Where I am, is Chinese Culture

Wo ich bin, ist deutsche kultur,” said Thomas Mann. “Where I am, is German culture,” captures in a single literary breathe a particularly keen and astounding acuity that has also been rendered as “Wo ich bin, die ist deutsche kultur”. This other version, standing alone and adding the word “die” (for “there”), entirely shifts the initial meaning: Mann as an embodiment of German culture, regardless of the consequence of space and time, thus symbolizes the spread of the culture, or cultural dominance.

Mann’s reported words in the New York Times (he might have originally said them in German) not long after he arrived in New York from Nazi Germany were as follows:

“It is hard to bear. But what makes it easier is the realization of the poisoned atmosphere in Germany. That makes it easier because it’s actually no loss. Where I am, there is Germany. I carry my German culture in me. I have contact with the world and I do not consider myself fallen.”

The point remains, and it is that Mann equals German culture. These days few Germans, or even Europeans, would make such a statement for the fear they might be called racists. Pride of culture, especially one attached to ethnicity, has been made a dirty thing in western discourse.

There are other objections to this window view of the world, in particular if the starting point is material or Hegelian. This sees an objective reality of the world standing outside of an independent self that, in turn, views the former with the tools of reason and argument. As this epistemological view gained currency in Europe, Christianity has declined because of the impossible proposition that is expressed as follows: if god is to be believed, it must be proved.

The essential influences acting on the external realities are usually considered to be “material” forces; for example, the way society is organized and how its production is expended. Early British society, for example, was not all equal or flat. It was organized top-down along class lines, each class pertinent to a particular form of production. Tall hat Britons owned land, flat hat Britons farmed it or worked the factories: incredible but such was the nature of British culture. And, in Hindu India, a caste system also defined the varied kinds of production so that in both systems the demand for equality increases with the swelling numbers are the poor.

Strip out all the influences on a person, the self is a stand-alone entity. This lone figure, and how its life should be lived, is the subject of existentialist philosophy such as that of Kant and in the political philosophy of Hobbes and Rousseau.

There are varied interpretations in describing this lone figure: he may have a “natural state” or he may possess only “natural” attributes (brutal and nasty, according to Hobbes). Regardless, these interpretations exalted the self, the lone figure, above all his circumstances with an important outcome seen today. It is that the philosophies, taken together, and taken especially from the theology of Thomas Aquinas followed by John Locke, that have lead directly to the present human rights framework.

Much as it may be denied (in the United Nations, for example) this manner of viewing the world is also cultural, of the Enlightenment kind. It was created nowhere else but in the west where a Judeo-Christian tradition gave it birth. No other philosophies outside this tradition have produced this level of sophistication in argument. Within this framework the civil rights regime has as its premise this: Take out all the external influences derived whether from god or society, I am equal at birth to everybody else. Being “self-evident” (further proof is unnecessary), it leads to the notion of “inalienability” and it is here that Confucian philosophy disputes.

The disputes exist at a number of points but may be summarized as follows: it is contradictory to claim the self as a stand-alone physical organism, upon which rules and values are stuck onto him to govern behaviour; this would infer a kind of social contract at birth.

The Confucian departure from this western definition of humanity (which originates with the self) starts backwards: A person’s human-ness is neither determined nor finished until he is dead. This is to say a person’s humanity undergoes evolution over a lifespan, in the values held and conducted through his relationships with others. Within the sum of these experiences and conduct of relationships, his humanness is derived and moulded on a day-to-day basis and from encounter to encounter. In short, the self during its lifetime is unfinished business as it constantly learns what it means to be human.

There is no fixed, pre-determinate construction in a person’s humanity, no “state of nature” to quarrel over. On the contrary: His life is the work of his culture, where he is born, raised, given a home and schooled. (Note this fundamental difference to the Enlightenment view: in the Confucian world, laws are not inconsequential; it is just that they are subordinate. They come later and are the effects of culture, not the pressure points to influence conduct from the beginning.) A key feature in the Confucian worldview is that the self is not the starting point; it is the end point. A person’s life (recall Thomas Mann) is the repository, the sum effect of his interactions with his parents, neighbours, classmates, colleagues and superiors. This is also to say that Confucianism has a highly humanistic outcome: man is the end, not the means to the way people behave towards one another. We are constantly thinking in terms of the other, whereas westerners think first of the self and its social contract. In particular, Confucianism rejects the western (Hobbes) view that pits one against all, which had been a doctrinal centerpiece in the human rights regime.

By granting individual sovereignty and by making all equal, that is subject equally to the law, it would, the theory goes, end the natural state of war among individuals, especially between the individual and the state. But, this state of nature or natural state of war is as confusing as it is alien to the Confucian mind. Among Confucianists, the state is merely an extension of the families, and individual persons conflict not from “natural tendencies” but from the failure of a defined relationship. Each behaviour is framed within and therefore contributes to and is dependent upon relations with all the different others, and within each encounter are certain given duties and responsibilities.

