The Useless Tree

Review: The Souls of China, by Ian Johnson

Walking through the hutong of Beijing, an outsider can miss a lot of the life that unfolds there. It seems like you see a great deal: people strolling out of their doorways in the morning in their pajamas; eagle-eyed nainai keeping watch on afternoon comings and goings; and in the evenings families perching outside their doorways on little stools chatting and joking, liaotian'r 聊天.

You think you have a good feeling of the rhythm of a neighborhood. But you don't. Not, at least, in the manner that Ian Johnson does.

His new book, Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, is the product of years of close observation and intimate contact with dozens of Chinese individuals as they go about making spiritual meaning of their lives. Religion is not the first thing most people want to talk about; indeed, it is a fraught topic (spoiler of many a Thanksgiving dinner). But Johnson has worked hard to forge close personal relationships with people, allowing him to witness and report on their religious practices and beliefs. He steps deep inside the hutong to reveal a diverse and lively spiritual life that most of us miss.

The core of the book follows three sets of religious adherents: The Beijing Pilgrims; The Shanxi Daoists; and the Chengdu Christians. What stands out about the first two groups is the syncretic quality of their beliefs. The Beijing Pilgrims center their activities on a Temple dedicated to a Daoist goddess, the Lady of the Azure Clouds, but they also venerate, among others, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, Guanyin. Defending some sort of doctrinal distinction between Daoism and Buddhism (which are defined as distinct practices by the state) is not their concern. They draw from a wide array of indigenous spiritual symbols and discourses to construct meaningful rituals.

Similarly the Shanxi Daoists are open to creative variation of the religious traditions they enact. In a moving passage toward the end of the book, Johnson describes the re-internment ceremony, a "ghost burial" - guizang, that a man has requested for his parents. He had not been able to have proper ceremonies performed when his parents died and wanted to do the right thing: have them disinterred and reburied under the watchful eye of a Daoist practitioner. In the course of the reburial, the daughter of the deceased couple steps forward with a suggestion:

"I would like to drape this [red cloth] over the coffins," she said.

Li Bin [Daoist adept] looked at her in surprise but instantly understood. White was the color of death; red used for a wedding. This was something he had never seen before, but it touched him and his eyes reddened.

"Good, yes, of course, what a good idea."

What matters for Li Bin, a man widely respected in his community for his understanding of Daoist rites, is not rigid adherence to formal liturgical procedures. Rather, it is intention and context that are most important: the spirits of the deceased can be respected and put at ease in more than one way, and his challenge is to find the subtle blend of custom and innovation most suited to the moment.

It is that sensibility the runs through much of Johnson's account of the revival of religion in China after Mao. The "moral crisis" wrought by dizzying economic and social and cultural change of the past several decades has been well and widely chronicled (see here, and here, and here). What Johnson shows us is how various Chinese individuals use a variety of religious traditions to recreate, or perhaps even build from scratch, personal and spiritual meaning in the face of very rapid urbanization, commercialization, and individualization.  His work certainly rebuts the rather lazy assertion, derived from badly worded surveys, that China is overwhelmingly an atheist society.  Quite to the contrary, religious and spiritual beliefs are diffused widely across contemporary Chinese culture and society, and those beliefs are creatively expressed in myriad ways.

This is true as for Chinese Christians as for others. Johnson describes how a Protestant congregation in Chengdu discusses and interprets their theology. This is not simply a passive imposition of a "Western" system of belief into a Chinese context, but a productive formulation of a distinctively local Chinese expression of Christian beliefs. People face uncertainty and personal crises in their lives, they seek solace in religious wisdom, and they come together to mutually articulate a common faith. Whether they draw from indigenous or international traditions, the pattern is replicated in countless locations across the country.

Johnson is well aware of the political implications of the upsurge of religion in China. The short Afterword is a smart account of the Party's ambivalence toward spiritual faith. On the one hand, the CCP is officially atheistic and its leaders must forswear formal religious affiliation. Yet the state's obsession with rapid modernization, which is still consistent with its core Marxist-Leninist ideology, has produced the social anomie that inadvertently fuels the popular turn toward religion. The irony: the godless Communists have created conditions for the return of the gods in China.  Party leaders are wary that their political legitimacy could be undermined by the expansion of religious practice; many people have more faith in the Lady of the Azure Clouds than in Lei Feng. Thus, on the other hand, Party leaders must publicly demonstrate a certain understanding and tolerance of religion. Comprehensive repression would create massive public anger and pose an ever more serious problem for political legitimation. We therefore see the apparently contradictory stories of Xi Jinping supporting the reconstruction of a Buddhist temple in Hebei, even while the government demolishes a Tibetan Buddhist community in Sichuan. An obvious political calculation is a work: some religions, especially indigenous practices, are to be tolerated, maybe nurtured, while others, especially those with connections to "hostile foreign forces" - Tibetan Buddhism, Islam in Xinjiang, Christianity generally - must be contained and controlled and curtailed.

So while religion thrives in China, as Johnson so ably illustrates, it also suffers.

Johnson draws out the complexities of contemporary religious life in China in vivid and fine-grained detail. He is a master story teller, continuing in the vein of his excellent 2004 book, Wild Grass.  His journalistic skill is enhanced by his scholarly proclivities. He is familiar with the academic literature on Chinese religion and he draws upon it to good effect. The overall result is a deeply knowledgeable, marvelously portrayed, admirably sympathetic, yet appropriately analytic exploration of the spiritual lives we might not otherwise see in our strolls through the Beijing hutong.

Fun With Ngrams: The Presence of Confucianism in America

Now that my semester is drawing to an end (still have grading to do), my mind is turning toward my research question: why has Confucianism not gained greater prominence in the United States in the past century (or so), and what conditions might be necessary for Confucianism to have a greater intellectual and cultural presence in America?

These questions are tied to yet another, more abstract, query, which is never too far from my mind: how do systems of thought meaningfully move from one cultural context to another (i.e. Confucianism to America; liberalism or Marxism to China; etc.). But that question is rather too broad for consideration just now; so, let's stick to the more focused questions about Confucianism in America.

I have been thinking about Confucianism in America for some time now (check the pdf version of the paper mentioned here) and I am very much aware of the empirical problem: how can we measure the relative significance of Confucian thought in the United States? I have my own impressionistic sense that, in fact, not many Americans have a good understanding of the philosophy, and many fewer take it into consideration as they ponder issues in their own lives or society.  But there's not a whole lot of empirical evidence to substantiate that vague notion.

So, let's turn for a moment to Ngram, the Google Books search feature that allows you to survey a significant corpus of texts for specific terms.

Using that tool, I searched for references to "Confucius" and "Confucianism" in books published in English in the United States from 1800 to 2008, to see if there is a trend over time, either a rising or a diminishing presence of those terms in American texts. I fiddled around with other parameters (taking the search back 1700 did not yield other significant data, and that chart was harder to see), and I post this here to provide a first look at how Confucius and Confucianism circulate in US publications.

 (If you right click on the empty part of the graph, and then click "This frame," and then "open frame in new tab," you can see it much better):

 

The first thing to mention here is that the data have been normalized; that is, they take into account the rising number of publications over time so that the lines for "Confucius" and "Confucianism" are not skewed by the changing total number of books published (the statisticians can fight it out about whether that is the best approach or not.)  A couple of things thus stand out here.

