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After Liberalism: What if Confucianism Becomes the Hegemonic Ethic of the Twenty-first Century?
by Richard Madsen
Although the international system is often characterized as fundamentally anarchic-a shifting balance of power among interest-maximizing states-underlying any stable international regime is a framework of international institutions: treaties, agreements, covenants based on a common language of international discourse and on some minimal consensus on norms of legitimate international conduct. This web of international institutions usually purports to be based on universal values. In reality, of course, the values are those central to the societies that dominate the international institutions. Currently, this means that the world's international institutions are dominated by the West, which is still led by the United States.
This web of institutions is currently called the "community of nations." The ultimate task of diplomacy is seen to be the integration of wayward societies into this community of nations. As President Clinton said in announcing his decision to normalize relations with Vietnam, "By helping to bring Vietnam into the community of nations, normalization also serves our interest in working for a free and peaceful Vietnam in a stable and peaceful Asia." Such rhetoric assumes that the central values are "our" values, irrespective of the values of the nation being integrated into the community. Central to the political cultures of Western nations, led by the United States, which currently dominate the international community, is the notion that these nations are founded on contracts between rights-bearing citizens, and that this contractarian way of life is the basis for their moral superiority.
Until recently, the main rhetorical strategy used by weaker, non-Western countries against the West was the accusation of hypocrisy. For instance, third world revolutionaries borrowed the Western language of self-determination and human rights to attack Western colonialism. In doing so, however, they implicitly conceded that values central to a Western sense of moral superiority were indeed universal. More recently, East Asian societies (and Middle Eastern, Islamic societies as well) have begun to attack the very notion of human rights central to Western political thought. China, for example, initially reacted to American attempts to pressure it to correct human rights abuses by denying that such abuses took place. Then, when the evidence of the abuses was too obvious, China took refuge in the prerogatives of national sovereignty. But this rhetorical strategy conceded that China should be on the defensive about failing to live up to internationally accepted norms. Within the past four years, the Chinese government has taken the offensive. It is trying (with some success) to lead a movement among Asian and Middle Eastern countries to get international institutions to change their very definition of human rights to one that emphasizes the need of societies to maintain social order for the sake of prosperity for all.
For the time being, they have not completely succeeded. At the UN Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna in 1993, representatives from the leading Western nations overcame a bold challenge from a coalition led by China-including Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Pakistan-to change the language of the UN resolutions in such as way as to emphasize the subordination of individual civil and political rights to the need for law and order. Beijing's bid to host the Olympics in the year 2000, although strongly supported by all Asian countries and by most of the developing world, was narrowly defeated by a majority of Western countries, partially on the grounds that China was guilty of serious human rights abuses. But as the economic and political power of East Asia increases, we can assume that East Asian countries will be in a position to force changes in the norms about human rights advocated by international institutions. In fact, Japan, China, and the East Asian newly industrializing countries will probably be able to change international norms on a whole host of issues, such as trade and international security.
The East Asian nations by no means constitute a straightforward united front. The region is riven with economic, political, and ideological rivalries-as is the West. But the terms of debate among East Asian societies are somewhat different from those of the West. A shift may be underway as profound as that of the seventeenth century, when the hegemony of Catholic Spain and Austria gave way to that of a Protestant, and eventually increasingly secularized, Northern Europe (which was initially multipolar but later came to be dominated by a hegemonic Britain). Before this happened, the standards for success in acquiring global wealth and power were set by a culture that embodied aristocratic values, employed patrimonial modes of organization to control its empire, utilized mercantilistic policies to ensure its economic dominance, and justified the whole enterprise with a religion and philosophy that sacralized hierarchy and emphasized the primacy of faith over reason.
Afterward, what we now recognize as Western liberal culture gradually came to set the standards for global enterprise. It was a culture that embodied bourgeois values, employed bureaucratic modes of organization, utilized free trade to tie its economic regimes together, and justified its institutions with a religion that emphasized the equality of every individual before God and a philosophy that asserted the primacy of reason as the basis for understanding worldly affairs. Up to the present time, societies that could not accept this culture were on the defensive. Those societies that remained bound to the Spanish tradition lagged economically and politically behind those of Northern Europe and North America, and the world's leading scholars (coming from the leading universities in the hegemonic North) argued that this was at least in part because they lacked the values essential for modernization.
