Feminist/Confucian: A Search for Dignity Michael Nylan Abstract: The author explores the concept of dignity from a modern feminist perspective as well as from the perspective expressed in the Analects of Confucius. She shows how the Confucian valuing of interdependence offers a fruitful approach for understanding modern dilemmas. The essay is based on a talk given in 2010 for the Venerable Master Hsüan Hua Memorial Lecture series sponsored by the Institute for World Religions in Berkeley, California.
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want in this talk to discuss what strangers and friends alike regard as my bizarre allegiance to two “isms” that are often thought to be outdated at best, and enemies to human dignity at worst. Those two “isms” are, of course, feminism and Confucianism, although the latter term is already anachronistic, for in the period that I specialize in—the classical era in China (roughly the same time as the Roman empire), Confucian teachings were a thousand years away from being synthesized into the coherent system that dominated many aspects of thought in late imperial China. I will also talk about human dignity—what we as human beings owe to one another—though the modern world, in its misguided imperative for capital accumulation and efficiency as measured via cost-benefit analyses (the new theology of the twenty-first century) tends to downplay “dignity” as a quaint idea, an elite luxury, even.1 I would speak of “dignity” because in my readings in philosophy and theology, no two individuals have ever been able to agree about what is just. Some mean by “justice” utilitarianism and others communitarianism, libertarianism, or God’s will.2 As one smart philosopher put it: “Justice is inescapably judgmental . . . an open invitation to narrow, intolerant moralisms.”3 By contrast, we all have a fairly good sense, I think, of what constitutes the sort of treatment we would accord dignitaries (i.e., those people who are widely deemed to have dignity). Dignity is hard to make into an abstraction and therein lies its attraction for me as a grounding for life.
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Before launching into the highly fraught topics of feminism and Confucianism, I think it best, however, to register a few preliminary observations: First, my remarks on feminism are bound to strike some as yet another call to embrace the social gospel, given the relentless hits that the concepts of social, legal, economic, and environmental justice have had to take the last five years, from the likes of the Texas Textbook Commission, the Oakland and Berkeley police responding to the Occupy events, Supreme Court decisions casting corporations as people, and the Ayn Rand wannabees among our political leaders. I may be an ardent admirer of Dorothy Day, warts and all, but her work is not the work which I would take up for myself. My own erratic journey has ever lacked a map, hence the impulse to wander and wool-gather, perhaps, and yet I hope that what I have to say about early Confucian teachings will by the talk’s end resonate with my preliminary remarks about feminism, so as to place both into greater ethical alignment. And though the word spirituality has been nearly ruined for me of late by those who have too often used and abused it, I will allude to the topic of the spiritual quest in my closing remarks. Several years ago, I began trying to make some sense of a collection of seemingly disparate thoughts, after a casual decision to reread Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own; at the time, I choose Woolf’s book more for its small size than its expected impact. When I first read the book as an undergraduate, I remember thinking that Woolf’s descriptions of being shut out of the man’s world of Oxbridge academia were horrific, but it could hardly apply to the second half of the twentieth century. After all, I had women teachers in my literature classes, at least, if not in history, in physics, in political science, or in economics. And Woolf has so often been criticized as an elitist, even by feminists;4 by the critics’ account, she supposedly was preoccupied only with the thought of how life ought to be arranged on behalf of upperclass women of genius. I was puzzled, for a single rereading of A Room sufficed to convince me that such criticisms are totally unwarranted. Not only women of genius would like to be able to use good libraries or eat a tasty luncheon. Woolf’s overt thesis in A Room’s of One’s Own is that women need a bit of money and a measure of privacy in order to write (or, I would add, even to think).5 Her three underlying theses are no less more important: first, the body is good and the senses therapeutic; second, the goal of human beings, whether male or female, is to feel “no need to be anyone but oneself,” defined as one’s best self;6 and third, that no human talent can possibly flower in an atmosphere of fear, and subtle put-downs are often just as effective in evoking fear in us as gross bullying. According to Woolf,
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women, like the poor, are “snubbed, slapped, lectured, and exhorted” (at least in part because they are the poor). Woolf requires us to consider “how unpleasant it is to be locked out” in any way. Nonetheless, Woolf ends by denouncing “all this pitting of sex against sex, all this claiming of superiority and imparting of inferiority,” which she ascribes to a range of immature impulses. She insists, “Life for both sexes... is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle” that “calls for gigantic courage and strength.” Men—and sometimes women—often act to strip women of their Women in America are self-confidence in their potentials, she complains. And then Woolf follows these remarks with what seems to farther behind men me to be a stupendous insight: “Possibly when X [man] insists a little too much on the inferiority of women, than women in other he is concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority.” Put another way: men, too, can developed countries. often feel stripped of any dignity, and, predictably enough, they fight back in the only ways they have learned. As Woolf suggests, “[T]here is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can never see for oneself. It is one of the good offices that sex can discharge for sex—to describe that spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head.” Put another way, women, like ethnic and religious minorities, and all the very poor, will have to figure out how to accept the blind spots of the powerful, acknowledging even in their worst enemies this basic human need to feel dignified, if they are not to continue to suffer disproportionately from