Keynes versus the Classics Round Two

The classics were, Hey stupid, Hey spaz.

Almost no students get full marks in Chinese classics.

At the time, he was teaching classics at Trinity College in Dublin.

And he's reworking a Confucian art tradition of scholar stones.

During the neo Confucian renaissance of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a metaphysical dimension was added to fill a gap exposed by Buddhism s inroads into China. Thereafter, a good Confucian could, with untroubled conscience, scorn the Buddhist renunciation of the world.

I read a book by a woman named Amy Richlin, who is the chair of the Classics department at USC.

From December 15 to 22, 2016, a brand new production of Hamlet by the National Centre for the Performing Arts again triggered the passion of Chinese audience for art classics.

Confucian scholars such as Jiang Qing openly acknowledge that their interpretation of Confucianism most closely parallels socialist ideals not the actually existing socialism in today s China, but the socialist ideals defended by Karl Marx and others. This Confucian tradition aims to influence contemporary politics, but it also remains separate from state power and orthodoxy, always ready to point to the gap between ideals and reality.

OK, I'm still in Poetics, in Aristotle, and I'm thinking out of nowhere, two terms come crashing into my head that I haven't heard since my classics professor in college drilled them there.

Lyu Jia, the Italian Chinese and the art director of the national grand theater, conducted the orchestra to perform the classics in succession. The overseas Chinese emotionally immersed in the familiar melody and high level performance.

During the past century, the post Confucian states have accustomed themselves to a pluralistic world of theoretically equal nation states. But it is difficult to know how deep that adjustment has gone.

For starters, economics teaching and research is deeply embedded in an institutional structure that, as with any ideological movement, rewards orthodoxy and penalizes heresy. The great classics of economics, from Smith to Ricardo to Veblen, go untaught.

These things can change. Other Confucian societies, such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, now have thriving liberal democracies, and there is no reason to believe that such a transition is impossible in China.

That is why Leung should embrace dialogue and compromise. Even a ruler whose mandate comes from heaven should heed the words of the Confucian sage Mencius Heaven sees with the eyes of its people.

I'm thinking here, for example, of customs like ancestral worship, of a very distinctive notion of the state, likewise, a very distinctive notion of the family, social relationships like guanxi, Confucian values and so on.

Early Confucian thinkers were writing in a world of small countries competing ruthlessly for territorial advantage. For them, the key to international power was political power, and the central attribute of political power was a morally informed leadership.

Many people have realized that in Xi Jinping's series of talks, articles, speeches and interviews, famous quotations from ancient Chinese books and records as well as classics are found everywhere, manifesting highly cultural self confidence and arousing the widespread resonance all over the world.

Like Japan and other Asian countries, Korean society, which is underpinned by Confucian thought, has experienced little political participation by women, though that appears to be changing rapidly. In 2000, only 5.9 of the National Assembly s 299 members were women.

Meiji Japan grasped the advantages of making the nation a macrocosm of the family. An imperial order in 1890 outlined the objectives of education the Confucian concepts of loyalty, obedience, and filial piety were to be transferred from the family to the nation.

Such concrete proposals for political reform inspired by Confucian values can rarely be published in mainland China. In fact, there are fewer constraints imposed on public discussion of liberal democratic institutions precisely because few Chinese are inspired by Western style liberal democracy.

Yet Hong Kong style capitalism is not founded simply on the pursuit of material gain. It is underpinned by a Confucian ethic that prioritizes caring for others over self interest, which helps to explain why Hong Kong has the highest rate of charitable giving in East Asia.

Nothing like this existed in China, where there was one monolithic state covering a fifth of humanity, and anyone with any ambition had to pass one standardized examination, which took three days and was very difficult and involved memorizing vast numbers of characters and very complex Confucian essay writing.

According to early Confucian thinkers, a key task for rulers is to strive to improve a peoples happiness, which is itself grounded in a moral way of life. Because poverty was an obstacle to moral behavior, they believed that the state should be vitally concerned with eliminating it.

Although girls still tended to choose subjects such as classics, languages and social sciences, and the boys more technical and vocational subjects, the distinction was blurring and there were increasing numbers of boys and girls studying non traditional subjects interestingly enough, the boys and girls in non traditional subjects tended to have better than average results.

Changing this view is not easy, because the Confucian belief that women belong in the home remains embedded in Japanese and some other Asian societies. Moreover, most of the people participating in forums or workshops focused on womenomics are women too often, these events simply turn into platforms for women to complain among themselves.

The Japanese occupation of China was a particularly galling and humiliating period because Japan was an Asian, not a Western, power. Moreover, like China, Japan was a society steeped in Confucian culture, which many Chinese reformers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries blamed as a critical impediment to their own country s development and modernization.

We Japanese have a deeply ingrained stoicism, reflecting the Confucian notion that people do not lament poverty when others lament it equally. This willingness to accept a situation, however bad, as long as it affects everyone equally is what enabled Japan to endure two decades of deflation, without a public outcry over the authorities' repeated failure to redress it.

Confucian literati, shunning manual labor, grew their fingernails long, but they never displayed antipathy towards the world of affairs. The Chinese myth of success was the bright peasant boy whose village clubbed together to educate him and whose subsequent success resulted in the elevation of all who had helped him on his way into the civil service.

Centuries of inculcation with Confucianism was as important to the rise of East Asia s hyper growth economies as the conjunction of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism was to the west. Confucianism s tenets still provide an inner compass to most East Asians in a post Confucian age, just as Biblical admonitions remain standards for the West in a post religious age.

Like a happy and secure childhood, Confucian civilization bestowed upon its practitioners the self confidence to meet the challenge of the West. Since Confucianism was essentially an agnostic ideology, concerned with the management of the visible world, the post Confucians experienced little of the spiritual angst that afflicted Hindus, Muslims, and Christians in their collision with the materialism of industrial society.

The occasion for this latest round of historical jousting is the release of Clooney s new film The Monuments Men, which details Allied efforts to rescue art works from the Nazis during World War II. His comments infuriated London s provocative mayor, Boris Johnson, himself a classics scholar and author, who shot back that Clooney s position on the issue was similar to that of the Nazis portrayed in his film.

For a happier New Year, we should listen to the core messages of all these great religions, above all the Confucian golden rule that we should never do to others what we would not like to be done to us. What religion should teach us is not how to hate, but to borrow again from Confucius how to develop societies that look after and welcome the poor, the stranger, and the oppressed.

An alternative to this line of argument is to claim that China has its own kind of democracy, based on a Confucian idea of government benevolence and the Chinese people s cultural propensity to sacrifice individual rights to collective goods. To those who take this view and on this point many Western businessmen are in complete agreement with the Chinese Communist Party the signatories of Charter 08 are simply out of touch with their own culture.

The ultimate guarantee of harmony was the ruler s justness, which permitted him to enjoy the mandate of heaven the people had a right, indeed an obligation, to rebel against a tyrant. But while the ethical basis of Neo Confucianism was crucial, the Chinese also understood the need for a morally motivated bureaucracy, and thus perfected in the seventh century the world s first examination system for selecting bureaucrats, with the Confucian canon as the syllabus.