Jordan & I are currently enrolled in a course on the history, politics, and culture of post-Mao China at Boise State University. This course requires us to write a few reflections based on our readings and the lecture materials. This is one of those assignments:
It is always interesting to note how one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
The courses I teach focus primarily on Western history and philosophy, which is one of the chief reasons that I was keen to take this course on 21st century China. I was convicted of my need to improve my understanding of China given its status in the coming century as perhaps the world’s most important country.
Among the focuses of my previous research and teaching is the transition from Reformation to Enlightenment amongst the Western nations. This transition began with Francis Bacon’s return to the inductive method of reasoning, which was in direct reaction (perhaps even rebellion?) to the more authoritative and deductive methodology of the Scholastics and the Reformers. This methodological revolution was expanded in the work of Newton, Descartes, and others who were the backbone of the Enlightenment, from its beginning in the 17th century and continuing well into the 19th century.
The work of these men and women produced, among many other things, a strong tendency toward optimism and progressivism in the West. The Lockes and Jeffersons worked to establish a more perfect kind of government with the hope that if they could find the right configuration, tyranny could be brought to an end for good. The Listers and Curies of the age worked to cure disease with the hope that perhaps one day all disease could be eradicated. In the minds of many in the post-Enlightenment, things had never been as good as they were as the 19th century advanced and the world was getting continually better.
It was not until the World Wars and the Great Depression in the first half of the 20th century that the progressive bubble was burst and the attitude of the West shifted from general optimism to the pessimism of the 1960s and following years. It should be noted that the 19th century was also the West’s great age of imperialism, forced political and economic expansion into the Americas and especially the Far East. The Western nations understood these expansions to be mutually beneficial. Not only were the “mother” countries receiving economic prosperity and political power, they understood their expansion as bringing civilization and culture to the East and in some ways fulfilling the great needs of those nations as well.
This contrasts sharply with the Chinese perspective as described in last week’s class. Whereas the 19th-century West understood its own history as ever-progressing, with the then-present as its greatest moment and an optimistic view of the future, China saw its own history as one of decline: its pinnacle was in the past and the present represented a new low-point. Whereas the West viewed its imperial expansion as at least something of blessing on its colonial countries, China considered this to be an unmitigated curse that was directly responsible for its own state of frailty. In this case, it would seem that one man’s treasure was another man’s trash. The only thing on which the West and the Chinese did apparently agree was that the expansion of national sovereignty was the way forward to political, economic, and cultural prosperity.
For my own teaching, this contrast translates into a vivid lesson on how our perspectives on these issues are formed by our fundamental assumptions. What are the rights of nations and how should they be enforced? What is prosperity and how should it be achieved? Is there an intrinsic conflict between innovation and tradition, and how much should we let these two forces drive our society? In these questions and so many others, our presuppositions manifest themselves in our ethics.
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