Article by John Derbyshire |
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| Dreaming
for the Whole World On
my shelf I have a copy of Ch’u Chai’s The Story of Chinese
Philosophy. It’s an
excellent little handbook: a
concise and informative survey of the field, with cute line drawings of
the most important sages. From
the point of view of a Western reader, however, it’s a very peculiar
book indeed. Dr.
Chai* takes us through all the main schools:
Confucius, Mencius, Taoists, Legalists.
The last philosopher he discusses in detail is Han Feizi, who
flourished in the middle of the third century B.C.
This chapter finishes on page 223.
Turning that page, we find ourselves looking at a chapter titled
“Conclusions.” This final
chapter covers, in ten pages, all the significant developments since Han
Feizi. The
reader coming to Chinese culture for the first time might think there is
some mistake. Perhaps he mis-read
the title: perhaps it is The
Story of Ancient Chinese Philosophy?
No, the title is as I gave it.
Is Dr. Chai playing some subtle oriental joke on us?
Did he just get fed up after Han Feizi and stop writing? Or did he perhaps present a 1,200-page manuscript to his
publisher, whose marketing department insisted on dropping the last 967
pages? (Don’t laugh:
this is exactly the kind of thing publishers do.)
None of the above. Dr.
Chai is an honest man, and the story of Chinese philosophy is just as he
has presented it: a starburst of intellectual activity in the fifth, fourth and
third centuries B.C., followed by 2,200 years of nothing much at all. This
came to mind while I was reading Peter
Watson’s piece in the London weekly New Statesman.
Watson is an English writer who is about to publish a book titled A
Terrible Beauty, advertised as “a history of the people and ideas
that shaped the modern mind.” New
Statesman is the descendant of the great British left-wing
opinion-and-literary magazine of that name that was so influential in the
1930s and 1940s. (It had its
last flourishing under the editorship of the historian Paul Johnson in
1964-70. Johnson was at that
point still a socialist. Until
1957 the paper’s official title was The New Statesman and Nation,
and it was known around Fleet Street as the “Staggers and Naggers.”) Watson’s
piece comes with a paper trail that you can follow back if you feel
inclined. It was written in
response to an article by Edward Said titled The
Clash of Ignorance in the October 22nd issue of America’s
own The Nation (which I have never heard anyone refer to as the
“Naggers,” though it’s not a bad nickname for that peevish
periodical). Said’s piece
in turn is a rebuttal of Samuel Huntington’s famous essay “The
Clash of Civilizations?” in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign
Affairs, which itself was inspired in part by Islamic scholar Bernard
Lewis’s penetrating September 1990 Atlantic Monthly article “The
Roots of Muslim Rage,”
in which the phrase “clash of civilizations” first seems to
have shown up. Anyway,
Watson, having done enough of a study of modernity to make a book about
it, has come to certain conclusions.
Here are some of them, lifted from the New Statesman
article, which of course you can read in its entirely for yourself to see
whether I am quoting out of context.
Italics are mine.
The
topic here is creativity. Why
was China so desperately uncreative for so long?
Why is the non-western world such an intellectual, artistic and
even military failure in modern times?
Why are the arguments of our “multi-culturalist” preceptors —
that any culture is just as good as any other — so laughably
unconvincing? Why is the
west so creative? Go
anywhere in the world today and you will see people — black, white,
brown and yellow people, speaking a babel of tongues — using gadgets
invented in the west, discussing ideas developed in the west, playing
sports devised in the west, working in buildings erected on western
architectural principles, wearing styles of clothing designed in the west,
reading novels and watching movies and listening to pop songs based on
western models... How
did this come about? A
hundred years ago the most popular explanations were biological.
Human beings come in different racial types, our great-grandparents
believed, and the white race — most particularly the European portion of
it — was genetically superior to the rest of humanity.
You can, of course, get locked up for saying things like that
nowadays. My own, only mildly
scandalous, opinion is that we don’t actually know enough about human
genetics to rule out biological factors:
but if they are present, it is just as factors, thrown in
with a lot of other factors. It
seems plain at any rate that being white and speaking an Indo-European
language does not guarantee you a creative culture.
Ask an Albanian, an Iranian (“Iran” and “Aryan” share the
same root word), or an Afghan. In
fact there have been quite long spells when white Europeans, although
highly civilized by most definitions of the word, were perfectly
uncreative: think of the
later Roman empire. Gibbon
said this was the case with the entire Byzantine empire, all one
thousand years of it, though I don’t know enough about the Byzantines
myself to pass an opinion on Gibbon’s opinion. A
different set of explanations was pressed on us in the last half of the
20th century. The west
basically stole its creativity, we were told by people like Martin
Bernal and the aforementioned Edward
Said. The
non-western peoples were just as creative as us, but we had stolen their
creations, then stifled or suppressed information about their true
origins, claiming them as our own. This
was all part of the “oppression” white westerners had visited on the
rest of the world. I used to regularly attend at an office of the New York City
municipal government to transact some business with a very pleasant young
female African American city employee.
On the wall of her office was a poster listing, in quite small
print, all the scores of inventions and discoveries that, according to the
poster, African or African-descended peoples had made:
the alphabet, the magnetic compass, airplanes, X-rays, ...
It used to make me think of the joke current among intellectuals in
the late-Stalinist U.S.S.R., when the authorities were pushing the idea
that Russians had invented or discovered absolutely everything:
“Russia — home of the elephant!” If
you read a lot of cultural commentary, as I do for a living, you get the
feeling that these late-20th-century “oppression” rationales for the
non-creativeness of the non-west, though they will no doubt linger on for
a few more years in dark corners (elite universities, schools of
journalism, National Public Radio, Hollywood, France) are now, so far as
most thoughtful people are concerned, fading away like the Cheshire Cat,
leaving behind the following single, simple, and daily ever more obvious
truth. We
of the west have political liberty. We
permit open inquiry into all matters.
Before deciding on issues of large national importance, we want to
hear different opinions about them from respected members of our
communities. We insist that
those who govern us must periodically submit themselves to our approval,
and, if that approval is not forthcoming, yield their offices peacefully
to someone we find more acceptable. We
keep clerics and military men at a distance from state decision-making.
We let writers and artists create as the spirit moves them,
submitting their creations to the general public for freely-given
opinions. Our societies have
many power centers, not just one. When
those centers conflict, we resolve the disagreement peacefully, according
to settled laws and conventions. Because
of all these things, because of our freedoms, we are creative, more
creative than any civilization has ever been before in human history.
We — mainly the U.S.A. — are creating for the whole world,
dreaming for the whole world. There
is indeed, as Peter Watson says, “a link between intellectual freedom
and political freedom,” and it explains everything.
“The evidence is incontrovertible.” That’s
the good news. The bad news
is that if you survey history on the large scale, our freedom and
creativity is an aberration, an anomaly.
The natural state of humanity is slumber, under the wise governance
of an omniscient Caliph, Son of Heaven, Divine Augustus, Little Father of
the People or other demigod. And
worse news yet: as tens of
millions of fundamentalist Moslems bear witness, huge numbers of human
beings — perhaps all of us, to some degree, in some inner recess of our
hearts — yearn for that slumber, actually prefer it over the
stresses and challenges and insecurities of freedom. ---------------------------------------------------------- |
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