Master Kung continued

Yesterday I happened upon another version of this same point in an article I chanced to be reading in a different context, from a journal called International Migration Review (which is in JSTOR). The author, Weiming Tu, is a prominent contemporary 'Confucian' and Director of Harvard's Harvard-Yenching Institute (see 1999 Atlantic article on Confucians for context). Tu characterizes the Western ethos as a product of the Enlightenment (an 18th century philosophical movement, "...critical, analytical, scientific, mechanistic and anti-metaphysical ...usually associated with social contract theory, individualism, natural right theory, and the pursuit of self-interest, rather than the search for community" [Jay 1984:30, cited by Tu]). Here are some extracts:

The Enlightenment mentality is the most dynamic and transformative ideology in human history. Indebted to or intertwined with it are virtually all major spheres of interest characteristic of the modern age: science and technology, industrial capitalism, market economy, democratic polity, mass communication, the information super highway, research universities, civil and military bureaucracies, and professional organizations. Furthermore, the values we cherish as definitions of modern consciousness including liberty, equality, human rights, the dignity of the individual, respect for privacy, government for, by and of the people, and due process of law are genetically, if not structurally, inseparable from it. The dark side of the Enlightenment mentality, exemplified by the rise of the modern West as a series of colonial and imperial powers is also an integral part of human history. The "unbound Prometheus", symbolizing the runaway technology of development, has been a force of destruction as well as a power of liberation... (64)

...the exponential growth of the central government, not to mention the ubiquity of the military bureaucracy, in all Western democracies has so fundamentally redefined the insights of the Enlightenment that self-interest, expansion, domination, manipulation, and control have supplanted seemingly innocuous values such as progress, reason, and individualism. A realistic appraisal of the Enlightenment mentality reveals many faces of the modern Western hegemonic discourse, progress means inequality, reason means self-interest, and individualism means greed. (68)

The idea of global stewardship implicit in Confucian humanism raises fundamental questions about virtually all the conceptual apparatuses informing our studies: liberties, equality, human rights, private interests, instrumental rationality, and due process of law. (59)

The persuasive power of the Confucian idea that despite ethnic, linguistic, religious, social, political, and economic diversity, human community ought to be inclusive and that related human beings, rather than isolated individuals, define not only our ordinary way, but also our original state of being human... The idealized notion of a human being as a rights-bearing individual motivated by self-interest who attempts to maximize his profit through rational calculation in the market place adjudicated by a legal framework is certainly incompatible with the Confucian perception of the self as a center of relationships and the Confucian emphasis on duty-consciousness, general well-being, rightness, sympathy, and the moral transformation of ritual. The construction of the idea of global stewardship based on duty rather than rights, communal well-being rather than self-interest, rightness rather than profit, and ritual rather than law is predicate on the Confucian concept of the "great unity" (datong)... (70)

The need to go beyond the Enlightenment mentality, without either deconstructing or abandoning its commitment to rationality, liberty, equality, human rights, and distributive justice, requires a thorough reexamination of the kind of global ethic that is necessary for human survival and flourishing. (71)