The Chinese Analogy
After a two year gap...
Not so long ago the intellectual consensus (for what it was worth) was that religion was doomed as societies modernised. That evidently seems to be untrue in some cases, not least the USA and now India. Now the reverse trope emanates from the religious right: that secular societies are doomed to extinction . I mean, just look at their birth rates as, with no eternal life to hope for, the élan vital somehow slips away.
The birth rate thing is complicated. The US does indeed manage to breed to replacement, more so in red states than blue, and the least fertile US state (Vermont) has a similar birth rate to the most fertile Canadian province (Alberta), while a great swathe of largely secular Eurasia, from Japan to Spain, sinks to lowest low fertility rates of below 1.4 children per woman, compared to a 2.1 replacement rate. Yet aggressively secular France matches the US (and not just its Muslims, who attend the mosque as little as nominal Catholics attend church anyway). Equally secular Scandinavia and the UK are not far behind.
There is evidence that the religious are marginally happier on average than the non-religious, other things being equal . They are not equal however; surveys indicate that most of the happiest countries are secular. There are various different measures, but small secular European countries all seem to rank top. Prosperity helps, but only up to a point – strong community and a fairly high level of equality seem more important (the US scores badly on the last). However, happiness isn’t everything, to say the least, it’s Brave New World enough as it is (without the hatcheries)
The other argument is that there is no precedent for a sustainable secular society. Er, no – the longest surviving continuous civilisation, China, was humanist throughout its history: there was a vague deity (Tien) but as distant as 18C deism. Even the most developed local “religious” form, Chan (Zen) makes no mention of God, and Daoism is equally vague.
This is not the first time that Confucian China has been compared with the modern West. With China in the process of headlong Westernisation, it seems that most of the cultural traffic between west and east has been one way. In a key phase of developing western modernity it was very much the other way, however . It is 1648. In Europe, the most devastating war to date in the continent has laid waste to Germany, and in the process religious fervour had drowned in blood. Yet the shattered continent is about to embark on its brilliant ascent to the modern world , or to descend into atheism, depending on your point of view: the Enlightenment.
Historical analogies or models quoted by contemporaries, as ever in the West, leaned to Greece and Rome. But for the first time there was another empire that was idealised and misunderstood – the one at the other end of Eurasia, whose history shows an eerie parallel development, given that there was so little contact with Europe (even as to timing – Socrates and Confucius seem to have been contemporaries).
It coincided with the first real substantial knowledge and indeed trade with China in history. The later 19 and 20 century image of China as backward benighted heathen was certainly not the 18th century one, which as it happened reached the peak of traditional society – its Antonine age – with the three Qing emperors from Kang Xi to Qian Long, before the 19C collapse. French philosophes were particularly impressed with a model of how a humanist society could function; the English were less impressed by the despotism, but still incorporated Chinoiserie, willow pattern, and naturalistic landscapes into refined culture.
Historical analogies are dangerous and speak to the obsessions of the time – the benevolent Celestial empire in the minds of such as Voltaire and Diderot bore little relation to reality. Still, creativity usually proceeds by metaphor, and there are once again some interesting parallels emerging. I draw my examples largely from Europe, that steadfast redoubt of secularism, where immigrants apart, there is no real sign of religious revival, indeed the last bastions such as Ireland and Poland are crumbling.
The ethical state. Traditionally, in the West, ethics were a matter for a separate institution – the Church – although it did of course try to direct the behaviour of the state. This eroded with state churches in the Protestant north, but then in America the religious refusenik culture of the Puritans overcame an Anglicanism which lost status after the war of independence (although curiously surviving as an upper class faith, but eroding there to into secularism) : church(es) and state separated again. Islam was always much that way, although with a more rigid doctrine of how the state should be run and daily lives conducted.
Now in Europe (America remains a battleground) the state is responsible for ethics and care as well as government, and separation has gone. So it was in China. The modern ethical state has its separate priesthood – in the universities, social workers and the medical profession – but ultimately these are all responsible or employed by the state. I am not suggesting of course that the ethics are the same as Confucian ones – collective as opposed to individual responsibility, and unthinking deference to elders are not the modern way. There is though a liberal consensus, a mix derived from Christianity and the western Enlightenment, which has spread across the world as part of the modern package. Ironically “universal human values” is latter day Chinese coded language for resistance to the autocracy of the state, but it carries no religious overtones.
Eclectic therapeutic cults. Life can be unfair and hard to bear, even in the cosseted world of the modern social democratic state – and then we all die anyway, without even the promise of eternal life. Ethics alone are not powerful enough for many: the Chinese peasant believed in a host of gods and spirits, and after the time of troubles following the collapse of the Han empire in the third century AD, Buddhism spread like wildfire. At the popular level this wasn’t the austere praxis of the sutras and meditating monks, but a colourful world of Buddhas and boddhisatvas past, present and future, treated as gods, and also replete with demons and evil spirits.
