China and the West

Babbitt, Irving. Humanistic education in China and the West [ID D28793].
Most of the Chinese I meet tell me what China needs is a Renaissance with all that a Renaissance implies in the way of a break with the past. Now the present Renaissance movement owes its inception to the pressure upon China from the Occident, and has developed thus far, so far as it has developed at all, on occidental rather than on Oriental lines. It is perhaps well that I should explain at the outset that it has been my business for many years past, in connection with the teaching I have been doing at Harvard, to study the nature of the European Renaissance or break with the mediaeval past that took place in the sixteenth century and to trace the main currents of European thought and literature from that day to this. I have been giving special attention to what one may term the second great forward push of individualism, or emancipation from traditional standards, that took place in the eighteenth century. The characteristic of this occidental movement, as I see it, has been, from the sixteenth century down, its tremendous expansiveness. It has been, first, an expansion of men's knowledge and control of natural forces in the interests of comfort and utility. This first or utilitarian side of the modern movement already has its prophet in Francis Bacon; you may know its votaries by their pleas for organization and efficiency, and in general by their confidence in machinery. The second side of the great expansive movement puts its main emphasis on emotional expansion and stresses at one time the fraternity that is to be achieved by this emotional expansion, at another time, the self-expression that it encourages. This emotional side of the movement had its prophet in the eighteenth century in Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
To bring together the two sides of the movement, mankind as a whole is to advance constantly in the control of nature to the ends of utility and comfort, and at the same time is to be united increasingly by the spirit of brotherhood conceived as a process of expansive emotion. This movement may be defined in its totality as humanitarianism. At the centre of humanitarianism as a philosophy of life is the idea of progress, which in some form or other is the true religion of our occidental expansionists. The typical man of the nineteenth century conceived that as a result of the combination of scientific discovery and expansive sympathy, he was, in Tennyson's phrase, moving towards a "far-off divine event."
Instead, it has turned out that he was moving towards Armageddon. A revulsion of feeling has ensued and the most interesting development of occidental thought of to-day is the increasing tendency to doubt the idea of progress in the form it has assumed during the past two centuries. (See, for example. Dean Inge's Idea of Progress (Romanes Lecture for 1920.) Certain persons are inclined to inquire whether some essential element was not omitted in our occidental break with the past, whether in the expressive phrase of the Germans, we have not poured out the baby with the bath water. As a result of this omission, the real issue is seen to be not the struggle between the forces of progress and those of reaction, but between civilization and barbarism. More than fifty thousand copies have recently been sold in Germany of a book by Oswald Spengler with the significant title The Downfall of the Occident. Everyone recognizes that the Occident has been amazingly successful in its pursuit of power, but the question may be asked whether it has not got its power as the expense of wisdom. Now the struggle between new and old that is beginning in China is along lines very familiar to students of occidental tendencies. On the one hand, is what seems to be an effete tradition, on the other are those who are working for a progressive and organized and efficient China. Another type of Chinese progressive is, I am told, for throwing over the Chinese classics, and going in for occidental writers of the extreme Rousseauistic type like Ibsen, and Strindberg, and Bernard Shaw. Now up to a certain point I sympathize with the aims of the Chinese progressives. China needs to become organized and efficient; she needs to acquire to some extent the machinery that has grown up in the Occident if she is to protect herself against the imperialistic aggression of Japan or the powers of Europe. China is likely to see something resembling the European industrial revolution. China also needs to escape from the rut of pseudo-classic formalism into which she had fallen as the result of a too inert traditionalism. At the same time China should not in its eagerness to become progressive imitate the Occident and pour out the baby with the bath water. It should be careful, in short, however much it repudiates the mere formalism, to retain the soul of truth that is contained in its great traditions. When one examines these great traditions one finds certain striking analogies with our Western traditions that the representatives of the utilitarian-sentimental movement have been so busy discarding.
The Western traditions have been partly religious, partly humanistic. The names that sum up these two aspects of tradition most completely are those of Aristotle and Christ, corresponding in a general way to those of Confucius and Buddha in the Far East. A writer in the Revue Philosophique points out that just as Saint Thomas Aquinas combined along scholastic lines Aristotle and Christ in his Sum of Theology, so Chu Hsi was making about the same time in China a scholastic combination of Buddhist and Confucian elements in his great commentary.
