孔夫子and Chinese Culture

When I ponder Chinese culture, the words cultivated acquiescence come to mind.  The Chinese have a very old culture, but the dominant philosophies and customs that I witness on a daily basis strike me as dull.  The variety of cultural backgrounds, daily disagreements over fundamental assumptions, and immense variety of thought found in America are simply absent in China.  This has both positive and negative results for the culture and the people, and I will explore them here.

Part of the difference can be explained by the fact that China is a developing, as opposed to a mature, economy.  People simply haven't had enough time to adjust to the lightening quick changes that happen on a monthly, even daily, basis all around them.  They haven't adopted the basic escalator courtesy of standing aside when someone wants to climb.  They follow the rules of the road only when it is convenient (driving on the sidewalk, the wrong way on one ways, and even the wrong way through the bike lane are all common occurrences, and don't even get me started on the insanity that seems to infect every single bicycle rider).   I believe these things will come with time, as the young people have a much greater sense of the importance of these basic rules than the older generations.

Another difference is the universal acceptance of social dogmas.  I have interviewed a large number of students and it is striking to me how commonly I get almost identical responses.  What is your favorite book?  The women give me pop culture junk from England and America.  The men either have never read a book for pleasure or have the same answer.  "论语" Lun2Yu3 by "孔夫子" Kong3Fu1Zi3, The Analects of Confucius by the western name.  What did he teach you?  To be loyal to my friends, my family and my country.  To be an honest man. 

I should note here, that Confucius is now widely believed to be too weak.  A part of the nationalistic narrative here is to fight against foreigners who have systematically repressed and weakened China for the last few centuries.  Confucius is a good moral philosophy, but he is soft on foreign policy...a mistake most young people would not approve of these days.

Here are a few widely held beliefs in China:
-Always drink hot water, drinking cold water will make you catch a cold.
-Certain foods should only be consumed in soups.
-Certain foods should only be consumed for breakfast.
-Wearing too little clothing in the winter will make you sick.
-These weird suction cups things at the spa will take away your illness.
-It's totally cool to shoot off thousands of noisy fireworks at any time, like 6am or 12am, or at random intervals throughout the day. 
-Burning trash on the sidewalk is an acceptable disposal technique.
The list goes on and on...

The point isn't that the Chinese have some different idiosyncrasies from western cultures, that's totally to be expected.  What's unexpected is the virtual unanimity with which these practices are viewed as either acceptable or mandatory.  Let's take a few examples of American idiosyncrasies:
-Oversized vehicles
-Christianity
-Football (American Football)/Nascar etc...
-Hot dogs
-Social pariah status for wearing clothes on consecutive days
-America is the greatest country and only does good.

For each of these American customs, it is not difficult to find an American who objects, loudly and sometimes angrily.  Plenty of people will tell you that driving an SUV is bad for the environment, that Football is pointless and barbaric, that hot dogs are disgusting and bad for your health, and there are even a few who will object to Christianity's vice grip on every aspect of our government and social institutions.  Many people like me just ignore the silly de facto ban on wearing clothes too often and there are plenty of more nuanced opinions of America's role in the world (as well as the America=Evil crowd that shares the lack of nuance of the prevailing view, but still does not agree). 

In my experience, people in China simply do not question the prevailing social norms.  Perhaps we can consider it a uniquely western tradition to question prevailing propaganda, or perhaps it is a uniquely Chinese/Eastern tradition to accept propaganda.  I don't know the answer to that, but I can say that I believe Confucius (used by the ruling party for the purpose of preserving the status quo) is both a symptom and a cause of the lack of Chinese resistance to authority. 

The legend of Confucius takes place in about the 4th century BCE (Before Common Era).  Like other religious or socially worshipped texts, Confucius's work was compiled centuries after his death by disciples and those who wished to use his philosophy to elevate their own social standing.  Here are two examples of translated passages from Confucius.  I did not translate these, they were done by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/confucius/

Confucius, at home in his native village, was simple and unassuming in manner, as though he did not trust himself to speak. But when in the ancestral temple or at Court he speaks readily, though always choosing his words with due caution. (Lunyu 10.1)

When at court conversing with the officers of a lower grade, he is friendly, though straightforward; when conversing with officers of a higher grade, he is restrained but precise. When the ruler is present he is wary, but not cramped. (Lunyu 10.2)

To me these quotes represent the mindset that the Chinese Government hopes to impose upon its citizens through education, propaganda, and socialization.  A mindset of fitting in, of not making waves, of not speaking out in the presence of social superiors, of restraining your thoughts and actions to fit a mold of decency that also happens to preserve the current social order.  Let's look further...

