Confucianism, tsarism and wokeism | thearticle

With the end of the Wars of 9/11 we ’ re in new strategic territory, and it looks pretty dangerous. A shooting war in Ukraine, a potential conflict over Taiwan and constant friction below

the formal level of war between competing states makes for a combustible mix. It ’ s a big strategic cast with middle sized powers with ambivalent affiliations like Turkey and India finding

a voice, Iran and North Korea testing nuclear boundaries and confessional tensions within Islam adding to the perennial problems of the Middle East. But the central antagonists are China,

Russia and the American-led West. Any form of conflict in the 21st century will be as much about ideas, cultural values and communicated information as about battlefield outcomes, as the war

in Ukraine illustrates on a daily basis. And, taken against this background, it is striking how differently the main players are equipping themselves for any possible contest. China

certainly has a claim to represent the longest continuous civilisation in the world and for much of that time it has been underwritten and sustained by Confucianism. A philosopher and

politician living in the 5th century BCE, Confucius established a set of behavioural standards that have a religious feel to them, but his eponymous doctrine can probably best be described

as a secular morality. This tradition recognises the supremacy of the state over society and of society over the individual; it is gradualist and incremental but ubiquitous, taking a

famously long view on everything from family ambition to national strategy. Even today, its central tenets continue to have a pervasive influence over cultural mores in China and across east

Asia   The only break with Confucianism — the Great Chinese Aberration — came during the Century of Humiliation (1839-1949). Successive Opium Wars, imperialist incursions by the West, a war

of national survival against Japan and a series of debilitating treaties broke the power of Qing China and the Confucian state bureaucracy that served it. The eventual victory of the

Communists in 1949 re-established a unitary Chinese state under an ostensibly Marxist system, but one which owed much to the Confucian tradition, a process compounded by the reforms led by

Deng Xiaoping in the late 20th century which laid the ground for the market economy that has defined modern China. Russia ns can make no similar claims about the longevity of their political

culture, but under the Romanovs — who ruled from 1613 to 1917 – Russia had a distinct and absolutist tradition. How could it be anything else with a tenure in power that started with Ivan

the Terrible and ended with Rasputin, caught between the residual power of the Mongols in the east and ambitious European empires in the west ? Indeed, it is a tradition that survived the

Russian Revolution and in Stalin (Joseph the Terrible, or the Great, according to taste) found a leader that exemplified all of the characteristics of Tsarism. His greatest regret was that

his armies only got as far as Berlin in 1945, when those of Alexander I had reached Paris in 1815. The Great Russian Aberration did not occur until first Gorbachev and subsequently Yeltsin

tried to dismantle the Soviet Union, liberalise a sclerotic society and abandon Tsarism. A period of economic and cultural turmoil followed before Putin restored the Romanov compact:

autocracy and rule by a tiny clique in return for the delivery of prosperity at home and glory abroad. What may seem like an exhausted kleptocracy to Western eyes is proving remarkably

durable, even against the self-inflicted pressures of the Ukraine invasion. Meanwhile, the West has been confident for the last 600 years in the cultural inheritance of the Renaissance, the

Reformation and the Enlightenment. Until, that is, postmodernism and its associated philosophies intruded upon the scene at the back end of the 20th century. Writers like Michel Foucault,

Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard began the deconstruction of Western cultural and societal assumptions by the examination of power, language, knowledge and the relationships between

them. They interpreted the world through a lens that detects power dynamics in every interaction, utterance and cultural artefact. It is a worldview that centres on social and cultural

grievance and reduces everything to a zero-sum political struggle revolving around identity markers like race, gender and sexuality. Quite why and how a small group of French academics

writing on the most recondite aspects at the boundary between philology and philosophy have come to so profoundly influence contemporary Western — and in particular English speaking —

society remains obscure, and will doubtless propagate a minor PhD industry for years to come. Nonetheless, the Woke sensibility they have authored dominates contemporary debate and it is

worth looking at the core events of the Western cultural canon through Woke eyes. When Kenneth Clark introduced the episode covering the Renaissance in his seminal TV series _ Civilisation ,

_ he used the words of the Greek sophist Protagoras: Man is the measure of all things. He then went on to explain the incalculable debt Western society owed to the group of artists,

architects, builders and writers who flourished on the back of profits from banking and the wool trade in Northern Italy in the early 15th century. To Clark, the role of individual genius

was paramount and he saw Leonardo da Vinci as one of the most sublimely gifted polymaths ever to grace human society. Seen through a Woke prism that rejects the individual and universal in

favour of group identity, Leonardo was male, gay and the recipient of unconscionable white privilege in the form of the generous sponsorship of the Medici family. In 1517 Martin Luther

published his _Ninety-five Theses_, a treatise that subsequently became the manifesto for the Reformation. In it he identified the corruption of Catholic orthodoxy in practices like the sale

of indulgences and sought the emancipation of individual conscience based on faith alone. In response to what was a challenge to papal authority and would become an existential threat, the

Church acted with remarkable circumspection. An extended doctrinal debate took place and Luther was called to explain himself to a papal legate. Eventually and after the exhaustion of due

process, he was excommunicated in 1521. It would be fatuous to draw comparisons between 16th century Church bureaucracy and today ’ s on-line environment. However, it is not fatuous to

observe that the author of an apostate doctrine writing today would be instantaneously cancelled — the cultural form of excommunication in the 21st century — by a vengeful and authoritarian

Woke mob, with no interest in dialogue or freedom of conscience. Finally, how could the fundamental Enlightenment principle of objective truth derived from scientific method have survived

against the tyranny of lived experience? What was good enough for Immanuel Kant simply doesn ’ t cut it for Oprah Winfrey. Knockabout stuff, but perhaps it makes a point. And behind that

point is a much more significant issue. Wokeism knows what it is against but has little idea what it is for. How could it when, by its rejection of objective truth and reason, it refuses to

substantiate itself and therefore cannot be argued with? As Lyotard concedes, the postmodern perception is not about factual truth but the strategic advantage gained by repeating slogans,

the vacuity of which cannot be revealed by reasoned debate. It is less a cohesive philosophy than a flirtation with intellectual nihilism. Meanwhile, the culture wars continue. Congress is

besieged, J K Rowling is cancelled and major cities like San Francisco and Portland are barely governable. In other words, the American-led West is living through its Great Aberration right

now.   So, at a time when the risk of international conflict is high and growing, we have the Chinese and the Russians comfortable in their political and cultural skins and drawing on

traditions that have served their civilisations for centuries, indeed millennia. In contrast, the English-speaking West is at war with itself and as preoccupied with the debate about whether

the possessor of a male sexual organ can be female as with international strategy. If it comes to a fight, who is your money on? A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication

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