Daoism & the Decline of University Education (老子，道德經）
21 March 2019 [link youtube]
Eisel Mazard, 2019, in Taiwan.
Youtube Automatic Transcription
what is meaningful and what is
meaningless in life it's really easy to go into a particular conversation a particular debate whether it's about your personal life your professional life your sex life your intellectual life it's really easy to go into a debate with the assumption that the difference between what's meaningful and what's meaningless is an objectively real distinction that's clear to all parties involved in the debate and it's almost never true I think even if there's no one you're debating with if you're sitting there alone examining your own life looking back on what you did in the last 10 years and looking forward to what you're doing in the next 10 years I don't think you should treat it as a settle distinction I think you should never stop questioning never stop doubting what's meaningful and what's meaningless anyway and I never stop doubting I never stop doubting this is the lava as most people refer to the text daodejing this is ancient Chinese philosophy I am the last person on earth to preach to you that everyone should read this book or this book would be meaningful or life-changing for you and you and you out in the audience I would never do that on the contrary I'm really self-critical I can remember very clearly what was meaningful to me above this book back when I was 21 years old something like that and how completely differently I read the book now what what was invisible to me in the text before and what left forward and seems salient and important the text before and what seems meaningful to me now and in reference to to both men the man I was and the man I am now I'm really kind of critical I'm really doubtful he's this meaningful is this meaningless so we took a block of time my girlfriend and I we sat down and we read this text together and I mean we sat at a table and had the book open and I read the text to her in English out loud and at some points I stopped and commented on what the original Chinese meant at some points I stopped and told her anecdotes from the first time I studied this text with Professor Leonard Priestley his lectures and what he drew attention to and analysis and history of the text and other kind of extraneous anecdotes and clarifications but the ways in which Taoism is different from Buddhism and Taoism is different Confucianism how they all contribute to and participate in the history of Chinese intellectual thought some people are gonna hear this and think wow I wish my husband sat down and did that with me I wish my boyfriend spent quality time with me sitting with me and reading and Tiger both teach me about and hope these kinds of things and some people are gonna hear this and think wow how completely meaningless I'd rather I'd rather watch ice hockey I'd rather watch a football game with my boyfriend drinking beer next to me on the couch that's what you want there's plenty of room on the couch it's not you're not gonna run out of opportunities to spend your time doing that and it would be really easy for someone like me to sit here and in a smug judgmental way treat the distinction between what's meaningful and what's meaningless as self-evident and agreed-upon mo and it's not it's not EW I don't even agree with myself on I'm constantly challenging myself as to what's meaningful almost meaningless so what what would make the study of this text meaningful well I already mentioned one of the easy answers in terms of why you justify teaching this in a university is talking about what Taoism is in contrast to Buddhism in contrast to Confucianism Carter's to these other traditions in China so that you understand the mutual distinctions and the intellectual competition between them another huge topic I was starting my girlfriend about is the difference between real Taoism Taoism is as exists in the real world and the ideas about Taoism that European intellectuals have kind of created and propounded and when we visited ty dome she got to see plenty of real-world doe ism she got to see their religion as it exists in Taiwan today in contrast to I don't know some kind of dry library room you know drawing-room notions that were that were propounded in popularized in Europe I would say especially in the period right after World War Two and another really interesting gap is that it is the gap between languages and cultures is the question of untranslatable ax T which is partly cultural and is partly linguistic so for me reading this now at age 40 unlike the man I was at 21 section five the English reads heaven and earth is not sentimental whoa what what an under translation it's shocking to me it's genuinely shocking for me to read the translation that says heaven and earth have no benevolence have no run re n opinion wow this is a shocking an iconoclastic statement then you read the whole paragraph or even just that that sentence this is really telling you heaven heaven and earth you know which doesn't just mean a monotheistic God but it kind of includes for the Chinese a Creator God and spirits a whole animistic universe of demigods or what have you but yeah ten heaven is also it's also a kind of abstract concepts but they don't care if you live or die heaven and earth have no no benevolence no compassion they don't care what they treat you as a disposable sacrificial animal Wow and this is right at the start of the text this is an unbelievably bleak nihilistic iconoclastic statement in in a foundational religious texts for Taoism now to present it to someone with no other context name which is just heaven and earth is not sentimental it treats all things as straw dogs there's no way anyone could arrive at the meaning of that passage by reading the English and there's no way you could have a sense of the sentiment and the emotional import and the impact of that so well those are also to me meaningful questions right to me I can't sit here and say that anyone else this is this is meaningful a rewarding