The Useless Tree

It's Hard Out Here For A Daoist

A disheartening, if not completely unexpected, story in China Daily today (h/t Sinocism) on the ways in which the growing materialism of Chinese society is undermining the practice of Daoist religion:

Taoist abbot Yuan Zhihong has a complicated attitude toward money: He knows his temple needs funds to make ends meet, but the commercialization of religious venues is affecting their sacred status....

A Taoist for 31 years, Yuan said religious venues have received more donations in recent years as the economy has grown, yet he lamented that many temples have become profit-driven, which is contrary to the nature of the religion.

This gets at the sometimes contradictory interactions of the competition for wealth and the search for personal meaning in China today.  To thrive economically, a person has to seize whatever opportunities for gain there might be.  And, in doing so, a person may fail to cultivate and maintain more deeply meaningful human relations.  The market (even one still significantly shaped by the state) dissolves the social bases of humanity.  What was it that Marx said?  Oh yes:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

When faced with that brutal materialism, many people seek spiritual or religious succor.  Thus, as China has become more competitively materialist, it has also become more religious, and Daoism is one of those religions that has grown in recent decades.

But, as the China Daily story suggests, religious practice cannot always escape from the venalities of the market:

However, Li Zhijin, deputy director of the Hebei Provincial Taoist Association, who attended the seminar, complained that many Taoists now care about nothing other than money. "They ignore the disciplines and don't observe the rituals," he said.

During a 2011 memorial in Huaiyang county, Henan province, a Taoist temple auctioned off the privilege of lighting the first joss stick for 1.18 million yuan to an entrepreneur. The action led to a public outcry.

Wang Ka, a professor of religious studies with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said commercialization has ruined the reputation of many religious venues.

"Ticket prices for some renowned temples are higher than 200 yuan, which is unaffordable for many people," he said in a lecture at the seminar. "The religion should not be used as a machine to make money."

But as Mr. Wang and Mr. Li and Mr. Yuan well know, the Daodejing anticipates just these sorts of problems:

Understanding sparse and sparser still I travel the great Way, nothing to fear unless I stray.

The great Way is open and smooth, but people adore twisty paths: Government in ruins, fields overgrown, and granaries bare, they indulge in elegant robes and sharp swords, lavish food and drink, all those trappings of luxury. I

t's vainglorious thievery - not the Way, not the Way at all. (passage 53)

People adore twisty paths: a tendency still as strong today, if perhaps not stronger, as it was back in the day when somebody wrote down those words.  Plus ca change...

Confucius on Why a Reversal of the Verdict is Necessary for June 4th

It's a sad day, a day of remembrance of the hundreds and hundreds of people (we still do not have a definitive count) killed by the PRC military in Beijing. I was in Nanjing back on that black day twenty four years ago, watching as the regime sought to repress and distort the reality of what had transpired.  The regime continues to repress and distort but, ultimately, it cannot escape from the responsibility it bears for those horrible events. 

This is a political problem.  It is evident that maintaining economic growth in China requires further structural economic reform: the regime has to allow for an expansion of the "private sector," an enlivening of the entrepreneurial dynamism of social forces unattached to the state.  But that "private sector" is not simply an economic space.  It is also a political arena, one that, if granted more freedom of economic choice will gain in political power.  And even a relatively modest yielding of power from state to society will open up more fissures where those who remember, and demand that that the regime be held accountable for its historical failings, can express themselves and pressure the regime.  I don't think the threat here is revolutionary: the CCP is simply too powerful to expect any sort of change of regime from within.  Rather, it is a matter of credibility and faith.  Even at this remove - 24 years - the evasion of the truth of June 4th is a political problem for the regime, as evidenced in how hard it has to work to continue to repress and distort.

Confucius helps us understand the problem the CCP faces.  Here is Analects 13.6 (Hinton):

The Master said: "A ruler who has rectified himself never gives orders, and all goes well.  A ruler who has not rectified himself gives orders, and the people never follow them."

子曰：「其身正，不令而行；其身不正，雖令不從。」

Translators in the crowd will immediately notice that Hinton's version is more focused than the original Chinese, which seems to be describing people in general, not only "rulers".  Also, who is precisely doing what is open to interpretation here.  For example, Watson has this passage as: "The Master said, if the person himself is correct, then although you do not order him to do so, he will act.  But if the person himself is not correct, then although you order him, he will not obey."

One reason I like Hinton's take is that he uses "rectify" for 正, which resonates with the notion of the "rectification of names:" 正名, from Analects 13.3.

That notion of "rectification" is important. Confucianism tells us that our actions and our words ("names") must be consistent.  We cannot simply assert that we are morally good without actually performing moral goodness in our daily activities.  And we cannot use rhetorical evasions to prettify our moral failings.  Actions and words must match; and actions speak louder than words.

