Harmony & Discord In East Asian Histories
What are the societal processes by which we make sense of chaos, organize the disorderly, and bring harmony to discord? Who decides what constitutes the virtuous, and by what right do they hold such authority? Holcombe motivates an argument proposing that the formative three centuries of East Asian culture, broadly between 500 BCE – 200 BCE enable us to connect three primary approaches which attempt to codify the virtuous and moral within warring Chinese culture and facilitate a translation to modern schools of ethics.
For Confucianism, of which much canonical documentation survives, a virtuous society is one which is led by those of moral example, and that the utilitarianist maximization of the good seeks to promote acts of propriety, flourishing and positive morality. That the key to a thriving society was the individual cultivation of a principled life, which in turn influences others and provides scale across communities. In this, Confucius advocates for the strong adherence to ritual, a focus on humanity, and filial piety, something we also seek today in the values of empathy, relatability, and humanity in our modern leaders. In this sense the original Confucian philosophy advocates for a desired and determined dutiful outcome of the promotion of the good, but essentially from one to many.
In contrast to the minimal state oversight of Confucianism and non-reduction to single rules, Legalism promotes what would become a more Kantian deontological approach of seeking to enforce codified written law and the empowerment of government to make decisions for the greater good and has clear connection to modern conservatism. In contrast to the individualism of Confucianism, Legalism seeks the universalizable, that which must apply broadly and to all, and where everyone could act on a single maxim to make a collective difference. It’s not hard to empathize with an approach which seeks to pull together the warring threads of a hundred schools of thought in a more discriminate manner.
In the center ground is Daoism, which advocates for more of a (non)consequentialist set of ethics and came to mean ‘the way’. Holcombe articulates many of the challenges in trying to pin down the ‘nebulous and varied’ considerations of Daoism, but ultimately connects it to the ‘simple, poetic and enigmatic in the extreme’ language of the Laozi. Unlike the human centered Confucianism or the societal Legalism, Daoism seeks broader, more cosmic ethical virtue, one where human concern is ultimately inconsequential. It provides a broader appreciation of nature and the natural world, discards human morality as artifice, and advocates for nonaction. All three remain highly contentious in modern politics, where inaction is scorned, human morality is paramount and contested, and the natural world is often that which is abused.
All of this is to say that the ethical and philosophical ideas around leadership, morality, virtue, governmental intervention, and the roles by which we enable others to determine the broader good remain as relevant and contentious as they did during the origins of East Asia. But the writings of Confucius, Shang Yang and Lao Tzu still hold many universalizable truths that often seem long forgotten. And with the world seemingly more fractured, polarized and disrupted, perhaps it’s time to remind ourselves of some of their learnings.
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