or how this would be how this would be useful in your lives now this connects to a couple of other questions that that are really ongoing and live for me right now I mean it is that this is not chalkboard in my life this relates the question of in what way is university education meaningful for people the vast river people go to university and study things that have no real world application that don't qualify them for a job political science major so I'm now qualified to do political analysis on YouTube yeah what job did that did that qualify me for I have here of a pathetic poster pamphlet for university program here in Taiwan that ends by very vaguely telling you that it will facilitate students capacity in their competitiveness in the pursuit of an individual career and I really crossed swords with professors at University of Victoria this is this is Asian Studies this program University of Victoria was an Asian Studies okay what are we doing here what are we studying what are we preparing people for now maybe it's this maybe it's hey we're preparing a new generation of Canadians to really have a refined knowledge of the difference between Taoism and Buddhism the difference between Confucianism and legalism different philosophies this Jeff but no that's not that's not what they were doing maybe we're preparing people you know for for some other career or some other life but the role of Education and what's meaningful in a purely subjective sense in this larger institutional sense that's something that haunts me it's an issue I I care about right now now how is this text different for me at age 40 and age 21 this connects exactly this question it's amazing that already at this primitive stage in the history of China long before the development of the National exam system or the Imperial exam system or the Emperor's exam system I wanna say long before organized education in China had gotten organized what's crystal clear in this book is that the audience he is addressing the audience the author is writing for is the class of scholar bureaucrat men who were civil servants but it doesn't translate the no way to translate the sense of who these men were their sense of themselves their sense of their role in life these were men who among other things presided over people being interrogated being tortured being judged and being executed you know they were they were pretty much judge jury and executioner not quite a little bit Fidel think they've they held the swords themselves but they were responsible for life and death decisions over individual cases involving individual people all Chinese justice of that kind of time involved torture you can read graphic historical accounts of that from all different angles people who are Pro torture shiney the Chinese justice system involved slavery - you know people get tattooed on the face and be made into a slave as as a punishment in some ways an unbelievably brutal role in life and we're talking about what it means to be compassionate what it means to be a good word what it means to be reasonable when you're in that role of the not quite a ruler not a king the English are uses the word governor a lot when you're involved in governing when you're involved in government and that is profoundly different from reading a Christian scripture I mean to whom or the Gospels addressed not to not to a scholar bureaucrat right but the assumption of this text and again the degree of difficulty even in reading this text and having this level of literacy in this person it completely assumes it will only be read by the scholar bureaucrats of society right that's not the audience the Christian gospel is written for that's not the audience the Quran in in Islam is written for and it's it's such a weird contrast having now spent years and years reading Buddhist scriptures Buddhist Sutent in the years in between it stands out to me so much is a distinctive feature of the Chinese philosophy and and Taoism specifically Wow even here it's really all about this role of extraordinary responsibility and yeah Airy addition to of the scholar bureaucrat that's by and for scholar bureaucrats and back when I was whatever I was 21 years old there about when I was a university student that did not stand out to me at all on the contract kind of scoffed and dismissed the political content of lotsa but at every stage of this book this is a political science book this is political philosophy from start to finish yeah there's also epistemology there's also there also you know straightforward doctrinal sentiments in there but above all else it's its political character you know really stands out to me so as I mentioned this book was written long long before the creation of the system of national examinations and this comes back to the contrast the bel eastern assumptions of the University versus Western assumptions with University in the Western world we made very rapid progress from the Dark Ages to the Industrial Revolution because the concept of organized education in Europe emerged on the one hand out of European Christian monasticism explicitly Christian Bible colleges what are you want to say monastic were factories and all the rest of it but monastic organized education and then on the other hand out of European military education and under the sudden need to have people who could do complex mathematics and certain types of science for the army out of this we created these durable institutions called universities that's really what it arose from and again you can look at a specific historical example like Scotland Scotland and the Scottish enlightenment the Scottish had no natural advantages over the rest of Europe but they really took this stuff where they disadvantages and was partly in response to those disadvantage they started building these universities they wanted to have enough medical doctors to put on ships because they had a shipbuilding industry so they needed a lot of medical doctors they needed universities to standardize the use of language because it's in Scotland they were