those with greater access to power and money. Woolf’s writing cannot be dismissed as a charming nonentity, for the undeniable fact of life in America (and China) is that men still do enjoy disproportionate access to power and money—something which the young seem increasingly unaware of. First-wave feminism (that before 1970) was intent upon seeing that women had the vote. (That women attained the right to vote long after African-American males speaks volumes about the nature of the hierarchy in the United States.) Secondwave feminism in the late twentieth century looked to place women in positions in power—in government, in academia, and in the corporate world—in what looks now, to one who has manifestly profited from it, like the laughably naïve belief that women would act appreciably differently (i.e., better) than men, once they occupied powerful positions in the hierarchy. What do third-wave feminists see? That women still earn about eighty percent of what men do for the same job is a statistic that has hardly budged since the Reagan era. (Not coincidentally, it is Issue 11, October 2012
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a statistic as true in China and the rest of the world as in the United States, and the wage gap grows much wider as men and women’s careers progress.)7 In fact, the workplace pay gap between men and women has of late become wider, according to an analysis of census data conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.8 And that workplace gap only compares equal work. Women still disproportionately make up the ranks of the part-time and unpaid laborers, and global competition puts more pressure on women to take up the slack in unpaid and underpaid work, esp. the care of the elderly, and this has been demonstrated in the U.S., in China, and elsewhere. Almost every economic indicator shows that women in America are actually farther behind men than women in other developed countries. For example, the gap in poverty rates between men and women is wider in America than anywhere else in the Western world.9 Thus unequal pay for equal jobs is but a symptom of a far larger problem: the way women are disparaged or condescended to, despite— and sometimes surely because of—their accomplishments. Nearly all economists have noted a sharp decline in life satisfaction for both men and women (but the decline is worse for women) during the decade from 1995 to 2005, the last year for which full data is available. As three smart feminist economists put it in a co-authored essay, we must be looking at the “totality of activities necessary for the provisioning of human beings,” including unpaid caring activities, the ways labor power is reproduced, and the interconnections between unpaid caring work and those paid activities that all conventional economists consider “economic activity.” Adherents of third-wave feminism, to my mind, should therefore dedicate themselves to seeing that men, as well as women, realize that human society as a whole—not just women in particular—profits if both women and men have access to jobs that will feed their families; if child and elder care are basic rights (not enviable luxuries reserved for the upper class); and if access to education, health care, and contraception is affordable for all. Some may be surprised to learn that the conditions conducive to the proper “provisioning of human beings” do not currently exist in the United States in the twenty-first century, but it is still more surprising that most Americans prefer not to see that these conditions do not exist. Most of us remember the polls cited during the 2004 election that said that forty percent of the American citizenry believed that they were in the top one percentile of wealth-owners. The true state of the U.S. economy is bleak indeed: the top one percent held forty-two percent of the nation’s net worth, compared to a collective forty-one percent for the bottom ninety-five percent.10 (Calculating annual income instead of net
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worth makes the figures still more lopsided, and every indicator shows growing, not diminishing inequality.)11 Many of you may know the name of the historian Tony Judt, author of prize-winning books about the American century. In an interview shortly before his death, Judt stated his firm belief that the single greatest problem the United States confronts at this juncture is simply that so many have “such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so.” In Judt’s analysis, the United States in particular and the West more broadly have become “so obsessed with efficiency and productivity that they have forgotten the importance of other moral considerations, like justice, fairness, and individuals’ well-being.” Judt speculated that the utopian abstractions of the twentieth century—he mentioned fascism and Communism, but we could add Freudianism, multiculturalism, positive thinking, and post-modernism—have left people too discouraged and also (and this is worse) too isolated in their own identity groups to believe that the ideals of justice, fairness, and individuals’ well-being could ever be attainable on this once-green earth.12 All most people hope for is enough wealth to insulate themselves from the worst indignities that their society can offer.13 Yet, as Han Yuhai, a Beijing New Left historian, has observed, for all too many in China and the U.S., the much-vaunted “freedom” of the market economy boils down to little more than the “freedom to want to be a slave.” Neuro-scientists, philosophers, and humanists all agree, however, that a rich social environment for humans absolutely requires the development of human emotional and imaginative capacities, most importantly, the ability to imagine others as having intentional states comparable to our own and, no less importantly, the allied ability to imagine ourselves as having intentional states different from our current one. (Whenever my students resort to the term “mindset,” I protest loudly.) People are unusual mammals insofar as they can and do frequently adjust the way they think to take into account evolving situations. As a result, courage and curiosity are not enough; human beings require in addition community, rather than fictional or “philosophical” autonomy, and not only because no one can flourish entirely on his or her own; pace the “we built it” slogan, people piece together the meaningful patchwork of their lives from their sense of the lives they have inherited or witnessed up close.14 As one philosopher of the emotions put it, “Imagine that each of us lives at the center of a set of concentric circles, the nearest being our own self, the furthest being the entire universe of living creatures. The task of our moral development is to move the circles progressively closer Issue 11, October 2012
