|
|
| |
THE
ABDUCTION OF MODERNITY
Part 1:
The race toward barbarism
By Henry C
K Liu
 The United States defines its global "war
on terrorism" as a defensive effort to protect its way
of life, beyond attacks from enemies with alien cultural
and religious motives, to attacks from those who reject
modernity itself. This definition is derived from the
views of historian Bernard Lewis, a scholar of Islamic
culture at Princeton University, who traces Islamic
opposition to the West beyond hostility to specific
interests or actions or policies or even countries, to
rejection of Western civilization for what it is. To
Lewis, Western civilization stands for modernity. This
anti-modernity attitude, he warns, is what lends support
to the ready use of terror by Islamic fundamentalists.
Samuel Huntington in his The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order argues
that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the
Cold War will bring neither peace nor worldwide
acceptance of liberal democracy. Huntington rejects
Francis Fukuyama's prematurely optimistic "end of
history" theme that the collapse of communism means
Western civilization is destined to spread as people
elsewhere seek the benefits of technology, wealth, and
personal freedom it offers. Instead, because technology
has been reserved for exploitation, wealth obscenely
maldistributed, and freedom selectively denied to the
powerless, narrow ideological conflict will transform
into conflicts among people with different religions,
values, ethnicities, and historical memories. These
cultural factors define civilizations. Nations will
increasingly base alliances on common civilization
rather than common ideology; and wars will tend to occur
along the fault lines between major civilizations.
Huntington points out that embracing materialist
science, industrial production, technical education,
rootless urbanization, and capitalistic trade does not
mean the rest of the world will embrace the culture of
the West. On the contrary, he argues that economic
growth is likely to increase the aspiration for cultural
sovereignty, breeding a new commitment to the values,
customs, traditions, and religions of native cultures.
The struggle is not capitalism against communism, but
backward civilization against modern civilization.
The fault in both these views is the assumption
that modernity is an exclusive characteristic of the
West. On the surface, such views appear self-evident,
since science and technology have been the enabling
factors behind Western ascendance and dominance. But the
"modern world" can be viewed as a brief aberration on
the long path of human destiny, a brief period of a few
centuries when narcissistic Western thinkers mistake
technological development as moral progress in human
civilization. Many barbaric notions, racism being the
most obvious, appear under the label of modernity,
rationalized by a barbaric doctrine of pseudo-science.
The West takes advantage of the overwhelming power it
has derived from its barbaric values to set itself up as
a superior civilization. The West views its technical
prowess as a predatory license for intolerance of the
values and traditions of other advanced cultures.
Chinese civilization has weathered successive
occupation by barbaric invaders, all of whom as rulers
saw fit to adopt Chinese civilization for their own
benefit and contributed to the further development of
the culture they had invaded and subsequently adopted.
The history of the West's interaction with the rest of
the world has been culturally evangelistic, to suppress
and encroach on unfamiliar cultures Westerners
arbitrarily deem inferior, often based on self-satisfied
ignorance. Until confronted by Western imperialism,
China might have faced military conquests, but Chinese
civilization had never been under attack. Barbaric
invaders came to gain access to Chinese culture, not to
destroy it. The West is unique in its destructive
ethnocentricity. Under the domination of the West,
Chinese or other non-Western intellectuals who do not
speak or read Western languages are considered
illiterate and ignorant, while Western "scholars",
including the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel, who do not speak or read Chinese or other
non-Western languages have written erudite books on
Chinese and other non-Western culture.
Gunpowder
was invented around the 4th century in China by Taoist
alchemist Ko Hong while seeking an elixir for
immortality. It is the height of Taoist irony that the
search for an elixir for immortality only yields a
substance that ends life abruptly. Gunpowder would not
be used in warfare in China until the 10th century,
first in incendiary rockets called feihuo (flying
fire), forerunner of today's intercontinental ballistic
missiles. Explosive grenades would first be employed by
armies of the Song Dynasty in 1161 against Jurchens
(Nuzhen), ancestors of modern-day Manchurians.
