Great Equal Society, The: Confucianism, China And The 21st Century

Confucianism, China and the 21st Century

Young-oak Kim, Jung-kyu Kim

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9789814504737
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Chinese History

Confucianism is the guiding creed for a quarter of mankind, yet hardly anyone has explained it in plain terms — until now. Written in a style both intelligible and enjoyable for the global audience, The Great Equal Society distils the core ideas of the major Confucian classics and shows how their timeless wisdom can be applied to the modern world. It also introduces pragmatic suggestions emanating from Confucius and his followers for ensuring good governance, building a humane economy and educating moral leaders.

The book's core message of inner morality, first expounded by Confucius millennia ago, will resonate on both sides of the Pacific, and its sweeping survey of the hot topics today — dysfunctional government, crony capitalism, and the erosion of ethics in both Wall Street and Main Street, among others — will breathe new life to Confucian teachings while providing much-needed answers to our urgent social problems.

The Great Equal Society is written by Young-oak Kim, a Korean thinker whom Wikipedia describes as “the nation's leading philosopher dealing with public issues and explaining Oriental philosophy to the public,” and Jung-kyu Kim, a talented trilingual writer who has published works in English, Japanese and Korean.

Contents:

• A Philosophical Shift:
  • Johnson's Great Society
  • Restoring Inner Morality
  • Institution versus Culture
  • A Society of Ren: Modern Examples
  • A New Philosophy for China — and for the World
• On Government:
  • Is Democracy for China?
  • Real Challenge for China
  • Two Views of Human Nature
  • Characteristics of Good Government
  • Freedom of the Media
  • Learn from Singapore
• On the Economy:
  • Laissez-faire versus Social Realization
  • Misery of the Middle Class
  • Breakdown of Morality
  • Restoring Humanity
  • Profit Motive as Secondary
  • Challenges for China
  • Suggestions for a Humane Economy
  • Christianity, Communism, and Claims of Community
• On Education:
  • Educational Arms Race
  • Money, Education, and the Democratic Ideal
  • Redefining the Purpose of Education
  • The Moral Animal
  • Beyond Freedom and Discipline
  • Confucian Theory of Education
  • Talent, Discipline, and Success
  • Moral Leadership
• The New China Model:
  • Rise of the “China Model”
  • Redefining the China Model
  • On Diplomacy
  • On the Environment
  • Celebrating China's Rise
• A Short Introduction to Confucianism:
  • Confucius and Religion
  • Confucianism as a Moral Philosophy
  • Confucianism versus Legalism
  • Failures of Confucianism

Readership: General readers interested in Confucianism, China, Great Equal Society.

A Philosophical Shift

The Master said, “A gentleman is enlightened by righteousness. A small man only understands profit.“

Analects, 4-16

Johnson’s Great Society

In his latest bestseller 11/22/63, Stephen King speculates about what might have happened if John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated on that fateful November day. Would the world have changed for the better or for the worse? We do not want to give anything away, but one of the surprising possibilities King suggests is that without Kennedy’s murder, the landmark civil rights bill may never have passed:

The great civil rights reform of the sixties never happened. Kennedy was no LBJ, and as vice president, Johnson was uniquely powerless to help him. The Republicans and Dixiecrats filibustered for a hundred and ten days; one actually died on the floor and became a right-wing hero… The race riots came next.¹

Although it is only conjecture, King could very well be correct in his assessment. According to Robert Caro, who recently published the fourth volume of his biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, the weeks following Kennedy’s assassination turned out to be Johnson’s “finest moment“.² The former Senate leader rammed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, taking advantage of his own legislative mastery and the outpouring of goodwill which understandably followed the tragedy. History often progresses in mysterious and unintended ways.

In spite of the circumstances that had brought him to power, Johnson seized the moment to enact his vision of the Great Society. The goal was not only to put an end to poverty and racial injustice but also to improve education, protect consumers, preserve the environment, and restore a sense of community. Here is how Johnson laid down the challenge in his historic address at the University of Michigan on May 22, 1964. (In another irony of history, standing next to him was George W. Romney, then governor of Michigan. He was a moderate Republican who strongly supported the Civil Rights Movement and fought hard to provide affordable housing for the poor. Mitt Romney is his youngest son.)

For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people. The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization… we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.³

The landslide victory in 1964 gave Johnson the popular mandate — and a highly supportive Congress, with Democrats controlling more than two-thirds of each chamber — to implement his ambitious agenda. Without delving into the details, his major legislative achievements include: the Civil Rights Act (desegregation); the Social Security Act (Medicare and Medicaid); the Economic Opportunity Act (Job Corps); the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (Head Start); the Motor Vehicle Safety Act; the Public Broadcasting Act; and the National Environment Policy Act. While the legacy of Johnson’s War on Poverty remains disputed, one telling statistic is that the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2% in 1963 to 12.6% in 1970. In particular, the proportion of African-Americans living in poverty declined from 55% to 27% around this period.⁴

