The Useless Tree

Confucian Death Penalty

     Confucius was generally against the death penalty.  One of the clearest statements of his aversion to capital punishment comes in The Analects, 12.19:

   Asking Confucius about governing, Lord Chi K'ang said: "What if I secure those who abide in the Way by killing those who ignore the Way - will that work?"
   "How can you govern by killing?" replied Confucius.  "Just set your heart on what is virtuous and benevolent, and the people will be virtuous and benevolent.  The noble-minded have the Integrity of wind, and little people the Integrity of grass.  When the wind sweeps over grass, it bends."

     There is another passage in the Analects, however, that suggests that Confucius might countenance killing, in cases where some sort of terrible transgression has occurred:

   The Chi family patriarch had grown wealthier than Duke Chou himself, and still Jan Ch'iu kept gathering taxes for him, adding greatly to his wealth.
   The Master said: "He's no follower of mine.  If you sounded the drums and attacked him, my little ones, it wouldn't be such a bad thing." (11.17)

     "Attack" may seem a bit vague here, but Mencius cites this passages and develops the idea further to reach this conclusion:

It's clear from this that Confucius deplored anyone enriching a ruler who didn't practice Humane government.  And he deplored even more those who waged war for such a ruler.  In wars for land, the dead crowd the countryside.  In wars for cities, the dead fill the cities.  This is called helping the land feed on human flesh.  Death is not punishment enough for such acts. (7.14)

     That sounds pretty tough.  We can conclude, therefore, that even though there is a general rejection of capital punishment in Confucianism, there are also certain kinds of actions - in the instances suggested above, the aiding and abetting of exploitation and war-making - that might deserve the death penalty. 

       But what other kinds of heinous acts might convince a Confucian that death is a deserved punishment?

       This question came to mind yesterday as I read this terrible and sad story in the NYT (it is behind a subscription wall, but I found a copy of it posted here):

The crimes that Mr. Holton committed 10 years ago are so horrible and sad that it hurts to read even the most dispassionate description: he shot and killed his four children, ages 4, 6, 10 and 12. Two at a time, through the heart, after having them cover their eyes and asking them not to peek.

    Daryl Holton is on death row in Tennessee.  He will be executed in the electric chair this Wednesday, if there are no last minute appeals, which do not seem to be likely.  There is some question about his mental capacity:

Was he punishing his ex-wife for obtaining an order of protection against him, as the state suggests? Or, as his defenders argue, was he depressed and temporarily insane, reasoning that his children were better off dead than to be raised by a mother with a history of alcoholism and abandonment?

Wouldn’t you have to be mentally ill to kill your own children?

     But he has been judged competent and that comes across in the story.

     It would seem, then, that he killed his children in cold blood.  His lawyer raises a point about a twisted motivation that Holton might have been acting upon:

“I would describe him as a highly ethical, moral person with a rigid moral code, who acts in accordance with that code,” she says. “In his mind, he killed his children out of the highest possible moral reasons, as odd as that might sound.”

 I find this utterly unconvincing, as I believe Confucius would also.  Killing children because one thinks it is somehow "better" for them is completely unacceptable.  If the mother was somehow unfit (and who knows?) there would have been various alternatives: provide her with the wherewithal to be a better parent; place the children in foster care, if need be.  Killing is beyond the pale.

      Confucianism would not accept the death penalty for any case of murder.  Two things make this case stand out for Confucian capital punishment:

      1) A father killing children is especially terrible because it violates the father's most basic and fundamental social duties: "cherishing the young."  The inhumanity required to line up four of one's own children and shoot them in the heart is truly exceptional, and worthy of a death penalty;

      2) The father shows no remorse or no sense of responsibility for his actions.  He is not looking inside himself to discover why he might have acted in such a depraved manner.  Instead, he works to isolate himself from his crime:

Time is nearly up. Corrections officers begin to hover. Hurriedly, Mr. Holton is asked whether he believes that he deserves to die for what he did. He answers in a way that continues to keep imminent things in the abstract.

“I’m taking myself out of the equation,” he says. “What I would say to you is that someone convicted of four counts of first-degree murder, with the aggravators that were found in my case, the aggravating circumstances — yes, that conviction is worthy of the death penalty.”

 His lawyer is wrong.  Whatever the twisted logic that led him to child murder, he is not " a highly ethical, moral person".  He is a fundamentally inhumane person.  He appears to be beyond rehabilitation.  Confucius might say: "He's no follower of mine.  If you sounded the drums and attacked him, my little ones, it wouldn't be such a bad thing."

