A Confucian-Daoist Millennium? is provocative. The title is based on the judgement that the 200 years of Anglo-American global dominance may be coming to an end. It uses this central idea to explore the forces that may restore East Asian communities to a central and leading global position over the long-term. Recent research suggests these Confucian-Daoist communities held such a role in trade and technology for several millennia until the early 19th Century.
From this perspective the book initially questions fundamental Western certainties deriving from Jerusalem, Athens and Rome before it advances evaluations of ten central Confucian-Daoist organising mythologies. It details ways in which these offer major challenges to contemporary Western understanding of the emerging global community.
The book illustrates that East Asian spirituality is largely free of the faith, dogma and prophets that have come to be associated with the Abrahamaic religions and that East Asian thought is suspicious of the West’s reliance on abstract concepts and rational structures. Rather, attention is directed to a disciplined intuition focused on the natural world. This has traditionally been protective of human health, ecological balance and environmental sustainability, even in the midst of perhaps the world’s most innovative civilization.
It will be interesting to see if the polluted and ecologically mismanaged areas of industrializing East Asia will be able to rediscover their traditions – with the assistance of technology - when it comes to the inevitable big clean-up. Following Western development models carries a heavy environmental price. China is a huge laboratory for finding out how to develop without sacrificing social harmony and the environment. Other developing countries will be watching Beijing’s efforts at fostering what the leadership terms a ‘harmonious society’ while continuing rapid modernization. Much like a yin-yang balance, Beijing believes this can be done.
Just as Chinese philosophy seeks to bring together divergent forces, A Confucian-Daoist Millennium? juxtaposes seemingly unrelated issues to highlight some surprising patterns. These illustrate, for instance, contrasting and competing Eastern and Western approaches to science, medicine, food and health. Moreover, the book uses these perspectives to comment on the role of that remarkable institutional innovation - the limited liability corporation - in both building and diminishing Anglo-American power and influence.
Some of the book’s contentions invite dispute, but readers will find themselves troubled by the evidence and references offered in their support. Whatever final evaluation is reached about particular topics it is unlikely that a serious reader will be untouched by the boldness, sweep and relevance of the treatment.
A Confucian-Daoist Millennium? is a challenging read, if for no other reason than that it presents an understanding of the world that disputes many comforting Western certainties. It ranges freely and selectively across four thousand years of Eastern and Western history, mythology and achievement in order to re-evaluate the contemporary relevance of a variety of perceived facts. Much may be unfamiliar to readers. While the book often prefers to offer thought provoking evidence rather than to draw clear conclusions, certain implications are hard to avoid.
Evidence is gathered from diverse perspectives to support the central contention that the East Asian region has qualities of civilization that give it serious competitive advantages in the contemporary global community. These qualities include apparently superior forms of administration, education, consciousness, change management, holistic science and practice in the maintenance of physical and spiritual health. Attention is drawn in passing to the many areas where Chinese scientific and technological innovation was hundreds, if not thousands, of years in advance of the West.
While much of this will surprise many readers, the book anticipates such a response. It points out at an early stage that John Hobson, in The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, has remarked that Anglo-American global influence benefited from a type of intellectual apartheid in extending and consolidating its power over the past two hundred years. This followed a period when Europe had borrowed extensively from the East, particularly China, in ways that were critical to the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions and the European Enlightenment.
It is not denied that this was necessary to advance with conviction the virtues first of Christianity, then of the Enlightenment, then of one favoured ideology or another and finally today of the Anglo-American universal values enshrined in the United Nations Charter. These all played important roles in constructing today’s global order. At an early stage, however, attention is drawn to the Viking heritage of many Anglo-Americans, leaving the lingering question whether perhaps today’s universal values are little more than a political convenience for the victors of the Second World War.
What are the implications for Australia and for Australian readers? If the book’s logic is to be followed, most Australians today have been affected by intellectual apartheid and will therefore be surprised by many of the book’s contentions, mainly because they have been educated to disparage such ideas. Readers will wish to make up their own minds on such matters. There is little question, however, that all Australians who seek to develop commercial interests anywhere in the East Asian region cannot afford to be too confident in any assumed cultural or political superiority vis-à-vis their host societies.
The purpose of the book’s critique of a contemporary Anglo-American order is constructive. It seeks out an assessment of the contest in the global marketplace between what is advanced as a declining Anglo-American order on the one hand and an ascendant Confucian-Daoist region on the other. The decline-ascent demarcation may not be believed but it is also not implausible.
A major purpose of the book appears to be a wake-up call. It is to send a warning to Anglo-American political leaders, government officials and contemporary commentators that most are flying blind in a world where the fundamentals are changing rapidly.
Will readers agree with the central themes of the book? It will be instructive to follow the fate of this book and to identify the reasons that motivate both its champions and its detractors. If A Confucian-Daoist Millennium? provokes debate and new ways of thinking then it has already achieved a great deal.