The power of Northern European liberal hegemony is manifest in the extent to which it is taken for granted. It has been casually, self-evidently identified with modernity itself. As the philosopher George Parkin Grant has written in his English Speaking Justice (University of Notre Dame Press, 1985, p. 48), "Members of classes are likely to consider their shared conceptions of political goodness to be self-evident when their rule is not seriously questioned at home, and when they are successfully extending their empires around the world." What is changing now is this taken-for-grantedness. Western liberalism may well survive, but it is no longer immune from serious self-questioning. Philosophers and social scientists are now compelled to debate its premises and to search for its underlying foundations. To a significant degree, this is occurring because other non-liberal societies, like the East Asian countries, seem to be proving that modernization is not identical with Western liberalism. There are other, perhaps even more powerful, ways to become modern, which may indeed challenge the economic and political hegemony of the West.
From Western Liberalism to Asian Communitarianism
To understand what is at stake, let me articulate briefly the principles of Western liberalism and show how these contrast with East Asian principles of political and economic organization and social philosophy.
The first principle is that of individualism. The individual is prior to society. Each individual is morally autonomous, free to choose his or her own life goals, and to pursue these in any way the individual wants, so long as he or she does not interfere with another's pursuit of goals. Societies come into existence only because of voluntary contracts of individuals trying to pursue more effectively their individual goals.
A second assumption is rationalism. The individuals who constitute societies are rational agents. The rationality they possess is primarily instrumental-the capacity to calculate the most effective means to achieve their ends. The way to establish public order is to increase, through a secular scientific education, the capacity of each individual for this kind of rational action. That way, each individual will see that he or she needs to follow similar procedures.
The rational individual will recognize the need to organize the pursuit of his or her goals through entering into contracts. Thus contractualism is the third principal assumption of liberalism. Stable social relations are formed because individual parties enter into agreements to provide mutual benefits. Aggregated, all of these micro-level contracts constitute the social contract that is the basis of society itself.
Legitimate contracts must be based on voluntary, rational choice-the ability of the individual to choose what is best for him or herself from the widest set of alternatives, without having any alternative arbitrarily excluded. In other words, choice must be based-the fourth principal assumption of liberalism-on universalistic rather than particularistic criteria.
Government, according to these assumptions, should maximize the capacity of individuals to achieve their private goals. It should provide the basic security necessary for this pursuit, and it should establish the procedures necessary to make the pursuit orderly, but otherwise it should interfere as little as possible. When governments impose limitations on some of the freedoms of individuals for the sake of maximizing the overall possible freedom, these choices must be legitimated through democratic procedures, which are based on the aggregation of individuals' choices through voting.
These are the principles that govern relations between individuals and society in a liberal nation state. Scholars and statesmen working within the liberal tradition assume that the path to a peaceful and just global community is an expansion of these principles to the world order: the world system is made up of a set of nation states that are like individuals writ large, sovereign and self-determining. These nations enter into contractual relations with one another based on their perception of self-interest. A healthy world economy depends on the capacity of such nations to trade freely among each other in an unfettered open market. A healthy world political system entails the ability of such nations to make free contractual agreements-"open covenants, openly arrived at." Norms governing international trade and international security should ideally be established by an international deliberating body like the United Nations. (Realistically, they are established and backed up by the power and for the interests of the most powerful nations.)
These liberal assumptions are beginning to be called into question within the West because they correspond less and less to the experience of people anywhere in the modern world. As self-doubt deepens, East Asian societies are providing alternative models of the successful pursuit of wealth and power-models that challenge and may supplant those of the faltering West. For all of their differences, people in East Asia seem to share certain half-articulated, taken-for-granted general assumptions about how to pursue a good life, how the individual relates to society, and how societies should pursue wealth and power.
The first of these assumptions is that society is prior to the individual-that individuals cannot have any substantial identity apart from social relationships, especially familial but also (broadly conceived) political relationships. Although there would be enormous controversy over what this means in practice, Asians share a vaguely defined sense that the interests of society as a whole can, and sometimes should, take precedence over individuals' private interests.
A second assumption has to do with the nature of reason. The Confucian tradition stresses the rationality of humans, but it lays great emphasis on a moral rationality-not technical reason but the kind of reason that enables one to understand the rightness of the moral duties connected with one's role in society. In societies as different as Japan, China, and Malaysia, it is assumed that education should inculcate moral values rather than simply teach techniques. Although the specific content of those values may differ from society to society, it is assumed that the best and the brightest graduates of the educational system should be generalists with a firm grasp of the responsibilities that go with leadership rather than specialized technical experts.