Let us ask ourselves what is the element of wisdom in these great traditions, losing which the East as well as the West will fall from genuine civilization into a sort of mechanical barbarism.
This problem of civilization was never so urgent as to-day. For something without analogy in the past has taken place as the result of the discoveries of physical science: all parts of the world are being brought into physical and economic contact with one another. For instance, as a result of the European war, cotton went to forty cents a pound, the increase in wages that resulted for the colored people of our American South enabled them to buy silk shirts and underwear and this caused in turn a commotion in the market for raw silks at Tokio. The fiery chariots in which the ancient Chinese Taoists dreamt of flying through the heavens are becoming a reality. The trip from New York to Peking, or from New York to Buenos Aires may in no distant future be taken as quickly and with more comfort than the trip from New York to Boston as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century. In view of such inventions as that of the wireless telephone one may say that the whole world is, in a very literal sense, becoming a whispering gallery. Think of the danger if the words that are whispered are to be words of hatred and suspicion, if men are to be bound together in a huge mass of interlocking machinery and at the same time remain spiritually centrifugal!
Let us then discuss in a very and critical fashion the question which, as I have just said, is most urgent at the present hour—the question of civilization versus barbarism, considering first the question of civilization in general and then that of Chinese civilization in particular. What strikes one in surveying the past is the tendency of men to look on their own country and its ways of viewing life as civilized and on the men of other countries and their ways of viewing life as barbaric. The Greeks showed a considerable degree of assurance when they deemed themselves alone civilized and dismissed the vast outside world as barbaric. Dr. Johnson showed perhaps a still greater degree of assurance when he said of the Greeks themselves : "Demosthenes, Madam, spoke to an assembly of brutes, a barbarous people;" and also when he remarked : "For anything I see, foreigners are fools."
No country, however, is a more extreme example of the tendency in question than the China of the past. China was the civilized world; it was in the Chinese phrase All-under-Heaven (Poo-tien-shia) ; the rest of the world, if recognized at all, was dismissed as a vague fringe of outer barbarism. Buddhism, to be sure, penetrated into China from without. But a memorial to the throne that was composed by a statesman of the Tang period begins as follows: "This Buddha was a barbarian." Now in a way I sympathize with this confidence of old China in its own civilization if not with the arrogance that led it to dismiss as of slight value the achievements of every other type of civilization, and I am going to state why in my judgement traditional Chinese civilization deserves a high rating, when compared with the civilization of other countries; this reason is first and foremost that, in spite of all its corrupt mandarins and officials of the past and present, China has perhaps more than any other country, planted itself on moral ideas. Joubert, one of the most sagacious of French critics, writes of the Chinese: "Are they in as imperfect a state as is commonly supposed? They have been frequently conquered, we are told. But are we to make the institutions of a country responsible for the chances and incidents of war? And is not long duration a sign of excellence in laws, as utility and clearness are characteristics of truth in philosophical systems? Now what people ever had laws more ancient, which have varied less and which have been more constantly honored, loved, studied?" One may add to what Joubert says about the traditional preoccupation of the Chinese with moral ideas that this interest has been displayed predominantly on the humanistic level. It has not been primarily naturalistic, like that of the Occident at the present time, nor again mainly religious, like that of ancient, and to some extent, modern India ; the chief concern of the Chinese has been rather with the ethical aspects of men's relations to one another in this world. For example, the so-called Sacred Edict of Kang Hsi (early eighteenth century) which is admirable from a purely humanistic point of view, is positively disparaging in its mention of both Buddhism and Christianity.
But the utilitarian-sentimental movement that is now being introduced into China also professes to be civilized and ethical, and in the name of its own conception of civilization and ethics, it will show itself ready, as it has with us, to discard traditional ethical conceptions whether humanistic or religious. I can only express the conviction at the risk of seeming unduly dogmatic because of my failure through lack of time to give all my grounds for this conviction, that the present movement in the Occident is at its very heart not ethical but pseudo-ethical. Let me return for a moment to its notion of progress. There is a sense in which everybody should believe in progress. Confucius showed that he believed in progress when he said of his disciple Yen Yuan: "Ah, what a loss! I used to see him ever progressing and never coming to a standstill." But the utilitarians have fallen into a palpable confusion between moral and material progress.
