Words&Dirt

“In our contemporary era, perhaps the most profound insight Confucianism has to offer the world today lies in prompting us to rethink the role of family as the ground and primary site of the consummate life and by extension, of a truly robust democracy.  Ironically, we might argue that at the same time, inopportune intimacy in relations is also China’s primary obstacle on its own road to democratization.  With so much investment in intimate and informal familial relationships, the Confucian tradition has been slow to produce the formal, more ‘objective’ and ‘transparent’ institutions necessary to sustain a Confucian version of democracy, and when it has produced them, these same institutions are often compromised and eroded by the excessive intervention of personal relationships.

While the familiar appeal to universals might suffer from the ambiguity of practical applications, the Confucian attempt to extend consideration to all involved is handicapped by the need for more abstract regulative ideals such as courage and justice that provide direction for what is a legitimate claim for consideration and inclusion.  Indeed, as democracy emerges in China, the cure for the ills of a decidedly Confucian democracy might well be a continuing appeal to rule of law and the formal institutions of democracy to contain the excesses of those intimate relations that have their beginnings in family feeling.  And who is to say that in the fullness of time, a Confucianism-inspired democracy––that is, a democracy grounded in a regimen of role ethics that does not suffer from the obvious tension between foundational individualism and social values––between the justified self-interest of discrete individuals and their commitment to the possibilities of a flourishing community––will not provide a worthy alternative to liberal democracy?”

––Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary, by Roger T. Ames, pg. 268

“His face underwent a certain change.  His voice was less harsh and wholly sincere as he said:

‘You must be happy, you sentimentalists, really and truly happy at dreaming and finding things good, and because you find some of them good, feeling good yourself.  Now, tell me, you two, do you find me good?’

‘You are good to look upon––in a way,’ I qualified.

‘There are in you all powers for good,’ was Maud Brewster’s answer.

‘There you are!’ he cried at her, half angrily.  ‘Your words are empty to me.  There is nothing clear and sharp and definite about the thought you have expressed.  You cannot pick it up in your two hands and look at it.  In point of fact, it is not a thought.  It is a feeling, a sentiment, a something based upon illusion, and not a product of the intellect at all.’

As he went on his voice again grew soft and a confiding note came into it.  ‘Do you know, I sometimes catch myself wishing that I, too, were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions.  They’re wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight.  And after all, delight is the wage for living.  Without delight, living is a worthless act.  To labor at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead.  He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me.’

He shook his head slowly, pondering.

‘I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason.  Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight; and, besides, you pay for your moments of intellectual delight by having the blues.  Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate.  I envy you, I envy you.’

He stopped abruptly, and then on his lips formed one of his strange quizzical smiles, as he added:

‘It’s from my brain I envy you, take notice, and not from my heart.  My reason dictates it.  The envy is an intellectual product.  I am like a sober man looking upon drunken men, and greatly weary, wishing he, too, were drunk.’

‘Or like a wise man looking upon fools and wishing he, too, were a fool,’ I laughed.

‘Quite so,’ he said.  ‘You are a blessed, bankrupt pair of fools.  You have no facts in your pocketbook.’

‘Yet we spend as freely as you,’ was Maud Brewster’s contribution.

‘More freely, because it costs you nothing.’

‘And because we draw upon eternity,’ she retorted.

‘Whether you do or think you do, it’s the same thing.  You spend what you haven’t got, and in return you get greater value from spending what you haven’t got than I get from spending what I have got, and what I have sweated to get.’

‘Why don’t you change the basis of your coinage, then?’ she queried teasingly.

He looked at her quickly, half-hopefully, and then said, all regretfully: ‘Too late.  I’d like to, perhaps, but I can’t.  My pocketbook is stuffed with old coinage, and it’s a stubborn thing.  I can never bring myself to recognize anything else as valid.’

He ceased speaking, and his gaze wandered absently past her and became lost in the placid sea.  The old primal melancholy was strong upon him.  He was quivering to it.  He had reasoned himself into a spell of the blues, and within few hours one could look for the devil within him to be up and stirring.”

––The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London, pg. 148-9