Thus, Analects 13.3 is both a general statement and a specific admonition to rulers. In our personal lives, we must work to make sure our words match our deeds.  For anyone in a position of political leadership, if he or she allows words and deeds to diverge, credibility is undermined and people will simply not believe in or follow his or her pronouncements.  Repression and distortion of the truth destroys exemplary leadership.

And that is the problem PRC leaders have faced since 1989.  They have repressed and distorted the truth of June 4th.  Although they have kept themselves in power, they have failed to rectify themselves and, as Confucius would predict, that failure has sown cynicism and disobedience in Chinese society, making their professed goal of the realization of the rule of law all that more difficult to attain.

But those in the PRC who want to know what happened in 1989, can know. The political leadership cannot hide the truth.  It will out.  A Confucian might say - and Confucians are generally optimistic in this manner - Rectification, of one sort or another, is inevitable.

Thoughts on Chinese Atheism

A map popped up in the Washington Post last week, illustrating a recent report (pdf) on expressions of religiosity and atheism around the world.  It seems China has the greatest share of the global population of self-identified atheists.  And this raises a question: why is China so atheistic?

The Wapo article mentions the Taiping rebellion, a religiously-inspired 19th century civil war that led subsequent Chinese governments to take a dim view of strongly institutionalized faith communities, and the militant atheism of the Maoist regime as key factors in understanding the current situation.  These are certainly part of the story.  But there are deeper historical-political roots to contemporary atheism in China.

We have to go all the way back to the emergence of a strong, centralized state apparatus and the use of Confucianism as an officially sanctioned state ideology to see the most fundamental origins of atheism in China.  This started in the Han dynasty but was refined in the Sui and Tang and after. In essence, the examination system created a powerful incentive for the study and mastery of a particular philosophy.  While it it true that there were always other schools of thought and religions circulating in Chinese society - Daoism, Buddhism, Islam, etc. - none of these brought the promise of access to power and wealth in the manner of Confucianism.  Fathers would press their sons to learn the Confucian canon and sit for the imperial exams because that was a direct and concrete means to familial prosperity. 

The political advantage enjoyed by Confucianism thus privileged a moral theory that did not focus on a god or gods as central figures of worship and meaning.  As I have argued before here, Confucianism does not fit neatly into our usual definitions of "religion" because of its "this worldly" orientation. Anna Sun's new book, Confucianism as a World Religion is an extended treatment of the checkered historical interactions of the largely Western-determined definition of "religion" and the Chinese experience of "Confucianism." 

As good as Sun's work is, however, I think that the issue here more than a cross-cultural mismatch of sociological categories (i.e. what counts as a "religion" or not).  Confucianism simply does not foreground god/gods.  It might function as a "religion" in certain ways, but it does not create a universalizing, transcendent faith, in the manner that we usually associate with "religion".  Thus, while Confucianism certainly assumes a spirit world, it does not produce a strong theism.  We might see it as agnostic.  As such, it does not produce a cultural milieu that is strongly supportive of theistic worship. In this negative sense, then, it could be seen as enabling atheism because it does not uphold theism.

Long story short: the material advantages associated with the study of Confucianism within the examination system produced a powerful cultural tendency that facilitated a modern atheism.  When the tumult of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries then roiled Chinese society, it is not too surprising that the ultimate result looks like the reported contemporary incidence of atheism.  The cultural ground, at least at the elite level of socio-political power, was never all that supportive of theism, and thus atheism faced fewer obstacles.

Of course all of this must be qualified: even though on this one measure China may appear to be the "world's most atheistic country," it is also true that religious faith and practice are growing markedly there.  I suspect that Anna Sun would say we are still asking the wrong questions.  And she may well be right.

Elderly caring for elderly may be good, but it's not Confucian

A sadly familiar story - the declining amount of time and attention younger Chinese people can and do spend with their aging parents and grandparents - was in the news again this week. On Sunday, Reuters ran a piece: "Greying China taps rural elderly to care for those even older."  And this was matched by a CRI English report dated the same day (not sure who should be credited with the scoop): "Old-Age care recommended for China's rural elderly" 

In both cases the story is the same: migration of young people from countryside to cities, in search of better jobs and lives, have left many older Chinese folks alone in rural villages with only other less elderly old folks to take care of them.  The impersonal forces of modernization thus erode traditional notions of filial piety.  From the Reuters article:

More than 95 percent of China's rural elderly still adhere to the traditional practice of seeking old-age care within their families, Wang said. But families are no longer able to cope, with youth and even middle-aged people heading to cities to find work, leaving the elderly behind to fend for themselves.

The old Confucian notion of extended family care and integrity seems to hang on - that's how I would interpret the "95%" figure, which should not be taken as completely precise.  But reality has changed: "...leaving the elderly behind to fend for themselves."

And this from the CRI piece:

"Because the farmers are going to other areas to find work and make money, our village ended up with left-behind, lonely elderly people. They are alone and they feel unhappy. In this situation, according to the needs of the villagers, we organized the elderly people to get together to live to old age, to help and support one another."