Confucian gentlemen did not do this stuff, however – it was vulgar and lower class. It might be permissible to indulge in the severely practical and this worldly practices of Chan Buddhism, or more in keeping with Chinese traditions to retreat to write Daoist poetry. The point is that all this stuff was what Philip Rieff called therapeutic religion: it is not focussed on the after life (as all good Christians and Muslims should be, in theory) but on how to cope with this one.
So it comes round again. It is untrue to label Europe, for example, as atheist: most people have a vague sense of “there is probably something there” akin to Tien: it is just that it has little connection with their daily lives, and they are dubious whether Jesus is their saviour. A whole slew of therapeutic cults arise again to fill this vacuum, in descending order of austerity and respectability from psychotherapy and Western Buddhism to mushy New Age stuff. Christianity is acceptable, but as just one of a number of choices for a therapeutic cult – and if Islam is ever domesticated, it will be by reducing it to the same level (with Sufism as a starting base).
A recurring base of Chinese cults was reverence for nature, now re-emerging as ecology and green politics. The desert cults of the Middle East had little time for these, seen as the Pagan enemy, and this still bedevils transatlantic politics on carbon emissions today, with religious attitudes entrenched on both sides.
This worldly, practical, rational
…. but in different ways. Traditional China was good at technology, and indeed by Song dynasty times in the 11th century got very close to an industrial revolution. It never got science, however. Every advanced civilisation has had art and literature, and usually performed more impressively than the West at the spiritual side. Despite some Indian and Islamic contributions, however, the glory of science is almost wholly Western.
The two roots of religion, I would maintain, are mystical experience and magic. The latter should have been eroded by science, which is why thoroughly modern men find it hard or impossible to believe the dogmas of the traditional faiths; the alternative, which the rise of various fundamentalisms exhibits, is to deny the bases of science altogether. China managed to blend the yang of practical statecraft and technology, with the ying of therapeutic mysticism.
There are numerous ways, however, where Confucian China and the modern secular West do differ. Confucian China was one of the longest lived civilisations in history, so it got something right about sustainable values, which arguably elude the modern global civilisation – but some of those values are also repugant to us. These will be the themes of subsequent posts
Not so long ago the intellectual consensus (for what it was worth) was that religion was doomed as societies modernised. That evidently seems to be untrue in some cases, not least the USA and now India. Now the reverse trope emanates from the religious right: that secular societies are doomed to extinction . I mean, just look at their birth rates as, with no eternal life to hope for, the élan vital somehow slips away.
The birth rate thing is complicated. The US does indeed manage to breed to replacement, more so in red states than blue, and the least fertile US state (Vermont) has a similar birth rate to the most fertile Canadian province (Alberta), while a great swathe of largely secular Eurasia, from Japan to Spain, sinks to lowest low fertility rates of below 1.4 children per woman, compared to a 2.1 replacement rate. Yet aggressively secular France matches the US (and not just its Muslims, who attend the mosque as little as nominal Catholics attend church anyway). Equally secular Scandinavia and the UK are not far behind.
There is evidence that the religious are marginally happier on average than the non-religious, other things being equal . They are not equal however; surveys indicate that most of the happiest countries are secular. There are various different measures, but small secular European countries all seem to rank top. Prosperity helps, but only up to a point – strong community and a fairly high level of equality seem more important (the US scores badly on the last). However, happiness isn’t everything, to say the least, it’s Brave New World enough as it is (without the hatcheries)
The other argument is that there is no precedent for a sustainable secular society. Er, no – the longest surviving continuous civilisation, China, was humanist throughout its history: there was a vague deity (Tien) but as distant as 18C deism. Even the most developed local “religious” form, Chan (Zen) makes no mention of God, and Daoism is equally vague.
This is not the first time that Confucian China has been compared with the modern West. With China in the process of headlong Westernisation, it seems that most of the cultural traffic between west and east has been one way. In a key phase of developing western modernity it was very much the other way, however . It is 1648. In Europe, the most devastating war to date in the continent has laid waste to Germany, and in the process religious fervour had drowned in blood. Yet the shattered continent is about to embark on its brilliant ascent to the modern world , or to descend into atheism, depending on your point of view: the Enlightenment.
Historical analogies or models quoted by contemporaries, as ever in the West, leaned to Greece and Rome. But for the first time there was another empire that was idealised and misunderstood – the one at the other end of Eurasia, whose history shows an eerie parallel development, given that there was so little contact with Europe (even as to timing – Socrates and Confucius seem to have been contemporaries).