Serve the People

     We hear a lot about "serve the people" in the PRC.  The official Mao-inspired slogan is not as popular now as it was years ago, but the official persona of Wen Jiabao symbolizes it: he is presented as an incorruptible man of the people; he serves the people.  And, a while back, Hu Jintao gave us "eight honors and disgraces," which had a serve the people quality to it.

    This is, of course, a Mencian idea.  The great Confucian very much emphasizes the importance of the sovereign providing for and being attuned to the needs of the people, so much so, the sovereign's own interests should come last:

Mencius said: "The people are the most precious of all things.  Next come the gods of soil and grain. The sovereign matters least."   (261)

    But we do not see all that much follow up in contemporary China.  Too often the corrupt bureaucracy and the self-interested functionaries serve themselves and the people are left to catch as catch can.

     It is nice, therefore, to see a story about people in positions of authority, albeit in this case simply the leadership of a provincial university, doing the right thing.  Roland picked it up:

On September 3, the Huazhong Normal University commenced school.  Out of 4,100 new students accepted this year, 2,200 receive free tuition, room and board because their families were disadvantaged.  Some of the students were brought to the university campus by their parents.  The university said, "We will not let a single new student quit on account of poverty, and we will not let a single parent sleep in the streets on account of poverty."  The following photographs were taken at the indoor gymnasium at 11:30pm on the night of September 3.  350 parents slept on mats provided by the school in the air-conditioned building.

    

Yes, they are the most precious of all things.  Mencius is smiling.

A Confucian Commentary on the Bush Administration

      A pleasant late-summer morning.  In my office, looking out on fields and trees, reading The Analects and making notes on which passages might fit into this or that chapter of the book I am writing.  And this jumps off the page at me, as if Confucius was speaking directly to Bush and company:

    Adept Kung asked: "To be called a noble official, what must a person be like?
    "Always conducting himself with a sense of shame," replied the Master, "and when sent on embassies to the four corners of the earth, never disgracing the sovereign's commission - such a person can be called a noble official."
    "May I ask about those in the next lower rank?"
    "Their family elders praise them as filial children," replied the Master," and their fellow villagers praise them as brothers."
     "May I ask about those in the next rank?"
    "They always stand by their words and bring undertakings to completion.  They may be stubborn, small-minded people, but still they can be accorded the next rank."
    "And those who are running the government now - what do you think of them?" asked Kung.
     "Nothing but utensils!" sighed the Masters. "Peck-and-hamper people too small even to measure." (13.20)

     I take Hinton's "peck-and-hamper" to mean petty and harrassing, pointless and narrow-minded.  And "utensil," like the contemporary American usage of "tool," is clearly derogatory.  But that last phrase seems a perfect slogan for the of days of the Bush era:

Bush: too small even to measure.

01.20.09

Taoists in Space

    An op-ed in yesterday's NYT, by Timothy Ferris, tells the story of the space probe Voyager I, a satellite that was launched thirty years ago and is now leaving the solar system.  Ferris was responsible for a recorded disc (remember records! They sound technology of the twentieth century, oh so long ago...) that was attached to Voyager, which would provide any sentient beings that might find it thousands or millions of years from now (it is designed to last a billion years...) some sense of what earth sounded like in 1977.  That's a scary thought: how much disco is on the record?

      In any event, Ferris ruminates on the vastness of space:

Contemplation of Voyager’s billion-year future among the stars may make us feel small and the span of our history seem insignificant. Yet the very existence of the two spacecraft and the gold records they carry suggests that there is something in the human spirit able to confront vast sweeps of space and time that we can only dimly comprehend.

      Yes, Way is vast.  And Ferris is one of those people who find comfort in that thought.  He uses this story to make that point at the very end of the piece:

If some recoil from the brink of space, others find it liberating. Our perspective was aptly expressed by the 18th-century science writer Bernard de Fontenelle, in his fictional dialogue “A Plurality of Worlds.” “You have made the universe so large that I know not where I am, or what will become of me,” complains a lovely young marquise whom Fontenelle is tutoring. “I protest it is dreadful.”

“Dreadful, Madam?” Fontenelle replies. “For my part, I am very easy about it.”