Social relationships, it is widely assumed, are ultimately based not simply on voluntary contracts between individuals, but upon responsibilities toward the society as a whole. People need to share not merely common procedures to pursue their own private self-fulfillment, but common public goals, and a common commitment to the social relationships that anchor their individual identities. It is one of the government's more important responsibilities to create this consensus. The state is a paternalistic educator, not just a neutral referee. The government-as long as it is doing its job correctly and has not become corrupt-is a guardian of a moral order that makes citizenship possible.
Since East Asian societies have not had the capacity to play a truly global role for most of this century, it is less clear how Asian scholars and diplomats will translate the above principles for a good national society into global norms for international conduct. The attempt by China to mobilize other East Asian nations in an effort to change international human rights standards gives one indication. As their wealth and power increases, Asian regimes will try to insist that individual rights are less important than the right of whole societies to maintain order as the foundation for economic prosperity. Like Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's Deputy Secretary of Foreign Affairs, they may argue that the West is foolishly destroying the foundations of its wealth and prosperity because of its obsession with "the idea of individual freedom."
Western social theory predicts that authoritarian societies will be less productive than ones that emphasize individual freedoms, because modern technologies require the kind of creativity and initiative that can only flourish in a free society. If authoritarian Asian societies continue their advances in productivity, they may force the theorists to modify their ideas. They may also push Western societies to modify the bases of their social contracts. Asian societies keep wages relatively low by suppressing the capacity of workers to organize into independent labor unions. They provide limited social welfare benefits, expecting intact, mutually loyal families to take care of members in need. Thus labor costs are low in comparison with most Western countries. In the name of keeping pace with "international competition," Western countries like the United States are breaking the power of labor unions, dismantling much of their welfare states, and "getting tough on crime" by suppressing previously accepted liberties. They are beginning to let Asian forms of social organization set the world standard for labor practices.
Besides changing the international moral balance between rights and responsibilities, and individual and society, the Asian societies are shifting the balance between particularism and universalism. Businesses award contracts not simply on the basis of universalistic, open competitive bidding, but because of long-standing particularistic relationships, sometimes based on near or distant kinship. Consumers, too, often base their buying decisions on long-standing loyalty, rather than simply on price. The result is the myriad of informal barriers to open trade that so upsets American business interests. The Japanese, especially, are weaving these patterns into regional trading blocs.
If the United States and Western Europe were to become largely shut out of this latter day version of a "Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere," they might have to concentrate their economic energies in their own regions, thus building on an expanded NAFTA in the Americas and the EEU in Europe. Expectations about what constitutes a good international economic system would change from a single open market to a regionalized world economy.
Changes in this economic "substructure" might generate changes in cultural-ideological superstructure. Economists might start to recast theories that assume that economic life everywhere follows a single set of universal laws. They might "discover" more contextualized economic principles. This would accelerate the move toward various forms of cultural relativism that has already begun in the other social sciences. The centrality of universalistic, instrumental rationality in education might change, as the philosophy of Western scientific education no longer set the standard for modern education throughout the world.
Cultural Consequences for the West
If the economic and then political hegemony of the East Asian region led within the next fifty years to some such changes in the norms and standards that governed global institutions, what would be the cultural consequences for Western societies? The United States would be the most affected, because for the second half of the twentieth century it accepted the burden of being the civilizational leader, the "powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice." Undoubtedly there would be profound loss of confidence and the cacophonous, confused social debate of societies faced by unprecedented social situations. For precedents, we would have to look outside the modern West to the experience of Asian or Middle Eastern societies suddenly faced with the intrusion of the West in the nineteenth century-or perhaps to the experience of Spain when hegemony shifted to northern Europe in the seventeenth century.
Out of the confusion would emerge several kinds of reactions. Initially, perhaps, the most pervasive reaction might be a kind of fundamentalism. One part of the Spanish response to its loss of hegemony was the institutionalization of a rigid, dogmatic Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Similarly, in China in the 1870s there was a movement on the part of elites to return to the fundamentals of Confucianism.