The concept of 仁 ren2, or just Ren.  This concept is related to compassion and altruism.  Cultivating this characteristic is often an exercise in self-deprecation.  In my opinion, to the extent that self-deprecation facilitates honest reflection upon one's mistakes, it is a good thing.  But to the extent that self-deprecation means sacrificing one's own happiness to serve others, I believe it is destructive to the actualization of an individual.  Confucius teaches that devotion to parents and older siblings is integral to the concept of Ren.  I too believe that family should be valued and loved as these relationships aid an individul in achieving contentment and fulfillment, but to what extent must we serve a parent who has destroyed him or herself?  Confucius would have us sacrifice our lives out of duty.  I believe there is a threshold we should not cross when sacrificing our time and well-being in pursuit of aiding a self-destructive person, even if that person is a parent or sibling.

Next let's take a look at Confucius' political philosophy.  This requires us to look at two concepts 正名 zheng4ming2 and 德 de2.  Zhengming is the concept that rulers should live up their rank by exhibiting De or virtue worthy of someone entrusted with leadership.  Starting at the top, if a ruler exhibits virtue, then his deputies and the masses will ultimately follow suit.  The way to maintain virtue is by practicing  礼li3, or just Li.  Li includes the rituals and ceremonies of sacrifice and humility to recognize the contributions of ancestors (which Confucius credited with all the wisdom that he taught).   The complex interactions of the aristocracy were practiced in reciprocal toasting and gift giving that bound the aristocrats in a mesh of mutual obligations and loyalties.  Thus the entire system was based on honestly and earnestly participating in the ritualistic social give and take that created mutual indebtedness throughout the aristocratic class.  If a leader was failing it was because he was not honestly partaking of Li, or the rituals.  To this day, those rituals and relationships are the foundation of the Chinese business and government communities and people work tirelessly to ingratiate themselves to others and develop useful relationships.  These relationships are known as 关系 guan1xi4.

Here's what strikes me about Confucius' political views.  There is no hint of the western concepts of natural law, human rights, consent of the governed, or right to revolt against bad leadership.  If there is a bad leader, he should be replaced by the person who has cultivated the best relationships amongst the existing aristocracy, not a person chosen by a popularity contest of the masses.  In fact, Confucius distrusted the artful speech and self-aggrandizement that is necessary to win the masses, considering it a violation of Ren.  This means Confucius stands directly opposed to democratic development.  He also believed that Ren governed an individual's entire life including their relationships with family, teachers, and government.  By extension, one should sacrifice for the leaders of the country much as one would sacrifice for one's own family.  There is no room for questioning the leadership of your father, your teacher, or your government.  If you cannot question your teacher, or your media, or your leadership, then everyone comes to believe the same things.  Everyone is educated to become an ideological and ethical clone.  It's little wonder that the Communist Party (post-Mao and his insanity) embraced Confucius so whole-heartedly.

I'm sympathetic to Confucius in a lot of ways.  First, I'm sympathetic to the pro-family ethos, subject to the limitations discussed above.  Second, I've never been an unabashed proponent of democracy as it encourages delusional sycophants to promote demagogues into leadership positions which they have no idea how to manage.  The demagogue's only interest is to promote their own power by continuing to score points with the vast swath of morons who voted for them.  This is destructive in a lot of ways, including the perpetual over-promising and under-funding that has trapped Western governments under enormous entitlements and crippling debt.  China, because it is still a developing economy without the weight of past commitments, and because its leaders feel little need to buy votes from the peasants, has an incredible surplus that it can spend at will to improve the country, and preserve the social order.  In some ways, Confucius promotes something closer to what I might advocate in a perfect world, leaders promoted based upon a consensus of the elite.  Of course, I wouldn't define elite quite the same way that the group-think ivy league liberals would, but I digress.  The real question is, at what cost does the system come?

Creativity is devastated under the Communist Party.  This is for several reasons.  First, Confucius and the educational system assume that all knowledge comes from ancestors (as did Confucius), and thus there is little need for creative breakthroughs that forge new ground and discover new knowledge.  Second, by teaching that respect for social and family superiors is the ultimate value and defending the moral suasion of the existing leadership, the system encourages people to accept the decisions of the Politburo without critique.  This encourages people to find reasons to excuse the behavior of government and cultural authorities rather than find ways to improve.  Third, the emphasis on social harmony above the importance of the individual is in violation of basic human instincts and dissuades people from seeing themselves as distinct from their society, discouraging them from following their own thoughts down paths of thought that have not been socially sanctioned.  Confucianism itself thus encourages group think at the expense of creativity.  I won't go into it here, but we all know that creativity and groundbreaking discoveries are the basis for scientific and economic breakthroughs.  China has a long way to go in this department.

Ultimately, the striking uniformity and lack of individuality of thought in China can be linked directly to Confucius and the nationalistic exploitation of his philosophy that is the predominant educational philosophy in modern China.  Groupthink is both the natural result of his philosophy, and a self-perpetuating cause for continuing the social orders of the past.  On the whole it is difficult to say whether cultivated acquiescence can be considered evil, as it certainly helps keep China both stable and peaceful.  The cost is the creativity and individuality we so value in America, the creativity that drove the creation of every aspect of the modern world.