THE RISE OF THE EAST AND THE DECLINE OF THE WEST
A CONFUCIAN-DAOIST MILLENNIUM?
THE CURSE OF INTELLECTUAL APARTHEID
Australia’s two hundred year history offers nothing to prepare its leaders or its people for its immediate future. This will be shaped from Asia – commercially, technologically, politically, culturally and psychologically. Indeed, Beijing, rather than Washington, is already emerging as the defining force behind major, if often discreet, global developments.
Australians confront a time of remarkable challenge - and even more remarkable opportunity. Unfortunately, however, Australia’s Anglo-American heritage carries a curse — a form of intellectual apartheid. This once promoted universal values to build an unprecedented empire but it now blinds to unfamiliar forces of civilization that are transforming the global community.
Without a major commitment to rethink the world, escape false certainties dictated by mythologies from Jerusalem, Athens and Rome, and discover the wonders long nurtured by the Confucian-Daoist world, it is unlikely that Australians will make the most of their place in the world.
Both the Confucian and Daoist traditions have been relentlessly slighted and disparaged by the promoters of intellectual apartheid. This has succeeded in leaving most people outside East Asia with little or no understanding of perhaps the world’s two most remarkable spiritual and wisdom traditions. Little attention is paid to the fact that they are the foundation of successive and unique revivals of Chinese political authority and civilization after periods of decline. This capacity for regeneration after imperial decline is almost totally lacking in Western history.
Confucianism builds spiritual character on the discipline of education, the morality of community and aspirations of service in high office. Daoism builds spiritual character on the acute and paradoxical observation of nature, the discipline of intuitive consciousness and the aspirations of cultivated self-empowerment. Both support a highly inventive and largely benign form of holist and organic science. Neither encourages the unquestioning faith and institutionalized dogma that tends to characterize the endlessly contending religions of the Abrahamaic tradition and that often breeds the false prophets warned against by Jesus.
As a commercial tsunami of East Asian economic dynamism takes over Australian marketplaces with cheap but quality Chinese products, Australian prosperity is determined by a seemingly insatiable Asian demand for its raw materials. Moreover, manufacturing and technological standards are increasingly defined by one or other of the Confucian-Daoist communities of Japan, Korea or China. The training of vast numbers of the highest quality engineers and scientists in this part of the world, which dwarfs comparable numbers in America and elsewhere, leaves little room for doubt that the influence of East Asia will continuo to grow and will soon overwhelm memories of American political, economic and technological leadership.
Intellectual apartheid ensures, however, that few in the West understand that the force that is beginning to define the 21st Century is of a Confucian-Daoist civilization with a profound holistic and organic approach to human and natural ecologies. It contrasts starkly with the mechanistic and reductionist corporate sciences that have come to characterize two hundred years of Anglo-American global order. While striving strategically to recapture lost political and economic autonomy, East Asians have worked with discreet resolve to guard traditional approaches to food and medicine, ecological balance and environmental sensitivity, even as they have of necessity sought to master industrial practices that threaten long-held cultural values.
John Hobson, in his The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, identifies how the West moved from an openness to Eastern culture to a denial of it around two hundred years ago. The Anglo-American globalization project and civilizing mission has extended power over this period by asserting the superior and universal character of its values compared to those of all others. It has consequently been necessary to insist on the inferiority of other traditions of civilization. This can be said to have worked remarkably well for two centuries but there is now accumulating evidence that it is becoming counter-productive. This seems likely to leave Anglo-American peoples with many false assumptions about the character of resurgent civilizations and emerging challenges.
East Asian communities have pursued a disciplined revitalization of mind and soul that is bringing about a profound change in the global knowledge economy – the foundation of the global real economy and global political order. Fundamental to this achievement has been a four millennia long mythology of government administration. This finds spiritual fulfilment in highly educated service in the practical, responsible and strategic management of the community’s security, welfare and prosperity.
While this pursuit varies today, depending on the vagaries of commercial imperatives and on whether it is exercised on a local, provincial or national level, the history and classical writings of China clearly identify such administrative work as the pinnacle of human achievement. This contrasts starkly with contemporary neo-liberal fashions in the Anglo-American world where government servants are invariably caricatured as obstacles and irritants to the efficient working of the ‘free’ market.
The deft discretion and deceptive art of Japanese, Chinese and other East Asian administrators rarely attracts informed attention. This can be illustrated by the fact that the banner phrase for neo-liberal economics, laissez faire, is a direct translation of the Confucian-Daoist principal of wu wei or non action, by way of the 18th Century French Physiocrat, François Quesnay who was known as the European Confucius. This is an ideal of minimum or non interference with the activities of the people, which has been pursued in East Asia by rulers and administrators of superior virtue. The respective applications of laissez faire and wu wei in today’s world could not be further apart.