Perhaps in the West we are seeing the beginnings of a similar reaction in religious fundamentalism and also what one might call political fundamentalism-for instance, the militia movement in the United States, with its celebration of an idealized eighteenth-century individualistic republicanism, its xenophobia and potentially its militarism. Such movements might become even more prevalent as the gnawing realization set in that American political culture really had lost the ability to set the standards for the rest of the world. As the historical record suggests, this kind of fundamentalism eventually is self-defeating. It leaves the society that embraces it isolated from the most dynamic sources of wealth and power in the world and causes it to lag further and further behind-which may even lead to economic crisis or military defeat.
Another kind of reaction is abject imitation of the new hegemonic culture. One sees signs of this in the United States not only in superficial adaptations of organizational methods, such as "quality circles" in industry, but also in calls to dismantle the welfare state, reduce ethnic diversity, and weaken organized labor. The problem with abject imitation is that it usually is self-defeating too, because the imitating society does not have the underlying habits that can make the foreign forms work. Thus, when countries in Latin America that are heirs to the Spanish colonial heritage have tried to adopt Anglo-American forms of government and economic organization, they have often continued to lag behind their powerful neighbor to the north. They simply cannot make use of the foreign organizational forms as well as the foreigners can. Thus, I would predict that if the United States tried to adopt the authoritarian forms of labor organization that work so well in Japan or Singapore, the result would increase confusion and conflict in American society rather than increasing productivity.
A final kind of reaction would be one of synthesis: an updating of one's cultural norms that takes account of insights learned from others as well as the deepest meaning of one's own culture. Thus, in the 1960s, in Spain and the other Catholic countries of Europe, the "aggiornamento" brought about by the Second Vatican Council enabled the Catholic Church to cast off some of the trappings of Counter-Reformation dogmatism. In Spain, this cultural transformation was a key factor in what Victor Perez-Diaz has called The Return of Civil Society: The Emergence of Democratic Spain (Harvard University Press, 1993). Some cultures take longer than others to carry out these updatings. Japan did so relatively quickly in the Meiji restoration of the 1860s. Other Asian societies have taken much longer. Usually, the resort to this kind of updating takes place only after fundamentalism and abject imitation have failed-300 years in the case of Spain. One would hope that liberal Western democracies might reinvent themselves somewhat more quickly.
RICHARD MADSEN is professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the United States's best known specialists on modern Chinese society. Madsen's work has been distinguished by his interest in what he calls "moral anthropology." He is coauthor, together with Robert Bellah, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton, of the award-winning book Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in America (University of California Press, 1985). Among his other works are Chen Village (coauthored with Anita Chan and Jonathan Unger) (University of California Press, 1984), Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (University of California Press, 1984), and China and the American Dream: A Moral Inquiry (University of California Press, 1995).
We need to seriously study Asian civilization.
The first of these assumptions is that society is prior to the individual-that individuals cannot have any substantial identity apart from social relationships, especially familial but also (broadly conceived) political relationships. (emphasis, mine.)
It should be noted (before everyone piles on) that what the author is talking about here is communitarianism (Amitai Etzioni), not communism. My understanding of this philosophy is that society is not viewed as a State vs. Individual dichotomy, but instead viewed like a stool with three legs, State, Individual, and Family --each having certain rights, but also, each imposing restrictions on the other. Interesting reading.
Over here in Japan there's no word for "I," there are several different titles that indicate rank, depending on the power relationship of the moment. My impression is that when a Japanese person has to speak to someone, the first thing that he or she must figure out is "Who am I this time?"
FYI
FYI
FYI
Thanks for the post; very interesting article at first glance. Self-bump to bookmark for later...
Sorry ... the Legalists won't have it!
(Just teasing ... thanks for the flag.)
How 'bout a bump ?
Interesting. Thanks for the flag.
Confucianism is a primitive philosophy, but compared to the religious and mystical traditions which prevailed in the West and in Africa for most of recorded history, it has the benefit of being earth-centered, humanistic, optimistic and ends-oriented. No question, this explains the fact that Eastern civilization was able to make significant societal advances while Europe and Africa stagnated under the weight of theocracy and tribalism after the fall of Rome. The limitations of this profoundly hierarchical and backward-looking philosophy were only exposed with the decline of religion and feudalism in the West, and the associated rise of laissez-faire capitalism, individualism, reason and science. The Eastern civilizations have gone into relative decline, the greatest, China, having descended into political absolutism in the century just past. Japan has managed to catch the wave, by slavish imitation of Western economic models (dating from its nineteenth-century contact with the West), but even then the advances have been limited to (perhaps temporary) economic progress—if opinion polls are to be believed, their population is the most miserable of all the industrial powers. I see little reason for concern that the East will power past us in this century, a scenario which has sold countless trashy books, but has so far been discredited completely by the actual course of events. Nethertheless, capitalism, individualism, freedom of thought and expression, and the supremacy of reason over mysticism and faith are precious, fragile gifts of the Western tradition, and we must ever be on our guard against those in our midst who would try to subvert them and sink our society into the swamp of collectivism, statism and unreason which has characterized most of human history.