Notice the general stagnation of references to "Confucius" over time, and the modest increase in references to "Confucianism".   This would suggest that in the nineteenth century, when there were relatively few translations of Confucian texts, the philosophy was generally identified with the person of Confucius himself. There appears to be an increase in references to "Confucius" along about 1920, but then a decline after 1960. As more texts are translated, and more interpretive work is done in interaction with Chinese scholars who are self-consciously considering their own culture and traditions in the 1890s and after, the term "Confucianism" becomes more prominent. We shouldn't place too much significance on the several notable spikes in "Confucius" references (e.g. 1829, 1867, 1910, etc.), as the total number of "Confucius" citations in any year is very small and the addition of just a few new books might create a spike. 

Interestingly, if we combine the terms "Confucius" and "Confucianism" we see a more noticeable rising trend in references, especially since 1860, which would suggest a growing prominence in American publications:

 

Here we notice a dip after 1960. This might represent a time-lag effect: after coming to power in 1949, the fervently anti-Confucian CCP successfully shifted the American discourse on Confucianism: US intellectuals gradually came to believe that the ancient philosophy was just irrelevant for understanding contemporary China. And that attitude might have been reinforced by the initial idealism of the Cultural Revolution, when left-leaning American scholars might have thought the "New China" really was new. Things change after 1980, when Maoism is revealed to be a crushing failure and Confucianism re-emerges in the PRC and in the minds of American intellectuals.  The apparent drop off after 1998 is harder to interpret, especially in light of the rising popularity of Confucian ideas and symbols in the PRC.

We should not, however, read too much into the generally upward trending line from 1860 to 1998. When we add some potential competitors for American intellectual attention, Confucius and Confucianism pale by comparison:

The scales here is a bit deceptive. If we round off the percentages we notice that, in 2008, there is a 0.0002% chance that "Confucius" is cited in American publications, and only a 0.0001% chance that "Confucianism" will be mentioned.  If I am reading the data correctly, this suggests that "Buddha" (0.0008%) is four times more likely to be cited than "Confucius" (0.0002%), and "Buddhism" (0.0006%) is six times more likely to be cited than "Confucianism" (0.0001%).  Also, the upward trends of "Buddha" and "Buddhism" are much stronger after about 1940 than those for "Confucius" and "Confucianism."

When we add "Plato" and "Aristotle" to the mix, the relative position of Confucianism is thrown into sharper relief: both are cited more frequently by close to an order of magnitude than Confucianism. The downward trends for the ancient Greeks after about 1960 might be indicative of the rise of modern and contemporary philosophy in the American intellectual zeitgeist as well as in academia.

All in all there are no real surprises there. We would expect that Buddhism would have more of a presence in American culture than Confucianism.  As a religious practice, as well as a philosophy, Buddhism is explicitly promoted by adherents in locations (temples) particularly established to maintain and reproduce specific rites and beliefs. By contrast, there is very little by way of human and organization infrastructure for the propagation of Confucianism in America outside of academia. And the ancient Greeks are still considered to be foundational to "Western civilization" and promoted and read in the US with that sense of historical continuity in mind.  Plato and Aristotle are supposed to make sense to us (or make us sensible).  No such expectation attaches to Confucianism in America.

To some degree, then, our fun with Ngrams has (as my original discipline of Political Science is often accused of doing) rigorously quantified the obvious. Though, in this case the "rigor" is not terribly rigorous, just a couple of graphs. 

At the very least the last graph gives us a visual representation of what Confucianism is up against in the US.  Since 1960 it seems not to have made significant progress compared to Buddhism, and since 1980 is not really catching up to Plato and Aristotle, either.

Mencius Says: Donald Trump is Inhumane and Should Not Be President

When faced with challenging circumstances I turn to ancient Chinese philosophy in search of answers. And when the issue is a matter of political leadership I often find myself thinking: what would Mencius say? And so, here are some thoughts on the prospect of Donald Trump as President of the United States from a Mencian point of view.

It is fairly safe to say that Mencius would consider Trump unfit for any sort of exemplary leadership position. Quite simply, Trump sets a bad example. To start, his career as an aggressive, selfish, profit-seeking wheeler-dealer is a problem for Mencius.  Let's go to the text:

Yang Hu once said: "One who would be wealthy will not be humane; one who is humane would not be wealthy"  [為富不仁矣，為仁不富矣]

This is perfectly in keeping with one of the main themes of the text: how the pursuit of profit destroys moral character.  The very first passage of Mencius has him upbraiding a king: "Why must you use that word - "profit?""  And he expands upon the problem in passage 6B4, where he points out that invoking profit as a motive, even for a good cause like stopping a war, inevitably corrodes human relationships:

If you, starting from the point of profit, offer your persuasive counsels to the kings of Qin and Chu, and if those kings are pleased with the consideration of profit so as to stop the movements of their armies, then all belonging to those armies will rejoice in the cessation of war, and find their pleasure in the pursuit of profit. Ministers will serve their sovereign for the profit of which they cherish the thought; sons will serve their fathers, and younger brothers will serve their elder brothers, from the same consideration - and the issue will be, that, abandoning benevolence and righteousness, sovereign and minister, father and son, younger brother and elder, will carry on all their intercourse with this thought of profit cherished in their breasts. But never has there been such a state of society, without ruin being the result of it.

A person obsessed with profit-making will likely be a base and immoral person, unable to to understand more fundamental human qualities such as commiseration and humaneness and reciprocity.  In this, Mencius is very much following his forerunner, Confucius.  Remember Analects 4.12:

The Master said: "If profit guides your actions, there will be no end of resentment." 子曰：「放於利而行，多怨。」

This is not to say that all business people are, ipso facto, resentful and inhumane persons.  Rather, if one is engaged in profit-seeking he or she must be ever vigilant in resisting the morally bad tendencies inherent in profit-seeking. A business person must work especially hard to fulfill the key Confucian virtues of humaneness (ren) and uprightness (yi).

Needless to say, Trump fails in this regard. There is no one in the public eye more crass and greedy and insensitive than Trump.  He does not temper profit-seeking with conscientious care of others.  Shallow and garish and narcissistic materialism is his very brand. Thus, from a Confucian point of view he is inhumane - bu ren - 不仁.

For Mencius, it is imperative to confront inhumane leaders. In his own time, the Warring States period of Chinese history, it was all too common for kings to be swept up in egotistical pursuits.  And Mencius never shied from speaking truth to power and telling them they should get right with Confucian morality or give up their political power. The stakes were high (4A1):

Therefore only the humane should be in high positions. When one lacking in humaneness occupies a high position, his wickedness spreads to everyone. (Bloom translation) -  是以惟仁者宜在高位。不仁而在高位，是播其惡於眾也

It should be noted that all is not lost. While it is certainly bad to have an inhumane individual in a position of power, right-minded people can work to counteract his malign effect through constant public critique, which is what we will do.

Trump supporters might want to argue that we should not take his campaign rhetoric seriously: he was only doing what most politicians do in fighting to win office. But Trump is different. He has taken lying and deception and untruth to new levels, unseen before.  And, for Mencius, that matters, as suggested by Bloom's translation of 4A22:

Mencius said: "A person who makes light with his words is not qualified to assume responsibility."

Trump should not assume responsibility because he is, quite clearly, irresponsible and inhumane. Were he a conscientious and well-meaning person he would recognize his own flaws and step away from office.  But he won't; so, we will have to be like Mencius and continuously call out his inhumanity.

 

Why Hillary Lost the Election, According to the Yi Jing

Let me preface this with a statement of my own political position.  I believe the election of Donald Trump is a disaster on many levels, and I will do whatever I can to limit his power while he is in office and remove him from power, by legitimate means, at the earliest possible moment, whether that is the 2020 election or some kind of political opportunity before that.

But I must address an issue particular to this blog: as is evident from my last post, I misinterpreted the Yi Jing.

