What the West Got Wrong About China – Habi Zhang:
The reason why China would brazenly “disregard the international law” that many other nations voluntarily abide by is that the rule of law is not, and has never been, a moral principle in Chinese society. […]
It was the rule of morality, not the rule of law, that defined Chinese politics.
In The Classics of Filial Piety — primarily a moral code of conduct — Confucius teaches that “of all the actions of man there is none greater than filial piety. In filial piety, there is nothing greater than the reverential awe of one’s father. In the reverential awe shown to one’s father, there is nothing greater than the making him the correlate of Heaven.” We can therefore conclude that the Durkheimian sense of the sacred object — the source of moral authority — is the father in both the literal and metaphorical sense. With this understanding, Confucianism can be viewed as a religion as manifested in the ritual of ancestor worship.
What the individual sovereignty is to liberalism, ancestor worship is to Confucianism.
Fascinating. James Dominic Rooney offers a partial dissent here — though it’s not to my mind especially convincing. David K. Schneider weighs in on the debate and comes down more on Zhang’s side: “liberal government is antithetical to the Confucian ideal of benevolent government. In Mencius, the happiness of the people is the measure of good government. But the people are not sovereign. Only a king is sovereign and conformity with Heaven’s ritual order is the responsibility of an educated political and economic elite, which is charged with the duty of acting as parents to the people, who in turn are obliged to submit.”
This argument sheds an interesting light on my recent essay on “Recovering Piety.”
I wish there were a larger version of this response by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to an autobiographical questionnaire. The eye is drawn to his joking response to “If not yourself, who would you be?” — but I like his answers to “What characters in history do you most dislike?” (“Very tolerant to them all”) and to “What is your present state of mind?” (“Jaded.”)
The other day I put on Richard Linklater’s Heads I Win / Tails You Lose (1991) — four hours of film leaders, those splotchy, static-y, often countdowny things you see at the beginning, or rather before the beginning, of movies on actual film. I put it on and (I was alone in the house) just left it on, and went about my business. Whenever I came through the room I’d stop and watch for a few minutes; and when I was working in the kitchen I could hear it — occasionally a beep or even a word or two. I sort of feel that I experienced it the way it should be experienced.
(I had a GIF of a leader here but decided that it’s too manic to leave on the page.)
normie wisdom 3: two quotations on common responses
The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life, just as there are a large number of persons who believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes of people are entertaining conversationalists. But the average man or boy writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer and better gospel than any of those iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as their bonnets. It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a "many faced and fickle traitor," but at least it is a better aim than to be a many faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good many modern systems from Mr. d'Annunzio's downwards. So long as the coarse and thin texture of mere current popular romance is not touched by a paltry culture it will never be vitally immoral. It is always on the side of life. The poor — the slaves who really stoop under the burden of life — have often been mad, scatter-brained, and cruel, but never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivelling literature will always be a "blood and thunder" literature, as simple as the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.
By a Stock Response Dr. I. A. Richards means a deliberately organized attitude which is substituted for ‘the direct free play of experience’. In my opinion such deliberate organization is one of the first necessities of human life, and one of the main functions of art is to assist it. All that we describe as constancy in love or friendship, as loyalty in political life, or, in general, as perseverance — all solid virtue and stable pleasure — depends on organizing chosen attitudes and maintaining them against the eternal flux (or ‘direct free play’) of mere immediate experience. This Dr. Richards would not perhaps deny. But his school puts the emphasis the other way. They talk as if improvement of our responses were always required in the direction of finer discrimination and greater particularity; never as if men needed responses more normal and more traditional than they now have. To me, on the other hand, it seems that most people’s responses are not ‘stock’ enough, and that the play of experience is too free and too direct in most of us for safety or happiness or human dignity. [...]
The older poetry, by continually insisting on certain Stock themes — as that love is sweet, death bitter, virtue lovely, and children or gardens delightful — was performing a service not only of moral and civil, but even of biological, importance. Once again, the old critics were quite right when they said that poetry ‘instructed by delighting’, for poetry was formerly one of the chief means whereby each new generation learned, not to copy, but by copying to make, the good Stock responses. Since poetry has abandoned that office the world has not bettered. [...]
We need most urgently to recover the lost poetic art of enriching a response without making it eccentric, and of being normal without being vulgar.
Currently reading: John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought by Gordon Campbell 📚