An admirable pragmatism seems to be emerging from this heartbreaking set of circumstances: even as they struggle with their familial loneliness, the elderly are coming together in mutual aid.  The less old among them care for the more old.  And that is shaping up to be a "model" for elder care (Reuters):

Surrounded by green wheat fields that stretch across a flat plain, Qiantun [Hebei] is unremarkable among countless rural Chinese communities, but its old-age care model is now a prototype cited by central government as a solution to the daunting challenge of caring for a vast and rapidly greying rural population.

Yet even if this should prove to be a relatively efficient means to solve a growing problem, we need to note the obvious: this is yet another example of how China is moving away from its Confucian past.  

I take a rather broad view of what "Confucianism" might be in the modern world.  I have no expectation that, in order to fulfill a contemporary standard of "Confucian" behavior," all children must directly live with and care for their elderly parents.  That may have been the expectation one hundred years ago (two hundred years ago?), but it is untenable in a modern, globalized economy.  Younger workers have to go to where the jobs are.  Many, struggling in hyper-competitive labor markets, will not secure sufficient wages and benefits to take care of their parents in their old age.  What "Confucianism" would require in such circumstances, is that  you do the best you can with what you've got.

But the state of elder care in China today suggests that many younger Chinese people, harried by the uncertainties of (post)modern life, just can't focus on their parents.  They just can't live up to even a modified, contemporary Confucian expectation of actually enacting their obligations to their elders.  And, so, the elderly must fend for themselves.

We could cite many different passages from the Analects here, but let's go with one of the most poignant ones:

Ziyou asked about filial conduct (xiao 孝). The Master replied: "Those today who are filial are considered so because they are able to provide for their parents.  But even dogs and horses are given that much care.  If you do not respect your parents, what is the difference?" (2.7 Ames and Rosemont)

Providing basic shelter and food and clothing and the like is insufficient.  "Respect" is required.  And, for Confucius, that entails a consistent, even daily, consideration of the wants and interests and happiness of the elderly.  It's a tough job. The isolation and unhappiness of the rural elderly described in the stories above suggest that insufficient respect is being paid.

And, lest we think, this is a problem confined to the Chinese countryside, here is this story, from the All-China Women's Federation:

Across the whole country, there is now an estimated demand of 8 million beds for the elderly but there are only 2.662 million beds in all the nursing homes in China, which doesn't meet the demand at all.

In Beijing, half of the vacant beds are available in nursing homes located in remote suburban areas or are available in homes with poor facilities although they are located in more central areas. Vacant beds are not available in public nursing homes or in private nursing homes of good repute.

With the development of the economy and society and the changing of people's ideas on care-giving for the elderly, many families now have moved away from traditional ideas of taking care of the elderly at home, and prefer well-equipped nursing homes with good environment. Many elderly choose to live in nursing homes since their children are too busy or may be abroad and not able to take care of them.

This sounds very familiar to an American: children are too busy to care for parents; parents do not want to be a be a burden. And that is my point in mentioning all this.  I in no way intend to demean contemporary Chinese experience. Rather, my purpose here is to suggest that the Chinese past is not the Chinese present, and that the Chinese present is becoming more similar to the American present than to the Chinese past. 

I have on-going discussions with various friends and acquaintances on the extent to which we might be able to understand China as a "Confucian society."  I think it is not.  And the transformation of elder care is, I believe, a prime indicator that it is not.  There may be conscientious individual Confucians (i.e. persons who really do fulfill something close to a Confucian morality in their personal lives) in China now but, for most, the competitive materialism of capital-eque society and economy and culture make Confucianism an anachronistic shadow of a lost time.

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Confucianism is not catching on in the United States

As my semester winds down, and grading final papers and exams presses in on me, I find my attention turning (don't worry, I'll get back to the grading shortly) to more pleasant summer pursuits. For me, this year, those include attending a conference in Beijing, or, to be more precise: "The International Conference on Comparing China and the West: Bringing the Disciplines Together," to be held at Peking University (they still use the old school Wade-Giles transliteration) in July.  I'm not quite sure who all will be there or what the line-up of papers and presentations will be (the conference web site has not yet posted a program), but it should be interesting.

What attracts me about this conference is the opportunity to write and present something on certain issues that have emerged in the wake of my most recent book (which is grinding along toward publication, likely in October).  That volume works through a number of cases of how concepts drawn from pre-Qin Confucianism and Daoism might be applied to contemporary social and ethical issues in America. Now that it is done and nearly out, I have begun to think more broadly about how such intercultural conceptual transpositions work.  What can Confucianism be in the contemporary US?  It cannot be what it was in pre-Qin China, and it cannot be exactly what it is in contemporary China, but can it be something still recognizable as "Confucianism" in America now?  I have, up until this point, simply assumed that the answer to this question was "yes, there can be a contemporary American Confucianism."  But what does that entail?

