My first ever culture corner preview...
I'm
salivating with anticipation! For my ethics class, I've given the
students the assignment of writing a story with a moral conclusion, like
the hare and the tortoise, or the men who built homes, one on a rock,
the other on sand, etc. I'm envisioning this to be a goldmine for
our entertainment! With the Chinese film equivalent of the Oscar being
called the Golden Rooster, can you imagine what these students are going
to come up with!?!?! The best part I think will be trying to guess
what the moral of the story is. Stay tuned....
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After
flying so high on the hopes of expectation, I fell, plummeting to the
grounds of reality. Having now been in China for almost three years
(three years!!) I'm kicking myself. I know better - I should've seen this one coming! What was I thinking? Not only did the students’ moral stories lack imagination, they lacked originality. Here
are the statistics: a few turned in stories of their own creation, but
were bland and dull. A few more blatantly plagiarized: nothing like
satisfying the requirements of a "creative writing" assignment in an
Ethics class by stealing another's words. But most simply took an
existing story and slightly altered it, for example replacing the
tortoise and the hare with a leopard and a sloth, the remainder of the
story remaining identical. Of the latter two, I prefer the plagiarism.
At least their "creativity" was economized. So, I have nothing to as interesting to offer you as I’d hoped upon giving the assignment.
In
case you weren't aware, just about every granule of creativity and
individual thinking has been squeezed out of Chinese society. As
Western influences begin to take root, things are changing, but
generally speaking they are a bunch of lemmings, individuality and
ingenuity crushed beneath the wheel of potential social criticism. At
first I wanted to blame leftover communism for this, but the longer I've
been here and the more I've read, I think the reason is an -ism that
has been around longer than Marx’s variety.
Many,
many hundreds of years ago while Medieval Europe was still trying to
find properly sharp splinters to spear their bed lice and dumping shit
and piss out their windows onto the street, the Chinese were a
sophisticated, civilized society, wearing silk, sipping wine, and
expounding in poetry. Confucianism, a tool that kept peace in society
and allowed those in power to maintain that power for long periods of
time, reigned. I assume most of you think of Confucius as "that smart
Chinese guy" and know not much more about him other than his ability to
utter the most profound statements in a paucity of words. (You know,
“man who live in glass house see sky.”) So, I will tell you a little more, particularly how he crushed the creative spirit of China.
As
with his contemporaries, people like Laozi and Mozi, Confucius, or
Kongfuzi, was a philosopher trying to spread a doctrine, his being that
developing virtue is the most important facet of humanity. In
particular, benevolence is the virtue to be held in the highest regard,
and as your parents give birth to you, i.e. showing you the ultimate act
of kindness, you have an obligation to obey them, no matter what they
say, or whether they are even still alive. For example, one part of a
child's duty according to strict interpretation of the practice was to
regularly pay respects to their dead ancestors, which is why
Confucianism is often classified as a religion by the West, despite the
fact there is no god or gods, only dust and bones. (Wait, aren’t we
squabbling over the shroud of Turin…)
Wanting
to talk about virtue ethics one day in class, I asked my students: "Why
does your mother love you?", hoping to draw out their virtues as
examples. Now, in the past during conversation I've jokingly asked this
question to other Chinese people and always gotten the same answer.
Because my class wasn't as casual, I thought I might get a different
answer. But no, I received the same answer, yet again – from every student:
"My mother loves me because I'm her child." (Imagine the resulting
answers from a class of American students, e.g. "Because I don't eat all
of her pop-tarts.", “Because I have her eyes.”, “Because I go to the
shop and buy her cigarettes.”) This put a kink in the start of my
lesson; it's difficult to make a list of virtues in the face of
Darwinian logic. My point is, Confucianism remains evident today. Blind statements regarding the obligation one has to their parents come from everyone I've asked.
As
government, in particular the king, is society's parent, one also had a
duty to obey whatever he said according to Confucianism. The doctrine
of Laozi (move to a mountain and become a hermit, writing poems and
growing vegetables) and Mozi (love everybody the same, the street
bum the same as the government official) did not play as well into the
hands of those in power. Thus, you can see why Confucius's
doctrine was promulgated by leadership. The current Chinese government
so adept at propaganda, I can assume they began learning how to
indoctrinate back then, telling the people they were concerned for the
"well-being of the family," the indirect benefit to themselves left
unmentioned. But that's just me being cynical.