In Chinese dynastic culture, the use of firearms
in war was considered cowardly and therefore not
exploited by honorable warriors of self-respect.
Firearms would not develop in dynastic China, not
because of the absence of know-how, but because their
use had been culturally circumscribed as not being
appropriate for true warriors.
In the history of
human progress, willful rejection of many technological
inventions is traceable to cultural preference. This is
the basis for concluding that the technological
militarism of the West is of barbaric roots and that a
civilization built on military power remains barbaric,
the reverse of modernity, notwithstanding the guise of
technology.
The oldest picture in the world of a
gun and a grenade is on a painted silk banner found at
Dunhuang, dating to the mid-10th century, that came to
be in the possession of Musee Guimet in Paris in modern
times. The museum on Place d'Iena was founded by French
industrialist Emile Guimet, a 19th-century Asian-art
collector from Lyon. On the silk banner, demons of Mara
the Temptress, an evil goddess, are shown trying to harm
the meditating Buddha and to distract him from his
pursuit of enlightenment, with a proto-gun in the form
of a fire lance and a proto-grenade in the form of a
palm-size fire-bomb. The fact that these weapons are
shown to be used only by evil demons illustrates the
distasteful attitude of the ancient Chinese toward
firearms.
Crossbows, known in Chinese as
nu, have a shorter range than double-curved
longbows and are slower in firing. But they became
devastatingly accurate after a grid sight to guide their
aim was invented 23 centuries ago by Prince Liu Chong of
the imperial house of the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220).
Crossbows were first used 28 centuries ago in
the Spring and Autumn Period (Chunqiu 770-481 BC)
when their employment in the hands of the infantry
neutralized the traditional superiority of war chariots.
The use of crossbows thus changed the rules of warfare
and the balance of power in the political landscape of
ancient China, favoring those states with large
sheren (commoner) infantry forces over those with
powerful chariot-owning militant guizu
(aristocrats).
The earliest unification of China
by the Legalist Qin Dynasty (221-207 BC), whose unifying
ruler was an antagonist of fragmented aristocratic
feudalism, was not independent of the geopolitical
impact of crossbow technology.
History records
that in 209 BC, the Second Emperor (Er Shi, reigned
209-207 BC) of the Qin Dynasty, son of the unifying Qin
Origin Emperor (Qin Shihuangdi, reigned 246-210 BC), who
fought 26 years of continuous war to unify all under the
Qin Dynasty (221-207 BC), which subsequently lasted only
14 years before collapsing, kept a crossbow regiment of
50,000 archers.
Han Dynasty historian Sima Qian,
author of the classic Records of the Historian (Shi
Ji), wrote in 108 BC that a member of the Han
royalty, the prince of Liang Xiao (Liang Xiao Wang), was
in charge of an arsenal with several hundred thousand
crossbows in 157 BC.
Two working crossbows from
China, dating from the 11th century AD, one capable of
repeat firing, came to be in the modern-day collection
of the Simon Archery Foundation in Manchester Museum at
the University of Manchester, England.
Most
triggers and sights used in crossbows in China were
manufactured by master craftsmen who signed their metal
products with inscribed marks and dates. Shen Gua
(1031-94), renowned Bei Song Dynasty (Northern Song
960-1127) scientist cum historian on Chinese science and
technology, referred to his frustration over his
inability to date accurately an 11th-century excavation,
upon finding on a crossbow mechanism the inscription
"stock by Yu Shih and bow by Chang Rou", but with no
accompanying dates.
Even in 10th century BC,
production of crossbows in China had already involved a
sophisticated system of separation of manufacturing of
parts and mass assembly of final products.
Crossbows were last used in war in China by the
Qing Dynasty army in 1900, with tragic inadequacy,
against the invading armies of eight allied European
powers with more deadly firearms.
The ancient
Greeks employed crossbows successfully at Syracuse in
397 BC. After the fall of the Roman Empire, crossbows
reappeared in Europe only after the 10th century. They
were used at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 by William
the Conqueror.