Moreover, a cultivated Confucian-Daoist sense of spirituality tends to disdain the faith and dogma that are so central to Western religious tradition and secular ideology. Rather this type of spirituality focuses on the realities of organic life, physical nature and community purpose in this world. It develops through education, training and disciplined reflection a profound intuitive consciousness that is little constrained by those close relatives of religious dogma — unexamined rational stereotypes that are popular in the West and that are often marketed as ideological imperatives.
But perhaps the most interesting aspects of this civilizational tradition are to be found in approaches to strategy, change, science, health, and the quantum jazz of organic life. These are all profoundly nurtured by ancient classical writings that remain remarkably vital today. Indeed, careful reading and reflection highlights striking weaknesses in contemporary Anglo-American cultural assumptions.
It may seem strange to use a strategic classic to advance an examination of the cultural and spiritual essence of the world’s oldest continuous political civilization. Jiang Taigong’s Six Secret Teachings includes, however, Twelve Civil Offensives. These illuminate much of the past millennia of Chinese history, the essence of Japanese and other East Asian success since 1945 and the genius that inspires hospitality throughout the region.
Jiang Taigong was a legendary strategic figure who, after reaching the age of seventy two, helped found the Zhou Dynasty three thousand years ago. The Twelve Civil Offensives attributed to him advocate dealing with a stronger adversary through a form of conquest through service. Japan, after defeat and occupation in 1945 displayed the strong sense of purpose and discipline that is required by a weaker party to seduce and overcome its conqueror through flattery, attentiveness and the provision of a continuous supply of superior consumer goodies. Other East Asian communities followed Japan in this strategy until today the technology and manufacturing of advanced materials and components is largely monopolised by the region and the United States is heavily indebted to the region.
Of course Japan was aware of the example of China, where two of the last three imperial families were foreigners (Mongols and Manchu) but where Chinese culture continued to pervade and rule over behaviour and thought. Moreover, the instinct of the Twelve Civil Offensives is deeply rooted in the region’s elegant traditions of hospitality, which painlessly draw those of questionable virtue into self-betraying indulgences. Future historians are likely to remark on the frailty of American resolve before the temptations of Asian attention.
Equally relevant in the modern transformation of East Asia has been the profound influence of perhaps the world’s most ancient and mysterious classic, the Yi Jing or Book of Changes. This, together with the great Daoist classic the Daode Jing, has shaped qualities of thought, science and medicine that have long contrasted strongly with those of the West.
While, as Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin point out in The Way and the Word, the ancient Greeks sought clarity and deductive rigor in their thought, the Chinese have long been more interested in identifying correspondences, resonances and inter-relationships in their exploration of the world and human experience. In this the Yi Jing has played a central role in maintaining an awareness of the various but fundamental human concerns that require attention in the midst of change, both in facilitating it and in mastering it.
In particular, it has shaped the disposition of peoples throughout East Asia to think broadly and fluidly about the yin and yang imperatives that often demand change in the context of the fundamental personal, family, and political interests that may be threatened by such change. This has produced a pragmatic and flexible character that has frequently, over several millennia of history, facilitated successful and dynamic change in the midst of political threat and danger. It has also produced the only civilization that has repeatedly shown the capacity for reinvention and regeneration after imperial decline and collapse.
The initial words of the Daode Jing also assist in this as they warn against rigid and mistaken reliance on apparent mental certainties:
The Dao that can be explained is not the everlasting Dao
The Name that can be named is not the everlasting Name.
The above lines, which can take some years to yield up their full meaning, remind that the words, concepts and rational forms that often guide human reflection can be imperfect constructs and are inclined to mislead if not constantly reconfirmed by disciplined intuitive perception of reality.
Few earlier periods rival the early 21st Century as a time of rapid, intense and unpredictable change. Few, if any, communities presently rival the Confucian-Daoist communities of East Asia in the ability to preserve stable government, raise educational aspirations, and compete successfully in manufacturing, technology and diplomacy. In this they both conform generally to commonly accepted norms while simultaneously and continuously setting standards unmatched elsewhere. Moreover, change in the region takes place at the same time as a sense of continuity with past tradition is deftly preserved and given a modern but even deeper relevance.
There continues to be little recognition that until two hundred years ago Western achievements in science and technology did not compare well with those of China. Moreover, in most Western economies, there is little understanding of the problematic character of the West’s modern science and technology. While fringe movements are critical of the ecological and environmental damage inflicted by the mechanistic and reductionist nature of mainstream science, powerful financial and corporate interests have a total commitment to a culture of relentless innovation and speculative investment. This ensures that popular media and other public sources of information show limited tolerance of more organic and holistic approaches to the physical environment of organic life.