Much
the same as the Bible once was in the West, one of Confucius's books,
"The Book of Rites," was utilized throughout society as a guide for
living. People studied, memorized, and practiced the incredibly
detailed list of rites one must perform to be properly obedient to their
parents –dead or alive - and government – dead or alive. Rites and not
laws, they were, however, and therefore not wholly enforced by the
government. Rather, wielding the strong arm of justice was the wagging tongue of your neighbors and the public, critical voices of leaders. Yes, this is much the same as any fundamental religious community. However, there’s a difference to the Confucisnism. It's
not: "I saw Johnny touch Christy on the shoulder at the grocery store.
Is that the way friends should act! What would their spouses think? I
hope Jesus will forgive them." Instead, it is: "Johnny only wore
sackcloth and wept for the first 35 months and 29 days after his
father's death instead of the full 36 months prescribed – I know, I was
counting. I wouldn't do that, I'm a filial son." You get the idea.
So,
much the same as Christians can be depended upon to hold certain ideals
and be a self-policing community without formal law, so too have the
Chinese been since Confucianism took hold. The ideals
foremost on people's minds when deciding what moral course of action
should be taken, the gossips await to judge. The scale of society
obviously being much larger in China, this begs the question: where do
depraved citizens go when not following the moral precepts of a whole
country? To a different country? The answer is: nowhere but to the
mountains to write poems and grow vegetables. But really, essentially
the people had only the choice: CONFORM or be isolated socially, the
benefits of nepotism and bribery no longer available. So, they
conformed. And conform they did, and they've been conforming ever
since, accent on the family, moderation, humility, benevolence,
obeisance, etc.
With conformity in such high regard, introducing fresh, innovative ideas into society does not bode well. What's
different and unknown is something to be feared and doubted. During
the Tang Dynasty, a the Chinese Golden Age, new inventions and creations
appeared, benefiting society in general. But since that
time, especially during the Ming and Qing Dynasties, Confucianism and
neo-Confucianism ruled, and very little has been introduced. As
a result, how many Nobel prize winners have come from China? Not
many. What's the most recent advent of technology originating in
China? Waiting… How many original kinds of Chinese music have you
heard lately that aren’t rooted in a tradition hundreds or thousands of
years old? Again, waiting… How many contributions to world society has
China made since the Tang Dynasty when they produced four wonderful
things we still use today: the compass, paper, printing press, and
gunpowder? It's interesting to note, while the Chinese used gunpowder
for fun and fireworks (and most effectively I might add), foreign powers
took this invention and created powerful weapons, weapons they later
used against China to subjugate certain parts, all because the Chinese
were living in the same groove they had been for hundreds and hundreds
of years. (Side note: this is how Hong Kong came to be British.) In
other words, aside from slight nuances, maybe hairstyles or the fit of
clothes, poems having six lines instead of four, peach trees instead of
plum, Chinese society has gone virtually unchanged for a very long
time. It's only in the past century that cracks have begun appearing in
a façade literally millennia in the making, Communism only the latest
manifestation of utter conformism.
Some of you are turning your nose up at China as a stale, tedious social environment because of what I’ve just described. But
you should know that, relatively speaking, the result is also one
wherein their society has been incredibly stable and peaceful compared
to Western nations. Certainly their leadership has changed, wars have
been fought, but when compared to what has happened in Western nations
during that time, they are like a sleeping cat who only wakes up
occasionally to stretch its claws and find where the sun has gone. In a
country of 1.3 billion, poverty – the supposed breeder of crime – is at
an incredible high, yet it is still safer to walk down any street or
dark alley in China than the most civilized street our "great" Western
societies can offer. You may not be able to say anything bad against
their government, but they don’t have children going to school and
expressing their individuality by aiming a gun at their classmates.
Maybe artistic styles have undergone little or no change in the past 15
or so centuries, but every family may fully depend on its members to be a
cohesive unit, there for you in youth or old age, ready to fulfill duty
by helping you, even in death, rather than shuffling you off to the old
folk’s home. It is to these depths that Confucianism goes – and steals
away my hopes for wonderful moral stories.
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