Father Knows Best

Confucius: And the World He CreatedBy Michael SchumanBasic Books, 2015Master Kung -- known to us as Confucius -- was really bad at job interviews. He spent most of his life traveling to, failing at, or fleeing from meetings with Chinese rulers. Someday a virtuous prince would surely see reason and admit him to the influence he craved. Despite frequent rejection, he continued to hope. So did the disciples who began to follow him. In the 500s BC, many rulers dotted the landscape of China, strongmen governing pieces of a former empire. Everyone acknowledged Confucius to be an expert in the customs and morality of that lost empire, the Zhou dynasty. He offered to any ruler who would listen guidance to reclaim some of the glory of the past.Michael Schuman, in his new book on the legacy of Confucius, writes that,

Years would pass but no matter how many hundreds of miles he traveled, Confucius never found his virtuous prince. Despite his tireless efforts, he ultimately failed in his lifelong mission to reform a broken and chaotic China.

Thus Schuman opens a book that's mostly about Confucianism, the ancient fount of East Asian morals and social customs -- with the personal failure of Confucius, and then with his posthumous triumph.On one hand, Confucius himself seems to have been one of those strangely charismatic, prophetic figures who stand, magnified to a brilliant blur, at the origin of a religion. Like the Buddha, like Mohammed, like Jesus, he both mediated a pre-existing moral culture and offered a brand new lifestyle. Like them, he attracted earnest disciples, whose persistent zeal was the key ingredient in his eventual influence, who remembered and wrote down his words, who did their best to imitate him. Schuman is willing to go a step further: "Confucius may be the greatest teacher in human history."

Confucius may have been one of the few remaining experts on Zhou customs and culture during his time. According to Sima Qian, Confucius visited the Zhou capital to observe the ancient rites firsthand so that he would be better able to preserve and disseminate them. Confucius's political career was a long (and ultimately unsuccessful) mission to convince the kings, dukes, and ministers of China's warring states to learn from their ancient predecessors and govern based on their ideas and rituals. [...] As a historian, he searched for the lessons of the past; as a revivalist, he strove to propagate a proud cultural legacy that was in danger of being completely obliterated. To a certain extent, he was a cultural fundamentalist, motivated by an unswerving belief that only the traditions of Chinese antiquity offered the antidote to modern evils.

On the other hand, unlike the founders of religions, Confucius claimed no special approval from the gods or special fitness as a man. He even confessed to falling short of the ideal that he preached, that of a gentleman, a junzi. He achieved no apotheosis, claimed no gift of prophecy, and when he died he stayed dead. (When in 1966 the followers of Mao howled down upon the hometown of Confucius, they proved it by digging up his dust.) "Confucianism is missing the most obvious trappings of a modern religion," writes Schuman. "There is no real clergy, no defined 'church,' and no central deity as a focus of worship."Yet the ethical ideals and political principles of this man ultimately pervaded Asian culture and came to function for hundreds of years as the official ideology of the most advanced civilization on earth, the Middle Kingdom, imperial China. His followers turned his failed career into a civilization-founding fable.It's not easy to write well for non-experts about a deeply foreign system of thought. it's virtually impossible to do so fairly when that system has developed over millennia and continues to animate people increasingly feared as civilizational rivals. But Michael Schuman has done it, telling the story of Confucianism, explaining what makes it unique, and considering with refreshing fairness the challenge it poses to the complacency of western culture -- all in a short book composed with the vivid energy of journalism.The book falls into three parts: a history of Confucianism, a discussion of its ideals, and a survey of its recent resurgence. What makes the book so valuable, besides Schuman's easy anecdotal prose, is the critical but open stance he adopts. I often found him asking and attempting to answer the same questions that occurred to me as he described some of the strange and even repellant aspects of Confucianism. But though the book is written with a Western readership in mind, it refuses the easy step of simply measuring Confucius by the canons of liberal conscience and democratic piety. The best part of Schuman's book is therefore the second, where he explores Confucianism's dedication to filial piety and education.How can Confucianism have a monopoly on these things? Aren't they ubiquitous values? Certainly, but not in quite the same extreme style as in Confucianism.Filial piety was raised by Confucius to something like the place of justice in the Greek philosophical tradition. He thought it should characterize not just the relationship of parents and children, but every relationship between any two people. Schuman writes,

Confucian filial piety determines a person's place in the world and forged the very structure of East Asian society. Nearly every human relationship has taken on a familial quality -- the connection between the government and the governed; the management of Asian companies; and patterns of social interactions between just about any two people who meet, whether at the office, at a party, or on the street.