I have been willing to assume the possibility of an American Confucianism because, as I hope my book illustrates, I can see how ideas drawn from early Confucian texts can be systematically applied to ethical debates here and now. They are not wholly alien to contemporary American concerns.  With a little bit of interpretive work, they yield reasonable and understandable contributions.  In a more general sense, as I read and re-read and re-re-read these texts, I am constantly noticing how ideas from them speak to me in an immediate sense. These books do have meaning in our own time; we can find meaning in them; we can make meaning from them.

And, of course, there has been a great deal of intellectual work done in recent decades that clarify how Chinese and American thinking can intersect and synthesize.  I'm now reading Gish Jen's new book, Tiger Writing, and I am beginning to believe in the virtual inevitability of the hybridity of the independent and interdependent selves.  We are all now, always, both (I will elaborate that idea later in another post...)

While all of this seems plain to me, however, what I also notice is the absence of explicit reference to Confucianism outside of a rather small circle of comparative philosophers and historians and writers. In a time when it is more possible than ever to bring Confucianism into American thinking, it just does not seem to be happening.  Or, it is happening only excrutiatingly slowly.  Confucianism, as my title today suggests, does not seem to be catching on in the US.

I have some ideas for why this is so, and what might have to be done to change things, but I am still working them over (i.e. haven't written the conference paper yet!).  Today, I just want to point out a rather blatant example of what I mean when I say Confucianism is not catching on.

Last week, The New Yorker ran a piece, "The Baby in the Well," by psychologist Paul Bloom.  It is a relfection on the notion of empathy, working through certain conventional understandings of its importance to ethical life and laying out, contrarily, the case against it.  It is a typically smart New Yorker piece, with the cheekiness to question something that we would assume everyone is for: empathy.

For me, the totally baffling thing about the article is its failure to cite an obvious reference for this subject matter: Mencius.  To those familiar with that great Confucian thinker (like my friends over at Warp, Weft and Way), the title of Bloom's piece seemed to be invoking one of the most famous images in Mencius:

Here is why I say that all human beings have a mind that commiserates with others.  Now, if anyone were suddenly to see a child about to fall into a well, his mind would be filled with alarm, distress, pity, and compassion. That he would react accordingly is not because he would hope to use the opportunity to ingratiate himself with the child's parents, nor because he would seek commendation from neighbors and friends, nor because he would hate the adverse reputation [that would come from not reacting accordingly].  Bloom, 2A6

"Reacting accordingly," for Mencius, is moving to prevent harm to the child, which is impelled by a deep human capacity for commiseration and empathy.

This is a perfect trope for Bloom's purposes, but, alas, it is nowhere mentioned.  The "baby in the well" of the title refers to a couple of cases in American history of children actually falling into wells and attracting national attention, which Bloom ultimately believes is misplaced.  But if he wants to make a case against these sorts of emphatic reactions, wouldn't it be great to invoke the most famous "bady in the well" reference in all of Chinese experience?

But, no.  When "baby in the well" is brought to mind in American discourse, very few people, relatively speaking, make what for some of us is the blaring obvious connection to Mencius.  And that is because Confucianism, more generally, has not caught on in the US.

Perhaps I could blame, in some way, Bloom for this failure. If he is seriously thinking about empathy, and employing the "baby in the well" image, he should, as a highly accomplished academic psychologist, know that the apt Mencius reference is there for the taking.  But that would be unfair.  His training and professional experience largely ignore ancient Chinese sources, which are simply out of sight and out of mind.  In another, longer piece, "The Moral Life of Babies," from the New York Times Sunday Magazine, he makes one reference to Confucius, as a source of the "golden rule," but, again, no consideration of the Mencian assertion that we are born with an innate capacity to do good.  Similarly, one of the books he mentions in the "Baby in the Well" article, The Emphatic Civilization by Jeremy Rifkin, makes only glancing reference to Confucius, again in relation to the global presence of "golden rule" ethics.

Thus, a vast tradition, which strikes me as so clearly relevant to contemporary questions, is largely an afterthought for many intellectuals working on issues central to that tradition.

The problem, it seems to me, is not simply a matter of the ancientness of ancient Chinese thought.  Ancient Greek and Roman and Christian and Jewish thought are regularly invoked in American intellectual life.  We are raised on those sources and we, many of us, believe that those traditions continue to be immediately relevant to our contemporary lives.  In these cases, old can be good.

But ancient Chinese thought is an eon and an ocean away.  It just seems so remote, at the outset, that many Americans may just not want to try to look there for meaning. 

