The Analects of Confucius: China's Dark Ages.

Analects of Confucius a book that I read
for the first time as a teenager and then I'm now reading for the second time as an old man it absolutely did not occur to me it did not occur to me that I would have less appreciation for this book in my old age then I have when I was a teenager think of all the things I've done in the last few decades I studied Buddhism I learned pal League I've lived in Cambodia Laos Thailand various parts of China I started studying the Chinese language I briefly study Japanese I've studied such an amazing array of things and history politics and languages of Asia you might think that now and a41 in giving this book a second chance that I would have some kind of deeper or more profound appreciation for the philosophy of Confucius but I think that'll be a little bit like saying to an atheist if you were now to reread the Bible would you have more or less appreciation for it or more or less contempt perhaps I utterly despise the philosophy of Confucius and it's very interesting that now at 41 I'm rereading it simultaneous with a rereading of Lord Shang yang normally no English - says Lord Xiang Lord Xiang Yang's book that started the counter Confucian current in Chinese philosophy normally called in English legalism what Xiang yang is constantly preaching against is this horrifying vision of a society where advancement and promotion within the aristocracy and within the government is based on your ability to memorize and recite passages of poetry where government is not in the hands of capable competent men who know how to farm who know how to lead an army who know how to resolve a court case who know how to collect taxes know where government is in the hands of a bunch of effete and useless aristocrats who spend all of their time standing around and carrying out fancy tea drinking ceremonies swilling wine complimenting each other singing songs together memorizing and reciting poetry from the supposedly respectable compendium of literature known as the book of ODEs what Shang yang is warning us against is the horrifying vision of precisely what Chinese society was to become it was a sigh ities at during the lifetime of Confucius was based on advancement by memorizing and reciting the literature that was already ancient during the time that Confucius was alive and many many centuries later the work of Confucius itself would replace the book of oz would replace the edging also the book of documents it's called an Englishman strangely you know would replace that more ancient literature as being the touchstone the the source texts the locust classic us that every scholarly gentleman must memorize must commit to memory must write examinations about in order to get ahead so Lord Shang represents a kind of pragmatic mud and blood technocracy saying no you need men who are responsible you need to have promotion that's based on bravery in battle and you know the people who are in charge of farming need to be competent in agriculture what one of his most strikingly modern sentiments is that government should not be based on superstition government should based on statistics you should use the statistical method and evaluate it what you do with your land Lord Shang is very big on the rule of law and order and he very bluntly and brutally talks about the enforcement of law and creating the people's trust in government through law enforcement and so on and so forth whereas someone like Confucius has a completely superstitious an irrational notion of how government works and if how people come to trust their rulers and how rulers come to inspire good behavior in their people what Confucius tells you reading the text shall we say literally I'll tell you in just a moment whatever by literally and what would be the opposite of literally in this context reading the text literally Confucius tells you again and again it doesn't matter who wins the war it doesn't matter who has the best soldiers it doesn't matter eyes the best army money doesn't matter don't worry about what matters is the performance of ritual correctly and cultivating your own mannerisms so that your whole life is kind of pervaded with ritual ritual not merely in the sense of sacrificing a goat at the altar to the gods which they do we get details about that that kind of ritual is a huge part of life but then also that in your relationship with your parents and the fellow villagers everyone I mean that almost every part of your life is pervaded with and defined by write and ritual shows it so well done it and then the other side of it is this inner struggle for the cultivation of true virtue and we're told again and again that performing the rituals alone learning the customs singing the right songs memorizing the poems nature book of votes all of that would be meaningless if you didn't have the inner virtue behind it if you weren't performing these rituals with sincerity and if you do that Confucius is literally teaching you that those other things don't matter you don't have to worry about or any money you don't have to worry about whether or not you starve you don't have to worry about whether not the people of your kingdom are gonna starve you don't have to worry about who wins the war because all you do is when you sit on the throne when you govern whether you're the mayor or the king of the whole kingdom whatever when you occupy that position of authority everyone respects you in response to you because you have this kind of ritual purity on your side and then you have also this inner purity this true virtue this true goodness that he's very interested in tell you about cultivating and that is what we would call complete the only defense I can offer of Confucius the only positive thing I can say about him is that I do think in his own time when he was himself alive all of this was meant to be interpreted with a certain wink of the eye a certain clinda you know he's standing there giving this morality lecture and saying well you know we're fine gentlemen like you and I we don't care about earning money and in reality all the students are spending most of their time worrying about earning money well you know we're fine gentlemen like you and I we don't spend our time chasing after beautiful women something mentioned many many times and his students are of course obsessed with chasing beautiful women and you know we we can't be too concerned about military affairs it's completely explicit in this text that Confucius himself and his students they are practicing archery they are asking each other questions about what would you do if you were the commander leading an army of three columns what we do in this and that military conflict they studied military concepts in the past they're asking questions about ongoing military conflicts at that time they are political creatures and they are creatures who are effete aristocrats but to some extent it remains a fighting aristocracy it remains a concept of the aristocracy that's still