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to the center, so that we regard our parents and children like ourselves, our other relatives like our parents, and strangers like our relatives.” How would we then begin to address our current disinclination to recognize the most basic facts about our current situation? The answer is obvious: by pushing forward an agenda capable of correcting at least the very worst abuses—the very worst indignities, if we name them forthrightly—endemic to the current situation. Reading the New York Times editorials as I prepared a first draft of an earlier talk, I came upon Evan Bayh’s explanation of why he decided to quit the Senate.15 Regardless of whether he made the right decision, what intrigued me about his explanation was the boldness of his proposed solution for our currently non-functioning government: he proposed that Democrats and Republicans have lunch together once a month. As he wrote, “It is much harder to demonize someone when you know his family or It is nonsense to consider have visited his home.” Similarly, the evidence gathered by gay rights groups suggests that once people count Confucian teachings among their close acquaintances a single gay person, they are loathe to deny equal protection under the law somehow anti-feminist, to any gay person, let alone attribute to gays a potential, even a likelihood, of committing heinous crimes if not anti-female. against children. Such observations bring us circling back to the most basic requirement for civility in society. For millennia, maintaining civility was the goal that women saw as their chief contribution to society, the goal that women seem content to have forsaken as readily as men, in their scramble for the more elusive albeit material goals in the impossibly stacked deck provided courtesy of global capitalism. That desire for civility leads me inexorably back to early Confucian teachings, and specifically the rhetorical statement ascribed to the Master Kongzi: “If it is really possible to govern countries by ritual and yielding, there is no more to be said. And if it is really not possible, of what use is ritual?”16 This question—despite all the cant associated with “Asian Values” and the rank dishonesty of many of the self-described New Confucians—leads me back again and again to the Confucius of the Analects, thanks in large part to its compelling vision of the secular as sacred. Before discussing the lessons I find in the Analects, I feel the need first to dispel the arrant nonsense that Confucian teachings are somehow anti-feminist, if not anti-female. The Analects of Confucius mentions women two times and the two times only. The first time it lauds a wife and mother as one of the ten paragons of virtue,17 calling her a sage without providing further context, and the second time (again, without
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sufficient context) it lumps women together with servants as a group “difficult to serve.”18 Of course, astute readers will immediately think to ask whether Confucius here is speaking of all women in general or of specific women in particular, as the same statement would have categorically different imports in the two cases. Indeed, it seems unlikely that Confucius is discussing women in general; most commentators believe that he is making a comment about his disastrous interview with the Lady Nanzi, who wished to parlay her association with him to improve her reputation. Absent context, we can do little but speculate on the original meaning of the line. Much more telling to my mind, then, is the reputation acquired by the Ru/classicists or Confucians in the centuries after Confucius, and there the record is clear and consistent: the Confucians are excoriated by the Mohists and by Han Feizi for their good treatment of women, as their classical traditions make it plain that a husband is to value his wife as much as or more the members of his patriline (e.g., his parents).19 As early Confucian teachings were formulated in an age when status trumped gender, the members of the governing tended to be less concerned with gender than their counterparts in our society, but that may be an inadvertent blessing, too. (Virginia Woolf insists—and I suspect she is right—that “No age can ever have been as stridently sex conscious as our own,” yet all this self-consciousness has hardly brought us appreciably closer to dignity, not to mention equality.) Be that as it may, early Confucian society was, by Aristotle’s definition, a virtual gynokratia (rule by women), since women in early China could (1) own land; (2) exercise authority in the family; and (3) exert a measure of control over their own dowries if they left a marriage.20 Women of all ages and stations were often legal heads of households. Moreover, no one questioned the right of women to an education until nearly two millennia after Kongzi/Confucius, during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). And—most astonishing to me—no fewer than three of the five Classics we now dub “Confucian” owe the very fact of their transmission down through the ages to discrete rescues by elite educated women of the early period. After setting the record straight on the early Confucians’ attitude towards women, it is perhaps time to see what the early Confucian teachings do advocate, in order to further the project of human flourishing. I see five tasks as central to Confucian teachings, and that centrality proven by the frequency with which the Master Confucius returns to speak of them in the Analects: 1. The necessity to cultivate the social self; Issue 11, October 2012
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2. The (related) necessity for hard, absorbing, and committed work (shades of Woolf here);21 3. A relentless focus on improving this life, because we cannot know any other life, and human beings are put on this earth to connect with one another; 4. The clear conclusion that people’s main jobs in life must be to see to the feeding, educating, nurturing, and comforting of others (activities often relegated to lesser importance, to the degree they have been cast as feminine);22 and 5. The inescapable assertion that the duty to “nurture” means that war is to be used only as a last resort, since wars inevitably mean “collateral damage” (the existence of that very phrase marking how low we have sunk in our morality), also that the drive to “love people” must entail trying to “spare them” (ai 愛 means both in classical Chinese). Should we manage to make progress in these five activities, Confucius tell us, our world is likely to be made up of relations and friends