John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, has identified both communism and neo-liberalism as messianic movements dependent on faith, although clothed in the language of reason and science. He is also not an enthusiast for the contemporary fashionable belief in the benevolence of scientific and technological innovation. He declared boldly in Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions that humanity is not the master of its inventions.
These shape modern life in ways beyond control and comprehension. As a result, contemporary life has become a confusion of unrecognised and unsupervised experiments. Troubling examples include the industrialization of agriculture through the intensive use of pesticides, fertilizers and antibiotics to render plant and animal life unnaturally productive and the use and over-use of chemicals, illegal or prescribed, to alter human mood or behaviour.
Dr Mae-Wan Ho’s London based Institute of Science in Society has been a leader in illuminating the accessibility of various forms of holistic understanding that could heal much of the damage inflicted on the living environment by mechanistic and experimental science. The aggressive character of contemporary commercial science rarely displays, however, the patience and reflection necessary to consider seriously such alternatives.
Ho has advanced a vision of ecological balance in the language of contemporary biophysics – the union of biology and physics – showing how human life and nature are a whole and are intimately interconnected, resonating and intercommunicating.
This begins with an ecological version of energy flow. Plants use chlorophyll to absorb sunlight in individual packets or quanta called photons before animals consume this stored energy, allowing the sun’s energy to be circulated round all the organisms in the biosphere. This energy cycle interacts with a parallel chemical cycle in a very complicated way, leaving no doubt that all life is a dynamic unity with sunlight streaming through an open system maintaining it far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Life might be seen as a little electric current going round and connecting up all nature with the sun and the earth, reflecting the unity of physics and biology. Biochemistry and molecular biology do not address such questions, however, and explain little about how the energy plucked originally from the sun is translated so efficiently into various forms of work - chemical, mechanical, electrical and osmotic
Ho has suggested that one can think about molecular coherence in living systems in terms of a jazz band in which individuals are doing different things and are yet in tune or in step with the whole. It is a state of cooperativity with individuals working in unison by doing their own thing and expressing themselves. She has suggested that these characteristics of biological systems include:
· the efficient transfer and transformation of energy
· the communication amongst cells and organisms resonating to the same frequencies
· the use of coherent electromagnetic signals of different specific frequencies for sensitive, multiple recognition systems and the organization of cellular metabolic activities
· the use by the immune network and other biological functions of specific recognition between hormones or ligands and their receptors
· the stable persistence of the working system arising from the inherent stability of coherent states.
The critical words above are biochemistry and molecular biology do not address such questions. These are the sciences that still dominate much Western thought and even underpin hopes of a windfall for investors from the bio-tech industries. Such limited rational structures are often a poor reflection of the forces of nature and the character of human spirituality.
In seeking to understand this failing, it is useful to reflect again on Greek clarity and deductive rigor and the Chinese exploration of correspondences, resonances and interconnections. Clearly, Ho’s above explanation, despite being articulated in Western scientific language, explores correspondences, resonances and interconnections.
Ho has pointed out that such insights have illuminated life and nature and inspired human understanding across a wide range of traditional cultures prior to the intrusions of the West’s aggressive Enlightenment science. These insights also offer a sound and powerful framework within which to address the ‘miracles’ of many alternative therapeutic practices that have been the target of the guardians of Western medical orthodoxies.
The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Medicine, also referred to as Neijing, is both one of the most important texts of Daoism and perhaps the highest authority on traditional Chinese medicine. At the same time, it reflects a sense of cosmic order that could be described as Confucian. The contrast with the agricultural, food and pharmaceutical innovations of the 20th Century could not be greater.
· Stress and its adverse affects on life processes and the immune system and
· Lack of exercise
· Excess calories
· Denatured and processed food from denatured and chemically damaged soil
· Exposure to tens of thousands of environmental toxins.
The article noted that medical technology, diagnostic testing, overuse of medical and surgical procedures, and excessive prescription of pharmaceutical drugs worked to further harm weakened bodies. The lack of effort and money committed to preventative measures compounded these problems.
Even so, recent Western scientific work ranging from ‘nonlocal phenomena in quantum physics and nonlinear dynamics in mathematics to complexity in ecosystems, the fluid genome in the new genetics and consciousness in brain science’ has been used by Mae-Wan to cast light on the recalcitrant character of Western industrial science and to give respectability to ideas that might otherwise have seemed unacceptable.