Wherever an inequality of power, station, age, or honor obtains between two people, their relationship will be judged in a Confucian culture according to the norm of filial piety. The inferior will be expected to defer to and solicit the pleasure of the superior. This standard does wonders for social cohesion. Schuman describes how the precarious and labor-intensive farming techniques necessary to sustain the population of ancient China may have fostered respect for social cohesion, a necessity of survival. But whatever the cause of its prominence, filial piety gives contemporary East Asia an extraordinary emphasis upon social hierarchy.

The filial relation itself, moreover, differs from its Western analogue. The primary burden of care lies upon parents in North America. The same emphasis does not fall upon end-of-life care by children of their parents; and it would seem virtually perverse to us to witness, for example, a daughter-in-law serving her husband's parents. But in Confucian cultures, the burden of care falls almost entirely upon children. Schuman tells of folk tales designed to reinforce the value of filial piety with gruesome morals -- like the one about the son who kills his own son to ensure he would have enough food to feed his mother. In some of the weirder byways of Confucian history, children were expected to cut off and cook a body part for a parent who was ill. Filial piety, in other words, at its ideological extreme, could lead to a literal cannibalism of the young by the old.But more than this inversion, what seems troubling to someone outside the tradition is the absoluteness of a superior's prerogative. Schuman tries to defend what will seem to a Westerner like the very antithesis of our cherished personal liberty:

Confucius's views on filial piety are much more complicated than they at first appear. On the one hand, Confucius never expressed any clear limitation on the practice of filial piety. In most of his recorded comments, he emphasized compliance, without any qualifications. [...] On the other hand, he was opposed to blind devotion to parents, or to anyone in authority. In The Classic of Filial Piety, his interviewer asks him point-blank if filial duty entailed unquestioned obedience to authority. "What words are these!" Confucius exclaims in horror. It was the duty of the filial son to protest, or "remonstrate," against improper behaviour committed by his father.

But ultimately the duty to remonstrate seems fairly weak. To believe that remonstrance can ameliorate the potential for tyranny in any significant way, one has to grant an awful lot to the persuasive force of rational argument. (It's worth remembering that Confucius -- never one to hold back an appropriate remonstrance in his princely interviews -- never got the job he wanted.) Actual resistance was forbidden; remonstrance with compliance exhausted the legitimate resources of a victim.Like filial piety, the ideal of education signifies something different when upheld with the systematic intensity of Confucianism. For the majority of the many dynasties of Imperial China, government servants were chosen through the civil service exams, a grueling test of students' knowledge of the five classics traditionally attributed to Confucius. As in our own supposedly meritocratic educational systems, the vicious realities of inequality often undercut the promise of social mobility. But the stories of those brilliant or lucky young men who ascended to direct the empire from low beginnings, just because they scored well on the civil service exam, proved a steady source of popular aspirations for Chinese society.Educational meritocracy of this sort is a deeply Confucian system. Confucius himself sought high government position without high birth -- the wisdom he had gained from studying Zhou customs and rituals were enough, he thought, to recommend him. He enjoined the same studies upon his disciples.East Asia retains to this day the idea that tests of education should determine a person's social opportunities. In South Korea and China, for example, the all-consuming race to achieve good enough scores to enter an excellent college is not, as in the US, the privileged concern of the upper middle class, but the near-universal obsession of every family. Young people often sacrifice relaxation and social pleasure to study for the stressfully competitive exams that will determine their whole future. Schuman tells us that,

The drive for learning in East Asia has turned into a pressure-cooker, boiling the region's children into stressed-out, overburdened, memorizing machines. Children spend their teenage years buried in books, with little free time to pursue sports or have a social life. After their regular classes, any child with hopes of passing the exams then attends costly "cram" schools, called hagwons in Korea. In all, Korean high-schoolers usually study fifteen to sixteen hours a day.

Filial piety and educational meritocracy are the basic ingredients of Confucian culture. They go far in accounting for the millennial stability of the Middle Kingdom. But they've also been blamed for its stagnation. How did the most advanced civilization in the world -- writing on paper and enjoying the use of the compass while the nations of the rude West fought each other from small kingdoms and lived with the comparative comfort of cavemen -- become so ineffectual in the early modern world, prey of every military-commercial adventure a European nation chose to undertake? Surely it had something to do with the fact that China's rulers were guided by men whose primary accomplishment was to memorize the five classics? Or the fact that innovation was stamped out by the excesses of filial piety? These questions characterized the modern suspicion of Confucianism. Schuman writes,

[Confucius] became a symbol of imperial rule and the Chinese social system that developed under it -- and, in modern times, when that traditional system came under attack from new ideas from the West, it was the sage himself, along with the society that had been created in his name, that became tarnished as backward.