The Second Lateran Council of
1139 condemned crossbows, together with usury, simony,
clerical marriage and concubinage. Their use was banned
under the anathema of the Church, except for use against
infidels. The ban on crossbows was a position of moral
righteousness yet to be taken by Christendom in modern
times on the use of nuclear arms and other weapons of
mass destruction.
Richard, Coeur de Lion
(1157-1199), mostly absentee king of England (1189-99)
and less-than-successful hero of the Crusades, took many
crossbows on his Third Crusade in 1190. Hernando Cortes
(1485-1547), Spanish conquistador, used the crossbow as
one of his main weapons in subjugating Mexico in the
16th century.
In medieval warfare, the rules of
European chivalry required, as those of dynastic Chinese
martial arts did, that honorable combat be personal and
bodily. Arrows were considered cowardly by medieval
Europeans, as firearms were by dynastic Chinese up to
the 19th century. The use of bows and arrows was stooped
to only by those outside of the socio-military
establishment, the likes of outlawed English yeomen of
the 12th century, such as Robin Hood and his chief
archer, Little John, legendary folk heroes of English
ballads. Another famous 13th-century archer was the
legendary Swiss patriot William Tell, whose story would
be made popular by Friedrich von Schiller's drama and
later by Gioacchino Antonio Rossini's popular opera.
European knights, when prepared to suffer
calculated losses, were able to survive slow-firing
enemy crossbows with limited range. In sufficient
numbers, the horsemen were able to decimate in full
gallop an unprotected line of much-despised enemy
crossbow-men. However, they were not able to overcome
fast-firing longbows with long range.
Two
millennia after the invention of crossbows in China, the
Battle of Crecy of the Hundred Years' War, which took
place on August 26, 1346, first demonstrated the
effectiveness of Edward III's English archers, composed
mostly of newly recruited, socially shunned yeomen with
longbows, against the respectable armored French knights
of Philip VI.
Similarly, the Battle of Agincourt
on October 25, 1415, decisively confirmed the
obsolescence of hitherto invincible French aristocratic
knights on horseback. In opposition, English yeomen,
commoner foot-soldiers, members of a class unappreciated
by their social betters in their home society, applied
with glory in war a despised killing tool designed for
illegal poaching in peace. Armed with a fresh military
application of ignoble longbow technology, the socially
inferior English yeomen in the form of simple unarmored
infantry-archers, proved their battlefield supremacy to
the socially superior French aristocrats in the form of
powerfully armored mounted knights.
The Battle
of Agincourt marked the end of the age of chivalry and
announced the obsolescence of its stylized methods of
warfare. It also heralded the beginning of a period in
which the sovereign would look for military support from
the gentry of his realm rather than traditionally from
the aristocracy. This gave rise to the resulting
political implication that henceforth war would have to
be fought for national purpose or religious conviction
rather than for settling private feuds among royalties.
In William Shakespeare's Henry V, the
central scene of which features the Battle of Agincourt,
the most glorious in English history, King Henry
addresses his yeomen soldiers in a famous nationalistic
exultation:
"Dishonour not your mothers; now
attest
That those whom you call'd fathers did beget
you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And
teach them how to war. And you, good yeomen,
Whose
limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle
of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your
breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you
so mean and base
That hath not noble lustre in your
eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the
slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's
afoot;
Follow your spirit; and, upon this
charge
Cry 'God for Harry! England and Saint
George!'"
After the battle scene, Shakespeare
(1564-1616) has King Henry recount the French dead:
"The names of those their nobles that lie
dead:
Charles Delabreth, High Constable of
France;
The Master of the Cross-bows, Lord Rambures
..."
In ancient Chinese warfare, the code of
honorable martial conduct required that combat be
personal, bodily and frontal. Combatants were organized
according to rank, as per all other social activities in
a class-conscious and rigidly hierarchical society.
Jiangjun (generals) were pitted against
jiangjun, captains against captains and foot
soldiers against foot soldiers. Social segregation was
reflected in the proverb: "Earthenware does not deserve
collision with porcelain."