I am going to quote on this latter point a passage from a young English critic, Mr. John Middleton Murry. In his "Evolution of an Intellectual" (1919), he writes as follows: "There would not be the faintest trouble in reading modern history in such a fashion that the disaster of the war would appear, not a terrible aberration of mankind, but the logical culmination of all that process of complicating and multiplying material satisfactions which began with the Industrial Revolution in England and has usurped the name of civilization. This so-called civilization, it could be clearly shown, has acted merely as a multiplying instrument. It has increased the desires of man, and increased the horror of the method he has always chosen to attain them if unimpeded satisfaction were not permitted. * * Modern civilization is only a complex of material discoveries and it is nothing more. In other words it is not a civilization at all. It is a material condition which has usurped a spiritual title. The excitement of the process of its creation was so great that the peoples involved in it had no time to look about them. The fervor of activity was upon them, and they made, with an ease that now seems to us almost, miraculous , the assumption that their fervor was a moral fervor. * * Words of real moral and spiritual import were, we will not say debased, but transferred from one scheme of values to another. * * The language of morality became the language of materiality. *** There were no adequate spiritual controls. The problem is how to create them."
Disraeli says that the English-speaking peoples have been unable to distinguish between comfort and civilization. The word comfort itself is an interesting example of that tendency of which Mr. Murry speaks to transfer words from one scheme of values to another. "Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted". The American of the present day wishes to get his comfort without any preliminary mourning; and this is a main aspect of what has been termed our criminal optimism. Moreover the utilitarian debasement of general terms is only half the story ; the sentimentalist has also tampered with the right meaning of words in his endeavor to prove that it is possible to satisfy the requirements of the moral law by some process of emotional expansion. All other modern revolutions were preceded about the middle of the eighteenth century by a revolution in the dictionary. It was about that time, for example, that the word conscience began to take on its present meaning; instead of being a still small voice, as it had been traditionally, it became a social conscience that operates rather through a megaphone.
Now the way to deal with such confusions and sophistries is not simply by an appeal to the past or to some form of traditional authority. Since the persons who utter these sophistries profess above all to be modern, one should meet them on their own ground and deal with them in a thoroughly modern, that is, in a thoroughly critical spirit. According to Mr, Murry, material progress has been able to pass for spiritual progress only by a twisting and perversion of general terms. This reminds us that Socrates, the first great exponent of the critical spirit in the Occident opposed to the sophists of his time and their uncritical break with the past a rigorous definition of general terms. We are reminded also of a saying of Confucius. When asked what he would do first of all if the reins of government were put in his hands, he replied that the first thing he would do would be to define his terms and make words correspond to things. The man who wishes to practice the Socratic and Confucian art of making words correspond to things and to discover how far our current theories are in accord with the actual facts of human nature must use the past as his laboratory. One should remind the modernist, who piques himself above all on being experimental, to how great an extent tradition itself is only a convenient summing up of actual experience. Confucian doctrine, for example, can be judged not only by its fruits since the age of Confucius, but reflects a great body of moral experience in the ages that preceded him. I cannot forbear quoting at this point a passage from the late M. Chavannes, Professor at the College de France, and at the time of his death the most accomplished of occidental sinologues: "Confucius was, as it were, five hundred years before our era, the national conscience which gave precision and corroboration to the profound ideas of which the classic books of remote antiquity reveal to us the first outlines. He went about proclaiming the necessity of conforming to the moral ideal that China had slowly conceived in the course of centuries; the men of his time refused to obey him because they found it too difficult to give up their comforts or their interests; they felt nevertheless that his voice had a more than human authority; they were moved and stirred to the depths of their being when they were touched by the potent spirit coming from the distant past which summoned up in them the truths glimpsed by their fathers."