There are also political obstacles to the wider diffusion of Chinese thought in the US. The public embrace of Confucianism by the current PRC government, connects in the minds of some, the ancient philosophy with contemporary political practices that are seen as odious.  Why would you want to embrace ancient Chinese thought if it is a pillar of current Chinese authoritarianism.   To be clear: I do not believe that Confucianism necessarily produces authoritarianism; indeed, if may function best, as a moral theory, in a democratic political context.  But I think the perception is there for some, maybe many, Americans: Confucianism has been historically, and continues to be today, an ideological tool used to bolster centralized state power.

Thus, part of the solution is to make clear that Confucianism can be consonant with liberalism, which I take to be fundamental to American cultural, as well as political, understanding.  And I believe such accommodation is possible.

But it is more than politics.  For those of us who see the ways in which ancient Chinese thought can speak to modern American life, our work is cut out for us: we just have to make the case, day in and day out, in the widest possible array of illustrations, that Confucianism and Daoism and other philosophical perspectives do indeed have something to say today us today.  Maybe in this case familiarity will breed appreciation.

Further to the Daoist Trolley (non)Problem

Wow. Lots of hits for my post on a Daoist response to the Trolley Problem.  It was put up on the Reddit Philosophy page and that brought a deluge of readers, many, I imagine, first-time visitors to this blog.  Hundreds of comments were generated over there, too many to process here.  But it all brought some further thoughts to my mind and I want to record them here.

It seems that many of the Reddit commenters either did not read the post carefully or did not read the whole thing through. Lots of people jumped on me for intepreting wuwei as "doing nothing".  I certainly realize that wuwei does not mean that we must always literally do nothing.  Indeed, few seemed to notice that I had a second translation there, one that I had hoped suggested the active aspect of wuwei: "nothing's own doing."  This is David Hinton's term, and I have always apprecitated it.

So, yes, I agree, wuwei is not an absolute restriction on action.  Later in the post I make this explicit:

[Daoism] would offer no imperative to act, but it would also offer no imperative not to act.  If action occurred spontaneously and immediately, a Daoist would not ask for reasons.  There might be many casues of such action.

But I think the rather stark "doing nothing" serves a certain purpose. Often, in whatever circumstances we might face, we can feel an urge to "do something," to take some action to change what is unfolding before us.  The default assumption is that we can intervene to make things "better".  This is what Daoism resists.  By positing a notion of wuwei, it pushes back against our feel-good assumptions about the likely efficacy of our actions in the world.  How often have we heard of unintended consequences overwhelming what, at first, appeared to be a happy ending?  Time is an especially harsh adversary in this regard.  What might appear effective at one moment can emerge, a year or two or ten later, as folly.  We must do something to get rid of Saddam Hussein! We must act! And act the US did, with baleful results.

The Trolley Problem is, of course, highly abstract. We have no sense of context, no sense of particulars, no sense of history.  As such, it if fairly meaningless: we live and act in particular contexts, and those contexts certainly shape our reactions.  I, personally, have never been in a situation anything like the Trolley Problem. I have no idea, really, how I might actually behave in a moment like that. The whole thing is set up, in my estimation, to privilege consequentialist thinking. If "all else were equal" and the stark choice of one death versus five deaths were before us, what would we do?  Well, "all else" is never equal.  Life is always more complex.

Daoism, and Confucianism for that matter, are much more contextually sensitive than consequentialism.  Ethical calculations from either of these perspectives (yes, I realize Daoism is not a fully formed ethical theory, nor is it meant to be...) would seek to understand the surrounding circumstances more fully, before action is taken, because right action must be attuned to context.  In the peculiar conditions of the Trolley Problem hesitation might produce inaction. But, without further knowledge of the particulars, we cannot judge the ultimate goodness or badness of such inaction.  One of the five saved does not have to turn out to be a mass murder but just, perhaps, a negligent driver who inadvertently kills a child ten years in the future.  How would the mother of that child judge the earlier hero of the Trolley Problem?   How can we know what good or bad will come, years from now, from our actions today? 

The bottom line is this: to simply assert that killing one to save five is necessarily correct, is to live in a world of abstractions that has no real relevance for how life is actually lived. 

Some commenters have suggested that Daoism is just not suited for a construct like the Trolley Problem.  I understand this contention, and I partially agree with it.  I agree that the Daodejing and Zhuangzi fundamentally resist the very idea of a consistent and universally applicable set of principles that might be used for resolving moral dilemmas.  To the contrary, they embrace dilemmas as a basic feature of the fullness and complexity of Way.  But for all of that I still believe that these books can be used to inform how we live our lives now.  They are very much about being in the world and, as such, can give us some insights - though never hard and fast rules - for how to act or not act as Way unfolds around us.  However imperfect, I think there can be Daoist responses to the ethical problems we face now.

And I very well understand how many people, perhaps especially Americans, will be dissatisfied with Daoist nonaction or minimalist action.  For those who are searching for clear answers to vexing problems, dissatisfaction will be their first reaction to a philosophical perspective that rejects the very possiblity of clear answers.  In chapter seven Zhuangzi writes: "You mean you're only now realizing that there are no answers?"