Expertise in
corporeal martial skill was so highly prized that
jiangjun were frequently expected to engage
personally in one-on-one combat with their opposing
counterparts. Battles were sometimes won or lost
depending on the outcome of high-ranking personal duels
under the watchful eyes of troops on each side. By Tang
time in the 7th century, however, the cult of martial
chivalry in which individual valor determined the
outcome of battles already had become only a legend of
the past. Firepower was still considered cowardly. And
the use of firearms was not acceptable to proud warriors
as respectable members of the social elite. Until
influenced in modern times by popular Hollywood films on
the American Wild West, Chinese children playing war
would prefer swordfights to gunfights.
Gunpowder
remained unknown in the West until the late 10th
century. However, Europeans abandoned outmoded rules of
chivalry after the Middle Ages and enthusiastically
incorporated firearms and artillery into the lexicon of
their military arts after the late 15th century. In
contrast, thanks to the Confucian aversion to
technological progress, Chinese military planners did
not modernize their martial code, basing foreign policy
on the principle of civilized benevolence. They
continued to suppress development of firearms as immoral
and dishonorable up to the 19th century, much to China's
misfortune.
As a result, European armies arrived
in China in the 19th century with superior firearms.
They consistently and repeatedly scored decisive
victories with their small but better-armed
expeditionary forces over the numerically superior yet
technologically backward, sword-wielding Chinese army of
the decrepit Qing Dynasty (1636-1911).
China's
most influential revolutionary, Mao Zedong, proclaimed
in modern times his famous dictum: "Political power
comes from the barrel of a gun." He was in fact
condemning the obsolete values of Confucianism (ru
jia) as much as stating a truism in barbaric modern
realpolitik.
Confucian ethics notwithstanding,
morality and honor failed to save China from Western
imperialism, because morality and honor require
observation from both opponents. It was not a clash of
civilizations, but a clash between civilization and
barbarism. Militarism is a race toward barbarism
camouflaged by technology as modernity.
The
Boxers Uprising of 1900, the Chinese name for which is
Yihetuan (Righteous Harmony Brigade), was an
extremist xenophobic movement. It was encouraged as a
chauvinistic instrument for domestic politics by the
decrepit court of the Qing Dynasty, dominated by the
self-indulging, reactionary Dowager Empress (Cixi
Taihou, 1838-1908). The Boxer Uprising was used by the
Dowager Empress as a populist counterweight to abort the
budding "100 Days" elitist reform movement of 1898, led
by conservative reformist Kang Youwei (1858-1927) around
the young monarch, the weak Emperor Guangxu (reigned
1875-1908), belatedly and defensively advocating
modernization for China.
The members of
Yihetuan, in a burst of chauvinistic frenzy,
rejected the use of modern and therefore foreign
firearms in favor of traditional broadswords. They
relied on protection against enemy bullets from Taoist
amulets, their faith in which would remain unshaken in
the face of undeniable empirical evidence provided by
hundreds of thousands of falling comrades shot by
Western gunfire. The term Boxer would be coined by
bewildered Europeans whose modern pragmatism would fill
them with a superficial superiority complex, justified
on narrow grounds, over an ancient culture that
stubbornly clung to the irrational power of faith, in
defiance of reason.
Historians often trace the
source of national predicaments to particular decisions
made by leaders based on personal character, rather than
to structural conditions of institutions. This
convenient emphasis on personal political errors at the
expense of deterministic institutional structure tends
to nurture speculations that with wiser decisions, a
socio-economic-political order trapped inside an
obsolete institutional system would not necessarily be
doomed to collapse under the strain of its own
contradictions. Such speculations are hard to verify,
since it can be argued that bad political decisions by
faulty leaders are not independent of a nation's
institutional defects. The penchant of the sole
remaining superpower to resort to overwhelming force
against those not willing to bend to its will may well
be an institutional march from modernity back toward
barbarism.
Ironically, the Boxers Uprising so
discredited the public image of the stubbornly
reactionary Qing court that, within a decade after its
outbreak, the democratic revolution of Dr Sun Yat-sen
succeeded in 1911 in overthrowing the three-century-old
Qing Dynasty, despite the effective reactionary
suppression of progressive monarchist reform efforts in
the dynasty's last phase, or perhaps because of it.