When we translated the Chinese term datong as the Great Equal Society (rather than the Great Unity, as it is commonly rendered), it was partly meant as a tribute to Johnson’s Great Society. Therefore, it is particularly distressing for us to point out that the achievements of the Great Society were gradually reversed in important ways over the subsequent decades. America today is more unequal than it was during the 1960s.⁵ The education gap, which had been closing at one point, continues to widen relentlessly. About 50 million Americans, including 7 million children, do not have health insurance.⁶

On a more general level, the American political scene today is characterized by bitter partisanship, with brazen lies masquerading as election strategy, while the great majority of its businesses are engaged in the single-minded pursuit of profit, seemingly oblivious to all other human, social, and environmental considerations. If the ultimate goal of the Great Society was to “elevate our national life“ and “advance the quality of our American civilization,“ then it clearly failed. In the political realm, we have a major political party which apparently decided its only goal was to win the next election — and wilfully triggered a budget crisis toward that end. In the economic realm, we have a whole sector which, in its short-sighted greed, precipitated the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

What this sad state of affairs shows is the limits of purely institution-based reform. The failure of the Great Society was not due to the lack of well-intentioned legislative efforts, but due to the culture of greed and selfishness which somehow pervaded all levels of American society. How could the American elite ever allow this to happen? In our opinion, the main culprit was the widely held belief that the pursuit of self-interest was the “rational“ thing to do. Any other mode of behavior — say, a cab driver charging less fare to a blind woman, a phenomenon which is surprisingly common — was considered “irrational“ and demanded explanation based on selfish reasons (e.g. “ ego motivation,“ meaning the cab driver just wanted to feel good about himself).⁷ Not only was the utilitarian calculation of self-interest condoned as the “natural“ thing to do, but it was actively encouraged as the “right“ thing to do — a philosophical stance known as rational egoism, coined by Ayn Rand in The Virtue of Selfishness. When we pursue this line of thinking to its logical extreme, we arrive at Gordon Gekko’s famous dictum in the film Wall Street: “ Greed is good.“ It was this kind of unquestioning belief in rational self-interest which slowly tore apart the fabric of Protestant morality, which had once upheld this great nation.

Restoring Inner Morality

So what is to be done? We felt the answer would not be found within the Enlightenment tradition of the West, because the entire edifice of the Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, lies on the bedrock of rational self-interest — and the negative view of human nature it necessarily entails. Rational self-interest, which currently serves as the standard postulate of human behavior in our political, economic, and social sciences, is a barren and sad view of human nature. It assumes that everyone in society is functioning only to maximize his self-interest. If we follow this view, a human being is essentially reduced to a machine (which only calculates) or a beast (which only follows its libido).⁸ Democracy and capitalism merely become mechanisms by which competing interests — clashing libidos, if you will — are somehow sorted out without resorting to an all-out war. But is that all there is to human nature?

For a truly alternative perspective, we have turned to our own tradition in the East, namely Confucianism. Confucius held that the most essential attribute of a human being is not the profit motive but ren. What is ren? While ren is commonly translated as “ benevolence,“ the term originally meant “an ability to feel“ or “empathy“ — an ability to imagine oneself in another’s shoes — and its meaning has later expanded to include new connotations such as compassion, aesthetic sensibility, and humaneness. Confucius thought it constituted the basis of morality, suggesting that those who possess ren — those who can truly feel — cannot help but be moral. Mencius took this line of thinking further to assert that we are all born with a moral inclination, and that our innate moral impulse is at least as strong as our desire for money or sex. Is this not a much richer, and more realistic, view of human nature, one which treats mankind with proper dignity and respect? A millennium later, Neo-Confucians argued that by cultivating one’s moral nature — and by exercising it toward the betterment of society at large — anyone could aspire to achieve “ sagehood“: self-cultivation and social realization were seen as the keys to leading a meaningful and satisfactory life. Why does one feel more comfortable and fulfilled when he follows ren, cultivates himself, and devotes himself to his family and society? It is because human beings are aesthetic, perfectible, and social by nature.

We see here that morality for Confucians is not about following a set of rigid rules based on God’s decrees; rather, it involves the active choice of a virtuous life based on an enlightened understanding of human nature. Confucians sought to promote a moral society through persuasion and examples — awakening the goodness within, if you will — rather than through incentives and punishments. In fact, one might argue that moral acts achieved via carrots and sticks are not really moral at all, if one defines morality as “doing the right thing when no one else is watching.“ Imagine a classroom full of students. When the class ends, students pile out of the room. There is a piece of trash on the way out. Most students ignore it, but one student decides to pick it up. What is special about his act? For the student in question, there is no material incentive to be gained, or physical punishment to be avoided, by taking care of the trash. To borrow Kant’s distinction, he is just following his categorical imperative (doing something because the thing is good in itself) rather than a hypothetical imperative (doing the right thing on the condition that it leads to a reward later). This seemingly trivial example illustrates perfectly the essence of what we mean by inner morality.