who wish us well. And insofar as we will have learned to accommodate their fundamental needs to be nourished and valued, as well as our own, to that extent we may all experience greater dignity in the everyday. When we dedicate ourselves to that one humane goal, all parties will have been schooled to develop that potential for compelling behavior worthy of emulation that is unique to humans and yet utterly attainable.23 In the Chinese way of speaking, we have finally “become humans,” meaning, we have become worthy of consideration (i.e., “dignified”), in large part because we will have conferred dignity on others. In promoting this idea, Confucius and the early Confucian masters advocate far more than pure instrumentalism, certainly: they insist that only by doing the work of nurturing others can we hope to live secure in our own pleasures, since this is the only condition which does not threaten to make us or others into virtual slaves. Attaining the enviable security of life lived in a true community, in other words, presupposes our awareness of the basic human allied needs to be seen, seen truly, to belong, and to connect. Once that insight is grasped, we have sufficient motivation first to imagine a better world and then to strive to achieve that world by a series of purposeful acts in this world. This realization most religions hail as the first step on the path to union with the divine. Before getting lost in the relational, sustaining pleasures to be had from the full embrace of the demands of human community (a topic that I am currently finishing a book on), perhaps I should say a brief word in
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connection with each of these five teachings. All five Confucian teachings are alike informed by the bedrock belief—no more liable to proof than any other article of faith—in the innate human drive for sociability that underlies the entire Analects, beginning with its first memorable verse: To learn and at due times to practice what one has learnt [with people], is that not after all a pleasure? That friends should come to one from afar, is that not after all delightful? To remain unsoured, even though one’s merits are unrecognized by others, is that not after all what is expected of a noble person? (1/1) Regarding hard work, one of the key problems for the early Confucians was to justify their firm belief in the inherent nobility of the trained impulse to serve others, a belief they evidently shared with the Mohists. The Confucian assertion of the nobility of hard work stood in stark opposition to the teachings of most other would-be advisors to the throne, including the legalists and the adherents of Yang Zhu; indeed, the Confucians went further than any other line of thought in insisting on the pleasure that comes from bringing dignity and pleasure to others through service. Any number of lines from the Analects will support this characterization; I give two: The noble person cultivates in his or her self the capacity to ease the lot of other people. (14/42) To demand much from oneself and little from others is the way for the ruler to banish discontent. (15/14) Those in power are told to (1) attend strictly to business (their business being the welfare of their subordinates);24 (2) observe promises; (3) be economical; (4) show affection towards subordinates; and (5) use the labor of subordinates only in ways that ultimately conduce to the benefit and dignity of all.25 Confucius was just as certain as John Rawls that a measure of economic security was the basis for self-respect. But no particular relief from continual hard work was offered for those in power, let alone for those shut out from real power. Multiple characterizations of the Master supplied in the Analects, my favorite being 7/18, show Kongzi himself to be nothing if not a hard worker: This is the character of the man: so intent upon enlightening the eager that he forgets his hunger; so happy in doing so, that he forgets the bitterness of his lot and he fails to realize that he is growing old.26 Issue 11, October 2012
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I often remember these lines, because I have learnt as teacher that one seldom knows the effect one is having upon students, but the love of the work seems to buoy me up nevertheless, except during the worst of times (e.g., faculty meetings) so much so that I can nearly apprehend the insistence of one Han Confucian master who said “that the sage takes pleasure in being a sage”27 despite all the effort and worry expended. The sage, in Confucius’ view, does not “merely know the Way,” but prefers it. As the Analects insists, “The sage does not merely prefer it [presumably on rational grounds], but rather takes pleasure in it.”28 The Confucius of the Analects is most voluble on the subject of nurturing. When asked what he most wishes for himself, he replies: In dealing with the aged, to be of comfort to them; in dealing with friends, to be of good faith with them; in dealing with the young, to cherish them.29 Taking those words seriously makes it impossible to ignore the “one thread” that runs through Confucius’ teachings, by his own account: “loyalty [to others’ interests] and shu 恕, a rich term that is glossed by the early commentaries as: (1) “likening others to oneself,” seeing the humanity in ourselves and others, and (2) “not requiring of others what is beyond their capacities,” lest one humiliate, overtax, and undermine them. Equally hard to ignore is Confucius’ insistent focus on improving this life, rather than speculating about our place in the next. Analects 11/11 has the Master answering a disciple who asked “how one should serve the ghosts and spirits,” “Until you have learnt how to serve other people, how can you learn how to serve the ghosts and spirits?” And when the disciple persisted, going on to ask about the ideal relation between the living and the dead, the Master replied, “Until you know about the living, how are you to know about the dead?” If I were to cite the line that speaks to me most acutely, however, it would have to be Analects 12/12, where the Master says, Behave when away from home as if in the presence of an important guest. Deal with the common people as if you were officiating at a solemn sacrifice. Do not do to others what you would not like yourself.30 We are all used to the Golden Rule, but Confucius asks both less and more of us here. On the one hand, we are not expected to love others as ourselves (something that I suspect is impossible for all except those graced with special gifts). On the other, we are enjoined to consider what words