Extremist reactionaries, in their eagerness to be
gravediggers for progressive reformers, usually become
instead unwitting midwives for revolutionary radicals.
The Taoist concept of the curative potential of even
deadly poison was again demonstrated by the pathetic
phenomenon of the Boxers Uprising.
Thus a case
can be made that extreme fundamentalist opposition to
the West may be the midwife for modernization of Islamic
civilization. The capitalistic West nurtured and used
Islamic fundamentalism as an antidote against communism
in the oil regions of the Middle East during the Cold
War, the same way it had nurtured and used fascism
during the Great Depression. The antidote proves to be
more lethal to the capitalistic West.
Western
military prowess, with its arsenal of smart bombs and
weapons of mass destruction ready for deployment to
impose its will on others, is not a march toward
modernity, but a retreat toward barbarism. A
civilization built on militarization of the peace
remains a barbaric civilization. What Western militarism
has done is to abduct modernity as synonymous with
Western civilization, depriving human civilization of an
evolving process of cultural diversity. The effect of
this abduction of modernity had been profound and
comprehensive.
The West is not the only guilty
party in history, only the most recent. Chinese
civilization during the Qin Dynasty (221-207 BC) took a
great step forward toward forging a unified nation and
culture, but in the process lost much of the richness of
its ancient, local traditions and rendered many details
of its fragmented past incomprehensible to posterity.
Universality and standardization, ingredients of
progress, are mortal enemies of particularity and
variety, components of tradition. Human civilization
deserves a richer vision of modernity than that offered
by the West. Until modernization is divorced from
Westernization, non-Western civilizations will continue
to resist modernization.
Tu Weiming, professor
of Chinese history and philosophy and director of the
Harvard-Yenching Institute at Harvard University, wrote:
"Hegel, [Karl] Marx and Max Weber all shared the ethos
that, despite all its shortcomings, the modern West
informed by the Enlightenment mentality was the only
arena where the true difference for the rest of the
world could be made. Confucian East Asia, Islamic Middle
East, Hindu India, or Buddhist Southeast Asia was on the
receiving end of this process. Eventually, modernization
as homogenization would make cultural diversity
inoperative, if not totally meaningless. It was
inconceivable that Confucianism or, for that matter, any
other non-Western spiritual traditions could exert a
shaping influence on the modernizing process. The
development from tradition to modernity was irreversible
and inevitable."
Tu suggests that, in the global
context, what some of the most brilliant minds in the
modern West assumed to be self-evidently true turned out
to be parochial. In the rest of the world and, arguably,
in Western Europe and North America, the anticipated
clear transition from tradition to modernity never
occurred. As a norm, traditions continue to make their
presence in modernity and, indeed, the modernizing
process itself is constantly shaped by a variety of
cultural forms rooted in distinct traditions. The
recognition of the relevance of radical otherness to
one's own self-understanding of the 18th century seems
more applicable to the current situation in the global
community than the inattention to any challenges to the
modern Western mindset of the 19th century and the first
half of the 20th. For example, the outstanding
Enlightenment thinkers such as Francois Arouet de
Voltaire, Gottfried Leibniz and Jean Jacques Rousseau
took China as their major reference society and
Confucianism as their major reference culture. It seems
that toward the 21st century, the openness of the 18th
century, as contrasted with the exclusivity of the 19th
century, may provide a better guide for the dialogue of
civilizations.
According to Professor Tu, in
light of the ill-conceived hypothesis of the "coming
clash of civilizations, the need for civilizational
dialogues and for exploring a global ethic is more
compelling. Among the Enlightenment values advocated by
the French Revolution, fraternity, the functional
equivalent of community, has received scant attention
among modern political theorists. The preoccupation with
fixing the relationship between the individual and the
state since [John] Locke's treatises on government is,
of course, not the full picture of modern political
thought; but it is undeniable that communities, notably
the family, have been ignored as irrelevant in the
mainstream of Western political discourse."
