Can Xi Jinping Save the Humanities? Part 1: Sprouts of Learning

What's Xi Jinping 习近平 to do? By that I mean, what could the leader of country with the most people and cash do to help us humanists? The humanities are in trouble, and he's a seemingly randomly chosen benefactor, so what could he do? Should he swap out the power suit for an old blazer with a beat up Beckett paperback in the pocket to meet the gang at the campus dive so we can complain about all the philistines who get to pay their rent? 

No. But seriously, I do want to think about the relationship between the revival of Confucianism and other traditions in official discourse in China and the liberal arts in the West. The recent idea of Confucianism coming back bears some note first.

As much as American conservatives are seeing a war on religion, Confucianism represents a religious tradition that has practically died very recently. For a hundred years, it's been socially and politically out of the picture in Asia for all but the barest rituals and resown social theories. 

The most important recent Confucian Astroturfing goes back to Lee Kwan Yew 李光耀, the long time leader of Singapore. Lee argued that flipping the value-judgments of racial caricatures Western Darwinians gave to East Asians to write off imperialism could today be used to explain the capitalist successes of Japan, Korea and the Chinese micropoles. Passivity becomes deference, submissiveness becomes altruism, self-efacement becomes willingness to change. So 19th-century Oriental obstacles became 21st-century Asian values. 

The reaction in mainland China has been faint but generally positive. Lee appealed to Communist leaders, who since the 1980s have lacked any formal program for understanding and expression of their style of authoritarianism and vigor in the market. So, from this comes the claiming of Confucius as a Chinese legacy to UNESCO in 1994, the Confucius Institute, and these political-intellectual social fashions are said to appeal particularly to Xi. Insiders I know only expect the role of the Confucian classics to grow in primary and secondary education in China, and the state is heavily promoting scholarship on Chinese humanities as only Taiwan had recently before.

This is the official story: dry, bureaucratic, still hinting at the colonial moralities even if reworked; it's banally clear in its ambitions of justifying authoritarian nationalism. But, it binds up a history that has a great deal in it to inspire, that of the New Confucianism of the 20th century and today. For a long time, I have been interested how a sort of Confucianism survived in such environments as the philosophy department of Peking University in the first decades of the republican period.

However, John Makeham is surely right when he describes this as a deracinated thought experiment among cosmopolitan intellectuals, all elite men who have almost all found homes in places like Hong Kong, Taichung and Boston.

As much of a challenge as Tu Wei-ming 杜維明 or Jiang Qing 蒋庆 presents to the bland conservatism of an official, curated Confucian revivification, it would be difficult to see them in the mold of the Benedictine scholars of the Western middle ages. In the imagination of traditionalists like Alasdair MacIntyre, these monks not only preserved the content of Aegean and early-Christian thought in a time of isolation and chaos, they wrote a rule for life, a devotional method inspired by classical virtues to the new end of scholarly discipline. If Foucault and Charles Taylor are to be believed, we can see the roots of the altruism and disciplinary austerity of modern society in places like the medieval monasteries. Though Jiang might see himself in this vein, I don't know how this kind of intellectualism and devotion could  influence and thrive in a modern political society.

So though Professor Tu in my view is an inspiring and provocative public intellectual, it's President Xi's thoughts on the Confucian curriculum in state schools that will have the biggest impact on the future of patriotic subject-formation among the college-bound and not in China. In the next post I want to think about this contrast in coordinated ways: what space for the critique or mutuality, the big humanistic subjectivities, might there be in this proprietary culture? That, as opposed ours of course.

Style

Finally! The definitive review of the hooks and hang-ups of Taylor Swift's 1989! Alas no. Here I want to put out a few style notes to those of interest. According to Facebook, the number of people willing to shout across the Internet about the minutiae of usage, at least in English, is considerable, so fire away if you're interested.

First, I find myself these days really only able to use the dry, sometimes elliptical academic prose I read all day. There is one convention that's always attracted me to The New York Times, The Economist and so on, and that's the bougie frisson of titles, the deferent and fancy use of Mr. and Ms. But, this is too forced and old-timey even for me.

As for proper nouns and special terms of foreign languages, most will probably be in Arabic or Chinese. For Arabic, I follow the ever-handy standard of the International Journal of Middle East Studies for transliteration of any premodern Arabic personal name, but I'll use the familiar Anglicized names of places like Cairo and Damascus. Why do we do this? Something to do with the British empire I'm sure.

I think I'll also use common Anglicizations without diacritics and so on for modern people's names like Hosni Mubarak and Muammar al-Qaddafi. I likely won't write "Ḥusnī Mubārak" though this is more precise to the standard Arabic because of the (Eurocentric) commonplace ways of referring to such prominent people. I have noticed an effort on the part of some people in the Gulf to bring transliterations in line with academic protocols, so Hijaz is now preferred to the familiar Hejaz, and before long we might be more comfortable seeing Makka instead of Mecca. As this is a choice of the users themselves, we are to stick with them just as with the renaming of Mumbai from Bombay, Kolkata from Calcutta.