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and gestures we find humiliating, demeaning, and condescending, and then avoid using those words and gestures with others. More strikingly, in my view, we are instructed to give others the exquisite courtesy due recognized dignitaries. This treatment places us in the honorable role of the host who wants to be hospitable to others. It requires us not only to meet the needs of others but also to anticipate them, as we most certainly would do if important guests were to visit. It requires continually asking others what they would need and like, rather than presuming what they deserve and merit. It requires us to consider those who are actually in our power as if they were a higher power, without conceding to them any worldly power to harm ourselves or others. One line of the Analects after another reiterates some variation on this set of injunctions, which leads me to see this extension of courtesies to the lowliest as the central task for any would-be Confucian31 —and one that I find myself routinely failing at. No part of this set of injunctions mandates a particular creed about the afterlife; no part of it distracts us from the ordinary mysteries of life. What this set of injunctions does is move all of us quietly but firmly away from the “main aspects of modern identity—liberty, autonomy, . . . the subject’s self-positioning or rational self-determination.”32 As human beings, we are constantly bewildered by the way things turn out, a sentiment that overtook Confucius as well.33 There is no reliable way to calculate the long-term consequences of our actions, however well-intended, nor can reason, custom, or experience resolve many puzzles of human existence.34 (John Rawl’s Theory of Justice would demonstrate, if proof were needed, that no way exists to construct a theory of human morality with the certitude academics demand in the evaluation of scientific theories.) The early legends about Confucius would give us to understand that Confucius went to his death believing himself to be a miserable failure. Ultimately, of course, he was hailed as an uncrowned king (and, in some texts, a divine being), credited with a remarkable ability to turn his personal misfortunes into blessings for others. The main thrust of the Confucian Analects remains throughout, then, the human imperative to act on the assumption that small acts count, and so we should be careful to accord others the same measure of dignity that we would gladly allow an important guest.35 But if those acts of connecting, communicating, and sharing are to be done well, they require us, more often than not, to set aside our own physical and psychological comforts, not to mention our favorite mental constructs, clearing a space where we have the time, the attention, and the will to better observes others’ needs. Issue 11, October 2012
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No rational cost-benefit analysis will then produce a tally of the precise dividends that accrue from this particular orientation in life. As Confucius admits in the Analects, we must not only provisionally adopt this way of operating in the world but make it a habit before we can possibly see any benefits from this way of operating. But if we prepare for others adequately, we will most likely learn, I believe, to feel at home in our own skins and the circles we operate in. That explains why the early Confucian masters can assure us that greater human happiness is to be found in connecting, communicating, and sharing than in working to gain or assert power over others. My sense that the word spiritual lies somewhere in all this immediately confronts me with the dizzying multivalence of that word in modern English: am I to employ the word in the definition of “not adhering formally to a religious tradition but nonetheless spiritual” (as my students are wont to do) or “not mundane or worldly but spiritual” (as my generation typically does), or simply as a synonym for religious—a term whose history is far more fraught than we usually admit, especially where early societies are concerned, than many care to acknowledge.36 I began ruminating on the remarkably clear definition of shen 神 (the “divine”) supplied by one early Confucian master, Dong Zhongshu: “an unseen force capable of accomplishing endless transformations” in itself and others, in drawing on the capacity of being “whole in power.” That “unseen” is then often interpreted to refer to “hidden Happiness is found virtue,” a willingness to let others take the credit for any good that is done. Fundamentally, then, by early Confucian notions, the “divine” must be transformative, in communicating and even transfigurative, and it best works “without visible traces.” So whether there is one god, multiple gods, or no sharing, not in gaining god at all—most early thinkers disliked making definite pronouncements on what to them was an unanswerable power. and not particularly interesting line of questioning—we are meant to heal people and things (our own hearts and bodies included) through highly conscious practices that are nonetheless unshowy and incremental, in the firm belief that every single aspect of this blessed world has within itself a spontaneous capacity to heal itself, so long as we accord it that measure of undivided attention that it may need to strengthen this capacity. The spiritual task the early Confucian masters describe, then, is to work to allow people and things to become more distinctively “whole in power” than they were before, without asking for recognition in return. Above all, the early Confucians target cheng 誠, a word conveying
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a constellation of ideas having to do with “integrity,” “intactness,” and “authenticity.” So I choose to try my best each day to make each person as an important guest, because this construction or lived reality—it hardly matters which it is—does not allow me to evade my responsibilities to invest others with human dignity or to overlook the character or plight of myself or others. For local signposts pointing to that compelling wholeness (which the Chinese trace to “integrity”; which Aristotle equates with “greatness of soul”; and which Buddhists equate with enlightenment),37 I generally turn to Wendell Berry, a fellow Kentuckian, who has said it far better than I could. Berry names “the greatest disaster of human history” the change that “happened to or within religion” leading to “the conceptual division between the holy and the world.”38 In light of this insight, in Berry’s novels, the characters come to learn that they are “part of a place already decided for it and part of a story begun long ago and going on”; their minds are “driven out of the old boundaries into the thought of absolute loss and absolute emptiness, in a world that seemed