She has noted that the official toppling of the machine metaphor, which had dominated the West for at least two thousand years, by relativity theory and quantum physics at the turn of the 20th century. gave rise to new scientific visions and possibilities. These are much more in tune with other ancient traditions and intuitive insights. In particular, it held out the hope of participating in science fully, with intellect, feeling, body and spirit – the real meaning of the mutual entanglement of `observer' and the `observed' in quantum theory. .
The development of a science of the organism was, however, interrupted and eclipsed by the rise of molecular biology since the 1950s, taking biology back to mechanical reductionism. This culminated in a genetic engineering technology that has the potential to undermine the spiritual and social values that characterize humanity and to destroy life on earth. Nevertheless, the `organic revolution' has survived and has been gathering momentum across the disciplines over the past 20 years. It has established that nature is non-linear, dynamic, interconnected and interdependent, with no separation between science and spirituality.
Ho emphasises that there is a two-way connection between science and society, with each shaping the other. Moreover, she interprets science, in the most general terms, to be any active knowledge system shared by a society of human beings that gives both meaning to their way of life and the means to live sustainably with nature. It follows that science is inseparable from the culture of society and its moral values.
Ho then explains that organisms are possessed of an irrepressible tendency towards being whole; towards being part of a larger whole. She states that quantum coherence describes the perfect coordination of living activities in our body, and that there is growing empirical evidence that it may indeed underlie living organization. She sees the totality of molecular, cellular and physiological reality of the ideal, healthy organism involving endless improvisations, where each and every element, however small, enjoys maximum freedom of expression, while remaining perfectly in step and in tune with the whole.
This notion of mutual entanglement of part and whole is readily extended to societies, ecosystems and ultimately to all of nature, as was done by Alfred North Whitehead. This recovers the profoundly holistic ecological traditions of indigenous cultures worldwide. As Ho suggests, the diverse activities of organic life can be thought of as ‘quantum jazz’, where every single player, however small, is improvising freely from moment to moment, and yet keeping in beat and in sync with the whole. With neither composer nor conductor, the music emerges spontaneously as it is played, in endless variations that are never exactly repeated.
While Mae-Wan Ho has articulated the divide in scientific visions in terms of two competing schools in contemporary Western science, it is evident that the mechanistic, reductionist school continues to rule most industry and commerce in the West and that the organic, holistic school is more in tune with traditional Asian scientific thought. It may be some time before the organic, holistic school gains serious institutional authority in an industrialized world but leading thinkers and increasing numbers of educated individuals are beginning to explore the wisdom inherent in self-empowering notions like Chinese qi and Indian prana.
Mae-Wan Ho has shown that advanced Western scientific thought can be used to illuminate many non-Western scientific traditions, which have struggled to gain acceptance in the developed world. Habits of intellectual apartheid continue, however, to reinforce false certainties and familiar comforts and stand as an obstacle to Western understanding.
COMMERCIAL TSUNAMI OR CULTURAL RENAISSANCE?
East Asian communities with their long and successful tradition of organic and holistic science have shown themselves to be more than competitive in the last decades of the 20th and early years of the 21st Century. Their discreet but profound disciplines of administrative excellence, intuitive consciousness, yin and yang wisdom and the exploration of correspondences, resonances and interconnections have demonstrated a startling but consistent capacity to outperform Western industry. This economic dynamism has created a commercial tsunami that is leaving few parts of the world untouched.
Australia has an envious, if daunting, opportunity. If it can overcome Anglo-American intellectual apartheid and begin to transform itself, it may be capable of participating, even if peripherally, in a remarkable 21st Century cultural renaissance. Of special appeal, the Confucian-Daoist traditions of East Asia have nurtured many forms of wisdom that offer to help heal the destruction inflicted on human health, natural ecologies and environmental sustainability by the aggressive, mechanistic and corporatized conquests of Western medicine, science and industry.
To understand and benefit from this, it will be necessary, however, for Australia to forego gradually many of the comforts and certainties of an Anglo-American heritage. Of course, it may be necessary to transform itself somewhat more rapidly than Japan and China, when they were confronted by an intrusive Western civilization. Yet the challenges posed today by the Confucian-Daoist world appear much more benign than those posed two hundred years ago when the West imposed its civilization upon an unprepared Asia.
Most Australians probably would prefer to avoid such thoughts and challenges. It is more the national character to trust that the region’s commercial tsunami will do little more than break an economic drought here and there. Yet, it is likely that the character of thr response will determine whether Australians continue to inhabit what seems like The Lucky Country — or The Unlucky Country. In the latter case, many, if not most, are likely to be overwhelmed by the renaissance of a civilization that leaves them culturally bewildered, inept and defenceless.