When I consulted it on whether Hillary Clinton would win the presidency, it returned a reading that I took as a positive response.  Yet the outcome was the very opposite of my interpretation. It is a temptation to say "the Yi Jing was wrong," but my understanding of that book, gleaned from conscientious practitioners, is that the Yi Jing is never "wrong," it is we who fail to understand it.  It is in that spirit that I will return to the question in an attempt to discern my misunderstanding.

We might want to say that Hillary did, in fact, win the popular vote, and that is a significant thing. I would not, however, want to suggest that the Yi is out of touch with contemporary American political realities, most notably the Electoral College. For our purposes here we need to face this as a clear loss for Hillary.

Maybe the key point is this: when we face circumstances that are bad, unexpectedly bad, and that run against our expectations for the good, our first impulse should be one of self-reflection.  What is it that I failed to see or do? This is something we should all do, all of the time, including Hillary herself. If we apply that question to the previous reading, certain ideas emerge.

The initial hexagram, number 5/Waiting, appeared to be positive. But, as I pointed out in the reading, there was this line: "Waiting. If you are sincere, you have light and success."  And as I wrote then, and certainly as both Hillary haters and now even despondent Hillary supporters are no doubt repeating, the roots of the failure might lie in some facet of her insincerity.  In some ways, this is an easy and obvious critique. Hillary was disingenuous and flip-floppy, something that was emphasized by her opponents, and this weakened her support among those constituencies that were expected to vote for her in greater numbers. There is obviously something to that criticism, which can be applied to most politicians, but it seems insufficient to me, especially when she was running against a person much, much more insincere than she.

Perhaps the next point, then, is that she, and I, did not sincerely understand just how many people would be willing to discount Trump's insincerity.  I am seeing this pop up especially in foreign policy.  Trump's "American First" rhetoric suggested that he would not engage in "foreign adventures" and, thus, would not lead the country into another war.  Hillary was framed as more hawkish.  Yes, she tried to suggest that he was too unstable to be trusted with the nuclear codes (there's something we all pray will turn out not to be true) but, despite her disavowals her vote to authorize the Iraq war is remembered by many people.  It might go too far to characterize her as a neo-con, but she positioned herself in a manner to draw the support of neo-cons away from Trump.  And Trump obliged. He hammered her on her Iraq war vote and, despite his "I love war" comment, his media operation warned that Hillary was the war-monger.  And now we will see. I suspect that, in fact, Trump will turn out to be more hawkish than Hillary, he will be quicker to use military force if any "red lines" are crossed, and thus, we are more likely to find ourselves in a serious military confrontation.  I may be wrong about that, but working through the massive inconsistencies of Trump's campaign rhetoric yields no firm conclusions, yet.

Most people do not vote primarily on foreign policy, but we might think of how on matters of domestic policy a similar dynamic played out: Trump's statements, however untrue and implausible, were, in fact, resonating more effectively than Hillary's. The growing frustration with rising costs of health insurance is relevant here.

So, Hillary lost, in part, because she discounted the reach and power of Trump's message, not so much as it was emanating from Trump, but as it was received by potential voters.  Had she been more sincere in facing "things exactly as they are" (as the initial reading stated), she might have campaigned differently, spent more time earlier in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. 

Or, maybe, it was never going to be possible for her to overcome the anger at the "establishment" that worked against her.  It is beyond ironic, of course, that Trump somehow was able to frame himself as the anti-establishment candidate, and we will see the extent to which he is able to deliver on the implicit and explicit promises of that position, but, for now, for those of us searching for ways to rebuild a humane politics after the wreckage of this election, we must learn and look forward to more effective political listening and speaking in the future.

There was another hint of danger in the initial reading, another point that I overlooked. Hexagram 63/After Completion, which pointed to the emerging tendency, is generally a very favorable statement.  I read it as such. But, as I noted, it also includes an element of caution. This might best be understood as a matter of timing. The hexagram suggests that everything is in its proper place, and a certain positive equilibrium has been achieved; the worry is that the only possibility, then, is decay.  Think of the sun at noon: things cannot get brighter, they can only get darker. The timing issue is this: at what point has that positive equilibrium been reached and when does decay set it. My reading was that Hillary's successful election would be the moment when everything came together perfectly.  What has happened, however, suggests that, perhaps, the moment of harmony had already been reached and decay was inevitable. That, certainly, is what has happened. In the run up to the election, with so many polls and analyses pointing to a Clinton victory, we did not realize just how dangerous the situation was, just how out of balance things were already becoming. 

And so here we are. For those of us who care about equality - in all its aspects: political and economic and social - the world has fallen apart. The one big positive message that we can glean from the Yi Jing, however, is that when things lurch in one direction the inevitable movement of Way will gradually bring things back into balance. Nothing is inevitable. We will have to work to effect a better outcome. But there is a Way to a better Way.

Friday Yi Jing Blogging: Hillary will win Presidency

The US Presidential contest has taken on bizarre twists and turns in recent weeks and months, mostly generated by the unstable behavior of Donald Trump.  So, it is high time we settle the matter and consult the oracle, which I did today with the question: Will Hillary win the Presidency this year?

I wanted to be specific in my question by focusing on "this year" because you never know when the Yi is taking a longer view than you might be expecting.  Remember way back in 2006 when I asked the Yi Jing if she should run for president?  At that time she was the presumptive favorite to be the Democratic candidate but the Yi was not fooled: it suggested that she should not have thrown her hat in the ring for 2008.

But now we are in a very different moment of Dao. We're getting close to the time of decision, and the Yi is quite clear: Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States.  Let's go to the reading.

The oracle returned Hexagram 5, Waiting, with a moving yang line in the second position:

The upper trigram, symbolizing water, sits above, or in this case perhaps within, the upper, heaven, suggesting the possibility of rain.  We know a change is coming, the rain will fall, but we cannot force it, we have to wait for it. Thus, the title that Whilhelm gives to this hexagram: Waiting.  It suggests a situation when patience is of the utmost importance.  Here is The Judgment is full:

Waiting. If you are sincere, you have light and success. Perseverance brings good fortune. It furthers one to cross the great water.

I can hear the anti-Hillary wags right away: she's not sincere so she won't be successful.  But the Yi is not referring here to emails and ersatz scandals (Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi!).  It is more about a sincerity and honesty of recognizing the situation one faces. The Judgment suggests a time of danger, the coming storm could be damaging.  It is saying that Hillary has to stand up and persevere in the face of the coming assaults from Trump.  That's how I would interpret this portion of Wilhelm's commentary:

It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any sort of self-deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events, by which the path to success may be recognized. This recognition must be followed by resolute and persevering action.

It should be noted here that when the Yi counsels perseverance, it is most often formulated as "perseverance furthers;" but notice here the more definite sense of positive outcome: "perseverance brings good fortune."  The Yi is optimistic.

And the advice to "cross the great water" suggests that, once a certain patience has been exercised, resolute action will bring success. 

The moving yang line in the second position strengthens this sense of a second Clinton Presidency:

Nine in the second place means: waiting on the sand. There is some gossip. The end brings good fortune.

The sand here implies the banks of a river, a potentially dangerous place. And notice how specific the Yi is here in identifying the kind of challenge Hillary faces: "there is some gossip."  Trump is obviously going to attack her with every libel and assault that he can muster.  This is what she must patiently endure.  The commentary reads: "Slander will be silenced if we do not gratify it with injured retorts."  If she maintains her campaign discipline, stays on her message, doesn't take take whatever bait Trump throws out, she will be good.