In
Tu's view, East Asian modernity under the influence of
Confucian traditions suggests an alternative model to
Western modernism:
(1) Government leadership in
a market economy is not only necessary but is also
desirable. The doctrine that government is a necessary
evil and that the market in itself can provide an
"invisible hand'' for ordering society is antithetical
to modern experience in either the West or the East. A
government that is responsive to public needs,
responsible for the welfare of the people and
accountable to society at large is vitally important for
the creation and maintenance of order.
(2)
Although law is essential as the minimum requirement for
social stability, "organic solidarity" can only result
from the implementation of humane rites of interaction.
The civilized mode of conduct can never be communicated
through coercion. Exemplary teaching as a standard of
inspiration invites voluntary participation. Law alone
cannot generate a sense of shame to guide civilized
behavior. It is the ritual act that encourages people to
live up to their own aspirations.
(3) Family as
the basic unit of society is the locus from which the
core values are transmitted. The dyadic relationships
within the family, differentiated by age, gender,
authority, status, and hierarchy, provide a richly
textured natural environment for learning the proper way
of being human. The principle of reciprocity, as a
two-way traffic of human interaction, defines all forms
of human-relatedness in the family. Age and gender,
potentially two of the most serious gaps in the
primordial environment of the human habitat, are brought
into a continuous flow of intimate sentiments of human
care.
(4) Civil society flourishes not because
it is an autonomous arena above the family and beyond
the state. Its inner strength lies in its dynamic
interplay between family and state. The image of the
family as a microcosm of the state and the ideal of the
state as an enlargement of the family indicate that
family stability is vitally important for the body
politic and a vitally important function of the state is
to ensure organic solidarity of the family. Civil
society provides a variety of mediating cultural
institutions that allow for a fruitful articulation
between family and state. The dynamic interplay between
the private and public enables the civil society to
offer diverse and enriching resources for human
flourishing.
(5) Education ought to be the civil
religion of society. The primary purpose of education is
character-building. Intent on the cultivation of the
full person, schools should emphasize ethical as well as
cognitive intelligence. Schools should teach the art of
accumulating "social capital" through communication. In
addition to the acquisition of knowledge and skills,
schooling must be congenial to the development of
cultural competence and appreciation of spiritual
values.
(6) Since self-cultivation is the root
for the regulation of family, governance of state, and
peace under heaven, the quality of life of a particular
society depends on the level of self-cultivation of its
members. A society that encourages self-cultivation as a
necessary condition for human flourishing is a society
that cherishes virtue-centered political leadership,
mutual exhortation as a communal way of
self-realization, the value of the family as the proper
home for learning to be human, civility as the normal
pattern of human interaction and, education as
character-building.
Tu acknowledges that it is
far-fetched to suggest that these societal ideals are
fully realized in East Asia. Actually, East Asian
societies often exhibit behaviors and attitudes just the
opposite of the supposed salient features of Confucian
modernity indicate. Indeed, having been humiliated by
imperialism and colonialism for decades, the rise of
East Asia, on the surface at least, blatantly displays
some of the most negative aspects of Western modernism
with a vengeance: exploitation, mercantilism,
consumerism, materialism, greed, egoism and brutal
competitiveness.
Nevertheless, as the first
non-Western region to become modernized, the cultural
implications of the rise of "Confucian" East Asia are
far-reaching. The modern West as informed by the
Enlightenment mentality provided the initial impetus for
worldwide social transformation. The historical reasons
that prompted the modernizing process in Western Europe
and North America are not necessarily structural
components of modernity. Surely, Enlightenment values
such as instrumental rationality, liberty, rights
consciousness, due process of law, privacy and
individualism are all universalizable modern values.
However, as the Confucian example suggests, "Asian
values" such as sympathy, distributive justice,
duty-consciousness, ritual, public-spiritedness and
group orientation are also universalizable modern
values. Just as the former ought to be incorporated into
East Asian modernity, the latter may turn out to be a
critical and timely reference for the American way of
life.
Henry C K Liu is chairman of the
New York-based Liu Investment Group.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact [email protected]
for information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