very directly rooted in military service and shall we say carrying out the law whether that's acting as a judge or jury or executioner to be blunt and the Confucian Estrada sized for that also so what most people would tell you is that when you read Lord Shang you're looking at the sort of brutal mud and blood reality of politics even of economics whereas with Confucius you're looking at some kind of refined religious ideal of what it is to be a good manner lead a good life I have to tell you the religious ideal that's presented here taking it seriously is much more horrifying to me than the religious ideal of the New Testament of Christianity I'm an atheist I'm a nihilistic atheist and I've certainly spent much more time in my life worrying about and lecturing about what's wrong with Christianity currently and historically then I have spent time worrying about what was wrong with Confucianism but the warning issued by young the warning issued by Lord Xiang is profoundly right nothing could be more horrible than to live in a society where advancement and promotion in government and in the aristocracy is based on your ability to memorize and recite erotic poetry written a few centuries earlier where the king and the ministers select a young man and put him in charge of an army or put him in charge of agricultural reform on the basis of the fact that he has refined manners when sipping tea or swilling alcohol and standing around and courting poetry and casually participating in archery contest this is an absolutely horrible vision of how to organize a society and it held back the development of China for many many centuries this really was you know China's Dark Ages this is the secret formula for why China never did make the progress that Europe did over a period of say 2,000 years there's a whole lot wrong with Chinese society that we can see in germ or in principle here in the the Analects of Confucius going further though even just inwardly personally morally ethically I would rather try to live my life by sincerely interpreting and applying the principles that are in the New Testament that Iran in Christianity then living by these principles these these are bad principles this this is very bad advice for how to be a good person even compared to a religion I don't believe in and despise like Christianity um to give a little bit of credit where it's due Christianity is both anti-clerical in terms of the actual text of the New Testament the Bible and it's quite a tea ritual remember that old line let the dead bury the dead it's not what goes into a man's mouth that defiles him that's what comes out of his mouth you have many many passages where Jesus is telling you explicitly that the ways of the old temple the Judaism of the the Temple in Jerusalem are now over and what a coincidence this book was actually written in the context of the discretion destruction of the temple it very much emerge from its own political and historical circumstances that instead the ethic of what it means to live a good life and be a good Jew although we now think of this as Christianity now Judaism in its own time this was a kind of air SATs reform of Judaism what it meant to be a good Jew was no longer going to be something defined by these rituals so the et ritual element of Christianity alone makes it a much better philosophy to live by than this which is ultimately mired in the backward-looking view of a man who lived in a period of time when the Zhuo dynasty was falling apart and ending and who was squarely facing backward toward the past and said no said no to all the progress that's represented by someone like Shang yang said no no no let's go backward backward backward not forward let's keep imitating our ancestors let's keep imitating them right down to the minor details of the type of cup you use when performing a certain ritual and the ritual is performed in the palace and by the local kind of mayor or the local petty government officials let's continue to have a society that's utterly dominated by and defined by you know what - you and I must be utterly meaningless details of what should be the decorations on the ceilings and the columns of people in different stations of government and how to perform funeral rituals this sort of thing the the notion of ritual here which includes acts just as crude as tribal people ritually sacrificing a goat or a lamb and it's it's no better than what you might think of as you know a backward tribal people with their witch doctor killing an animal for magical and superstitious reasons that kind of ritual is part of this life but it's almost worse to see this the way in which right and ritual and ritualistic attitudes are supposed to infest and corrupt every element of your life including your relationship with your parents your relationship with your children your relationship with your husband or wife and of course the delusion he asked you to participate in is that if only you will be pious enough if only you will conform honestly and utterly with these rituals they you will be rewarded with wealth without having to pursue wealth that magically the universe this is very much like the power of positive thinking in our times and there's this hit book the secret there's some ways in which this resonates with shocky hippie religiosity in the 21st century if only you as a ruler practice this kind of purity inwardly and outwardly then you will be rewarded with having a great Kingdom and the people will obey you you'll inspire the people to be good people and there will be law and order there'll be law and order that doesn't rest on the use of brutality and force or even the quality of the laws you're writing whatever doesn't come from these worldly sources it comes from this supernatural and mysterious source that is a worldview that I can say is somehow more anti-realist than Christianity so that's my wistful reflection for you the particular translation is excellent the introduction even though it's only about 10 or 12 pages it's worth buying the book for for those 10 or 12 pages in the introduction very informative sums up a lot of save you four years of going to university frankly you just read the introduction twice but the book itself is absolute garbage and I close this video just by saying we're living through a period of time in the year 2020 when Confucius has been transformed from being the great enemy of the Communist Party of China to being the mascot of the Communist Party today all around the world the Communist Party operates what's called the Confucius Institute it's a chain of Institute's all around the world they've taken the name of Confucius and the idea of Confucianism and they've made it into something that represents the new China in the same way that Mickey Mouse represents the Walt Disney Corporation I don't have any sincere fear that China will revert to the mentality of the Dark Ages but it's certainly a period of time when we all have to look at China with one eyebrow raised and asked what is next