And, once we account for that moving line, where is the situation tending? To one of the most favorable of hexagrams, 63, After Completion:

Here is Whilhelm's opening commentary:

The transition from confusion to order is completed, and everything is in its proper place even in particulars. The strong lines are in the strong places, the weak lines in the weak places. This is a very favorable outlook...

Of course, in good Yi fashion, there is a note of caution: when everything is just as it should be, the future is bound to bring some decay, the emergence of a new disorder.  Here that could suggest that once she secures the office of President, Hillary will face new political challenges, something she is certainly expecting.  But as a sign of the general tendency from where we are right now, After Completion points to a positive outcome for the Clinton campaign.

So congratulations President Clinton, but be on guard as your political adversaries will soon be looking to bring you down.

Freedom and Gender in China Now

I want to return to something that comes up in Jiwei Ci's book, Moral China in the Age of Reform, and elaborate on it in reference to struggles over changing constructions of gender in contemporary China.

Ci takes as his starting point the brute reality of a rapidly changing China (I blogged his book here and did a longer review of it here) . Modernization is happening here so rapidly and so extensively that many people feel at a loss: they no longer have a clear sense of what values hold the society together and they experience this as a "moral crisis" of sorts.  A big part of this story is the increased social and cultural and economic (but less so political) freedom that Chinese people have now compared to just about anytime in the country's long, long history. My summer school students, 18-21 year old Chinese undergraduates at Renmin University in Beijing, are much more free to find the job of their liking, a spouse that they love, a career and lifestyle of their own making, than was the case for older generations.  Their parents and grandparents did not face nearly as wide an array of personal life choices, and so the generation gap is massive.  At this point, it is simply impossible to undo the urbanization and social mobility and consumerism and materialism of the times.  Thus, Ci contends that this new found freedom must be thought through and defined in a manner that helps people understand who they are and who they can be now. He frames this issue like this:

Whatever alternative to this [new modern] life we find attractive or feasible, I for one believe that a radically more individuated moral subject must figure in it and so, correspondingly, must a kind of freedom that makes such a moral subject possible.  Only this kind of moral subject can give us any hope of making the best of the new form of life in China today and, if necessary, transcending it through critique and struggle from within. (4)

So, what can freedom be in China now?

This question confronted me directly in my class. A little background: I was teaching (just finished Friday!) a summer school class on "Confucianism in America" to Chinese undergraduate students at Renmin (People's) University.  Interestingly the majority of my students this year, as in the two other years I have taught it, were female.  Indeed, 25 out of the 30 students were young women (and, yes, we discussed the misogyny to be found in The Analects). Since it is a bit unusual for them to have an American professor, I would start each class session with "question time," during which they could ask me any question they wanted about the United States.  They asked about many things: the peculiar American fascination with guns; attitudes toward the South China Sea decision; how people feel about their communications being monitored by the government.

And then they asked about sex.

To be clear: one young woman asked what Americans thought about premarital sex and about extramarital affairs.

I was a bit taken aback: what should I say as an older American man in a quasi-public forum with mostly young Chinese women?  As I formulated my response, I was happy that she had felt comfortable enough to raise the issue. I had been encouraging them to ask any question they wanted, and she had.

I told them that attitudes on premarital sex had changed over the years, with more and more people and institutions coming to see it as natural and acceptable.  At my college, I pointed out, the issue was framed in terms of consent and safe sex.  We do not try to stop young people from having sex but to make sure that if they chose to do so they make those choices responsibly.  I mentioned recent problems of sexual harassment and assault. In concluding, I said that how one defines ones sexual orientation and practice is up to the individual him- or her- (or their-) self; it is an expression of one's individuality.

A couple of follow up questions were raised, which was interesting in that the students would usually not pursue a topic with multiple questions.  They were clearly interested about this.  Another young woman asked about sex education in the US, how we talked to children and students about sex.  I told them it was built into middle school and high school curricula and that at my college there was a fairly significant effort to continue to make students aware of consent and safe sex.  The discussion continued for about ten minutes.

And thus it became evident that they were not only questioning American attitudes and practices, they were questioning Chinese attitudes and practices.

It seems that in June a controversy had erupted on Weibo, when a teacher in Guangdong province called out a Chinese sex education text book that referred to young women who have premarital sex as "degenerates".   On social media women fought back, arguing that they should be able to determine their sexuality for themselves, without public opprobrium.  And what about men? Why weren't they, too, being tagged with the "degenerate" label?  Many of the young women in my class were likely aware of these debates, and they wanted an American perspective.  Also, they are certainly all too aware of the continuing social construction and reproduction of gender norms and expectations that subordinate women socially and economically, as described in Leta Hong Fincher's book, Leftover Women.

As I reflected on this conversation, I realized that this is precisely the kind of thing Ci is writing about.  The young women in my class are, in various ways, more free than their mothers or grandmothers. A wide variety of personal choices and opportunities lay before them.  But that freedom is not fully articulated and theorized. How free can and should women be when it comes to their sexuality in China today?  Clearly, there are still attitudes and practices here that run counter to the expectations and identities of the younger generation. To what extent and in what manner should the prospect of freedom be subordinated to existing or reinvented social norms?

Ci's analysis is especially helpful here because his notion of freedom is not a crude anything-goes egoism. He invokes Foucault's notion of a "mode of subjection" to recognize that individuals are always already embedded in social contexts, with their attendant norms and practices, and that we are constantly engaged in a process of shaping our individual preferences and habits and interests in light of social and political and economic forces. We are not wholly free, we are subjected (subjugated?) by various aspects of modernity.  My own sense is our subjection to economic pressures, the market, might be most powerful. We often limit ourselves in the face of material incentives and disincentives. But, as my female students made clear, subjection to gender norms is also powerfully at play (there seems to be a cycle: young people press for more freedom which in turn produces a conservative reaction for a return to "tradition").

Ultimately, the women in my class were thinking about how certain social forces work to define gender roles ("degenerate women") in such a manner as to limit their sexual, and ultimately social, freedom. They were pressing back against this narrower mode of subjection, and actively engaging in the process of subjection.  They were resisting certain conservative limitations and defining for themselves their freedom within a newly created, and perhaps somewhat expanded, mode of subjection.  They are not wholly free, but they want to be freer and they want to have more of a say in what that freedom means.

A parting thought.  All of this happened in a class that was considering possible modern meanings of Confucianism. I encourage more liberal interpretations of The Analects and Mencius, readings that recognize the historical patriarchal qualities of the texts but insist on a contemporary gender-neutral understanding. In the multiform Confucian revival in China now there are people who are bringing Confucian ideas into their personal lives in a manner that helps to expand and make sensible the social-cultural freedom they enjoy.  But there are also those who use "Confucianism" in a more limiting manner, imposing a top-down neo-traditionalist mode of subjection that works against freedom.  My sense is that these projects will ultimately fail here. The young women in my class will not accept a "Confucianism" that pushes them down into someone else's definition of who they should be; they want to define themselves. If Confucianism is to have a significant modern presence in China, it has to work with freedom not against it. 

Confucian Rationality and Its Modern Fate

What can Confucianism be in a modern context?

That question has been turning over in my mind a lot lately, as I move through Beijing and think about the class I am teaching at the Renmin University Summer School: "Confucianism in America." Yes, I'm back, for my third year, and it's good to be back.  But that question comes at me in various forms: how is Confucianism being understood and used by Chinese people right now in China? Can Confucianism be a world philosophy, sensible to Americans and others in non-Chinese cultural contexts? Indeed, what can Confucianism be in any modern context, Chinese or American or whatever?  Questions, questions, questions.

