CHINA: UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

As a partner in the only truly Sino-Western global law firm on the planet, I have a ring-side seat witnessing, in microcosm, the most important encounter of two different value systems and polities of our time. This sounds hyperbolic and grandiloquent, I know, but it happens to be so.

I have been fortunate in my career to have had few days off work for ill-health, partly through having an irritating knack of only getting sick (or at least only acknowledging it) at the weekend or when on holiday. But I was recently laid low by some local lurgies for a couple of days mid-week. The ensuing overwork-ethic guilt syndrome provoked me to use the time to digest (via You Tube) an entire semester of the lectures on Justice by Harvard Professor of Politics, Professor Michael Sandel. He has a gripping Socratic style, and has achieved an unlikely rockstar status in East Asia, especially China.

In bare summary, the reason for the East’s fascination with Sandel is his critique that Western liberal rights theories lack a communitarian ethical content, and there are fascinating points of concordance between Sandel’s political philosophy and Confucian and Daoist thought.

To begin to unpack that jargon, we can borrow Sandel’s Socratic technique which begins by confronting his students with scenarios that provoke difficult moral questions. He starts by asking his students to imagine they are driving a streetcar (picture a San Francisco one on a steep hill). The brakes have failed; five workers are on the track ahead, who will all surely die. There is, however, a sidetrack, on which only one worker is present. You can turn the wheel and kill one to avoid killing five. Most students vote to turn the wheel, espousing a consequentialist morality and the utilitarian principle that the greatest good for the greatest number is the goal (see Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill).

Sandel then switches the scenario. This time you are not the driver, but you are standing on a bridge above the track watching the streetcar hurtle towards the certain death of the five workers. You then notice a very fat man leaning over the bridge, and realise that with a quick shove, you can deposit him on the track to halt the streetcar, fatally for him, but sparing the five. This time very few students would push the fat man over. Their moral intuition requires some imperatives, wherein certain means cannot be justified by utilitarian ends. Here Sandel introduces his students to Immanuel Kant’s theory that true free will is not the programmed response to seek pleasure and avoid pain that is at the heart of the utilitarian thesis, but rather the free adoption of moral imperatives (achieved via reason and not revelation) to which we voluntarily subject our behaviours.

As Sandel’s lectures progress he walks his students through the “strong rights” theories of liberal and libertarian thought and then begins to poke some holes in the limitations of purist, individualist free-market morality. Is it okay to charge $10 for a 10c bottle of water after a hurricane? Can a liberal really justify the affirmative action, that a triple A majority community candidate is displaced by an ABB minority candidate as a sacrificial dedication to a communal goal. If the one worker on the track is your child, and the five are not, do you have a moral basis to favour your own? Can the state of Israel justify airlifting only Ethiopian Jews, from famine? Tough questions.

Having done my 13- hour Harvard course with Sandel, I then watched him speak with a panel of East Asian political philosophers (mainly co-authors with him of the essays in Encountering China, Harvard University Press 2018). His co-panelists were respectively from Hong Kong, Korea, PRC and Japan.

It was striking that the leaning of the East Asian contingent on this panel was that Confucian and Daoist thought needed the antidote of liberal individual rights theories to combat its emphasis on hierarchy and placing the harmony of the community above the happiness of the individual. Their concern was that state and nationalist interests wanted to co-opt the Confucian emphasis on harmony and Daoist quietism to ensure conformity and obedience.

 Sandel, sagely observed that the common goal of these public intellectuals was to attack the ills of their own community, so that it was entirely understandable that Sandel’s concern should be communitarian morality suffering from selfish, market based individualism, whilst his East Asian colleagues were more concerned with the suppression of individual rights by an authoritarian and hierarchical state wanting to instill conformity and obedience, sugar-coated as harmony.

 Sandel had nonetheless been struck that (of all the audiences that he addresses, worldwide) it is in America and China that audiences are least likely to object to price gouging, because those two societies seemed to have swallowed whole that the laws of supply and demand are the only necessary ethic. The Korean professor , in particular, was wryly amused that if the dialogue had taken place 20 years beforehand, there would not have been a breath of a suggestion from his Chinese friends that Confucian thought had any place, and that his compatriots would have objected to Confucianism as hierarchical and anti-feminist.

As a lawyer I am fascinated by the comparative law approach as a method of learning, searching for elements of concordance between, civil law, common law and the Sharia. Extending this methodology to comparative political philosophy and how religious and ethical traditions have formed worldviews in the East and the West seems to me to be hugely important work.

The Thucydides’ Trap predicates that conflict is a likely (but not inevitable) outcome when a rising global power begins to assert itself, and the established dominant power internalizes that as heralding its own decline. It does not take a genius to discern the risk that relations between America and China are currently on a similar trajectory to those between Athens and Sparta chronicled by Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War, which took place in the fifth century BCE. Take a read of the book “Destined for War” by Kissinger disciple Graham Allison of Harvard’s Center for Science and International Affairs: it is sobering stuff.

 What gives me great cause for optimism, however, is the scope for synchronicity and the capacity for the revival and adaptation of Eastern philosophical thought to create a harmonious union between diverse and opposing viewpoints.

