History

Win One For Confucians

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Win One For Confucians

Last column I talked about how Taoists irritated with detail-obsessed Confucians reminded me of how people got annoyed with conspiracy theorists. It was a strange revelation, and one I’ll probably analyze for awhile to understand underlying human behavior. But let’s talk about something I learned from my (limited) reading of Confucian thought.

First, I want to be open about my opinions – and limits on my knowledge – of Confucianism. I took an interest in it due to A) Taoists arguing with them and B) an interest Chinese history, usually communications. I’ve read a few texts, a few historical documents, and a larger amount of Taoist mockery or fellow-feeling depending on when said texts were written. I’m no expert.

I would sum it up as “anal-retentive humanism about cultivating morality.” Confucius himself seems to have been a thoughtful, witty, pleasant, but at times anxious or neurotic person who didn’t seem to really intend to found a religion. In practice it has often served power and patriarchal culture, but through it run elements of counter-culturalism and principle. My limited experience have been more “WTF” than I expected.

But in my limited readings, a story stood out – one that, years later, taught me a lesson. So let’s give the Confucians a win.

In my readings there are often stories about the importance of mourning one’s parents when they pass. It’s important to recognize their sacrifice, the duration of mourning, and so on. There’s enough dead parents in a casual reading Confucian literature to make you worry you stepped into a Disney film. Yes I get filial piety and all that, but still.

Once or twice I’d encounter a story of an king who’s father (who had stepped down) passed away. This meant big public ceremonies and so on because, hey, dead king. What stood out to me is people being impressed at how sad the living king was, how he wept and mourned so aggressively. At first I thought the stories were annoying, performative – I mean, you know, let’s not make a show of it, be honest.

Years later, as I contemplated politics in America in the 2020s I thought about all the transgressive politicians. The ones that were basically online Influencers, the ones acting like they were Shock Jocks. The ones who were supposedly both the best of us and hideous assholes and in no way role models.

They were being performatively against what we supposedly valued.

. . . and suddenly I got the king and his Big Mourning.

I don’t want leaders who violate our principles, I want them to embody them. I want the continuity and stability of society, not its fracturing. Wanting leaders that violate everything you say you care about means you’re both an asshole and destructive – and stupid. Even if a leader is, dare I say it, a bit performative, it’s saying there’s an agreement on what matters, even if things might get a tad fuzzy around things in the “best face forward” way.

Moral performances of certain kinds – what people might call “virtue signaling” – are ways of communicating and reinforcing values. They are reflections of the agreement that hold society together. It may be a janky agreement, it may have edge cases that aren’t on the edge, but unless a society is totally screwed, it matters.

Then I got it. These kings were virtue signaling, but about stuff important to the community, the love of parents, the proper activities. King and peasant were bonded together in “when we lose our parents, we respect those that created us.” A weeping king was, at that moment no different than a farmer who lost his mother and father.

So know what? Chalk one up for the early Confucian writers. Some moral and ethical continuity, via ritual, is important. Yeah it might not be 100% true or honest all the time, but if it’s enough for society to grow and function, then it’s important. It might not seem like a ritual, but there is a time to say “we are on the same side” and act on it.

Because we’ve damn well seen what happens when destroying everything is lauded, and violating what actually works is worshiped.

-Xenofact

Who We Were In Time

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I was recently reading Thomas Cleary’s The Tao of Politics. These are extracts from the heavily Taoist document the Huainanzi. Having read another set of extracts (Original Tao), I thought it would be a refresher, and helps convince me to buy a full translation which is 1000 pages long. As of this writing, it’s in the mail, so I got convinced.

However, beyond my compulsion and Cleary’s ever-excellent translations, he made an interesting comment on the Huainanzi and Taoism. The Huainanzi was written in a time of rebuilding after a painful period of war, a look back and a plan for the future. Cleary noted other formative Taoist documents, the Tao Te Ching and Chuang-tzu were written in times of war, and were affected as such. These were Taoist documents but written in radically different times.

That got me thinking about history and the words of wisdom we seek. Yes, we all know writings we partake in are written “of the time,” under certain conditions, and so forth. We accept that, but Cleary’s comment made me think that we know that but maybe we really need to think about it.

We may read books and scripture and so on that are written of their time, but even books of the same lineage like these Taoist documents are written under radically different situations. This isn’t different generations alone, these are people who wrote between war and peace, destruction, and construction, dying randomly from civil strife or having a chance to not do so.

I think it really behooves us to look at documents of our philosophical and mystical efforts and when we see something of it’s time, pause and reflect on that. Maybe we don’t just read and admire and learn from the great minds and philosophers in our library but ask what were they going through and seeing. History is experienced.

It’s said that Lao Tzu, author of the Tao Te Ching wrote it while hightailing it out of a city in disgust with the age. Sure, it’s probably mythical-metaphorical, but people of the time might get it as wise guys were saying “screw this, I’m riding a buffalo into the mountain” because things sucked.

It’ll help us better understand what we read because we get the time, the who, and the why. It’ll also let us have some empathy on those we seek to learn from. That above comment about bugging out of society makes me feel some sympathy for Lao Tzu even if he is a pen name or metaphor. Sometimes I want that buffalo – and boy do I get Chuang-Tzu’s desire to be poetically sarcastic as hell.

But another advantage to this? When you look at philosophical lineages – again like Taoism – across time, the writings occur in radically different situations. However among those books and essays across centuries you read, there are consistent patterns. Those consistent patterns are lessons that have survived different times, places, events – they’re worth learning from.

None of us are outside of history. When understanding timeless wisdom, we need to understand history to learn what’s transcended it – and understand what people went through. The timeless and the specific together.

-Xenofact

Hand The Book Across Time

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There are tales I’ve heard about Chinese scholars hiding their books in the walls of their home. Barring a fire, and even then, their writings would be be preserved. As I look at our troubled world here in the 21st century, I can understand that mindset. I die, the book lives on.

There’s something about humans saving knowledge.

We transmit stories by tales and song and riddles. We handed off culture in a marathon race among minds before we could write. What words and stories that are in your brain have passed on in some permutation since our ancestors hunted with stone-tipped spears?

How many archaeological digs find caches of wisdom? Scrolls in pots, carefully preserved bamboo strips, lovingly hidden paper, passionately engraved stone. Untold millions of people leaving behind their knowledge.

Then there are the transcriptionists and later the press. People copying book after book after book, at first by hand, then by block and plate, and today by computer and printer. There are people who’s lives are just the transmission or keeping of documents.

Think of the humorous findings by translators and relic-hunters, things preserved because people just keep records. How the internet laughs at terrible copper merchant Ea-Nasir. How we laugh in agreement at young Japanese Emperor Uda lovingly writing about his cat. Humans just keep records, and those so often outlive us – and today we shake our head at that merchant or pet our cat and feel connected to the ruler of a country long dead.

When evil threatens, we hide and preserve and transmit and print. For all that is lost to history, to time, to paper that frays and ink that fades, we have saved so much. We have opposed tyrants and we have avoided censorship, often at the cost of lives. We will die – or kill – to save information.

There is something so human in preserving the word. Something that is transcendent of the individual. To be human is to be information, to be transmission. The you that you are now, the me that I am now, are just momentary permutations of something much larger.

When I look at the world and all its suffering and problems, then back to all these singers and writers and printers, I think I understand. We’ve all been handing things off down the line since we could first think and communicate. Even as we find new ways to burn our planet and destroy each other, that urge lives on.

We hide the book in the walls, we sing the song, for that will build or save the future despite the present.

–Xenofact