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
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