An interesting article that would require 100 pages for a reply. There is a linguistic conceptual framework in this that is a little loose for my standards. However, if the slave, or semi-slave societies of Asia advance economically, it will require a more serious analysis than most people in this country have put forth.
Slave societies work, and work very well. They built the pyramids of Egypt and the edifaces of Rome. Relying on purely economic arguments to sort out ideologies is shakey. This is why I tend toward psychoanalytically based political ideological construction.
Interesting thesis, but Japan seems to be having real trouble right now. Granted we probably shouldn't write them off, but don't articles like this show up every few years? The problem with such head to head comparisons of societies is that East and West each have their advantages and disadvantages. The US and Europe have each shown an ability to adapt and compete with one another notwithstanding their very different societies. Barring real catastrophes the same is probably true with the West and East Asia. Each side has strengths with complement the other.
I question whether US elites are really so far from Confucianism or Mandarinism in their attitudes. Is the current "bourgeois bohemian" lifestyle the same as traditional bourgeois liberalism? Also, the bit about militia movements is so 1995. I imagine that if things turn sour over here, some forms of radical dissent will reemerge, but the author's schema is too neat, what with the reactionary forces calling for a return to the "old republic". The problem is that the old republic in some ways resembles "Confucianism" more than what we have now.
And are the Japanese really what they once were? What if continued stagnation leads them to make real changes? China is the big unanswered question. Probably it will really change the world. But won't affluence and power also change it? If the economy tanks, the author's vision could possibly come true. If the economy grows, it probably won't.
MADSEN is China-centered. He seems to equate traditional Chinese confucianism as the common currency in Asia. Although it has had great influence on shaping societies in China, Japan, Korea and those with a high percentage of ethnic Chinese (Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan), the actual adaptation of Confucian mores varies more than do Christian mores do between, say, Germany and Great Britain.
While you may find superficial similarities between reverence for authority in China, Korea, Singapore, Japan, etc. it is strictly superficial. As you pointed out, the Japanese are far more socially compatible than any of these socieities, the Koreans maybe second. I'd rank China as dead last. What holds them together in seemingly united social order is exactly the same as what held Germany together in the 1930's-- aggressive national socialism cobbled together by political terror.
The frightening thing about the communitarian ideal is society, for its own good, can remove cancerous growths that threaten it. So Hitler can remove the Jews, Stalin the Tartars, China, Cambodia,.... their problem citizens. The second aspect of this is it becomes very tribal, a racial superiority. The way conqured nations fared under the Japanese in WWII and Tibet under China now is barbarous.
And it is all just to keep an ordered society. It is not worth it, but many desire it, as can be seen in this country. We still have a semi healthy balance, as can be seen from the conversations between libertarians and those who are not. you need freedom for the individual, individual rights that might upset the society coupled with laws that keep some order. Ours is a very delicate society that pushes back and forth, but is also robust because it is alive and has not surrendered it soul.
"...but Japan seems to be having real trouble right now."
Nothing over here is as it appears. The economy's designed so that even if Japanese worked 20 hours a day to live in a capsule hotel and eat one rice ball a day, they'd still be wiping out and seizing control of Western industrial concerns. What they consider to be economically advantageous is different from what we do. They understand this, and play it up to the hilt.
For instance, Japanese banking is supposed to be in real trouble. Well, an easy solution to that would be to start selling off their US paper, and they hold more of it than anyone else. What would that do to our economy? What would the geo-political consequences of such a sell off be?
Please see post #16.
"...I see little reason for concern that the East will power past us in this century....,"
How many manufactured goods do you own which are actually American made?
"What holds them (Red China) together in seemingly united social order is exactly the same as what held Germany together in the 1930's-- aggressive national socialism cobbled together by political terror. "
I agree. Unfortunately, such observations are shared by hardly anyone else.