In the 20th century, China's Communist party accepted this interpretation. Mao tried to stamp out Confucianism wherever it could be found. Confucian scholars were executed. Their writings were burned. The grave of Confucius was desecrated and his name became an insult. The Analects were superseded by the Little Red Book. Schuman tells about one of Confucius's descendants whose parents hid from him his lineage and who, when he discovered the truth, was actually ashamed to be related to someone he had been trained to despise.Confucianism had been persecuted before. In its journey from Master Kung's failure and death to the time when it was adopted as the official imperial ideology, it had witnessed its share of book burnings and violent exterminations. It triumphed eventually. And the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century have witnessed a similar regeneration.Schuman ends his book with a few chapters about the new infiltration of Confucius into East Asian business, politics, and even into the Communist Party of China.He draws upon the testimony of Chinese businessmen who think the Confucian ideal of the firm-as-family improved the profit-motivated firm of democratic capitalism. One Chinese businessman took it as his Confucian duty not to lay off his workers during the 2009 financial crisis. His profits declined drastically; at one point he had to dip into his own pockets to keep things afloat. But he was committed to the idea that he had a paternal responsibility to those who worked for him. After the crisis, however, the firm rebounded faster than its competitors -- largely because it had a fully trained, and thankful, workforce. Schuman quotes the businessman saying, "In traditional Confucian culture, the collective mentality is society's asset."Schuman also brings up Singapore, an economically booming city-state where the dictatorial prime minister Lee claimed he had achieved, on the basis of Confucian political ideals, a superior alternative to Western liberalism. Those ideals involve a shift away from the Western concept of a state governed by laws and not by men. For Confucius, "good men were more important than good institutions to achieving good government." This principle lurks behind the absolute obedience enjoined by filial piety: ultimately justice can only be guaranteed for the people by the innate persuasiveness of goodness and the attractions of moral authority, not by the balance of self-interest that obtains between the branches of divided government or the competitors in a market. For Confucius, Plato's famous question -- "who will guard the guardians?" -- simply never came up.

"Can you have a good government without good men in charge of government?" Lee [Prime Minister of Singapore] asked rhetorically in a 1994 speech to Singapore's parliament. "American liberals believe you can, that you can have a good system of government even if weak or not so good men win elections and take charge. . . . My experience in Asia has led me to a different conclusion. To get good government, you must have good men in charge of government." These good men, in Lee's view, should decide what is best for everyone else in order to promote the greater good of society. "I say without the slightest remorse," Lee once said, "that we wouldn't be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters -- who your neighbor is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think."

This is the Confucian attitude that made it such an appealing ideology to emperors.If it really is Confucian, that is. Schuman points out a number of ways in which Confucius would probably have disapproved of Singapore's government: he would have disapproved of their draconian legal system and of the suppression of free speech. He thought the moral authority of a good ruler would be sufficient to keep his people in line, without the harsh application of punishment and the death penalty, and that subordinates should always be free to "remonstrate."The Communist Party of China has not missed Confucianism's potential for renewing social cohesion and inculcating obedience. In one of the ironies of history, they have begun to reintroduce as a model the figure and teachings of the man whom they were trying to expel from their midst just decades earlier. Schuman writes that,

After a century of ridicule and abuse, the ageless sage is being embraced by the Chinese government in much the same way that the imperial courts had since the days of Emperor Wu. Children in Chinese schools recite proverbs from the Analects along with the sayings of Mao. Confucian temples have been repaired, and the state-controlled Chinese press regularly reports on the ceremonies that again take place within them. [...] The government even promoted a 2010 feature film based on Confucius's life starring Hong Kong action hero Chow Yun-fat. State officials restricted the number of theaters showing American megahit Avatar in an effort, some movie fans in China suspected, to draw crowds to Confucius.

Confucius, it seems, is coming back -- not that his moral influence ever really disappeared in East Asia.To the never-ending chorus of book-length think-pieces on Asian culture, perpetrated mostly by his fellow journalists, by platforming politicians, or by popularizing professors, Schuman has added a new note. It really does surprise the weary reader of such books to find one that combines verve and veracity, historical probity and philosophical curiosity. As East Asia begins to fill our thoughts more frequently, it's good to have a popular introduction to one of the roots of its foreignness. As Schuman points out at the beginning of his book, "there is still simply no way to interact with a Chinese, Korean, or Japanese person without understanding, and contending with, the ancient ideals of Confucius."____Robert Minto is an editor of Open Letters Monthly. He blogs and tweets..