took the plunge and set up a Facebook profile.  I am gradually learning the ins and outs of cyber-social networking.  It's interesting, but hardly breathtaking.  I have connected - or "friended" in the new lingo - several former students and it is great to be a bit closer, at least in terms of daily information, with them.  And I have discovered that a few other folks, faculty members and old friends, my own age have ventured into the new medium, which, it seems to me, is clearly dominated by twenty-somethings.

      I mention this because social networking is gaining some attention in the media.  Yesterday I chanced upon this article in The Telegraph, and when I got home and opened the pages of the most recent New Yorker there was this Talk of the Town column on the same subject.

     The Telegraph piece suggests that internet social networking is not really changing the way the real social world (if we can call it that) works. We may make all sorts of acquaintances online, but our most important and vital friendships are those we experience face-to-face:

The circle of friends of internet users is expanding vastly, with some acquiring millions of new pals as if they were collecting action figures, stamps or collectables.

However, the overwhelming majority are merely nodding cyberacquaintances and the number of core friends remains mostly unchanged, at only around five people, according to a new survey....

...

Despite this extraordinary flux of making and breaking friendships, the actual number of close friends "is approximately the same as in the face to face world," said Dr Reader.

There are "good evolutionary reasons" why this should be. Making friendships means investing time, even money, in another person. To ensure that investment is worthwhile, face to face contact is invaluable, he said. But "it is very easy to be deceptive on the internet."

Of all the sites, the majority - 90 per cent - of close friends have been met face to face. "Face to face contact is a requirement for intimate friendships."    

     It would seem, then, that we are not yet at a point where Confucian notions of sociability have become irrelevant.  We still need direct contact with one another, and we need to invest time (Confucius would de-emphasize the money thing...) with one another, to create avenues for the expression of our Humanity.  Here is Analects 12.24:

Master Tseng said: “The noble-minded use cultivation to assemble friends, and friends to sustain their Humanity.”

     While, for Confucians, our family obligations are primary, we need friends, face-to-face friends, to fully enact and extend our Humanity in the world.  And, in a way, Facebook friending may facilitate this kind of Humanity.  In the little time that I have used it, I have already been able to see that friends can communicate their feelings and states of mind (by updating their "status").  I can know if someone is especially stressed at work, or feeling sad for some reason, or celebrating some happy event.  And I can then respond accordingly.  Granted, such interactions are rather remote and removed, they are not face-to-face, but they can have some meaning.  Getting a little note of encouragement on a bad day from an internet friend, something that social networking makes possible, could be a nice little lift. 

     Confucius, I believe, would have a Facebook page.  But he would not friend just anyone:

The Master said: "Above all, be loyal and stand by your words.  Befriend only those who are kindred spirits.  And when you're wrong, don't be afraid to change (9.25, 1.8)

     Other translators have rendered that "kindred spirits" line a bit more sharply; here is the Ames/Rosemont text: "...Do not befriend anyone who is not as good as you are..."  That could lead to some awkwardness.  Imagine responding to a Facebook friend request with: "no, thanks, but you're not as good as me..."  But, still, I think Confucius would be in the game and online.

     Notice, too, his concern with "standing by your words."  Hard to know if all of your internet friends are doing that.  The possibilities of spoofing and dissembling are great, indeed, online.   Confucius might then counsel that if you catch out a "friend" deceiving you, it may be time to "defriend" him or her.

     The New Yorker piece is rather more apprehensive:

The peril in getting to know classmates on the computer is that incoming undergraduates may forget how to do so in real life. That was the thinking behind “Facebook in the Flesh,” a seminar held during N.Y.U.’s freshman orientation. “Meeting new people face-to-face can be . . . intimidating,” a brochure read. “This fun, interactive workshop will get everyone talking as we build social networks in person.” The session took place at the Kimmel Center—it was scheduled at the same time as “Dude, Where’s My Class?”—and drew about thirty-five students, who spent the initial minutes sitting side by side in uncomfortable silence. Eventually, two girls struck up a conversation and realized, to their delight, that they were both from Long Island. (“Suffolk County?” “Me, too!”)

     I don't see this as a problem created by, or unique to, Facebook social dynamics.  The start of college has always been awkward.  There are always more shy people who feel uncomfortable being thrown into a new and unknown social setting; and there have always been those more garrulous types that take to such situations with elan.  Facebook doesn't change that much.  Indeed, it might help, to some degree, by providing an introduction to some people before a face-to-face encounter, creating some basis for common conversation: "Oh, I see from your Facebook profile that you are a Yankees fan.  So, am I..."

     On balance, then, my initial sense is that Facebook is not destroying the social interaction necessary for Confucian Humanity.  It may even promote it.  And Confucius himself has some advice that we all might keep in mind as we friend and, at times, defriend, one another:

Confucius said: There are three kinds of friends that bring profit, and three kinds that bring ruin.  Forthright friends, trustworthy friends, well-informed friends: these bring profit.  Obsequious friends, compliant friends, clever-tongued friends: these bring ruin." (16.4)

UPDATE: Chris Panza weighs in  with a Confucian critqiue of Facebook.

Another Year

   I posted these two pictures last year on this day and here they are again (the top one is from Roland):