speaking a bunch of local dialects nobody else understood there were reasons why organised education got organised in Scotland but it was in response to disadvantages not advantages and it is fair to say that neither India nor China took those same steps forward in institutionalizing education now the disadvantages today all these countries in Asia have imitated and reproduced the advantages and disadvantages of European and American style education the system of education that existed in medieval China pre-modern China ancient China is gone but for so many centuries all of Chinese society was reorganized under the impetus provided just by the government providing standardized exams not a system of education if anything this was this is the opposite this is a known and systematic education the Emperor provides an exam and then everyone else in China parents tutors independent school teachers they all have to scramble around to get organized and provide people with lessons provide people classrooms they've got to sort it out for themselves how they're gonna prepare people to write this exams everyone knows what's gonna be in the exam everyone knows what you need to know what you need to learn but the role of government was not in providing an education system it was providing the criteria by which you would be evaluated and that exam was 100% linked to advancement in social status in standing to becoming what what Louds a here called a sage what I'm calling a scholar bureaucrat becoming one of the men who gets to sit in judgment over who gets tortured and who gets executed it was precisely the path to becoming a civil servant in the society that uniquely admired and valued the civil servant and that those men were also rewarded of course with a relatively luxurious lifestyle and income so that's a a model of Education where education is 100% linked to employment 100% linked to social advancement and in the West what we've ended up with even though we had this tremendous dynamism in Europe in emerging from the dark ages and pressing the words Industrial Revolution Scottish enlightenment invention of the discovery of electromagnetism the steam engine taking technologies that already existed elsewhere like gunpowder but then adapting them and modern artillery out of them and so on this is stuff that happened in Europe and that's why Europe went on to conquer large parts the world for better and for worse from my opinion mostly for worse of course my biased opinion but what happened in the West was that the institution ossified the institution of the university became an end in itself and today people pay to go to universities a families literally bankrupt themselves to put their children universities people live with more than a hundred thousand dollars in debt to go to university and they don't even believe in what it is they're learning they don't believe that they are going to become more erudite people they don't believe they're going to become people with even a higher aesthetic appreciation for life they don't believe they're going to become people who listen to better music or ah have have a more elevated appreciation for the theater or something they certainly do not think their people are gonna elevate themselves in this you know partly religious partly civic and political understanding of social hierarchy people are signing up to go to university I think it's no exaggeration to say just so they can say they went to university and look this this is in no small part the tragedy of of Western civilization right now that I really think Eastern civilization can kind of hold up a mirror for during my childhood in Ontario we had a Conservative government that boldly declared they were going to reduce the budget and have low taxes and lower government budget by some enormous percent they were going to have lower taxes in a smaller budget and when they were elected they promised they would do this without in any way reducing the money spent on education or healthcare and I remember one of my teachers said have you looked at the government budget I was a kid of course and you know he said to the class what percentage of the budget for Ontario is anything other than education and healthcare and that was the first time I really sat and looked at the numbers and look at the pie chart really thought about it that Wow the awesome responsibilities of government is in very large part education the education we don't think of it that way education is the work of government the decisions about education are themselves ineluctably political and there's no going back I mean they're they always will be today China still has the culture of the National exam in terms of the way they regard University and organize you high school more than university because the exams that will get you into university the sense of a national standardized examination that takes the measure of your soul it's a huge thing in Chinese culture but of course today they have a government system of Education so I'm left looking back at this and questioning what's meaningful in what's meaning meaningless in my own life and as with so many things ultimately it's a somber set of meditations on the shortcomings of the education system that I happen to be born into and I'm left with a sort of ashen conviction that one way or another things have got to change change is objectively real improvement is a question of ideology I can tell you system is going to get better rather than worse but my whole life this set of assumptions that emerged in such an a certain way from the dark ages in Industrial Revolution this set of assumptions about higher education they've been creaking and groaning under the weight of new expectations in a new economy and I just can't believe that the Western world is going to go on bankrupting itself to provide the next generation with the type of education that is not only worthless but that nobody believes in that nobody values and I can't believe that the eastern world that Taiwan where I'm living now or Japan that they are going to bankrupt themselves just to have the satisfaction of imitating on Arkan culture
