The Useless Tree

Mass Evictions in Beijing: What Would Mencius Do?

Beijing gets cold this time of year and the impending winter is especially hard now for tens of thousands of city residents. In the past week or so, the Beijing Municipal Government has demanded that people immediately vacate dwellings that have been deemed unsafe. It doesn't matter that they have lived in these homes for many years and have nowhere else to go on such short notice. Police have been deployed to force people to leave as bulldozers move in to demolish large areas of housing and small businesses.

The action comes after a tragic fire, on November 19th, which killed 19 people in a cramped, migrant worker neighborhood. There certainly are fire and safety issues that need to be addressed in Beijing's working class precincts, but the government's sweeping and instantaneous uprooting of so many families goes well beyond the putative safety concerns.  It is an assault on the "low end population," - diduan renkou 低端人口 - a dehumanizing term coined by the government to describe workers from other provinces who do not hold official Beijing residency papers, in an aggressive and coercive gentrification. It is happening all over the city.

Some Chinese intellectuals have publicly criticized the heartless manner in which the mass evictions have been carried out. An open letter states: “Any civilised and law abiding society cannot tolerate this, we must clearly condemn and oppose these actions.” 

And we could add, any humane and caring society, one that lived up to the highest ideals of its Confucian tradition, should also condemn and oppose these actions. That's what Mencius would do.

Consider this passage:

As to the people, if they have not a certain livelihood, it follows that they will not have a fixed heart. And if they have not a fixed heart, there is nothing which they will not do, in the way of self-abandonment, of moral deflection, of depravity, and of wild license. When they thus have been involved in crime, to follow them up and punish them - this is to entrap the people. How can such a thing as entrapping the people be done under the rule of a benevolent man? Therefore an intelligent ruler will regulate the livelihood of the people, so as to make sure that, for those above them, they shall have sufficient wherewith to serve their parents, and, for those below them, sufficient wherewith to support their wives and children; that in good years they shall always be abundantly satisfied, and that in bad years they shall escape the danger of perishing. After this he may urge them, and they will proceed to what is good, for in this case the people will follow after it with ease.

 若民，則無恆產，因無恆心。苟無恆心，放辟，邪侈，無不為已。及陷於罪，然後從而刑之，是罔民也。焉有仁人在位，罔民而可為也？是故明君制民之產，必使仰足以事父母，俯足以畜妻子，樂歲終身飽，凶年免於死亡。然後驅而之善，故民之從之也輕。

 Mencius believes that a government is responsible for creating economic conditions that facilitate the moral lives of "the people."  The struggling migrant workers in Beijing are trying to secure a "certain livelihood," steady employment and enough of a paycheck to take care of their families. By destroying their homes and pushing them out into the cold, the municipal authorities are denying people the means to "serve their parents" and "support their wives [spouses] and children."  Should the people protest and if they are arrested, they are not, from this perspective, guilty of some sort of crime. Rather, they have been "entrapped" by an inhumane government. Desperation born of intolerable circumstances is a sign of callous leadership.

Some might want to argue that the notion of "low end population" has some resonance with the Confucian idea of "small people" - xiaoren, 小人. And it's true that Confucius and Mencius are sometimes exasperated at the moral failings of people with insufficient moral education. But that is not reason to cast people out of their homes and drive them out of the city. Indeed, their perspective would be precisely the opposite: when confronted with "small people," government must remain steady in its commitment to provide stable material opportunities and public education.

However much leaders in China like to present themselves as avatars of a revived traditional Confucian morality, the actions in Beijing trample upon the basic precepts of Confucianism and offer only the most depressing illustration of inhumane government.

 

Review of Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto by Bryan W. Van Norden

Last year, Jay L. Garfield and Bryan W. Van Norden penned an op-ed in the New York Times that took academic philosophy departments in the US to task for failing to take seriously non-Western systems of thought. They suggested that, to better reflect the historical and cultural prejudices of their actual undertakings, philosophy departments in colleges and universities should change their names to “Department of European and American Philosophy.” 

For those of us keeping track, Garfield and Van Norden's critique was hardly surprising. Among China specialists, the ingrained bias in academia against accepting Chinese philosophy as "philosophy" has been chronicled for years, most notably in the American Philosophical Association's Newsletter on Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies, especially the Fall 2008 (pdf) and Spring 2016 (pdf) editions, and in Brian Bruya's 2015 analysis in the journal, Dao: "The Tacit Rejection of Multiculturalism in American Philosophy Ph.D. Programs: The Case of Chinese Philosophy."

But the op-ed sparked some outrage in its comments section (797 comments strong!) and initiated a sometimes pointed exchange of views  among philosophers on the intertubes.

And now comes Van Norden with a more fully developed, yet no less punchy, polemic in the form of a concise and persuasive book: Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto.  And, indeed, he pulls no punches.