Happily an excellent book by Sebastian Billioud and Joel Thoraval, The Sage and the People: The Confucian Revival in China goes a long way in answering the Chinese side of my questions. They show, through very detailed fieldwork, that many people in many different walks of life are finding in Confucianism, or various aspects of the tradition, myriad different interpretations and practices that might bring some new source of meaning into their personal lives.  This is a "bottom-up" view, showing us complex micro-social thoughts and actions.  They also consider the "top-down" efforts by public authorities to appropriate Confucianism for their own purposes of political legitimation, but the overarching picture that Billioud and Thoraval paint is one of diversity and plurality in the meaning and use of "Confucianism" in contemporary China. I'll return to this excellent book in a future post but let's shift in a somewhat more abstract direction.

In trying to get a handle on how conditions of modernity challenge certain premises of classical, pre-Qin Confucianism (I am thinking here of how we can understand The Analects and Mencius in the here and now), I want to work through some ideas from another excellent new book, The Confucian-Legalist State: A New Theory of Chinese History by Dingxin Zhao.  It is a magnificent intellectual effort, a sweeping argument that delves into the early emergence of state structures in the  Warring States period and the lasting and multiform effects of those political structures throughout Chinese history.  Zhao brings the historical analysis into the modern period, contending that the answer to the age-old question - why did industrial capitalism not arise indigenously in China? - is to be found in the power of the "Confucian-Legalist State," which itself draws upon Legalist political and penal practices, legitimated by Confucian ideology.  For him, it's not a "cultural" thing, it's a structural thing, a political structural thing.  As a political scientist, I find this historical-sociological, political-structural perspective persuasive.  But I'm sure the book will spark many debates for many years, which I look forward to.

Zhao, unsurprisingly, draws on Max Weber (and I think he succeeds in avoiding Weber's mistakes) in several ways.  He adopts and adapts Weber's typology of rationality (rationalities?). I won't rehearse here the entire analysis, but just focus on some key ideas, which I think are rather helpful in understanding Confucianism in the contemporary moment.

Among the various types of rationality posited by Zhao, following Weber, are: substantive rationality and instrumental rationality. Our everyday sense of "rationality" tracks with Zhao's definition of instrumental rationality: means-ends calculations (finding the most efficient means to certain specified ends) that produce "social action that is motivated by purely pragmatic and egoistic interests." (Zhao, 38).  The focus of instrumental rationality is more on means, and less so ends. One can be "good" at doing "bad" things from this perspective: a good bank robber is one who figures out the best means to the end of stealing money.  Substantive rationality, in contrast, focuses more on ends, on how we define the goals of social action.  It operates, according to  Stephen Kalberg (on whom Zhao also draws):

not on the basis of a purely means-end calculation of solutions to routine problems but in relation to a past, present, or potential "value postulate".... Not simply a single value, such as positive evaluation of wealth or of the fulfillment of duty, a value postulate implies entire clusters of values that vary in comprehensiveness, internal consistency, and content.

Working from these two concepts, instrumental and substantive rationality, it is pretty clear that The Analects and Mencius are offering a kind of substantive rationality, they are urging us to order our social action in terms of certain "clusters of values" that Confucius and Mencius believe will create good personal and social-political outcomes.  We should act in the world according to values such as ren and yi and li and zhong and xin.  Perhaps these are more than "values;' they all connote a kind of imperative: they don't just tell what what the "good" is, but they tell us we really should do the "good" as defined by these concepts. If the value cluster of Confucianism (and I am thinking here of the pre-Qin Confucian-Mencian strain of the tradition) motivates social action that runs counter to instrumentalist "pragmatic and egoistic interests," the tradition tells us that we should do the substantively rational thing (the thing that lives up to the values of the Confucian good) instead of the instrumentally rational thing (the thing that might profit us individually).  We can see this anti-instrumentalist ethos throughout both The Analects and Mencius.

Perhaps the most outstanding anti-instrumentalist trope in The Analects is the character of Yan Hui, the follower who Confucius himself believed came closest to realizing the substantive rationality of his teachings.  Confucius praises Yan Hui in passage 6.3 where he says: Yan Hui, "....loved to learn. He did not transfer his anger; he did not repeat a fault. Unfortunately, his appointed time was short and he died; and now there is not such another. I have not yet heard of any one who loves to learn as he did."  None of the other disciples quite lives up to the virtue of Yan Hui, who is also famous for eschewing material prosperity and comfort, as noted in passage 6.11:

The Master said, "Admirable indeed was the virtue of Hui! With a single bamboo dish of rice, a single gourd dish of drink, and living in his mean narrow lane, while others could not have endured the distress, he did not allow his joy to be affected by it. Admirable indeed was the virtue of Hui!"

Yan Hui lived the good Confucian life even though it brought him poverty.  Others of Confucius's followers, most notably Zigong, did not go to the material extremes of Yan Hui, which suggests that even in pre-Qin days people who tried to follow the Confucian Way tempered its substantive goals with certain instrumentalist calculations.  Nonetheless the core of the doctrine emphasized a substantive rationality.

Mencius also goes hard for substantive rationality.  He is often quoted as trying to persuade power-holders to give up on  li - 利 - "profit," or "benefit," or "interest." In the very first passage of Mencius the philosopher admonishes King Hui of Liang: "why speak of profit?"  Rejecting "profit" as a goal is a central theme throughout the volume.

We could delve much further into the anti-instrumentalist facets of these texts, but we should also note that early Confucianism is complex.  Both Confucius and Mencius do, at times, make instrumentalist arguments, most commonly when they are trying to convince rulers to follow their philosophy. They will contend that certain political and economic ends can be attained by Confucian means: a country will prevail in war if it enacts humane government, or a ruler will gain legitimacy if he leads a virtuous life.  Perhaps most notable along these lines is the praise Confucius heaps on Guan Zhong in passage 14.16 and passage 14.17 (the fact that story this is repeated suggests the writer(s) attach a certain significance to it).

Guan Zhong came to be Prime Minister for Duke Huan of Qi.  But Duke Huan had been implicated in the death of his brother (or that is what some of Confucius's followers believed),something a good Confucian gentleman should condemn. In the two passages from The Analects mentioned above, two of Confucius's disciples, Zilu and Zigong, both assume that Guan Zhong should not be respected.  But Confucius takes the opposite view, lauding Guan Zhong because, regardless of the possible charge of fratricide, Guan Zhong reformed the kingdom of Qi and brought it prosperity and power.  Seems like the ends justified the means, or, at the very least, in this case, an instrumentalist rationality took precedence over a substantive rationality.

I would not over-interpret the Guan Zhong passages of The Analects, however.  It might still be best to understand the general thrust of early Confucian thought as a kind of substantive rationality.  In most cases, most of the time, social action should be oriented toward realizing the cluster of values of Confucian morality: Humanity, Duty, Ritual, Sincerity, Wisdom, etc. We should, in short, be like Yan Hui.  In certain rare circumstances, however, perhaps we can be like Guan Zhong, and push aside what substantive Confucian rationality might suggest and go for a more cold and calculating instrumental rationality.

To return to Dingxin Zhao's work, he is helpful in this regard. Resisting an overly stark dichotomy of substantive v. instrumental rationality, he suggests that the latter can be understood as having two expressions: "privately oriented instrumental rationality (means-ends calculation for private benefit) and publicly oriented instrumental rationality (means-ends calculations for public good) (38-39).  This distinction is useful in a number of ways.