larger even than the sky that held it.” From that place they travel through “happiness and hardship and longing and satisfaction and death and grief, and somehow become innocent again.” They come to find that “to be loving something is to take comfort from it.” These are the figures intent upon keeping to the “membership” forged by their neighbors, friends, and lovers, for they “wish to help what could only be endured.”39 And they see, too, that “in a place like that you don’t need to say much.”40 In the end, in Berry’s imagination, it finally only remains for each person who would join the membership to become “each other’s welcomer and each other’s guest.” My joint advocacy of feminism and of early Confucian teachings therefore constitutes a project entirely separate from that promoted in a spate of recent books devoted to moral disquiet and moral clarity— projects urging a return to Enlightenment thinking, an appeal to return to reason, rationality, and ethical deliberation, with “ethical deliberation” defined as “an understanding of a problem’s scope; fair assessments of possible actions or lack thereof; decisions supported by justifications (partial, multiple, complete, and not).” But it is surely over-reliance on reason that has brought us today’s preference for calculations of certitude, however morally irresponsible these prove to be, and these calculations in modern life have made neither America or China the “best of all possible worlds.” Besides, my way of thinking tallies with Bernard Williams’ insight that we study the Ancients, because they can tell us not just who we are, but also who we are not: they can denounce the falsity or the partiality or the limitations of our images Issue 11, October 2012
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of ourselves. . . . [This is because] the ethical thought of the Ancients was not only different from most modern thought, particularly modern thought influenced by Christianity; it was also in much better shape. . . . [Ancient thought] makes no use of a blank categorical imperative [posited by Kant]. In fact—though we have used the word moral quite often for the sake of convenience—this system of ideas basically lacks the concept of morality altogether, in the sense of a class of reasons or demands which are vitally different from other kinds of reason or demand. . . . Relatedly, there is not a rift between a world of public “moral rules” and of private personal ideals: the questions of how one’s relations to others are to be regulated, both in the context of society and more privately, are not detached from questions about the kind of life it is worth living.41 This recalls Berry’s “greatest human disaster,” of course, though Williams addresses a smaller slice of readers, professional philosophers and classicists. Let me say a bit more, then, about what I believe to be the contemporary shortcomings of over-reliance upon ethical deliberation: Many have argued that the main problem in our new century is not that we are willing to discard principles but ready to discard the very idea of acting on principle itself. Enlightenment and postmodern philosophy (which some have termed nothing more than footnotes to Kant and the Enlightenment) have taught us that we should not—or need not—act until we can locate the best principle to act upon. Unfortunately, in the interim, as Yeats and Joanie Mitchell put it, “The best lack all conviction/while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” As those quick to condemn the “reality-based” world advance their agendas with stunning conviction, correspondingly less effort on the part of society’s leaders goes into figuring out how best to face the challenges of operating in the world efficaciously, which nearly always requires acting collectively, i.e., working with those who do not share one’s convictions. Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart (1985) suggests that “the language of self-understanding” can actually, quite counterintuitively, limit the way people think.42 For how else can we know who we currently are, except by observing what we currently do in others’ company? Meanwhile, thinkers as disparate as Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Foucault have identified the strongly “ascetic” and “isolating” impulses common to modern strivings— impulses confirmed by Barbara Ehrenreich, the contemporary American social critic, in her most recent work, entitled Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America.43 Both feminists and Confucians reject
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these impulses on the grounds that the body is good, an excellent vehicle for sociality. Feminism has a further insight here, insofar as it acknowledges the strong sense that our persons and our place in the universe seem both unstable or (what is different) fractured, with both states precluding real self-understanding. If we are honest with ourselves, we must confess that we go through much of life in states ranging from bewilderment to muddle—no matter how much conscious and quiet practice we have engaged in. This is not only because we are always motivated to act by a complex tangle of motives and because we can no longer be sure about the relation between the unseen and the seen, the material and the immaterial. It is also because, whenever we act, we generate new realities for ourselves and others. As the current neuroscientific understanding has it, “Like sand on a beach, the brain bears the footprints of the decisions we have made, the skills we have learned, the actions we have taken.”44 All these observations are entirely consistent with the early portraits of Confucius and the teachings ascribed to him and his followers. Why are we alive? What are we meant to do? Whence this propensity to fear and hurt others? Do we really act out of principle or self-interest? These are questions that we see Confucius asking in the early accounts, but he cannot ever answer them to his or others’ satisfaction.45 He only knows that, in the end, he is “different from other men,” in not having a fixed set of rules to tell him “what is right and not right” in a given situation.46 He only knows that to try to act well makes him feel more alive. We cannot reasonably hope to reason our way out of the state of bewilderment, since those far wiser than we are have not done so in the past. At best we can decide how to proceed in the midst of bewilderment. I know that I am neither as good nor as happy as I could be—and like Confucius, even if I didn’t know it, I am lucky to be surrounded by those who are quick to remind me of my flaws.47 But if I switch places, devoting some or most of my time to the happiness of others, I do find that I feel somehow more alive. Living outside rigidly fixed roles requires a strong ambition to live more fully, even when daily conscious practices incrementally strengthen that will. At the same time, I insist that not to imagine a better world than the one we live in currently would be to deny the very function of the human brain (not to mention the human heart): to imagine objects, episodes, and people that do not exist in today’s experiential realm but that may exist elsewhere or be brought into existence by our purposive acts.48 As a recent psychology experiment has shown, the only sure indicator of what we ourselves will end up doing in a given situation is what Issue 11, October 2012