What is likely to attract the most attention is the assertion of racism, both in Garfield's foreword and Van Norden's opening chapter, as part of an explanation for the exclusion of non-Western philosophies from too many philosophy curricula in the US.  Academic philosophers, the majority of whom likely identify politically as liberals or progressives, will no doubt recoil at the charge. Garfield, however, is careful to draw a distinction between structural racism and individual racism:

A social structure can be racist when it serves to establish or to perpetuate a set of practices that systematically denigrate - implicitly or explicitly - people of particular races.

Individual academic philosophers can be anti-racist but, through their participation in exclusionary intellectual activity, reproduce a kind of racism. Van Norden, in the first chapter, uses the term "essentialist ethnocentrism" to delve more deeply into the problem, and he provides more substance to it through citations of Kant and Hegel and other cornerstones of the Western philosophical canon.  He goes on to argue that Kant and his followers, influenced no doubt by racist conceptions of the impossibility of "philosophy" in non-Western histories, are responsible for the ethnocentric view that "philosophy" encompasses only those texts and traditions, starting in ancient Greece, relevant to their own European intellectual projects. Drawing on Peter K.J. Park's book, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830, Van Norden writes:

On the one hand, defenders of Immanuel Kant's philosophy consciously rewrote the history of philosophy to make it appear that his Critical Idealism was the culmination toward which all earlier philosophy was more or less groping, more or less successfully.  On the other hand, European intellectuals increasingly accepted and systematized views of white racial superiority that entailed that no non-Caucasian group could develop philosophy.

The absence of non-Western philosophy from contemporary American academic philosophy departments is not an ahistorical accident. Van Norden's chief task is to confront his philosophy colleagues with this sad and sorry history and make the case that the time for correction, for the inclusion of non-Western systems of thought, is long past due.

In chapter 2, he turns to the affirmative case, a demonstration of the kinds of valuable insights and arguments non-Western sources bring to established philosophical issues and problems. For me, this is the most valuable and successful chapter in the book. In several tightly argued sections, Van Norden brings Cartesians into dialogue with Buddhists on matters of metaphysics; he contrasts Hobbes and Mencius on issues of political philosophy; and shows how Aristotelians and Neo-Confucians might debate questions of ethics. In each case, due attention is given to each tradition's basic premises and constructive comparisons are developed. If anyone is looking for a focused and clearly written chapter to demonstrate to a class, or a roomful of philosophers, or some other group of interested parties just how thought-provoking and refreshing comparative philosophy can be, this is it. I will likely use it in the classroom for precisely this purpose.

Chapters 3 and 4 take on broader problems in American politics and society that create obstacles to more open and inclusive ways of thinking. In Chapter 3, "Trump's Philosopher's," Van Norden presses back against the impulse to build symbolic and physical walls in efforts to construct fantasies of civilizational or nationalistic purity.  Although the US is the focus, China and Xi Jinping's invocation of Confucianism and other classical philosophies does attract his attention. This statement applies as much to Xi as it does to Trump:

Political figures who invoke philosophical or spiritual works for nationalistic purposes have no interest in the actual content of the classics they claim to revere. What is important in each case is that the classics are symbols of what is distinctive and superior about us as opposed to them.

Van Norden then moves on, in chapter 4, to argue against the notion that philosophy is useless, the domain of egg-headed academics and impractical isolates. Taking Marco Rubio's infamous line from the deplorable 2016 Republican Presidential candidate debates - that "welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less [sic] philosophers" - he shows how the study of philosophy contributes to successful careers and, more importantly, enlightened citizenship. That these sorts of points have to be made demonstrates just how far down the anti-intellectual path the contemporary culture has strayed, but Van Norden is right to leave no baseless and boorish charge against philosophy unanswered.

The book concludes with a return to academic philosophers and the humanities. Here Van Norden stresses the dialogic practices of Socrates and Confucius, so highly esteemed in the higher education of their respective traditions, as a commonality that might bridge the unnecessary and unfounded divide that separates American and non-Western approaches to philosophy.  He ends with an invitation to his academic colleagues:

I too desire to bask in the lunar glow of Plato's genius, and walk side by side with Aristotle through the sacred grounds of the Lyceum. But I also want to "follow the path of questioning and learning" with Zhu Xi, and discuss the "Middle Way" of the Buddha. I'm sure you and I will not agree about which is the best way for one to live.

Let's discuss it...

This is, ultimately, a generous book that reaches beyond the initial charges of racism and essentialist ethnocentrism to show constructively how non-Western philosophies can be brought into fruitful interaction with the Western philosophical canon. While some of it engages with social and political issues well beyond the academy, it should be taken seriously as both a diagnosis of a significant intellectual problem within American colleges and universities and as a concrete prescription for a better way.