Legalist "Tiger" parenting is bad for you

Over at Slate, Paul Tullis reports on some new research by Su Yeong Kim, a specialist in human development at the University of Texas-Austin, and others that suggests "Tiger Parenting" - made infamous by Amy Chua - is generally not effective.  This is from the abstract of Kim's recent work on the subject:

Path analyses showed that the supportive parenting profile, which was the most common, was associated with the best developmental outcomes, followed by easygoing parenting, tiger parenting, and harsh parenting. Compared with the supportive parenting profile, a tiger parenting profile was associated with lower GPA and educational attainment, as well as less of a sense of family obligation; it was also associated with more academic pressure, more depressive symptoms, and a greater sense of alienation. The current study suggests that, contrary to the common perception, tiger parenting is not the most typical parenting profile in Chinese American families, nor does it lead to optimal adjustment among Chinese American adolescents.

Notice that Kim and her colleagues quite consciously work to quantify the notion of "Tiger" parenting, placing it on a scale between "supportive" and "harsh," though closer to the latter than the former.  And, on the whole, it would seem that it produces precisely the opposite results than what the "Tiger" parents desire: lower grades, less filiality, more alienation.  Chua might, of course, say that it worked for her and her daughters.  But, in light of this analysis, her success (and I do not meant to imply that the paths her children have taken are the only manifestation of "success" in child rearing) might have more to do with other factors, such as the socio-economic and academic context in which her children grew up, as opposed to strict parenting.

All of this further suggests that Mencius may be the better source for parenting advise than Han Feizi.  When Chua's "Tiger Mother" argument first emerged, I argued that we should not view it as an example of "Chinese" parenting but, more particularly, of Legalist parenting.  The classic text of Legalist thought, Han Feizi, does not focus on parenting, but it gives us these sorts of statements:

In a strict household there are on unruly slaves, but the children of a kindly mother often turn out bad. (125)

Turns out it is just the opposite: the children of overly strict parents turn out badly.

Compare this to these lines from Mencius, who comes closer to the "supportive" style of parenting:

Encourage them and reward them.  Help them and perfect them.  Support them and give them wings, and reveal them to themselves.  Then you will bring Integrity alive in them. (5.4 )

That is Hinton's translation; here is the Chinese, from Ctext:

勞之來之，匡之直之，輔之翼之，使自得之，又從而振德之。

Bloom has it:

Encourage them, lead them, reform them, correct them, assist them, give them wings, let them "get it for themselves." Then follow by inspiring them to Virtue.

Some interesting differences there but the sense if the same: it is not about strict punishment but, rather, igniting something inside children to bring them into their own.  And that, the data suggests, makes for better humans.

To a Daoist, the Trolley Problem is not a Problem at all

A reader sent in an interesting email, asking how Daoism might respond to the "Trolley Problem."  A great question!  Let's think it through.

For those not familiar with it, the "Trolley Problem" (I will link here to the obituary of Phillipa Foot, the philosopher who coined the term) runs something like this: a trolley has lost its brakes and is hurtling down the track; straight ahead of it, five people are stuck on the track; on a siding, one person is stuck on the track; either way the persons on the track will be killed; should the driver of the trolley actively turn onto the siding and kill one person, or allow the trolley to continue forward and kill five people?

This is a classical example of consequentialism, which tells us that our ethical judgments should be determined by the consequences of our actions.  On those grounds, the driver should intervene and turn the trolley to kill only one person.  Deontological ethical theories have much more difficulty with this scenario.

But what would a Daoist do? 

Those familiar with Daoism will immediately say "nothing," given the prominence of wu-wei - 无为 - "doing nothing" or "nothing's own doing" to Daoist thought.  And that is generally the first Daoist answer.

The Daodejing gives us some reason for nonintervention in the face of horrible events, even when some sort of action might have an ameliorative effect.  We might think that our action is reducing  pain and suffering in the world, in preserving five lives when one is lost, but is that really the case? Are we really reducing the sum total of pain and suffering in the world (a consequentialist calculus)?  A Daoist would reply that we cannot know, and thus should not act.

To act on the consequentialist logic is to assume that certain factors will not change in the future.  We cannot know whether one of the five persons saved might go on to be a mass murderer and produce much more pain and suffering in the world than we realized.  And how can we know the possible future accomplishments of the one person we caused to die?  Perhaps he was destined to be a great doctor, able to save many lives.  The apparent "moral clarity" of consequentialism is a fiction because we cannot know the consequences of our actions beyond the most immediate moment.

The beginning of Daodejing 29 gets at this sentiment:

Longing to take hold of all beneath heaven and improve it...

I've seen such dreams invariably fail.  All beneath haven is a sacred vessel, something beyond improvement. Try to improve it and you ruin it.  Try to hold it and you lose it.