meaningless in life it's really easy to go into a particular conversation a particular debate whether it's about your personal life your professional life your sex life your intellectual life it's really easy to go into a debate with the assumption that the difference between what's meaningful and what's meaningless is an objectively real distinction that's clear to all parties involved in the debate and it's almost never true I think even if there's no one you're debating with if you're sitting there alone examining your own life looking back on what you did in the last 10 years and looking forward to what you're doing in the next 10 years I don't think you should treat it as a settle distinction I think you should never stop questioning never stop doubting what's meaningful and what's meaningless anyway and I never stop doubting I never stop doubting this is the lava as most people refer to the text daodejing this is ancient Chinese philosophy I am the last person on earth to preach to you that everyone should read this book or this book would be meaningful or life-changing for you and you and you out in the audience I would never do that on the contrary I'm really self-critical I can remember very clearly what was meaningful to me above this book back when I was 21 years old something like that and how completely differently I read the book now what what was invisible to me in the text before and what left forward and seems salient and important the text before and what seems meaningful to me now and in reference to to both men the man I was and the man I am now I'm really kind of critical I'm really doubtful he's this meaningful is this meaningless so we took a block of time my girlfriend and I we sat down and we read this text together and I mean we sat at a table and had the book open and I read the text to her in English out loud and at some points I stopped and commented on what the original Chinese meant at some points I stopped and told her anecdotes from the first time I studied this text with Professor Leonard Priestley his lectures and what he drew attention to and analysis and history of the text and other kind of extraneous anecdotes and clarifications but the ways in which Taoism is different from Buddhism and Taoism is different Confucianism how they all contribute to and participate in the history of Chinese intellectual thought some people are gonna hear this and think wow I wish my husband sat down and did that with me I wish my boyfriend spent quality time with me sitting with me and reading and Tiger both teach me about and hope these kinds of things and some people are gonna hear this and think wow how completely meaningless I'd rather I'd rather watch ice hockey I'd rather watch a football game with my boyfriend drinking beer next to me on the couch that's what you want there's plenty of room on the couch it's not you're not gonna run out of opportunities to spend your time doing that and it would be really easy for someone like me to sit here and in a smug judgmental way treat the distinction between what's meaningful and what's meaningless as self-evident and agreed-upon mo and it's not it's not EW I don't even agree with myself on I'm constantly challenging myself as to what's meaningful almost meaningless so what what would make the study of this text meaningful well I already mentioned one of the easy answers in terms of why you justify teaching this in a university is talking about what Taoism is in contrast to Buddhism in contrast to Confucianism Carter's to these other traditions in China so that you understand the mutual distinctions and the intellectual competition between them another huge topic I was starting my girlfriend about is the difference between real Taoism Taoism is as exists in the real world and the ideas about Taoism that European intellectuals have kind of created and propounded and when we visited ty dome she got to see plenty of real-world doe ism she got to see their religion as it exists in Taiwan today in contrast to I don't know some kind of dry library room you know drawing-room notions that were that were propounded in popularized in Europe I would say especially in the period right after World War Two and another really interesting gap is that it is the gap between languages and cultures is the question of untranslatable ax T which is partly cultural and is partly linguistic so for me reading this now at age 40 unlike the man I was at 21 section five the English reads heaven and earth is not sentimental whoa what what an under translation it's shocking to me it's genuinely shocking for me to read the translation that says heaven and earth have no benevolence have no run re n opinion wow this is a shocking an iconoclastic statement then you read the whole paragraph or even just that that sentence this is really telling you heaven heaven and earth you know which doesn't just mean a monotheistic God but it kind of includes for the Chinese a Creator God and spirits a whole animistic universe of demigods or what have you but yeah ten heaven is also it's also a kind of abstract concepts but they don't care if you live or die heaven and earth have no no benevolence no compassion they don't care what they treat you as a disposable sacrificial animal Wow and this is right at the start of the text this is an unbelievably bleak nihilistic iconoclastic statement in in a foundational religious texts for Taoism now to present it to someone with no other context name which is just heaven and earth is not sentimental it treats all things as straw dogs there's no way anyone could arrive at the meaning of that passage by reading the English and there's no way you could have a sense of the sentiment and the emotional import and the impact of that so well those are also to me meaningful questions right to me I can't sit here and say that anyone else this is this is meaningful a rewarding or how this would be how this would be useful in your lives now this connects to a couple