To sort out these relationships is natural to the Chinese, or Korean, or Japanese, but westerners find it impossible to grasp because they look to written codes, contracts, and laws to guide behaviour. The Chinese father’s position to his son is different to that of his position to a colleague or superior. In the totality of these relationships are norms and ethical rules that all go into defining culture, residing in the society, family and the self. It is this culture, Chinese or Korean, which makes a person what we call human.

Thus is a fundamental difference between the western and Chinese worlds. The first insists on a fixed, pre-determined way of behaviour (such as it found in the civil rights code and in laws, such as race laws). The second, given certain duties, responsibilities and ethical calculations, encourages flexibility or fluidity. Reason is not inimical to such calculations; rather reason is encouraged to work through the relationships.

When Britain and all of Europe introduced its race laws, they merely reaffirmed, legally, the Enlightenment culture, a secular code-based culture derived from argument as opposed to faith.

When Hong Kong decided to introduce the same laws, it reaffirmed nothing. On the contrary, the mere idea that the laws were needed clashed with an existing Confucian order, a culture nonetheless even if it had been polluted by a prior British political regime. Western-schooled Hong Kong politicians who willingly stand to one side speaking only on behalf of the civil rights regime ignore the undercurrents of the conflict. This is because the laws are demonstrably not only anti-Chinese but also anti-Confucian; or, in short, anti-culture because they embody a dogmatic European worldview of the self and how it should behave to the exclusion of other cultural norms. Liberal politicians, with civil rights groups on their heels, were driving an Enlightenment doctrinal law without their admitting so, either willfully or naively, so it is no coincidence that the loudest in support of the race laws are those with a legal background, and a British one at that.

The problem isn’t in making the two systems of thoughts gel or fit each other. They can’t. One is an ethical, long-tested system that is inclusive; the other is legalism based on doctrinal dogma: all men are equal is a non-negotiable point, even if the notion is unrealistic and in many societies patently false.

This, the dogma, is one reason why secular Europe and Islamic rules of behaviour have conflicted. At opposite poles of entirely different ethical systems, both are legalistic and both are doctrinal such that when they overlap in societies that mix white Europeans, secular or Christian, and fundamentalist Islam, the problems of societies multiply not in spite of the rights regime but because of it. In their extremes these conflicts find expressions in race-motivated individual murders and rapes (Netherlands, Britain, Norway) and mass killings on trains (Spain and Britain). Belatedly these countries are beginning to wonder if it is their version of multiculturalism that has led to the endlessly recurring cycles of social turmoil such as in Paris where minority youths vandalise or burn cars on an almost nightly basis, and conduct a big bonfire on a perennial scale.

Britain among European countries is especially worse off. Numerous European writers believe that it is a matter of time before it turns itself over to Islamic rule, not a far out notion because in parts of Yorkshire parallel laws exists: one for an immigrant community another for the indigenous, white British.

In replicating the British race laws, Hong Kong ignores the proof of their failures whether the purpose is integration or social peace. And the minorities who are to be accorded equal rights have not the legal standing of Chinese citizens. Even if the laws may not be immediately consequential, these laws represent the import of a questionable philosophical doctrine and a triumph over Chinese culture. More plainly said, they represent the negation of a long established system of thought and culture upon which an entire native population has been raised to accept and trust. To be Chinese, in particular to practise the Confucian discourse upon which Chinese think through problems and conduct themselves is suddenly not only ethically wrong but also to be made criminal.

All this means that the race laws work to repudiate an entire culture, the Chinese culture. To recall why this is so, return to the Thomas Mann statement, which can be rendered as: Where I am, is Chinese culture. It reaffirms the notion that within the Chinese being is his culture; it resides in him and makes him who he is. This is not an entirely ethnocentric statement because Chinese culture is, in its roots, Confucianism. If spoken hence by Koreans, who are more fervent Confucians than the Chinese are, or have been, then they are perfectly right to claim: Where I am, is Confucian culture.

Recall also how Confucianism defines the self and how within its different sets of duties and responsibilities the culture governs the relationships of Chinese among themselves and with others. The race laws not only usurp that kind of individuality, but they actually take over the mechanism within which relationships are conducted: Treat the foreigner in a such and such manner, or else go to jail.

An abiding nature of this culture is that for millennia it has given its people solace and resilience against the odds of innumerable hardships. Now Hong Kong’s liberal politicians will betray it in the name of race “equality”, a kind of equality imported from a doctrine that accepts no other interpretation other than its liberalism, no ethics save its own laws, and no individual responsibility and no family responsibility except those defined by, and which serve, the state.

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