Similar problems stalk English use of Chinese. For references to Chinese before about 1900, I'll use the standard Hanyu Pinyin transliteration without tone-markers for people's names, with traditional characters on first mention: Wang Yangming is 王陽明, easy. After 1959, I'll use the same transliteration but with simplified characters for people most associated with the mainland, so Zhou Enlai is 周恩来. For Taiwanese, Hong Kongers and so on, I'll have to stick to the gawky and somewhat inconsistent Wade-Giles as that's tradition, and no one really refers to Taiwan's president as "Ma Yingjiu". The traditional characters will hopefully clear everything up. As with any language, I'll try to use special terms like li 禮 sparingly and always with translation, but the characters are almost always needed to clear things up so we know we don't mean li 裡.

And what else is there? I suppose I'll stick to the commonest conventions only qualifying to say I have problems with capitals. Do we need to capitalize the names of types of political formations after the proper adjective? You see the French Republic, but not the Icelandic Republic, not for the Viking one, that is. And what about churches, do we need to accept that Catholics have basically purchased capital-c Church, viz the Church? Aren't the Eastern churches just as old, prestigious and universal in their ambitions, might the Amharic or Coptic churches be older in some sense? And what about historical periods, brands or movements? How is the Civil War the American one, but there's the Congolese civil war, the Northumbrian renaissance versus the Italian Renaissance? I don't know, and might not be consistent as a result.

I suppose I won't be up to much cussing unless I can't fucking stop myself or it's really fucking pertinent to the expressions due. And the same goes for improvisational forms of expression current in new media. But sometimes, they're irresistible and I can't say no. Because Internet, I literally. can't. even.

Nativity

In her 2008 essay "Altered State", Andrea Lee says "I'm not sure I love it, but it's mine." It's a wonderful memoir; it's perfection of that New Yorker "Personal History" format. I find myself remembering this quote of hers in a variety of contexts.

For example, sometimes I hear someone like David Hollinger describe recent trends in religious observance in the US. He will say that among Christians, committed practice is on the decline overall, especially among the educated, and is increasingly confined to evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics. In this picture, the old liberals in the mainline churches are graying into irrelevance. Hollinger's work comports with what you find from Mona Chalabi or Ross Douthat, so this is a common thing to hear.

When I encounter this argument about the good ol' churches (a biblicist has informed me the correct term is "historical churches") I can't help but feel a certain sense of loss that is hard to place and harder to justify.

Just what would be lost with my native tradition that I'm not really part of anymore? What sense of attachment or need is there then to feel vulnerable to loss?

These involve another question about what separated me from the churchly life in the first place. The Episcopal chaplain at school tells me what I am is a "cradle", with a (dubious) Mayflower claim and all. I was born into the church and in growing up got to be... less than Episcopalian. How does this happen? 

I can tell you how it happened for me. A summary version. I got the sense that I could "have" the goods of the tradition: the artistic richness, the way of welcoming, the progressive senses of justice and respect, without the tradition itself.

There was that, and the fact that I could not intellectually connect these goods of life to the tradition's main formations of the good, that is to the orthodox theology and Christology of the Anglican Communion. Just what of a good life, as we have come to conceive it, can be reduced to precisely professing the nature of the incarnate divine? 

But it is precisely the formulas that are central to the collective recognitions of the Anglican communion. Formerly the state religion of the British empire, what is holding the communion together, and it is barely held together, is the orthodox formulas of Nicaea, Chalcedon and so on.

This basic doctrinal idiom appears to be all that keeps North American liberals, southern African liberationists and British conservatives talking to each other.

This idea of salvation in its present relation to the good life on earth is immanent to me. I was born in the middle of it and have to make sense in terms of it.

Now, as I have told this story of falling off from one tradition, I have excluded more creative possibilities for it. But, whatever such a creative alternative to the lived tradition would be, for me it would need to include a vision of the good of plurality, that of mutuality among people with very different kinds of lived experience.

I know the Anglican Communion's imperial baggage is considerable: its diversity is because of the reach of British imperialism. However, the church I have known is one of the last places where adults of very different backgrounds regularly and intimately come together.

None of the Western alternatives to the intellectual exclusiveness of Christianity have been able to sustain this sense of community. These are mainly intellectual exercises. They have also tended only to be more exclusive, more minute in their distinctions, and their reach has never extended beyond people in the richer parts of the postcolonial world.

Worrying about the alternatives does nothing to affirm a reconnected relationship with Mother Canterbury.

Whatever relationship I'd find for me and with my family has dimensions that are not intellectual to which I have tried to put words. It begins with feelings I can articulate in something like Lee's formulation and a persistent fear of loss when I look at the difficulties of the newly vulnerable churches. 

Asking questions in terms of her formula focuses intensely on the personal: what is mine? how could I be sustained in spirit? Asking questions like this present a real danger of a Protestant excess of individuality. I hope that asking how one could flourish in a place in a broader world furnished with resources of good living and good deliberation can be a different kind of question. I consider this in the follow-up post "Singleness of Heart".