Shadi Bartsch: commitment

Transcript context

…Excellent question. We could start out by saying, “How do they think about democracy and our democracy?” One of the moves they like is to say, “American democracy came out of Athenian democracy,” which is really a generalizing, incorrect statement. Then, they say, “But look at Athenian democracy. What a terrible thing. They had slaves, They didn’t allow women or foreigners to be citizens. They were very xenophobic and a closed society.” So that’s one argument: American democracy is bad because it comes from Athenian democracy, which is bad. Another tack is to say, “America is not the only democracy. We are a democracy too. In fact, we are the largest democracy in the world.” The reason they say that is because on the lower tier of voting in towns and villages, it is a democracy. Those leaders are voted democratically, and then it becomes more and more of a meritocracy as you go up the system. So that’s the claim they make. Or they will say, “Everybody had a city-state in antiquity. It wasn’t just the Athenians, so they have nothing to boast about.” Or — this is my favorite — there is a Chinese scholar whose name is He Xin, who argues that there was no Greco-Roman antiquity, that in the Renaissance, the Westerners were so embarrassed about the fact that China had this glorious dynastic past. It was the Middle Kingdom. It had all sorts of innovations in technology and civilization that the West didn’t have at that time, so the West decided to invent classical antiquity so they’d have something to boast about to China. All those texts by Plato and Virgil and Ovid that we’ve been talking about — somebody wrote them in the Middle Ages and then stuck a date on them — 12 BC, 400 AD — which is one very interesting way of dealing with the Western tradition. Other ways in which they talk about the West is, recently, the intellectuals have been on a war against the concept of rationality as something that’s particularly Western in some of its manifestations, which sounds like a very odd thing to claim. How can rationality be Western? Obviously, rationality is not, per se, Western. But what they do is, they focus on the emphasis placed on rational thought in Plato and Aristotle, both of whom claim that you’re not fully human unless you’re rational, and that’s why we’re better than the animals, because we can reason. Then, they look back at their own Confucian tradition, which focuses on things like ren, which means humaneness to other people. You have to show ren — that’s one of the things a good person does. They say, “Well, on one side, people emphasizing rationality. On the other side, people thinking about ren and being a good citizen and being a good son and father. Which of these things will make the better society?” They argue that Western rationality has become far too instrumental, by which they mean science for science’s own sake. eing a good son and father. Which of these things will make the better society?” They argue that Western rationality has become far too instrumental, by which they mean science for science’s own sake. We don’t ask, “Hey, is this technology going to be good for us or the planet?” We’re just like, “This technology is faster, better. Let’s do it.” Whereas they claim that in China, the kind of rationality that they were more interested in is value rationality, where you use rational means, but in order to get to a value that is an ethical thing in and of itself. You might say we’ll use this form of technology to stop malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, and that’s two thumbs up. But we’re not going to use this kind of technology — this is all theory because, of course, everybody uses all these kinds of technology — but we won’t use this technology that simply produces more effective gases for warfare. That is the rhetoric. I’m certainly not making any claims about what’s actually going on, either in China or in the US around instrumental rationality or value rationality. But this is another thing that they’re now using against the West, that we’re missing some kind of moral compass. Right now, there are no top Chinese economists in China who are recognized as top economists by the rest of the world. How far off is the year where you think a significant portion of top classics scholars will be Chinese working in China? Is that right around the corner, or is that decades away?…

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