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we presume others would do in the same situation.49 In short, if I wish to act well, I must conceive of the possibility that others will act well and then act upon that conception. (This is precisely what one Classic, the Documents, advises.) After I have done that, it is far less difficult to conceive of the potential benefits—intangible and unseen, as well as tangible—of cooperating with others, while conceding, too, that feeling occasionally deceived or disappointed in others is but a small price to pay for the possibility of transfiguration.50 Believing that “[i]t is nothing to be right, and a true disaster to be righteous, but it is everything to do what you can,”51 there remains but the single imperative to try to afford those around me a greater measure of dignity, in the full knowledge that “the life I save may be my own.” Notes 1. “The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to a period of philosophical dominance for market economics worldwide. . . . It also led, in the United States, to a hubristic ‘bubble’ of market fundamentalism that encouraged . . . an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere. Over time, markets would most efficiently solve most problems, they argued. . . . From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.” Al Gore, “We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change,” New York Times, February 27, 2010. 2. E.g., utilitarianism (minimize social harm), libertarianism (maximize personal freedom), or communitarianism (cultivate civic virtue). 3. See, however, Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009); George Kateb, Human Dignity (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2011). 4. See the “Introduction” to A Room, where this charge is made by Mary Gordon (p. viii). Woolf wrote, “a poor child in England has little more hope than the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into” intellectual freedom (p. 108); to develop takes money, time, and leisure—how much money, time, and leisure may vary from person to person, but these are preconditions to development. 5. George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier made much the same argument about men. Woolf says, “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well” (p. 18). 6. “I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else.” 7. All China Women’s Federation report, 2001; Feminist Economics vol.; cf. Invest in Women, Invest in America: A Comprehensive Review of Women in the U.S. Economy, a report generated by the United States Congress Joint Economic Committee (December 2010). That women have slightly edged up from seventy-five percent during three long decades is mainly due to the fact that more women are in the labor market at the bottom, and among hourly wage earners (often near or at minimum wage), women earn ninety-two percent of men. See Catherine Rampell,
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“The Gender Gap by Industry,” New York Times (February 17, 2011), based on the Bureau for Labor Statistics report of February 2011. 8. Women make only 75.5 cents for every dollar that men earn, according to a new release by the U.S. Census Bureau. Between 2002 and 2003, median annual earnings for full-time year-round women workers shrank by 0.6 percent to $30,724, while men’s earnings remained unchanged at $40,668. Nearly half (forty-three percent) of the 29.6 million employed women in the United States were clustered in just twenty occupational categories, of which the average annual median earnings were $27,383. 9. A new report entitled “Frozen in Time: Gender Pay Gap Unchanged for 10 Years,” released on the eve of International Women’s Day (March 2012) by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), reveals that worldwide, women are paid eighteen percent less on average than their male counterparts at work. This report looked at women’s wages in forty-three countries, twice the number of previous studies. 10. One may fruitfully consult Dave Gilson and Carolyn Perot, “It’s the Inequality, Stupid,” Mother Jones (April–May 2011), which supplies helpful charts prepared by a Harvard economist after extensive interviews with more than 5,000 people; these charts contrast the true level of wealth disparity in the United States with people’s beliefs about that wealth disparity. 11. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/ 12. Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995), says identity politics point backward, and I’m inclined to agree. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 77, remarked that Foucault’s postmodern theories “is exactly the sort of left that the oligarchy dreams of, a left whose members are so busy unmasking the present that they have no time to discuss what laws need to be passed in order to create a better future.” 13. John Gray’s influential essay “Back to Hobbes” in his book Heresies (London: Granta Books, 2002), 109–14, argues that what people want most is not liberty, but protection. The rise of gated communities across the land surely reflects that perceived need. 14. Cf. Molly Worthen, “The Power of Political Communion,” New York Times, Sept. 16, 2012, 5. 15. Feb. 21, 2010, Sunday Opinion, 9. 16. Analects 4/13. 17. Analects 8/20, one of the “ten” virtuous ones at the time of King Wu was a woman (but saying cryptic). 18. Analects 13/25. 19. For the first, see the Mozi chapter “Fei Ru” (Against the Ru) and Han Feizi “Wu du” (Five Vermin); for the second, see Ying Shao’s Fengsu tongyi (passim), citing the ritual classics. The discrepancies within the ritual classics is a subject discussed in several of my works, including “Classics without Canonization, Reflections on Classical Learning and Authority in Qin (221-210 BC) and Han (206 b.c.–a.d. 220),” in Early Chinese Religion, Part One, Shang through Han (1250 b.c.–a.d. 220), eds. John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 721–77. It is confirmed in Zhou Yiqun’s forthcoming essay for T’oung pao on “Mothers in Mourning.”