Let us turn then to this Confucian tradition, resting as it does on an enormous mass of concrete experience, for light on the question that I declared to be so urgent at the present moment — the question as to what is the centripetal element in human nature, the element that really brings men together on the spiritual level, and not merely, like our mechanical devices, establishes a material contact between them while leaving them spiritual, by centrifugal. Confucius defines the specifically human element in man, not in terms of expansive emotion like the sentimental humanitarians of to-day, but as a "law of inner control; " (I borrowed this rendering of li from "The Sayings of Confucius" translated by Mr. Lionel Giles of the British Museum) and herein he agrees with the best humanists of the Occident from Aristotle and the Greeks down. If a man is to be truly human, he cannot expand freely along the lines of his ordinary self, but must discipline this ordinary self to a sense of measure and proportion. But most people, says Aristotle, do not wish to do anything of the kind; "they would rather live in a disorderly than in a sober manner." So that humanists in both the East and the West oppose to the democratic doctrine of the divine average the doctrine of the saving remnant. A man who accepts a truly humanistic discipline tends to become what Confucius calls a superior man ("True aristocrat" would perhaps be a better rendering. "Superior man" has about it a slight suggestion). (Chun tzu) or what Aristotle calls a highly serious man. Personally I am struck by the central soundness of this Confucian conception. It does not proscribe sympathy; it would merely have sympathy tempered by selection. (The element of sympathy is of course abundantly present in Confucian jen). You no doubt recall that apostles of an indiscriminate fraternity were abroad in ancient China as they are in the Occident to-day. The attacks of Mencius on Mei-ti and his followers who were for suppressing discrimination in favor of brotherhood still hold good against our western sentimentalists, for instance, against Tolstoy and his followers.
If the superior man is a great blessing to the world it is less because he engages in what is now known as social service than because he is setting the world a good example. Plato defines justice as minding one's own business. As a result of our current "uplift" activities the point is rapidly being reached where everybody is minding everybody else's business. The meddler and the busybody has perhaps for the first time in the history of the world got himself taken at his own estimate of himself. We are in fact living in what some one has termed the "meddle ages." It might be well to reflect on what Confucius says of his ideal ruler, Shun. Religiously self-observant, he says, Shun simply sat gravely on his throne and everything was well. Shun was minding his own business in the Platonic sense and the force of his example was such that other people were led to do likewise.
Humanistic ideas of the kind I have been describing were maintained in old China by a system of education. That this education had fallen into a rut of pseudo-classic formalism and that it had from the start grave deficiencies must, I think, be freely granted. But even here you must be careful not to pour out the baby with the bath water. There was, for example, a great idea at the bottom of the old civil service examinations, however imperfectly it was carried out. There was to be selection and severe selection on humanistic lines among those who aspired to serve the state, but the basis of the selection was to be democratic. This combination of the democratic with the aristocratic and selective principle is one that we can scarcely be said to have solved in the Occident. Our democratic development has been won largely at the expense of standards; and yet without leaders who are disciplined to the best humanistic standards the whole democratic experiment is going, in my judgement, to prove impossible. Let me take up almost at random another point in the old Chinese education that has been very severely and to a large extent rightly critized — namely, the undue emphasis on memory. Since Rousseau and his attack on memory in his "Emile" we have been tending to fall into the opposite extreme in the Occident. We have forgotten the uses of what I would term the selective memory. This type of memory must always play a large role in any genuinely humanistic training. You memorize great poems or the sayings of the sages even though they do not mean much to you at the time. This meaning is illumined by later experience. As it is, when children should be storing up in their memories the winnowed wisdom of the past, they are likely, as a result of our current sentimental prejudice in favor of child's "literature," to be reading some such books as "The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies" or "Peter Pumpkin in Wonderland."