Reminiscent of Irving Babbitt.
the supremacy of reason
Aspects of eastern thought can check the hubris of that precious gift called supreme. BTW, we are in the post-modern age which thumbs its nose at supremacy of reason.
Sorry, I know him by name only. Could you elaborate?
Well, an easy solution to that would be to start selling off their US paper, and they hold more of it than anyone else.
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Sell? To whom?
The implicit assumption is that people would continue to accumulate dollars and debt indefinately. That has been the base of the entire system of trade and economics. It has also enabled the fopishness incompetence and life of immature triviality that has developed here.
If the hollow system collapses, we're in trouble.
Just putting US securities on the market would be a body blow to us, which is why the Japanese buy so many Treasury Bonds and then threaten to sell them off at every trade negotiation.
It's important to remember that Japanese economics is about controlling economies of scale. They play for power, and wealth is valuable only if it increases power. It's been a command and control economy ever since the Meiji reformation, which modernized Japan. Whether that wealth is illusory is irrelevant.
BTW, we are in the post-modern age which thumbs its nose at supremacy of reason.
Well I know you hate and fear the light of reason, just like the leftist academics of the "post-modern age." You are all brothers under the skin, aren't you?
Very interesting; sobering, really. Thanks for the flag.
Well I know you hate and fear the light of reason
There are people who know me better than myself. But this really isn't about me.
"Aspects of eastern thought can check the hubris of that precious gift called supreme."
I've lived in Japan for nigh on nine years now, and without hesitation, I can affirm that Eastern thought, as I guess you imagine it, is little more than self induced schizophrenia.
Zen, for example, is little more than the scene from that movie where the son must shout to his father "THANK YOU SIR, MAY I HAVE ANOTHER?" every time he gets beaten.
This is not merely a Western prejudice. Ando Shoeki, an 18th Century Japanese physician/Chinese Classics scholar turned philosopher noted that all the anciuent sages, saints, and all the Buddhas' sole purpose was to "make excuses for the thieves," referring to the Tokugawa Shogunate. For Ando, the traditional Asian system of warlord government was little more than arbitrary rule: brute force ideologically supported by Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. He proposed a new school of political thought which he described as "the theory of reciprocity," where each would be able to eat the fruit of his labor, without it being confiscated by the samurai.
Much of Eastern thought is mere thought reform, designed to manufacture an artificial personality mass produced for the immediate power relations of the moment, and to do so it must create a metaphysical crisis where the mind must reject what the senses can't deny, causing emotional and psychological paralysis. The person enduring this then becomes little more than clay to be molded by the strongest.
It is utterly contrary to human nature, and requires the destuction of the internal premise structure and the cultivation of masochism. Masao Miyamoto, a psychiatrist of some note, refers to it as "mental castration."
FYI
Irving Babbitt. A good collection of essays: Irving Babbit, Man and Teacher Manchester and Shepard
Babbitt, born 1865.
Appointed in 1894 to the French Department at Harvard.
excerpts:
"He was a foe to Bohemianism . . . he nevertheless half-unconsciously steered pretty close to the coast of Bohemia.'And now, finally from his Democracy and Leadership, in a chapter called "Europe and Asia":He would emit startling maxims such as this: "The function of books is to teach us to despise them." That has an obscurantist ring, but the maxim was evidently interpreted in a soundly conservative fashion by one who renewed his contempt for books by daily and hourly contact with them, though always on a markedly selective basis.
He would fortify his argument by dilating on Buddha's proscription of the "unthinkables," about which mere speculation was boud to prove eternally sterile.
He was already deeply immersed in Buddhism, and its influence in shaping his thought is so plain from the start that other influences (barring Aristotle) need hardly be invoked except as enriching tributaries. The ultimate convictions behind his humanism (which seemed then only an emerging aspect of his philosophy) are to be fully understood only in this Oriental light, however Aristotelian his analytic method. Buddhism preaches extinction of all desire, and is thus radically anti-romantic.
Confucius refused to talk about spiritual beings. In later years, Babbitt emulated this reticense. Thanks to Buddhistic influences, rather than to modern rationalism, the last vestige of theology was eliminated from his reasoning. In the later formulations of his thought he gave to the supernatural so little prominence that many of his readers, in fact most, fail to note that it still subsists as a mist-enshrouded Ultima Thule on the far edge of his mist-enshrouded Ultima Thule on the far edge of his humanism. There remained always his faith in a higher will, his mystic concept of an inner check, which was for him one of the primary data of experience.