As does this excerpt from DDJ 23:

Wild winds never last all morning and fierce rains never last all day.  Who conjures such things if not heaven and earth, and if heaven and earth can't make things last, why should we humans try?

Both passages suggest something beyond human comprehension: the world moves in mysterious ways; we cannot know, or improve upon those movements, and to try is to court something worse.

And just to be clear that bad things, like capricious deaths as a result of a runaway trolley, are inevitably apart of "all under heaven" we have this from DDJ 62:

Way is the mystery of these ten thousand things.

It's a good person's treasure and an evil person's refuge.  Its beautiful words are bought and sold and its noble deeds are gifts enriching people.

It never abandons even the evil among us.

That last line is a bit chilling.  In the Chinese text,"bad persons" - 人之不善 - is the subject.  People who are bad; people who do bad things: they are invariably a part of the fullness and complexity of Way. So, even if the trolley's breaks were fine and the driver was drunk and negligently ran over and killed six people, he would not be beyond the realm of human experience in Way.  We might punish him for this specific action (there is a general aversion to killing in Daoism) but we should not expect that we will, thereby, somehow solve the problem of evil in the world.  Bad things, like five people dying in a trolley accident that a morally ambivalent driver chose not to avoid, are inevitable and inescapable.

But Daoism does not express a clear principle that can be followed in most cases.  It would offer no imperative to act, but it would also offer no imperative not to act.  If action occurred spontaneously and immediately, a Daoist would not ask for reasons.  There might be many casues of such action.

For example, when Zhuangzi's wife dies, his immediate reaction is to grieve like anyone else; he feels the loss (as Graham has it).  After some time, he comes to realize that her passing is utterly natural, and conventional expressions of grief are simply misunderstandings Way.   But in that initial emotional response, we might imagine an impulsive, natural action that reflects who he is in that moment.  Were she to be standing on the track in front of him, and he were driving the trolley, perhaps he would throw the switch and kill five strangers.  He might just do it, unthinkingly, because something within his impelled him to.  Or maybe he wouldn't because, somehow, the prospect of five dead innocents might paralyze him.  In either case, he simply reacted, spontaneously, to what was before him in Way; and, in either case, that is justifiable in terms of Daoism.

Ultimately, the inconclusiveness of Daoism would be dissatisfying to rationalist consequentialists.  But it is not at all clear that consequentialism yields a superior moral outcome, because, as Daoism tells us, we cannot adequately know the full and true consequences of our actions.

No Self, No Other, Gish Jen, and Bipolar Disorder

I have ordered my copy of Gish Jen's new book, Tiger Writing, spured on by yesterday's review of it in the NYT.  Here's the gist:

...Jen’s father had been born into a culture whose parenting style explicitly intends the humbling of the individual self in favor of the needs of the broader collective. (Parents engage in short, selective conversation with their children, emphasizing “proper behavior, self-restraint and attunement to others.”) What this “low elaborative” parenting style aims at instead is the creation of an “interdependent self,” defined not by its sense of inner autonomy, but by its sensitivity to the social roles it must play depending on the context in which it finds itself. The scholars of cross-cultural cognition, who reject the universality of Western models of the mind, maintain that this emphasis on social context translates into a measurable divergence in how Easterners and Westerners literally see the physical world.

I sense the Confucian resonances immediately, perhaps because I have here, sitting on my desk, Roger Ames's book, Confucian Role Ethics, a philosophical reflection on the construction and reproduction of interdependent selves.   

My expectation is that the strength of Jen's writing will be its personal anecdote: she is reflecting on the irony that she has become a novelist, a person devoted to the cultivation of autonomous, inwardly defined characters, quite the contrary of interdependent selves.  This suggests that these purported cultural differences are not immutable.  In a single life time a person can, and does, move between a more independent and a more interdependent self.  Indeed, if we think further we may have reason to question the permanence of any sort of self, independent or interdependent.

An example of such malleability popped up in the NYT magazine the same day: Linda Logan's piece on her bipolar disorder. In it, Logan notices that psychiatrists and psychologists have only recently sought to consider how to reconstruct a patient's sense of self during and after acute phases of mental illness.  Her personal experience was very much a sense of loss of self; but treatment tends not to take this into account:

I would try to talk to my doctors about my vanishing self, but they didn’t have much to say on the subject. Instead they focused on whether I could make eye contact or how much expression I showed in my face. They monitored my lithium and cortisol levels; they took an M.R.I. of my head. I received an EKG, was exposed to full-spectrum lighting and kept awake all night for sleep-deprivation therapy. Nurses jotted down their observations; my scribbled lines in art therapy were inspected. Everything was scrutinized — except the transformation of my self and my experience of its loss.

Interestingly, the rebuilding of her self, though she does not frame it in quite these terms, appears to rely upon certain interdependencies: her reconnection to her family; her assumption of social and professional roles. And this would seem to agree with another point by Gish Jen:

She concludes that “we need both the interdependent and the independent self” and calls each one to recognize the claims of the other, while silkily suggesting that interdependent selves, more accustomed to striking balances, may be better equipped at finding the unity in apparent polar opposites, and thus at effecting this reconciliation of East and West.

