You Must Die So I Can Live: Part 1

This is a three part series, broken up for easier reading. It answers a basic question, “Why is it so hard for “Westerners” to understand China?” It explores not just the differing dominant philosophies of “West” and “East” but the assumptions underlying them and the historical and environmental reasons for them.

Can entire societies be sociopathic?

That depends on your understanding of human nature.

The majority view in the Western World is that human beings are inherently violent.

“Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Thomas Hobbes.

“Hobbes got it right”

Stephen Pinker

The Chinese disagree

When the way of nature is observed,
all things serve their function;
horses drawing carts, and pulling at the plough.
But when the natural way is not observed,
horses are bred for battle and for war.
Desire and wanting cause discontent,
whilst he who knows sufficiency
more easily has what he requires.

Tao Te Ching

That was written more than two thousand years ago by Lao Tzu. But it is a continuous theme in Chinese thought — even today.

China has pursued development under the vision of building an ecological civilization. From the traditional Chinese wisdom that the laws of Nature govern all things and that man must seek harmony with Nature, to the new development philosophy emphasizing innovative, coordinated, green and open development for all, China has always prioritized ecological progress and embedded it in every dimension and phase of its economic and social development. The goal is to seek a kind of modernization that promotes harmonious coexistence of man and Nature.

Xi Jinping

Add to this, harmonious co-existence of man and man.

War and revolution have all left their mark on China. But nothing like nature itself, the environment, which is the stage on which all must play and which determines their scripts — and which also informs Chinese concepts of what it is to be human and what form society should take. There is no god in Confucianism or Taoism: only nature, which enforces the need for social balance and cooperation. When these things break down, chaos ensues and people die. China has had its wars.

Yet, China has also had centuries of peace — in contrast to Europe which has been wracked by war since long before the Christian era — continually. Europe has never really had an kind of enduring peace: there has always been war somewhere.

Conflict Culture and Collaborative Consensus Culture

Europe therefore is a conflict culture: China, however, is a combined collaboration -consensus culture. Of course, these are imperfect generalizations. No culture can be reduced so simply to a single idea or modality.

Keeping that caveat in mind, we can say that while the Chinese had philosophy as a rational response to cultural challenge, the Europeans, like their Central Asian and Middle Eastern predecessors had religion: irrational heuristics set down by “gods”, divine authority figures who told them that only their tribe had the right to live. Nature was something to exploit or destroy.

No doubt all religions once had a rationale but when religions are institutionalized Believers are institutionalized too. No one remembers where “faith” comes from.

In conflict societies, hierarchy is the most important thing, enforced by threat of violence.

Notice the Kings, princes, and nobles are not counted as “Men” who are just above “wild animals”.

China was and is hierarchical too. But its pyramid is subtly different.

At the top was the Emperor. Below him bureaucrats — the Literati — who took their place through demonstrations of merit — examinations. Below them, large land owners. The next category was the peasantry, who were not only the economic backbone of the country but provided manpower for its military, which did not rely on a warrior class as in Europe. One down were craftsmen and merchants. At the bottom, a servant class, including low level bureaucrats. Both collaboration and consensus were important as you can see from the middle of the pyramid — its core — which was reserved for “productive classes”.

Many famous generals, thinkers, and even at least one emperor came from the peasantry. Merit mattered. It still does in China. The CPC for all its faults is a party of technocrats. You have to prove ability to get in.

In Europe, bloodlines mattered most. And they still do in the US.

Social mobility was built in the Chinese system. And all were “men” unlike in Europe.

Man: Good or Bad?

Confucius and Mencius thought holistically that human beings were good in the context of nature — and that source of evil was social imbalance and poor governance. If your roof leaks, don’t blame the rain, blame the design. One cannot fight nature. To survive, one must find balance and learn from mistakes. Europe was totalitarian and ideological; China was imperfectly democratic but pragmatic.

That idea has survived today. Xi Jinping has sought to meld Confucian morality and modern CPC ideology, looking back, as it were, to the future. The concept of “ecological civilization” is in the context of China revolutionary.

Collaborative Consensus cultures are sustained by friends and allies and cooperative relationships — and merit. You don’t want or need enemies.

Since conflict cultures by definition, need enemies, both within and without, and power needs to justify its violence, men are thought to be inherently brutal and greedy. It is always Me versus You. Us versus Them. There is no real collaboration because everyone is out for himself or herself. Nor is there consensus. What you get instead is compliance in the interests of personal survival. As long as serfs had bread they were happy. As long as modern Americans have smartphones and Starbucks they think themselves content.

China had philosophers with similar ideas.

Xunzi, the Chinese Hobbes of his time, believed men were born not so much “evil” but grasping and venal — and that the capacity for Good had to inculcated with culture, laws, and rituals — “civilization” — led by some wise person — like him, of course. What we call our “humanity” was / is something that had to be learned and enforced with discipline, something like the old British public school system — nurtural rather than natural.

But Xunzi was not in the mainstream.

Europe had its Rousseaus and Spinozas who saw human beings as part of nature and not separate. But for each, there were a dozen Hobbes who believed that man was divorced from the natural environment: greedy, brutal and selfish — justifying authoritarian control from above by a monarch or aristocracy, what Hobbes called “Leviathan”, themselves as separate from ordinary men as ordinary men are from animals.

Even today, Hobbes’ view is dominant as we can see by the extraordinary popularity of pseudo-scholar Steven Pinker’s books which present man as a genetic “deplorable” –a sort of upgraded chimpanzee with a bad temper and no moral sense.

Our modern Leviathans are Jeff Bezos, Soros and Gates and a few hundred people who own half the planet –including the people there and nod approvingly. For Pinker himself, Leviathan would be a Harvard professor like himself peddling fake theories.

But previous Leviathans gave us Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the atrocities of the Korean War, Vietnam and the Middle East. The fact is that people don’t like violence and don’t like to think about it, so long as there is no threat to us. We want to think we are good.