Amongst the distillations of the ancient expressions of Confucian and Daoist thought that the scholars writing in “Encountering China” coin to differentiate mere conformity through fear of authority, from harmony born of a diversity of opposites, one of my favourites is  “ a single sound is not musical, a single colour does not constitute a beautiful pattern, a single flavour , does not make a delicious dish, and single thing does not make harmony.”[1] [1]  This is Singaporean professor Chenyang Li’s  distillation of fourth century BCE Chinese philosophical writing in the “Discourses of Zheng” describing the thesis of minister Shi Bo (571-475 BCE) “Harmony [he] generates things, but sameness [tong] leads to replication. Using one thing to balance the other is called harmony whereby things come together and flourish. If, however one applies sameness to sameness, then things will necessarily diminish.”.

Another favourite image is in Professor Robin Wang’s essay examining Daoist attitudes to women and the conceptions of Yin and Yang as masculine and feminine principles. She contrasts the western myths of Cinderella and other feminine archetypes (who are portrayed as empty vessels only invested with power by their Princes Charming) to the idea (even encapsulated in Chairman Mao’s statement that “women hold up half the sky”) that men feed and women clothe, so that if one is missing we will either starve or freeze.

 Professor Wang crafts a striking metaphor to describe how “The yin-yang matrix is dynamic and fluid, and it celebrates just like the interactions of yin with yang, the interactions of the common good with freedom.” Her metaphor contrasts the actions of a knife and fork, each held in separate hands and cutting or piercing food, with the harmonious actions of chopsticks in one hand “There is not any single correct way to use them as long as they bring the food to the intended destination, and when and if they do it is clear that they are in a proper position with regard to one another, in a sort of rhythmical movement. Chopsticks appear outwardly identical, though each is held differently: one held straight, the other moving or yielding to the action of your forefinger or hand. But you can switch the chopsticks, and the one that was straight will now be the yielding one. It does not matter which goes into which position, so long as both work together harmoniously.”.

Reading all of this prompted me to dig out and go back to a compilation of CG Jung’s writings on Eastern thought [2]. Diving down from comparative law, to comparative political philosophy, to the depths of Jung’s extraordinary journeying into global myths and archetypes and the foundations of the collective unconscious, left me concerned that I was probably out of my depth and needed to come back to the surface, have a stiff Scotch, and sue somebody, which is my day job. But I couldn’t help myself.

Jung’s cultural frame of reference may never have freed him from some innate prejudices, but its breadth is unsurpassed. Probably only he could string together these three thoughts: -

1)     “According to the central concepts of Taoism, Tao is divided into a fundamental pair of opposites, yang and yin. Yang signifies warmth, light, maleness; yin is cold, darkness, femaleness. Yang is also heaven, yin earth. From the yang force arises shen, the celestial portion of the human soul. From the yin force comes kwei, the earthly part. As a microcosm, man is a reconciler of the opposites. Heaven, man and earth form the three chief elements of the world, the san-tsai.”

2)     “The picture thus presented is an altogether primitive idea which we find elsewhere, as for instance in the West African myth where Obtala and Odudua, the first parents (heaven and earth) lie together in a calabash until a son, man, arises between them.”

3)     “The division of the psyche into a shen (or hwan) soul and a kwei (or p’o) soul is a great psychological truth. This Chinese conception is echoed in the well-known passage from Faust:

“Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast,

And each will wrestle for the mastery there.

The one has passion’s craving crude for love

And hugs a world where sweet the senses rage;

The other longs for pastures fair above,

Leaving the murk for lofty heritage.”

Jung expressed rather accurately and succinctly one core thought which permeates the exposition of Eastern thought and its contrast to Western views. He describes the Chinese worldview in an essay “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle”. He opens this by explaining “The causality principle asserts that the connection between cause and effect is a necessary one. The synchronicity principle asserts that the terms of a meaningful coincidence are connected by simultaneity and meaning.”.

 For the meeting of Western and Chinese culture to be generative as harmonious rather than diminishing, or clashing destructively as two competing strains of sameness, the West will need to grasp and embrace this principle of synchronicity.

Western scientific thought is rooted in mechanical laws that predicate causality and raises the problem of either identifying a first cause or tolerating an infinite regression. This mechanical world view also casts the outcome of a meeting of cultures as producing a winner and a loser, rather than an outcome of one plus one equaling three.

As Professor Wang puts it “Ontologically speaking, only interaction and diversity can lead to generation, and only with generation can there be development, which in turn can lead to flourishing. The yin yang matrix is constructed from structures of interactive relationships and the dynamic tendencies to compel them, rather than on the individual characteristics of things in themselves with their own unchanging essences.”

 The limitations of the static laws of a Newtonian mechanical worldview being “the whole truth” rather than the partial truth ( which they have been empirically established to be ) engages the problem that  (as Wang describes) “ the model of a precise, predictable and orderly clock cannot solve the issue of the myriad things of the universe: how do the myriad things come into being? As Peter Corning (2002) puts it, “Rules or laws have no causal efficacy; they do not generate anything.”.

Anyway, that’s enough of this hippy stuff, I need a drink and either to sue somebody or sell them opium at gunpoint, a harmonious transaction if ever there was one.

[2] Jung on the East, Routledge 1995