Jeffrey Wasserstrom: uncertainty

Transcript context

…So there’s some degree, as you said, that Xi Jinping espouses the ideas of Communism and the ideas of Confucianism. So let’s go all the way back. You wrote that in order to understand the China of today, we have to study its past. So the China of today celebrates ideas of Confucius, a Chinese philosopher who lived 2,500 years ago. Can you tell me about the ideas of Confucius? First of all, we don’t know that much about the historic Confucius. He’s around the same time as figures like Socrates. And like with Socrates, we get a lot of what we know about him or think we know about him from what his followers said and things that were attributed to him and dialogues that were written afterwards. So you can have a lot of fun with these sort of Axial Age thinkers and what they had in common. Another thing that connects these Axial Age thinkers is they were trying to kind of make a case for why they should be able to educate the next generation, the elite, and sort of had a way of promising that they had philosophical ideas that helped decide how you should run a polity. Confucius lived in a time when there were these warring kingdoms in a territory that later became China. But what he said was that there had been this period of great order in the past that the lines between inferior and superior were clear, and there was a kind of synergy between superior and inferior that kept everything ticking along really nicely. He thought that hierarchical relationships were a good thing, and that the trick was that both sides in a hierarchical relationship owed something to the other. So the father and son relationship was a key one. The father deserved respect from the son, but owed the son care and benevolence, and things would be fine as long as both sides in a relationship held up their end. And he had a whole series of these relationships. The husband to the wife was, again, an unequal one of the husband being superior to the wife, but him owing the wife care and her owing him deference. And he had the same notion that then the emperor to the ministers were… These were all parallels, and there were no egalitarian relationships in Confucianism. Even something that in the West we often think of as a kind of quintessentially egalitarian relationship between brothers. In the Chinese tradition of Confucianism, there was only older brother and younger brother. Brotherhood was not an egalitarian relationship. It was one where the older brother took care of the younger brother and the younger brother showed respect for the older brother. So stable hierarchy was at the core of everything in society. It permeated everything including politics.…

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