My own general conviction, then, so far as I may venture to express a conviction on the basis of my imperfect knowledge of China, is that you can get rid of many things on the periphery of your traditional education, you can get rid of much that is scholastic in the Confucian basis of this education, you can modify much that is in the old books themselves ; many of the rules of good form for example that are laid down in the "Li Ki" seem to me to be no more of the essence of that decorum or law of inner control which must be at the heart of every true humanism than the fact, which has also been piously handed down, that Confucius ate ginger at every meal. You may, again, enrich your education greatly with elements drawn from the Occident, especially on the scientific and naturalistic side, and so acquire the material efficiency that China lacks. I believe, however, that with all the peripheral changes you need to retain a certain central rightness in the traditional conception. This rightness seems to me to derive from the perception that the maintenance of civilization is due, not primarily to the multitude and to some "general will" in Rousseau's sense that emanates spontaneously from a supposedly divine average, but to a saving remnant or comparatively small number of leaders. The ultimate basis of sound leadership is the type of character that is achieved through self-discipline, and this self-discipline itself has its root in humility or "submission to the will of Heaven." I am inclined to think that Confucius is superior to many of our occidental humanists in his clear recognition of the fact that the law of measure is itself subject to the law of humility. The mention of humility raises the question to what extent distinctively religious elements should enter into your new education ; for Confucianism, admirable in its own way, is not, in any complete sense of the word, a religion. This question is too large to be adequately treated in a talk of this kind and I am not planning to discuss it in any detail. I may say, however, in passing, that I have been struck by one thing in my study of Buddhism — and when I was a youth I was at pains to learn both Sanskrit and Pali in order that I might gain some knowledge of Buddhist doctrine at the source, — and that is, that in its original form Buddhism is much nearer to the modern spirit, which I have defined as the positive and critical spirit, than the Mahayana, which is practically the only form of Buddhism you have had in China. A certain number of Chinese should study Pali — some indeed are now doing this in America — not only to understand various aspects of the past in China but to discover how far this ancient faith may still be a living force upon the present. (It Is not easy to get an adequate notion of Buddhism through translations. The difficulty is in the rendering of the general terms. Fausboll, for example, has rendered fifteen different Pall words by the one word "desire" in his translation of the Sutta-Nipata ; Vol. X. Sacred Books of the East. In his translation of the Dhammapada (ibid.). Max Muller has (ch. XVI) rendered by "love" two different terms, neither of which properly has that meaning). Judged by its fruits in life and conduct Buddhism at its best is a striking confirmation of Christianity.
The conclusion of the whole matter is this: You cannot afford to neglect the ethical side of your Renaissance, nor again can you afford to be pseudoethical, as you may be, if you adopt too uncritically certain notions that are current in the West today. Specifically you will run the danger of losing what is best in your own great and civilized past without acquiring what is really civilized in the Occident. You will merely acquire, if you are too utilitarian, our machinery — our typewriters and telephones and automobiles — and, because the latest machinery is likely to be the best, you are likely to assume the same of our literature, and to run after our Rousseauistic eccentrics. The remedy, it seems to me, is not to lose touch with your own background in the name of a superficial progress, and at the same time to get into closer touch with our background beginning with the Greeks. You will find that the two backgrounds confirm one another especially on the humanistic side, and constitute together what one may term the wisdom of the ages. It seems to me regrettable that there are less than a dozen Chinese students in America today who are making a serious study of our occidental background in art and literature and philosophy. There should be at least a hundred. You should have scholars at all your more important seats of learning who could teach the Confucian Analects in connection with the Ethics of Aristotle. On the other hand, we should have at our important seats of learning scholars, preferably Chinese, who could give courses in Chinese history and moral philosophy. This might prove an important way of promoting a real understanding between the intellectual leaders of Orient and Occident. The tragic failure of the past century has been the failure to work out a sound type of internationalism. Science is in a sense international, but it has been turned to the ends of national aggrandizement. The type of brotherly love that has been preached in connection with the humanitarian movement has proved even more fallacious. Why not work for a humanistic international? An international, one may say, of gentlemen who, without rising necessarily to the sublimities of religion, feel that they can at least unite on a platform of moderation and common sense and common decency. My hope is that, if such a humanistic movement gets started in the West, it will have a response in a neo-Confucian movement in China — a Confucianism that will be disengaged from all the scholastic and formalistic accretions with which it has been overlaid in the course of centuries. In any case the decisive battle between humanists on the one hand, and utilitarians and sentimentalists on the other will be fought in both China and the West in the field of education.