The Great Equal Society, which we defined as “a society where public-mindedness prevails over selfishness,“ is nothing other than a society where its members autonomously do the right thing. Such a society can do without overly complicated rules, because one trusts that most people will act decently most of the time. To be sure, some kind of law enforcement is required to keep the society in order, but it is only called upon as a means of last resort — that is, after efforts at edification have failed. Paradoxically, such a society is actually freer than a society which prizes individual liberty above all else. Let us take America again as a counterexample. Although Americans cherish their ideal of untrammelled freedom, America has increasingly become a police state where one constantly feels watched, crimped, and corralled.⁹ We (the authors) feel fearful when we encounter a law enforcement officer in New York, in a way we never would in front of a policeman in Tokyo. What with all the litigation and security cameras, we do not see how Americans consider themselves the freest people in the world. Compare such a society with the Great Equal Society where “people don’t lock doors at night.“ Which would you rather live in — a society where you have to be ever vigilant, or one where you can let your guard down and relax?

If a society as a whole valued and practiced the virtue of ren, then members of such a society would be filled with benevolence and goodwill toward one another. Confucius captured this utopian ideal with a powerful image: a society without lawsuits.

The Master said, “When it comes to hearing and adjudicating a legal dispute, I can be as good as anybody. But what I really want is this: to govern in such a way that people do not need to sue one another!“¹⁰

For Confucius, widespread litigation was the symbol of mistrust and contention which characterized a money-grabbing society. Instead of spending a fortune on armies of lawyers and thick contracts, should we not restore humanity and morality to our society, so that we do not have to sue one another? A society without lawsuits is a society where the spirit of cooperation prevails over narrow self-interest; this, in turn, is the very definition of the Great Equal Society.

Institution versus Culture

How does the ancient vision of the Great Equal Society, with its emphasis on inner morality, relate to contemporary issues facing China?

Many people assume China can become a responsible world power only through a radical change in its political system. It is not just outsiders who think this way. For example, Jiang Qing (not the last wife of Chairman Mao but the influential author of Political Confucianism) proposes that China adopt a tricameral legislature, consisting of three houses: people’s representatives chosen by popular election, Confucian elites chosen by competitive examination, and elites entrusted with the task of cultural continuity (a Chinese version of the British House of Lords).¹¹

Surely, a lot of careful thought has gone into building this kind of proposal, but we find such discussion a bit hollow. For one thing, the political system in China is hardly broken: the Chinese Communist Party (henceforth referred to as “the party“) has already managed three consecutive transitions of power in a peaceful and orderly manner, and it continues to produce capable technocrats based on its well-defined merit system, correction system, and learning system. Unlike politicians in the West, who waste much of their time preparing for the next election, the mandarins in Beijing can concentrate their resources on long-term planning and execution of vital policies. We will examine this issue more deeply in the following chapter, but for now, let us stress that the party is here to stay, given the unique history of modern China and the legitimacy the party has acquired over the years.

The more fundamental problem with Jiang Qing’s approach is that he appears too obsessed with building the right system. We are not suggesting a system is not important. A democratic system allows voters to kick out incompetent leaders. A capitalist system allows consumers to weed out (by voting with their wallets) incompetent corporations. The beauty of both the democratic system and the capitalist system is that, to a certain extent, the system can be agnostic about the character of the individuals who operate it. Rational voters and consumers, out of self-interest, automatically ensure that the best leaders and corporations survive competition. Theoretically at least, it doesn’t matter whether the individual leaders or corporations are moral or not. As Adam Smith famously observed in The Wealth of Nations, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.“ Why rely on the kindness or humanity of others, when their self-seeking and greed will do the job?

Because, in the real world, self-interest alone will not do the job. Inner morality — doing the right thing when no one else is watching — matters, in almost every walk of our lives. What ails China is not the lack of elective democracy or free enterprise. It is what we read about in newspapers everyday — corrupt bureaucrats and unethical businessmen, for example. Underlying these problems is a fundamental deficit of social values.

Horror stories of unsafe food made in China abound, ranging from fish contaminated with banned drugs to toothpaste and cough syrup made with toxic chemicals to lead paint used on toys.¹² More than 145 patients were killed in Panama from Chinese cough medicine in 2006, the same year that scores fell ill and six died from a contaminated antibiotic in China. Two years before that, a dozen babies died from infant formula of little nutritional value in what is known as the “big-headed babies“ scandal. The most high-profile case to date may be that of Sanlu, which had long been the top producer of infant formula in China. Then, shortly after the Olympics, news surfaced that its milk was contaminated with melamine, a nitrogen-rich chemical commonly used to make plastic and fertilizer. China’s health ministry estimated that 300,000 babies had been taken ill due to contaminated milk powder. This came on the heels of the melamine-contaminated pet food scandal the previous year, when hundreds of dogs and cats had died in the US due to ingredients imported from China.

What do these sad stories tell us? Morality of the participants matters, even under the supposedly self-correcting capitalist system. If all we had was self-interest, this modern society of ours would fall apart any minute. Arthur Miller, an American playwright, describes in a 1947 play All My Sons (based on a true story) a father who supplies defective aircraft parts which cause planes to crash. Eventually his son, choosing his conscience over filial loyalty, reports his ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halt Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 A Philosophical Shift
• Chapter 2 On Government
• Chapter 3 On the Economy
• Chapter 4 On Education
• Chapter 5 The New China Model
• Bonus Chapter A Short Introduction to Confucianism
• About the Authors
• Endnotes
• Index