[He denigrated Rousseau] Again and again he repeated the couplet,
Ein guter Mensch is seinem dunkeln Drange
Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst.. . . while a Stoic or a Poussin or a Boileau meant by acting "according to nature," living on the high plane generally approved by wise men, a Rousseau, a Shelley, even a Wordsworth, meant by the same phrase living by his individual impulses . . . Again when Pascal appealed from the dry reason to the insrutable reasons of the heart, he was thinking of a heart enlightened and guided by the grace of God, but when Rousseau extolled the heart, he meant merely his own biological heart, desired of a notable series of frail if lovely ladies. For Irving Babbitt the beginning of wisdom, then, lay in a right understanding of those general terms which, exciting the imagination, are the battle flags of action.
Though Aristotle and Confucius come together in their doctrine of the mean, one should hasten to add that in their total attitude toward life they reveal the characteristic difference between the European and the Asiatic temper. The interests of Aristotle were far from being exclusively humanistic. He is supposed to have spent the happiest years of his life on the islands about the Aegean, observing the fish and marine life and preparing the material for the biological treatises that won the admiration of Darwin. . . He [Confucius] was not, like Aristotle, a master of them that know, but a master of them that will. He was strong at the point where every man knows in the secret of his heart that he is weak. The decorum or principle of inner control that he would impose upon the expansive desires is plainly a quality of will. [not to be confused with Nietzsche's will to power]Well, there's certainly more, and I don't mean to trouble you any longer.
Thanks for the quotes. I'll grab a book by him if I see one. Sounds like he was a "bohemian" when "bohemianism" was respectable.
FYI
Our posts crossed in the posting. I'll quickly repost a line from Vigilanteman which raises the important distinction and sometimes error: to equate traditional Chinese confucianism as the common currency in Asia
The will of the east, claims Babbitt is unlike the typical Occidental knowledge to virtue (Socrates) and knowledge to power (Bacon) or ruthless and sheer will that is inhuman and lacks pity (Nietzsche).
From my perspective the "will of the East" is an urge to be either a hammer or an anvil, and to avoid being a nail, as it relates to the Japanese proverb, "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
I utterly loathe Woodstock and its paradigms.
I utterly loathe Woodstock and its paradigms.
Then there's a friend for you in Babbitt. He, too, loathed the orphan progeny of Rousseau.
Rousseau? Those damned savages screwing around in the mud have more in common with piglets fresh from the sow's teat than anything human.
I've lived in Japan for nigh on nine years now, and without hesitation, I can affirm that Eastern thought, as I guess you imagine it, is little more than self induced schizophrenia.
We need to seriously study Asian civilization.
Recommending schizophrenia?
No, no, no. I have very little use indeed for traditional Asian thought aside from the authors I've listed.
bump ... I'll add some Steven Mosher.
I can affirm that Eastern thought, as I guess you imagine it, is little more than self induced schizophrenia.
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It's a bit like the mode of thought endemic to parts of California.
The ancient (probably apocryphal) curse of the Confucians has come true. We do indeed live in interesting times!
I always ask the Japanese with whom I have worked,"Do you see anything of value in our culture beyond our technology?"
So far no real response!
Q(to Mosher). If there are 20 million Chinese men who can’t find wives, could this lead to revolution within China?
A (from Mosher). This situation cuts two ways. These young men are 20 million potential barbarians who need the stabilizing influence of a woman and the responsibilities inherent in family life.
Now is that Eastern or Western? The Paris crowd has told us intelligence is the practice of chauvinistic domination. I'm confused.
bump
It should be noted (before everyone piles on) that what the author is talking about here is communitarianism (Amitai Etzioni), not communism. My understanding of this philosophy is that society is not viewed as a State vs. Individual dichotomy, but instead viewed like a stool with three legs, State, Individual, and Family --each having certain rights, but also, each imposing restrictions on the other. Interesting reading.
It should be noted that A) individuals exist without groups, but groups don't exist without individuals and B) governments of groups are inevitablely corruptable with a short life and a bloody death, brought about always by forgetting A.
Therefore, any group that extends beyond the lifetime of one individual (which excludes the nuclear family) is doomed to tyranny. This includes communitarianistic as well as communistic organization.
individuals exist without groups
Eh? And it takes a group to create an individual? Time to put my thinking cap on today.