 I would, however resist classifying interdependence as an "Eastern" or "Asian" value.  I find it alive and well in the "West," where it has always been.  Of course, it is modernity that brings the independent self into the social (and by that I also mean cultural and political and economic) scene.  Americans may like to think of themselves as rugged individualists, but they are, most of them, committed to a variety of social roles and networks and obligations that they would not give up.  Conversely, as is demonstrated by some excellent recent research, Chinese society is becoming more individualized.  The old distinctions of "East" and "West" really do not hold up anymore.

And that brings me to a larger question: why do we assume there is something like a stable, continuous "self"?  We may want to believe that there is something, either deep inside or firmly outside, that defines us in a consistent and quasi-permanent manner, from birth (or at least adulthood) to death. But Zhuangzi is not buying it.

I like the way Hinton translates this piece from chapter two:

No other and no self, no self and no distinctions - that's almost it.  But I don't know what makes it this way.  Something seems to govern, but I can't find the least trace of it.  It acts, nothing could be more apparent, but we never see its form. It has nature, but no form.

非彼無我，非我無所取。是亦近矣，而不知其所為使。若有真宰，而特不得其眹。可行已信，而不見其形，有情而無形

Zhuangzi, in chapter two, is asking us to give up distinctions, and he wants us to go all the way down: why hold on to a firm difference between self and other?  In Way, we are subject to a myriad of unknown forces.  Anything could happen at any moment, and what we thought we were - whether that definition is generated from within or without - can be swept away.  We might lose our families or lose our minds.  Or maybe we will gain something we never could have foreseen.  Whatever the change, we should know that circumstance is impermanent, transformation inevitable.  Way (Dao) - in all of its fullness and complexity -  is not mentioned in the excerpt above, but that is the thing that governs.  It has being (有情) but no form (無形).  We might do well to see our selves in the same manner: formless.

It is interesting that the third and forth characters above - 無我 wuwo- which Hinton translates as "no self," are used to express the Buddhist idea of anatta, "not-self" or "no-self,"  in Chinese.  We have to be careful of anachronisms here: Zhuangzi was written before Buddhism came into China (or at least that is the conventional wisdom).  So, the idea of "no self" here is probably not quite what is meant in Buddhism.  But it may be similar in some ways. It may be warding us away from holding on to the very idea of self, for if we grasp it too tightly, whether we understand it as independent or interdependent, we may well suffer as is shifts and melts away.

If you're self-less, you can simply be yourself.  That, in any event is what Daodejing 22 (Hinton) might be telling us:

Give up self-reflection and you're soon enlightened.

Give up self-definition and you're soon apparent.

Give up self-promotion and you're soon proverbial.

Give up self-esteem and you're soon perennial.

Simply give up contention and soon nothing in all beneath heaven contends with you.

不自見，故明；不自是，故彰；不自伐，故有功；不自矜，故長。夫唯不爭，故天下莫能與之爭

The Dao of Wolverines

Just had to mention this article, which reports that Jon Horford, a forward on the University of Michigan basketball team, is a student of the Daodejing.  Fantastic.  And it seems that the young man has a good grasp on the text:

"You can't say it's about nothing, but that's one of the main things -- just do nothing," he said of the book. "It's about returning yourself to your original nature, how you were before you were affected by everything around you."

That "everything around you" includes all of those social expectations and demands that obstruct our openness to Way.  "Original nature" could be problematic - we should steer clear of essentialist assertions of "human nature" - but the sense of unadulterated spontaneity is quite apt.

I would recommend that Horford next read the classic Cook Ding passage in chapter three of Zhuangzi, which came up in my class today.  That strikes me as the best statement of how an athlete might experience Dao:

And now ‑ now I go at it by spirit and don't look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants.

In other words, he is "in the zone," able to accomplish extraordinary physical feats without thinking, to be totally in the moment and react with utter finesse to the immediate context, rather like cutting to the rim in one explosive movement or making the no-look pass. Indeed, it is that sort of openness that inspires my own identity as a Daoist Yankee fan (and thus, I am not rattled by yesterday's poor showing from the Bronx Bombers....)

So, hooray for Mr. Horford, a man who is opening himself to Dao.  I am, first and foremost, a Badger, but I am happy to cheer for the Wolverines in the Final Four.  Maybe the Michigan cheerleaders can chant this from passage 22 of the DDJ (Hinton):

Give up self-relfection and you're soon enlightened.

Give up self-definition and you're soon apparent.

Give up self-promotion and you're soon proverbial.

Give up self-esteem and you're soon perennial.

Simply give up contention and soon nothing in all beneath heaven contents with you.

Do Nothing Blue -  and there is nothing that will be undone!