First, it gives us some insight into the apparent contradiction of Confucius's regard for both Yan Hui and Guan Zhong.  While the former is certainly a symbol of substantive rationality, the latter is good because of his publicly oriented instrumental rationality.  Guan is not acting for his own enrichment or profit.  Rather, he is acting instrumentally to improve the public good, or at least that is the way things worked out for a while in Qi.  Of course, there could be ways in which substantive rationality and publicly oriented instrumental rationality might come into conflict (and my sense is that Confucius and Mencius would generally stick with the substantive side of the situation) but public-spiritedness is something to which Confucianism aspires.  Generally, good public outcomes are presumed to follow if enough people focus on enacting the substantive rationality of Confucian ethics.  But a little instrumentalism to push along the realization of public improvement is not necessarily a vice.

Second, the grand Confucian-Legalist synthesis of the Han dynasty and after that Zhao so expertly analyzes is somewhat more understandable with the public/private instrumentalism distinction. On the face of it, neither the early Confucian philosophers nor the Legalists (Han Feizi in particular) would be comfortable with a theoretical accommodation with the other.  Of course, they were not consulted by the pragmatic statesmen who forged the Confucian-Legalist state. But the Confucian scholars and bureaucrats, who had studied the classics, including The Analects and Mencius, to gain access to state power, would, I imagine, have faced the contradiction of the substantively rational ethical outlook of those classic texts and the instrumentalism of the Legalist administrative and penal codes they had to enforce.  Perhaps they could find some relief from the potential cognitive dissonance in the very strong public orientation of Legalist instrumental rationality.  Han Feizi is very direct in denouncing private interests.  In chapter six of his text (just a brief description at this link) Han writes:

In our present age he who can put an end to private scheming and make men uphold the public law will see his people secure and his state well ordered; he who can block selfish pursuits and enforce the public law will see his armies growing stronger and his enemies weakening.

In other words, he is all about publicly oriented instrumental rationality, and that may be somewhat less grating to Confucians than the thing that both they and the Legalists abhor: privately oriented instrumental rationality

Finally, the public/private distinction helps us understand the challenges Confucianism faces in a modern context (finally getting back to my original question). Zhao again follows Weber in understanding modernization as an inexorable process of growth and domination of instrumental rationality, as it becomes formalized and theorized and routinized, over substantive rationality.  Thus, the "iron cage" imagery of Weber, a modern moment that brings "value-fragmentation" and "mechanized petrification."  But Zhao's public/private distinction focuses the problem a bit more. He argues that: "...the empowerment of economic power by ideology, which I refer to as the valuation and domination of privately oriented instrumental rationalism, is the most crucial feature of modernity." (44). Private instrumentalism is of greater effect than public instrumentalism.  If that is the case, it has significant implications for what a modern Confucianism can be.

Let's assume for a minute that China has now fairly thoroughly modernized.  Let's assume further that Jiwei Ci is generally correct in his empirical observations: that the modernizing forces of urbanization and social mobility and social-cultural individualization and heightened materialism and instrumentalism have brought on a "crisis of faith" in China. Can a revived Confucianism be a solution of sorts to the depredations of modernity in China?

An answer to that question derived from Zhao's work seems to be: not really. Or, maybe, not completely.

The practices and institutions of modernity in China very powerfully promote and reproduce privately oriented instrumental rationalism.  The Party attempts to rein in the worst excesses with various efforts at publicly oriented instrumental rationalism: the campaign to promote the "core values" of socialism, for example.  These do not really provide a substantive rationality, however, because the "cluster of values" offered by the Party really does not speak to the kinds of personal disorientation people are experiencing. "Socialism" doesn't have enough cultural and philosophical depth.  And that's where the Confucian revival comes in.  People really do go back to that tradition in search of something more substantial.  Billioud and Thoraval show us that many different sorts of practices come out of those efforts, many different "Confucianisms."  But the critical limitation to all of those undertakings is the power of the broader context of social and economic and cultural modernity. Even if people can carve out a little time in their lives to study and enact Confucian substantive rationality, they still have to go back to their jobs and interact with the bureaucracy and move through an increasingly instrumentalist and competitive society.  The stakes now of giving up on private instrumentalism are much harsher than in Yan Hui's day, or at least many people appear to believe so.  It would seem, then, that the substantive essence of the tradition is close to impossible to uphold in the midst of rapid and expansive modernization.

Perhaps Confucianism in its Guan Zhong garb, as a publicly oriented instrumental rationalism, can survive in modernity.  That is what the Party is banking on as it has sponsored and supported some aspects of the Confucian revival.  Yet  that project of trying to reconstruct what Yu Ying-shih refers to as "institutional Confucianism" runs the risk of alienating people through its association with authoritarian politics.  Moreover, any campaign to promote Confucian public-spiritedness will encourage people to search for the substantive rationality at the core of the tradition, and when they turn in that direction some of them will become disenchanted because of the profound disconnect between that substantive rationality and the modern rationalization that dominates their life.

Seems rather bleak.

But I try to be an optimist (Mencius helps keep the spirits up that way). Maybe something more modest is possible.  Modern Confucianism will not, indeed cannot, be grandly transformative.  It will not provide a comprehensive solution to the problems of modernity.  What it can do, however, is to offer some solace to individuals in personalized ways.  There cannot be a singular "Confucianism" to serve as a unifying source of meaning for all.  Rather, there can be, and indeed there are now emerging, many forms and expressions and practices of "Confucianism," suited to individual experiences and situations.  Modern Confucianism will remind us in general to focus on cultivating our closest loving relationships and be other-regarding: when we want to establish ourselves, we should help others establish themselves, and when we want to achieve for ourselves we should help others achieve for themselves (己欲立而立人，己欲達而達人). But what those words mean in specific circumstances and how we carry them out is only something individuals can determine for themselves and fit into their modern lives for themselves. 

Confucianism might not be enough to escape the Weberian "iron cage," but it could give us, like it gave Yan Hui, a certain comfort nonetheless.

(And, yes, I know I am echoing Joseph Levenson's classic book: Confucian China and Its Modern Fate.  The same sorts of questions are still being asked here: what is modern China? What is its Chinese-ness,and what is its modernity?)

(Photo of Temple of Yan Hui in Qufu, Shandong, China)

Making Confucius Relevant to Americans - One Hundred Years Ago

In 1915, Gu Hongming (Ku Hung-Ming) - a Chinese man born in Penang, educated in the UK, who rose to prominence serving an imperial government official in the waning years of Qing Dynasty China - published a book, The Spirit of the Chinese People, that was aimed to convince Europeans and Americans of the modern significance and utility of ancient Chinese culture, especially Confucianism.  It was one of several books he wrote, the one, now, a hundred years later, that might be most widely cited still.  In his own time he was something of a cross-cultural phenomenon. An anti-modernist, he defended the value of traditional Chinese ideas and practices while energetically engaging with intellectuals in the West on questions of how best to define and defend universal "civilization."  He believed that Westerners could not only understand Confucianism, but they could absorb it into their own lives in a transcendent global-cultural unity.  His idealism would be swept aside by the brutalities of the twentieth century, but it is instructive to look back on his book from the vantage of a hundred years.

Before we start, I should simply state that we will ignore here the rhetorical conventions of Gu's day that are so out of place in our time.  His championing of the "real Chinaman" and his sweeping generalizations about the national character of England and Germany and France are rather off-putting today.  He gets caught up, at times, in using the devices of Western Orientalism to refute the excesses of Western Orientalism.  But we will set all that aside and assume the best about Gu: he was working to bring Chinese and Western ways of thinking into dialogue with each other, searching for points of contact and profitable intellectual exchange.