of other questions that that are really ongoing and live for me right now I mean it is that this is not chalkboard in my life this relates the question of in what way is university education meaningful for people the vast river people go to university and study things that have no real world application that don't qualify them for a job political science major so I'm now qualified to do political analysis on YouTube yeah what job did that did that qualify me for I have here of a pathetic poster pamphlet for university program here in Taiwan that ends by very vaguely telling you that it will facilitate students capacity in their competitiveness in the pursuit of an individual career and I really crossed swords with professors at University of Victoria this is this is Asian Studies this program University of Victoria was an Asian Studies okay what are we doing here what are we studying what are we preparing people for now maybe it's this maybe it's hey we're preparing a new generation of Canadians to really have a refined knowledge of the difference between Taoism and Buddhism the difference between Confucianism and legalism different philosophies this Jeff but no that's not that's not what they were doing maybe we're preparing people you know for for some other career or some other life but the role of Education and what's meaningful in a purely subjective sense in this larger institutional sense that's something that haunts me it's an issue I I care about right now now how is this text different for me at age 40 and age 21 this connects exactly this question it's amazing that already at this primitive stage in the history of China long before the development of the National exam system or the Imperial exam system or the Emperor's exam system I wanna say long before organized education in China had gotten organized what's crystal clear in this book is that the audience he is addressing the audience the author is writing for is the class of scholar bureaucrat men who were civil servants but it doesn't translate the no way to translate the sense of who these men were their sense of themselves their sense of their role in life these were men who among other things presided over people being interrogated being tortured being judged and being executed you know they were they were pretty much judge jury and executioner not quite a little bit Fidel think they've they held the swords themselves but they were responsible for life and death decisions over individual cases involving individual people all Chinese justice of that kind of time involved torture you can read graphic historical accounts of that from all different angles people who are Pro torture shiney the Chinese justice system involved slavery - you know people get tattooed on the face and be made into a slave as as a punishment in some ways an unbelievably brutal role in life and we're talking about what it means to be compassionate what it means to be a good word what it means to be reasonable when you're in that role of the not quite a ruler not a king the English are uses the word governor a lot when you're involved in governing when you're involved in government and that is profoundly different from reading a Christian scripture I mean to whom or the Gospels addressed not to not to a scholar bureaucrat right but the assumption of this text and again the degree of difficulty even in reading this text and having this level of literacy in this person it completely assumes it will only be read by the scholar bureaucrats of society right that's not the audience the Christian gospel is written for that's not the audience the Quran in in Islam is written for and it's it's such a weird contrast having now spent years and years reading Buddhist scriptures Buddhist Sutent in the years in between it stands out to me so much is a distinctive feature of the Chinese philosophy and and Taoism specifically Wow even here it's really all about this role of extraordinary responsibility and yeah Airy addition to of the scholar bureaucrat that's by and for scholar bureaucrats and back when I was whatever I was 21 years old there about when I was a university student that did not stand out to me at all on the contract kind of scoffed and dismissed the political content of lotsa but at every stage of this book this is a political science book this is political philosophy from start to finish yeah there's also epistemology there's also there also you know straightforward doctrinal sentiments in there but above all else it's its political character you know really stands out to me so as I mentioned this book was written long long before the creation of the system of national examinations and this comes back to the contrast the bel eastern assumptions of the University versus Western assumptions with University in the Western world we made very rapid progress from the Dark Ages to the Industrial Revolution because the concept of organized education in Europe emerged on the one hand out of European Christian monasticism explicitly Christian Bible colleges what are you want to say monastic were factories and all the rest of it but monastic organized education and then on the other hand out of European military education and under the sudden need to have people who could do complex mathematics and certain types of science for the army out of this we created these durable institutions called universities that's really what it arose from and again you can look at a specific historical example like Scotland Scotland and the Scottish enlightenment the Scottish had no natural advantages over the rest of Europe but they really took this stuff where they disadvantages and was partly in response to those disadvantage they started building these universities they wanted to have enough medical doctors to put on ships because they had a shipbuilding industry so they needed a lot of medical doctors they needed universities to standardize the use of language because it's in Scotland they were speaking a bunch of local dialects nobody else understood there were reasons why organised