    This, I think, is what Chuang Tzu is getting at in the opening chapter of the book that bears his name.  It begins with several invocations of the enormous K'un fish and P'eng bird, fantastical creatures that denote size and scale beyond our understandings of nature.  The P'eng, for example, "needs ninety thousand miles of wind beneath it."  But after a few of these passages he then drops in this short image:

The cicada and laugh at it, saying: "if we put our minds to it, we can fly across to the elm or sandalwood.  But sometimes we don't make it, and we just end up fluttering on the ground.  What good's all this talk about ninety thousand miles heading south." (4)

     The small, in other words, cannot understand the vast.  Their worlds are incommensurable.  Chuang Tzu then invokes the P'eng again, and, again, just to make the point, turns to the small:

A quail laughs and says: "It's setting out for where? I bound into flight, and before I've soared a dozen yards I'm fluttering around in the brush again.  Surely that's the limit of flight.  It's setting out for where?" (6)

     The quail is questioning the P'eng's capability, but only because it is so far removed from its own experience.  I don't take this as an absolute denial of the possibility of the vast, but only as a statement of the limits of knowledge.

     The key is the laughter.  In both cases, the small laughs at the vast.  Small is not afraid, simply bemused.  Perhaps the vast really does exist as the legends (or scientists) say that it does.  But it has little direct connection to the immediate experience of the small, and it is not something to be feared or overawed by.  It just is.  And it cannot be used to judge the worth or value of the small.

      In terms of Ferris's article, the quail and cicada and dove are not recoiling from the "brink of space."  Perhaps they do not find it liberating because they do not need to be liberated: they are already quite aware of and comfortable with the limitations of their own capabilities.  But they are certainly easy about it.  They can laugh.

Not A Mencius Among Them

    We are in the run-up to the big Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.  This will be the 17th Party Congress (not to be confused with the People's Congresses, which are meetings of the legislative branch).  These meetings happen approximately every five years (in the interim the Party is run by the Standing Committee, the Politburo, and, most importantly, the Standing Committee of the Politburo.) and they usually bring with them significant leadership changes.   The top two leaders, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, will keep their positions, but others will be shuffled.

     Much secrecy surrounds the planning and back-room politics of the Party Congress.  It was only a couple of weeks ago that we learned that the big meeting would open on October 15th this year.  They do not want to set an opening date until most of the key decisions have already been made.  This strikes me as a sign of institutional weakness -  the organization is driven by the political jockeying of a few top people.  But, be that as it may, it looks fairly certain that things are now falling into place for the meeting.

      One of the best analysts of this kind of Pekingology is Willy Lam.  He has a piece in the Asia Sentinel that dissects some of the likely personnel outcomes of the Party Congress.  Here's his best guess for the membership of the highest decision-making body in the Party, the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC):

The incumbents are President and General Secretary Hu Jintao; Premier Wen Jiabao; and Vice-President Zeng Qinghong (to become National People’s Congress chairman in early 2008). Fresh PSC inductees are united front work specialist Wang Zhaoguo (set to become Chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference); Liaoning Party Secretary Li Keqiang (who will run the party Secretariat); Director of the General Office of the CCP Central Committee Wang Gang (to head the Central Commission for Disciplinary Inspection); and Guangdong Party Secretary Zhang Dejiang (to become Executive Vice-Premier).

 Here is what he has to say about some of the newcomers:

However, both cadres [Wang Gang and Zhang Dejiang] are also what Beijing pundits call affiliates of the “Wind Faction”: that is, they sway with the wind – or the powers-that-be. Indeed, Zhang and in particular Wang, who is in charge of the nerve center of the party, were among the first batch of senior officials to have crossed over to the Hu camp in early 2003.

Wang, 65, who spent a good chunk of his career looking after confidential party archives, has so successfully ingratiated himself with the new supremo that he has become Hu’s doppelganger....

Li [Keqiang], 52, is often called the “clone” of mentor Hu [Jintao]....

 It is not surprising that, in the highly bureaucratized world of Chinese Communist Party politics, the guys who make it to the top level are careful, conservative, yes-men, who have made a career out of sensing which way the political wind is blowing and bending accordingly.  We should not expect bold, individualistic leadership styles to emerge from such an institutional milieu.  The era of powerful singular leaders (powerful in the sense of having the capacity to individually turn public policy quickly in new directions) is gone.  There are no more Maos or Dengs.  And that may be a good thing.  Remember what happened under Mao's personalist rule (Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution) and how Deng turned out the army when things got rough in 1989.

     On the other hand, there is a downside to the sycophancy bred by deeply bureaucratic politics.  Where is the person who will have the political courage and standing to face up to the highest leaders and speak truth to power when that needs to be done.  Can we imagine any of the likely new PSC members challenging Hu and Wen on difficult decisions?  Or will they just go along with the flow, as they have always done, to protect their positions and perquisites? 