And it takes a group to create an individual?
Your basic statist "maxim".
Your parents were involved a socialist enterprise? I'm embarrassed you let the cat out of the bag. At least the Chinese keep socialism to a minimum.
BUMP and a bookmark. Thanks.
Two observations:
First, the American perspective on the social compact, and the individual coming before the Society, reflects the fact that within the lifetimes of the Founding Fathers, they had literally observed frontier societies being created in a wilderness from the ground up, as it were. You would have to go back a very long time indeed, in the Chinese context, to observe a similar phenomenon.
Second, while this article ascribes Western dominance to our concept of Society, that concept is no longer even dominant in the United States. Indeed, a Utilitarian culture now prevails throughout the Western World, which is really only a form of Socialism, and promotes the interests of the group at the expense of the individual. Some of us spend a lot of time fighting that prevailing concept.
It is this Utilitarian crowd that tries to impose universal standards on the World, and in that absurd effort, many Conservatives would side with Asians and others in resisting those standards. The Washington/Jefferson foreign policy was premised upon setting an example for others, but always respecting the right of others to mind their own business. The world would truly be a better place, if more countries adhered to such a policy today.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Your parents were involved a socialist enterprise?
Well, they called it "sex". I suppose that is the only form of socialism that works.
Astute observations.
Much of Eastern thought is mere thought reform, designed to manufacture an artificial personality mass produced for the immediate power relations of the moment, and to do so it must create a metaphysical crisis where the mind must reject what the senses can't deny, causing emotional and psychological paralysis. The person enduring this then becomes little more than clay to be molded by the strongest.... It is utterly contrary to human nature, and requires the destruction of the internal premise structure and the cultivation of masochism. Masao Miyamoto, a psychiatrist of some note, refers to it as "mental castration."
Outstanding insights, Mortimer Snavely. Sounds eerily like the "re-culturization project" of our post-modern, Western Left Progressive intellectuals. Though the latter trace their lineage back to Germany (e.g., the German Idealist philosophers of the late 18th and 19th centuries), not to Asia, it is uncanny how the foundational premises of the two systems of thought resemble one another. best wishes, bb.
Have you ever read "The Ominous Parallels," by Leonard Peikoff? I'm not an Objectivist, but the book would make any thinking person's blood run cold.
Hi Mortimer Snavely! I started Dr. Peikoff's book. But was so aggravated by his treatment of the ancient Greeks that I put it down at about Chapter 2. :^) (A little quirk of mine.) But I understand he is absolutely masterful on the German Idealists and their "legacy". So I guess I'm going to have to pick up Ominous Parallels again one of these days. Thanks for writing. best wishes, bb.
"The first principle is that of individualism. The individual is prior to society. Each individual is morally autonomous, free to choose his or her own life goals, and to pursue these in any way the individual wants... Societies come into existence only because of voluntary contracts of individuals trying to pursue more effectively their individual goals."
Well, I liked the first half of the article, at least. I wouldn't categorize a refutation of the "first principle" as necessarily Asian, at all. I'd call it Hegelian first, maybe "communitarian" second, though that is a newer debate. I also wouldn't lump all German Idealism together (Hegel would disagree w. Kant on the point above, I think).
Also, the quoted bit says "societies come into existence because of voluntary contracts of individuals." Do people still believe this anymore? I thought it settled that people set up societies unconsciously, through habit (see Bourdieu's work), and the whole notion of voluntary contract giving rise to society is untenable. The very notion of contract is a socially contingent notion, after all.
The poster noted the article was written with broad strokes, but this is ridiculous!! Good comments, however!
'Also, the quoted bit says "societies come into existence because of voluntary contracts of individuals." Do people still believe this anymore? I thought it settled that people set up societies unconsciously, through habit (see Bourdieu's work), and the whole notion of voluntary contract giving rise to society is untenable. (!?!?) The very notion of contract is a socially contingent notion, after all.'
This opinion is diametrically opposed to the Declaration of Independence, you know, all that stuff about altering or abolishing government, inalienable rights, and so forth.
Whoah! I'm talking about societies as opposed to a state of nature, not post-revolutionary society from pre-revolutionary society. In that case of course its conscious, and you've already got notions like contracts in any case. But you're also no longer talking about origins of social life and how the individual arises from community.
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