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which accumulates evil deeds, more than enough calamity. When an official kills his ruler or a son his father, this is not the result of a single day and night, but a situation that has evolved gradually.” 36. Seth Schwartz claims that no modern term of art, ethnic group, nation, culture, certainly not race, is any less anachronistic or misleading than religion itself. See his “How Many Judaisms Were There? A Critique of Neusner and Smith on Definition and Mason and Boyarin on Categorization,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 2:2 (2011), 224. Compare Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture-Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), chapter 2: “From the vantage point of a post-Enlightenment society that understands the separation of the political and the religious as an ideal to be protected, the Roman imperial situation requires careful attention to the myriad ways in which ‘Roman religion’ might, it could be defensibly argued, not quite exist. That is, insofar as practices that could conventionally be called ‘religious’ intersected so thoroughly with political institutions, social structures, familial commitments, and recognition of the self-in-society, there is very little in ancient Roman society that would not as a consequence qualify as ‘religious.’” In the same vein is Daniel Boyarin, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009). 37. However, I would stress the enormous gap in conceptualizing the person and social duties that lies between the pre-Buddhist and Buddhist world. See Nylan, “Living without Sin: Reflections on the Pre-Buddhist World in Early China,” Sin and Expiation: Perspectives from Asian Religions, edited by Phyllis Granoff and Koichi Shinohara (Leiden: Brill Numen Book Series [NUS], 2012), 57–72. 38. See Berry’s A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), opening of chapter 9. 39. Berry’s name for felicitous sharing. 40. For these quotations from Berry’s Hannah Coulter (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004), see pp. 33, 42, 54, 107, 46, and 47, respectively. 41. Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 20, 251 (italics are the editor’s; I substitute “the ancients” for Williams’ “[ancient] Greeks”). 42. See below for a recent study that shows that what we say of others is a better indicator of what we ourselves will do than our own self-assessments. 43. See Ehrenreich’s book published by Picador (New York) in 2010. 44. Sharon Begley and Antonio R. Damasio, The Emotional Life of Your Brain (New York: Hudson Street Press, 2012), passim, citing Begley and Jeffrey Schwartz, The Mind and Your Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (New York: Regan, 2010), 9. 45. George Orwell once observed that every life is a failure as seen from within. 46. Analects 18/8. Such an attitude, I am happy to say, precludes the preoccupation with purity and impurity that has us reserving purity for “people who think like me” while tending to denounce a range of other groups as “impure.” Such an attitude, I am happy to say, precludes the preoccupation with purity and impurity that has us reserving purity for “people who think like me” while tending to denounce a range of other groups as “impure.” 47. Analects 7.30. 48. See Sandra L. Gilbert, et al., “Genetic Links between Brain Development and Brain Evolution,” Nature Reviews Genetics 6 (July, 2005), 581–90.
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Michael Nylan 49. Nicholas Epley and David Dunning, “Feeling ‘Holier than Thou’: Are Self-Serving Assessments Produced by Errors in Self- or Social Prediction?,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79:6 (Dec 2000), 861–75. Four studies cited there suggest that people hold overly charitable views of themselves and accurate impressions of their peers. Participants consistently overestimated the likelihood that they would act in generous or selfless ways, whereas their predictions of others were considerably more accurate (and the best indicator of what they would do themselves in the same situation). This work builds upon Anatol Rapoport’s essay “Tit-For-Tat” in Two-Person Game Theory: The Essential Ideas (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966). 50. Here, Confucius comes close to E. M. Forster’s “Only Connect.” In Howard’s End, the Schlegel sisters call this “small price” a form of “rent” that must be paid if one is not to descend into cynicism or paranoia. 51. David Schulman, Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 223.
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