It coincided with the first real substantial knowledge and indeed trade with China in history. The later 19 and 20 century image of China as backward benighted heathen was certainly not the 18th century one, which as it happened reached the peak of traditional society – its Antonine age – with the three Qing emperors from Kang Xi to Qian Long, before the 19C collapse. French philosophes were particularly impressed with a model of how a humanist society could function; the English were less impressed by the despotism, but still incorporated Chinoiserie, willow pattern, and naturalistic landscapes into refined culture.
Historical analogies are dangerous and speak to the obsessions of the time – the benevolent Celestial empire in the minds of such as Voltaire and Diderot bore little relation to reality. Still, creativity usually proceeds by metaphor, and there are once again some interesting parallels emerging. I draw my examples largely from Europe, that steadfast redoubt of secularism, where immigrants apart, there is no real sign of religious revival, indeed the last bastions such as Ireland and Poland are crumbling.
The ethical state. Traditionally, in the West, ethics were a matter for a separate institution – the Church – although it did of course try to direct the behaviour of the state. This eroded with state churches in the Protestant north, but then in America the religious refusenik culture of the Puritans overcame an Anglicanism which lost status after the war of independence (although curiously surviving as an upper class faith, but eroding there to into secularism) : church(es) and state separated again. Islam was always much that way, although with a more rigid doctrine of how the state should be run and daily lives conducted.
Now in Europe (America remains a battleground) the state is responsible for ethics and care as well as government, and separation has gone. So it was in China. The modern ethical state has its separate priesthood – in the universities, social workers and the medical profession – but ultimately these are all responsible or employed by the state. I am not suggesting of course that the ethics are the same as Confucian ones – collective as opposed to individual responsibility, and unthinking deference to elders are not the modern way. There is though a liberal consensus, a mix derived from Christianity and the western Enlightenment, which has spread across the world as part of the modern package. Ironically “universal human values” is latter day Chinese coded language for resistance to the autocracy of the state, but it carries no religious overtones.
Eclectic therapeutic cults. Life can be unfair and hard to bear, even in the cosseted world of the modern social democratic state – and then we all die anyway, without even the promise of eternal life. Ethics alone are not powerful enough for many: the Chinese peasant believed in a host of gods and spirits, and after the time of troubles following the collapse of the Han empire in the third century AD, Buddhism spread like wildfire. At the popular level this wasn’t the austere praxis of the sutras and meditating monks, but a colourful world of Buddhas and boddhisatvas past, present and future, treated as gods, and also replete with demons and evil spirits.
Confucian gentlemen did not do this stuff, however – it was vulgar and lower class. It might be permissible to indulge in the severely practical and this worldly practices of Chan Buddhism, or more in keeping with Chinese traditions to retreat to write Daoist poetry. The point is that all this stuff was what Philip Rieff called therapeutic religion: it is not focussed on the after life (as all good Christians and Muslims should be, in theory) but on how to cope with this one.
So it comes round again. It is untrue to label Europe, for example, as atheist: most people have a vague sense of “there is probably something there” akin to Tien: it is just that it has little connection with their daily lives, and they are dubious whether Jesus is their saviour. A whole slew of therapeutic cults arise again to fill this vacuum, in descending order of austerity and respectability from psychotherapy and Western Buddhism to mushy New Age stuff. Christianity is acceptable, but as just one of a number of choices for a therapeutic cult – and if Islam is ever domesticated, it will be by reducing it to the same level (with Sufism as a starting base).
A recurring base of Chinese cults was reverence for nature, now re-emerging as ecology and green politics. The desert cults of the Middle East had little time for these, seen as the Pagan enemy, and this still bedevils transatlantic politics on carbon emissions today, with religious attitudes entrenched on both sides.
This worldly, practical, rational
…. but in different ways. Traditional China was good at technology, and indeed by Song dynasty times in the 11th century got very close to an industrial revolution. It never got science, however. Every advanced civilisation has had art and literature, and usually performed more impressively than the West at the spiritual side. Despite some Indian and Islamic contributions, however, the glory of science is almost wholly Western.
The two roots of religion, I would maintain, are mystical experience and magic. The latter should have been eroded by science, which is why thoroughly modern men find it hard or impossible to believe the dogmas of the traditional faiths; the alternative, which the rise of various fundamentalisms exhibits, is to deny the bases of science altogether. China managed to blend the yang of practical statecraft and technology, with the ying of therapeutic mysticism.
There are numerous ways, however, where Confucian China and the modern secular West do differ. Confucian China was one of the longest lived civilisations in history, so it got something right about sustainable values, which arguably elude the modern global civilisation – but some of those values are also repugant to us. These will be the themes of subsequent posts
posted by Total Issues at 10:30 pm
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