education got organised in Scotland but it was in response to disadvantages not advantages and it is fair to say that neither India nor China took those same steps forward in institutionalizing education now the disadvantages today all these countries in Asia have imitated and reproduced the advantages and disadvantages of European and American style education the system of education that existed in medieval China pre-modern China ancient China is gone but for so many centuries all of Chinese society was reorganized under the impetus provided just by the government providing standardized exams not a system of education if anything this was this is the opposite this is a known and systematic education the Emperor provides an exam and then everyone else in China parents tutors independent school teachers they all have to scramble around to get organized and provide people with lessons provide people classrooms they've got to sort it out for themselves how they're gonna prepare people to write this exams everyone knows what's gonna be in the exam everyone knows what you need to know what you need to learn but the role of government was not in providing an education system it was providing the criteria by which you would be evaluated and that exam was 100% linked to advancement in social status in standing to becoming what what Louds a here called a sage what I'm calling a scholar bureaucrat becoming one of the men who gets to sit in judgment over who gets tortured and who gets executed it was precisely the path to becoming a civil servant in the society that uniquely admired and valued the civil servant and that those men were also rewarded of course with a relatively luxurious lifestyle and income so that's a a model of Education where education is 100% linked to employment 100% linked to social advancement and in the West what we've ended up with even though we had this tremendous dynamism in Europe in emerging from the dark ages and pressing the words Industrial Revolution Scottish enlightenment invention of the discovery of electromagnetism the steam engine taking technologies that already existed elsewhere like gunpowder but then adapting them and modern artillery out of them and so on this is stuff that happened in Europe and that's why Europe went on to conquer large parts the world for better and for worse from my opinion mostly for worse of course my biased opinion but what happened in the West was that the institution ossified the institution of the university became an end in itself and today people pay to go to universities a families literally bankrupt themselves to put their children universities people live with more than a hundred thousand dollars in debt to go to university and they don't even believe in what it is they're learning they don't believe that they are going to become more erudite people they don't believe they're going to become people with even a higher aesthetic appreciation for life they don't believe they're going to become people who listen to better music or ah have have a more elevated appreciation for the theater or something they certainly do not think their people are gonna elevate themselves in this you know partly religious partly civic and political understanding of social hierarchy people are signing up to go to university I think it's no exaggeration to say just so they can say they went to university and look this this is in no small part the tragedy of of Western civilization right now that I really think Eastern civilization can kind of hold up a mirror for during my childhood in Ontario we had a Conservative government that boldly declared they were going to reduce the budget and have low taxes and lower government budget by some enormous percent they were going to have lower taxes in a smaller budget and when they were elected they promised they would do this without in any way reducing the money spent on education or healthcare and I remember one of my teachers said have you looked at the government budget I was a kid of course and you know he said to the class what percentage of the budget for Ontario is anything other than education and healthcare and that was the first time I really sat and looked at the numbers and look at the pie chart really thought about it that Wow the awesome responsibilities of government is in very large part education the education we don't think of it that way education is the work of government the decisions about education are themselves ineluctably political and there's no going back I mean they're they always will be today China still has the culture of the National exam in terms of the way they regard University and organize you high school more than university because the exams that will get you into university the sense of a national standardized examination that takes the measure of your soul it's a huge thing in Chinese culture but of course today they have a government system of Education so I'm left looking back at this and questioning what's meaningful in what's meaning meaningless in my own life and as with so many things ultimately it's a somber set of meditations on the shortcomings of the education system that I happen to be born into and I'm left with a sort of ashen conviction that one way or another things have got to change change is objectively real improvement is a question of ideology I can tell you system is going to get better rather than worse but my whole life this set of assumptions that emerged in such an a certain way from the dark ages in Industrial Revolution this set of assumptions about higher education they've been creaking and groaning under the weight of new expectations in a new economy and I just can't believe that the Western world is going to go on bankrupting itself to provide the next generation with the type of education that is not only worthless but that nobody believes in that nobody values and I can't believe that the eastern world that Taiwan where I'm living now or Japan that they are going to bankrupt themselves just to have the satisfaction of imitating on Arkan culture