     I think of Mencius, who so refreshingly challenges and contradicts errant emperors and kings:

Mencius said to Emperor Hsuan of Ch'i: "Suppose one of your ministers entrusts his family to the care of a friend and then leaves on a journey to Ch'u.  When he returns, he finds that the friend abandoned his family to hunger and cold.  What should be done?

"End the friendship," replied the emperor.

"And if a chief judge can't govern his court - what should be done?"

"Turn him out," pronounced the emperor.

"And if someone can't govern this land stretching out to the four borderlands - what then?"

The emperor suddenly turned to his attendants and spoke of other things. (2.6)

      I realize there is a parallel here as well to the current Republican Party leadership in the US - their blind loyalty to Bush and careerism has made it impossible for them to do the right thing.  Perhaps they, too, are mired in a kind of bureaucratic politics that elevates political expedience above good policy and sound decision-making.

It's Not Just Their Physical Health

     Here's what the China Daily reports (hat tip, CDT):

The high-living, high-pressure lifestyles of China's wealthy are catching up with their health, according to a  recent survey that shows many are paying a high cost for their affluence.

The survey of medical checks of 183 middle-aged company owners showed they were suffering from disproportionate diets and a lack of exercise.

The checks of 123 men and 60 women from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou showed all had at least one health problem. Each of the entrepreneurs surveyed owns assets worth more than 10 million yuan (US$1.31 million).

 Which, of course, brings Confucius to mind:

The Master said: "Poor food and water for dinner, a bent arm for a pillow - that is where joy resides.  For me, wealth and renown without honor are nothing but drifting clouds (7.16)

     A little more attention to duty and ritual might just lower that cholesterol and blood sugar.  A new Confucius diet!  I bet his most favored disciple, Yen Hui, was fit and trim:

The Master said: "How noble Yen Hui is!  To live in a meager lane with nothing but some rice in a split-bamboo bowl and some water in a gourd - no one else could bear such misery.  But it doesn't even both Hui.  His joy never wavers.  O, how noble Hui is!" (6.10)

     Notice the coincidence in both passages of modest material circumstances, poverty even, honor, nobility and joy.  All those fat, nouveaux-riches are neither noble or happy.... at least by Confucian lights.

Still Yet More on Yu Dan

    A piece in today's NYT reminds us of the popularity of Yu Dan's take on The Analects.  Not much value-added here, however.  Yu has been something of celebrity for over a year now.  I have blogged about her three times already: here, here, and here.   I am generally supportive of what she is doing - as I should be, since it comes pretty darn close to what I am doing.  So, I was ready for some critique in today's article, but it never really rose above the most basic description.  More analysis and evaluation is needed...

     There are a couple of good quotes, however.  First, Yu has a clear understanding of why her personalized - some might say Taoist-ized - version of Confucianism speaks to so many Chinese people now (her Analects book has sold over four million copies):

“When I was young, in the 1960s and 1970s, we didn’t have many choices,” she explained. “You never changed your job, or your house — and whoever thought of going abroad? Poverty brought stability; there were no inequalities. But now it is different, there are many gaps and people are unsettled. They want to find a way to live a less anxious life.”

     Modernization, which has accelerated extraordinarily in the PRC since 1979, ultimately creates a mass desire for pre-modern "stability" and "certainty."  People thus look to the past for ideas and stories that might ease their contemporary anxieties.  This same dynamic explains the demand for religion in the US and the Middle East, just as it explains the turn toward "national studies" in today's China.  The Post-Mao moment is also the retro-historical era (can I say that?  I just made up a word, 'retro-historical" to capture that sense of postmodern return to "history".  Maybe it doesn't quite work...)

       And I like Yu's response to her critiques here:

“I have a right to speak, and they have a right to speak,” she said of her critics. “I believe in a diversity of opinions. And my critics have their logic. You have to understand that some of these people have been studying Confucius their whole lives.”

     There is a marvelous irony in this essentially liberal statement: it is used by a woman in "Communist China" to defend her right to put forth her own interpretation of Confucius.  Liberalism in the service of Confucianism.  Or is it Confucianism embedded in liberalism?  Communism seems completely irrelevant to it all.  But can we say that China is now liberal?  Well, not completely; not politically.  But culturally and socially, Yu's defense of her rights and her embrace of diversity of opinions is utterly common in China.  So, it is, at least, liberalizing in this sense.  And that means that Confucianism in China now must be expressed through, and enacted within, a liberal idiom, if it is to be acted upon in the present.

     We are all liberals now (can I say that?).