The first thing to notice about Gu is perhaps the most obvious: he not only believed in the intelligibility of cross-cultural understanding, he lived it.  Although his cosmopolitan background - he was an early "third culture kid" - might have been unusual in his day, he demonstrates a fundamental human capacity to find meaning in more that one cultural context.  In that regard, he stands as a tangible contradiction of various assertions that different cultures are incommensurable. Some might argue that certain ideas embedded in one culture -- say, ren  仁 -- are simply untranslatable into, for instance, English.  While a one-for-one word correspondence may indeed be problematic, Gu rejects non-translatability in The Spirit of the Chinese People and forges ahead:

Love includes all true human affection, the feeling of affection between parents and children as well as the emotion of love and kindness, pity, compassion, mercy toward all creatures; in fact, all true human emotions contained in that Chinese word, jen (仁) for which the nearest equivalent in the European languages is, in the old dialect of Christianity, godliness, because it is the most godlike quality in man, and in modern dialect, humanity, love of humanity, or, in one word, love. (53)

We could take Gu to task for foregrounding "love" as a translation of ren, and "godliness" opens up all sorts of problems, but notice how these are only facets of a fuller exposition.  If we focus in on something like "the humanity found in the bond between parents and children" we would be closer to the core (dare I say "heart") of ren.  And that is the point.  We should not expect word-for-word translatability.  But if we enter into a serious conversation, if we seek out a variety of sources and perspectives, construct a semantic field of several terms and phrases, then we can come away with a good understanding of what ren means and entails, even if some of the isolated, specific concepts used in a larger discussion would not, in and of themselves, serve as adequate translations.

Another kind of incommensurability might come when we try to accommodate the claims of one culturally-embedded system of thought (let's call it a "philosophy") to the concerns and understandings of another differently culturally-embedded philosophy.  That is to say, while a philosophy might be comprehensible to people from other cultural contexts, its claims cannot be adapted and used or enacted in that other cultural context.  Notice how Alasdair MacIntyre states the problem thusly:

...Confucianism appears to face a recurrent type of dilemma: either it retains its highly specific and concrete character, thus tying itself to particular Chinese forms of social relationships of a traditional kind and, while not necessarily exempting the concrete embodiment of these forms altogether from moral criticism, rendering its moral standpoint inseparable from loyalty to these now often radically changing forms, or it makes itself relevant to types of social order in which these forms of social relationships do not or no longer exist, but in so doing it empties itself of specific moral content and so diminishes its doctrine of the virtues by specifying them only in barren generalities. (120)

He says a lot with that "barren generalities."  And he is saying here, essentially, that Confucianism, as a philosophy that arose and was given meaning within a Chinese cultural context, cannot really be invoked or employed to address issues in a modern American cultural context.  If a person tried to be an "American Confucian" she would have to either construct a social setting that somehow replicated "Chinese forms of social relationships of a traditional kind" or settle for a rather un-Confucian-like set of "barren generalities".   An American and a Confucian might be able to understand and talk to one another, by MacIntyre's lights, but neither could take on an authentic form of the other's culture.  A modern American could not really be Confucian or follow, as a way of life, Confucianism.

Let's put aside the question of authenticity (since it is bound up with the larger question of whether it is possible for any ancient philosophy to be authentically lived in a modern context) and consider whether differently situated philosophies are as incommensurable as MacIntyre believes.

Gu thinks not. He clearly believes that Confucianism can be useful to Westerners facing the depredations of modernity. Although his choice of words is unfortunate at times, what he seems to be arguing is that Confucianism is a kind of civil religion.  If we substitute "civil" for "state" in the following passage, we can see him begin to make Confucianism relevant to Europeans and Americans:

Again, the term chun tzu chih tao (君子之道 ) in the teachings of Confucius, translated by Dr. Legge as "the way of the superior man," for which the nearest equivalent in the European languages is moral law - means literally, the way - the Law of the Gentleman. In fact, the whole system of philosophy and morality taught by Confucius may be summed up in one word: the Law of the Gentleman. Now Confucius codified this law of the gentleman and made it a Religion - a State religion. (29)

Gu elaborates this notion of a civil religion, especially as it resides in and regulates and gives life to the family. He is a fierce traditionalist and insists that Confucian civil religion requires absolute loyalty to the emperor.  We could, however, argue that, now, given the irreversible demise of imperial authority in China and most parts of the world, the civil religion that emerges from Confucianism can thrive in a more populist political context. Indeed, in the Introduction to The Spirit of the Chinese People, Gu suggests just such a possibility when he refers to the Chinese "religion of good citizenship". (III).  And in that same Introduction he makes this argument:

In fact I really believe that the people of Europe will find the solution to the great problem of civilization after this war, - here in China. There is, I say here again, an invaluable, but hitherto unsuspected asset of civilization here in China, and the asset of civilization is the real Chinaman. The real Chinaman is an asset of civilization because he has the secret of a new civilization which the people of Europe will want after this great war, and the secret of that new civilization is what I have called the Religion of good citizenship. (X)

Confucianism, as the "religion of good citizenship," holds the solution to war torn Europe, a sentiment that Eza Pound seemed also to have believed (he published Cathay poems in 1915, too).  The "real Chinaman" is one who practices Confucianism and is, in Gu's mind, the avatar of a "new civilization," one that advances a universal humanity and draws from "the best which has been thought and said" (Matthew Arnold was a favorite of Gu's) from all the world's cultures.  Again, there is an obvious idealism in all of this, but one that rejects various assertions of incommensurability and spiritedly advances a global Confucian project.

For the most part, however, Gu failed in his intellectual efforts. The traditional imperial system he defended was not revived in China.  Confucianism did not catch on in the West. The horrors of WWI did not produce a great reconciliation of civilizations, but only paved the way for the worse horrors of WWII.

Interestingly, however, Gu seems to have anticipated the work of Robert Bellah, who is generally credited with coining the term "civil religion" in relation to America. And now, a new book has been published that considers how that notion of "civil religion" might apply to Confucianism in China today: Confucianism, A Habit of the Heart: Bellah, Civil Religion, and East Asia. There is much to contemplate in this volume, more than we can consider here.  But we should note Bellah's embrace of a kind of universal humanity not unlike Gu's. In the last chapter of the new volume, which might be the last of Bellah's work to be published, he resists cultural particularism, which holds that humans can find meaning only in specific cultural contexts and that universal humanity is, as MacIntyre would have it, barren:

What I would question.... is the idea that the global and the particular are mutually exclusive, that one lives in one and only one community, which, were it true, would surely make the idea of membership in "a single universal tribe" impossible. I would argue, on the contrary, that humans have almost never lived in one and only one community, that we almost always, and in modern times necessarily always, live in many overlapping communities...(208)

Gu is a living example of Bellah's point: a man who lived in more than one community simultaneously.  And, if Bellah is right, Gu is not all that extraordinary in this regard.  We all live in multiple communities, and we can find meaning in various cultural flows.  We may have to work at it, study language and philosophy and history and literature, but we can, as humans, come to know the cultures of others and, more significantly, bring those cultures into our lives as communities of which we are a part.  We can not only learn them, we can live them.  Notice, too, that, while he does not invoke Bellah's notion of "civil religion" Henry Rosemont Jr., in his most recent book, Against Individualism: A Confucian Rethinking of the Foundations of Morality, Politics, Family, and Religion, also sees a religious-like project in Confucianism that can be adopted by contemporary Americans.

He may have gotten some things wrong - the absolute loyalty to the emperor thing, for instance - but Gu was clearly on to something. 

A Williams College Education Doesn't Require Random Acts of Racist Speech

[A momentary break from my usual blogging focus to address a local controversy]

[Update: for the sake of clarity, I have deleted one phrase and added another. Readers will see this below at the strikethoughed text]

    I am a teacher. Every day I make decisions about what my students read and write, and what kinds of speech are intellectually meaningful in our classroom discussions. Within the limits of my pedagogical goals, I encourage them to freely explore arguments, push and pull ideas in unexpected directions, make mistakes. When it works well, it’s like John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things: marvelous innovation within the limits of the melodic structure.
    From that perspective, I can see why President Adam Falk was right to cancel the planned appearance of a speaker widely recognized, on both left and right, for his racist views. Williams College does not have an open-ended obligation to provide a platform for unmediated racist speech, nor is it a place of absolutely unlimited speech. Because we are an institution of higher education, our mission is to promote and support speech, and writing and learning, that is intellectually meaningful. The planned event did not meet that standard and, thus, was rightfully cancelled. Indeed, it should never have been scheduled in the first place.

Notes (and some thoughts) on Leigh Jenco's Book: Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West

 I've been following Leigh Jenco's work in comparative philosophy for some time now and was most happy to see her new book come out late last year: Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West.  It speaks, at least on a theoretical level, to an issue I am currently working on: how systems of thought can meaningfully move from one cultural context to another.  I'm focusing now on the conditions under which "Confucianism" might gain more traction in contemporary America.  Jenco's explication of Chinese debates from about 1860-1920 on how "Western Learning" might be imported into China and made meaningful there offers several key points that relate to my project.

Herewith some very rough initial notes and thoughts on this theoretically rich and thoughtful volume.

1) Meaningful cultural (or we might say philosophical) importation is possible. This might seem a self-evident statement but, as Jenco relates, it is contested.  Some theorists (e.g. Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre) have argued that knowledge is "particularlistic," embedded in specific social and historical contexts, and that embeddedness produces a kind of incommensurability between distinct knowledge communities.  The Chinese experience, however, suggests this assertion is empirically false.  Chinese thinkers not only learned "Western knowledge" but they came to understand and debate the theoretical preconditions that enabled such learning.  "Western Learning" ultimately came to be indigenized, transforming "Chinese" culture and experience.  A key problem with particularistic thinking is that it embraces a static and singular notion of "culture."  To the contrary, Jenco holds that "culture" is dynamic and plural, in both time and space.  Thus, where particularists assume that "the association of particular individuals with particular [cultural] traditions is therefore both automatic and authentic...." (46), Jenco views culture as an acquired achievement, the product of self-conscious learning:

If cultural practices or characteristics are cultivated rather than given, then certain cultural practices or institutions can be adopted in other times and places, though often not immediately and not by one individual, or within the time horizon of a single generation. (65)

It should be noted that Jenco's argument is not a type of universalism.  Rather, building on the "culturalist" interpretation of Chinese practice and identity, she recognizes the social and historical conditioning of knowledge but does not see this as an insurmountable barrier to cultural movement and intermixing and change.  By these lights, under certain conditions, it is possible for a system of thought like "Confucianism" to have meaning in a cultural context, like that of contemporary America, radically different from its Chinese origins. 

2) Jenco holds that not only can systems of thought move and be meaningful between cultural contexts, but she also believes that they can be transformative in their new context.  This is obviously the case in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but Jenco's argument is pitched at a sufficiently high level of generalization that it can apply to American now as well.  This is not simply a matter of "us" (if by "us" we mean an immutable and singular cultural identity) becoming like "them," but, rather, a continuous process of cultural change and reinterpretation, which happens within a particular place across time as much as it does between different places.  These lines spring out to me:

Just as (what we take to be) our own past heritage of thought fundamentally constitutes, rather than merely influences, our present production of knowledge, so too will situating foreign thought within the genetic narrative of our past be able to reconstitute our field of knowledge and our methods of inquiry.... This internalization of foreign thought effectively explodes the foreign/indigenous dichotomies that were its original motivation. (88)

How we might situate foreign thought into our past is an interesting question.  The answer has to do with how we understand how the past relates to the present.  If we, as Jenco, understand the past as interpretable in light of the social and political dynamics of the present, then we can imagine various discursive possibilities for including "foreign" pasts into our own.  This could be as simple as revealing parallel lines of inquiry in ancient Chinese and Greek texts, as has become more common in academic philosophy in the past decade or so.

3) Cultural transformation born of the transposition of "foreign" systems of thought cannot be reduced to "use" versus "essence."  This is the famous ti/yong - 体/ 用 - debate that took various forms over the course of several decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in China.  The conservative version of this formulation, that some sort of "Chinese" essence (which implies a kind of historical cultural continuity) can be preserved by only importing "useful" Western knowledge, is obviously untenable.  More interesting is Jenco's explication (published previously) of Tan Sitong's revision of the terms of this debate to dao/qi - 道 / 器.  Qi is something more than yong.  It might be translated as "vessel," and suggests something specific and concrete.  But it also here implies not just a kind of de-contextualized technology but recognizes that "the actual material objects supplied by the Westerners" are inseparably fused with "the faculties or capacities - intellectual, social, institutional, economic - that produce these objects." (130-131).  When an idea - let's say for building a train - comes into a new cultural context, it brings with it a whole host of social and economic and political and cultural preconditions and implications. Dao, therefore, is something both more general and more specific than ti.  We might say there is an "ancient Chinese Dao," but also that there is a "Dao of railroads."   But, ultimately, dao is unstable and changing as a result of the proliferation of many, many specific qis. Jenco notes that Tan: "...follows Wang [Fuzhi] by departing from typical neo-Confucian readings that held dao to be the foundation of qi... Wang reversed the relationship, holding that it was in fact "vessels" that held the "Way," or in other words, the particular and concrete that predicated the general and abstract." (128-129).   She quotes Tan:

"Once qi has changed, can dao alone remain unchanged? Change is precisely doing qi, and qi cannot leave dao. People cannot abandon qi; how then can they abandon dao?" (129)

There is much that could be said here, many questions raised.  For now, suffice it to note that this way of thinking recognizes that "culture" - one implication of dao - changes from the bottom up, from variations in particular, practical activities.  This is not simply a spatial dynamic, the importation of new ways of doing things from other places, but also temporal.  For instance, a "Confucian Dao," is determined by the practice of a variety of particular qi.  As particular practices change over time in China, the "Confucian Dao" changed as well.  Whatever historical continuity might be possible is not ideational but practical.

Another point here is: if lived experience - an agglomeration of many actually existing qi - changes dramatically from the past, let's say through a multifarious process of "modernization," then the basis of something like a "Confucian Dao" could be destroyed.  For "Confucianism" to persist in modernity, it is not enough for isolated intellectuals to think like Confucians, but, rather, there must be collectivities enacting qi that under-gird a "Confucian Dao."

4) The production of meaning, drawing from both indigenous and foreign sources, is a collective enterprise.  Jenco emphasizes this throughout the book.  This was very much the understanding and experience of Chinese intellectuals, and their collective effort was no less than to change "China."  That happened.  We cannot reduce that momentous historical transformation to only the work of intellectuals but the fact of that extensive change demonstrates Jenco's point here. The "foreign" can be made the "indigenous" through self-conscious social enactment.  This is not simply a matter of the hybridized experience of individuals, but can only come about through social interaction within and between groups: qun - 群. For there to be a Confucianism in America it must be based upon a social infrastructure.

In her last chapter she turns toward our own time.  Since such change was possible in China, why not in Europe and America?  That is, to some extent, happening, but Jenco's work gives us various conceptual resources to theorize how, for instance, Confucianism might take hold in America.

These comments do not do justice to this excellent volume. I will likely have more to say about later.  In the meantime, I highly recommend the book.