A couple of weeks ago, a Chinese friend of mine from Beijing was in town, and I spent a couple of evenings catching up with him. He’s an intelligent guy and a real gentleman. His main weakness is an obsession with golfing, but that’s no big deal to me, as this same tendency is very common in my own American family.
He goes by “Charlie” in English, which he speaks very well, having spent some five years studying here in the states. Charlie is what one might call a “junzi” — a Confucian gentleman. In terms of status, a junzi is essentially the Chinese version of a knight, but scholarly pursuits and cultural refinement are far more important than in the Western tradition. Of course, feudal China has been gone for sixty years, but just as in the West, old tradition continues to resonate throughout the modern culture.
As a man, my friend is an admirable person. He is far from what one might consider a brash “alpha male” here in the states, but he has a sensibility and self-confidence that give him a great deal of success with women in China, and I would dare say that these traits would serve him well here — if he cared for American women (he doesn’t).
This got me to thinking about the differences between Eastern and Western gender relations, and what it is about China, which is the cultural center of East Asia, that allows men to maintain a higher status relative to women than they do in Western cultures.
Before I single out China, I should note that China is not the only country in which men have a higher status than they do in the West — in fact, cultures derived from Northwest Europe are unique around the world for elevating their women while affording no special status to men. However, I know a lot more about China than I do about India, the Middle East, Persia and other non-Western civilizations, so that’s what I’ll stick to here.
The difference comes down to Confucianism, which is the philosophy that serves as the basis for Chinese civilization. Confucianism proposes that a proper hierarchical structure of human relationships in the temporal world is pleasing to God (called “Heaven” in most Chinese texts). In this structure, each individual has a proper place. Fathers are above sons, officials above the people, rulers above the officials, etc. Of course, husbands are explicitly above wives.
Confucianism specifies five primary relationships:
- Ruler to Subject
- Father to Son
- Husband to Wife
- Elder Brother to Younger Brother
- Friend to Friend
The only one that specifies the female place in relationships is that of husband to wife. Even friend to friend is about male camaraderie, such as that Confucius himself expresses from time to time in the Analects. A wife’s duty is to submit to her husband, and the husband’s duty is to treat his wife lovingly. This is a very simple arrangement, and similar to Christian ideals concerning marriage.
However, there are some big differences between Confucianism and Christianity, which is the most influential philosophical force in the West. Perhaps most importantly, Confucius does not profess to know the Word of God, but rather suggests that observing the laws of nature can give one a sense of Heaven’s intent. Therefore, there is no real concept of heresy in Confucian thought; however, impropriety takes on far greater significance than it does in Christianity. For example, failing to be virtuous and improperly following rituals can bring down the wrath of Heaven in the form of great disasters and social upheavals.
Christians may be equipped with the Word of God, but they are left to figure out hierarchy and order in the temporal world by themselves through clues in scripture and the structure of the early church. Part of the reason for this is that early Christians came from a marginalized community that had no real hope of ruling the state. To them, the order was clear: Rome rules, leaving their primary concern as the community’s relationship with God. Confucius, for his part, was speaking directly to rulers — he was explicitly trying to influence governance.
So today, when neither Christianity nor Confucius are officially canon, but both have a strong, essential influence on the civilizations they founded, we can find the most confusion in terms of hierarchy in places where the Word of God (i.e. divine authority) has the most weight in relation to concepts of temporal order (including ecclesiastical order). This is why Southern and Eastern Europe, with their respective Catholic and Orthodox sensibilities, have retained more of the traditional order than the parts of Europe and the United States most strongly influenced by the egalitariam Protestantism that democratized the Word of God, sweeping away whatever order may have existed in the barbarous marchlands of Northern Europe and settlements of Colonial America.
A further tendency to identify with the early Christians in Palestine through a common contempt for Rome tends to lend a strong iconoclastic streak to the American nature. This contempt for the conventional has been the source of much American progress – both moral and material – over the relatively brief existence of the American people, but it is also one of the sources of our present confusion in gender relations. America has repeatedly justified itself on divine authority despite a lack of consensus on how divine authority is to be interpreted, and even over what constitutes such authority. So one can see the strange phenomenon of Americans, even if they proclaim atheism, behaving as though there is some sort of irrefutable weight to their beliefs, which must be sanctioned by some force or the other (perhaps Darwin has become a spook?). Justifications through scripture have also become increasingly odd and divorced from reality, such as Governor Sanford’s attempt to use scripture to ameliorate his shameless adultery. Wouldn’t it have been better for him to simply say that he was only sating a hunger, reprehensible though his behavior may have been? No, not here; he had to make an attempt to sanctify it somehow.
It is this fragmented, febrile and often myopic interpretation of divine authority (how could it be otherwise?) that leads to an utter lack of consensus on propriety in American culture. In this bubbling cauldron of opinions and ideas, where every heresy has equal weight, there can be no lasting sense of order that sustains society. Rather, the survival of the state itself has become orthodoxy in America, and the impermanence, turnover and anarchy of society has become its corollary — or perhaps even the necessary ingredient of this orthodoxy.
We see the converse in Chinese civilization, where it is assumed that social order undergirds the state, and divine favor is granted through the preservation of that order. The state that fails to do so loses this favor, and is eventually crushed. So in China one gets the sense that the people and their customs survive and prevail despite the periodic failures of the state, whereas in America today it is taught that the state survives and prevails despite the periodic failures of the American people. This is really the essence of the term “propositional nation,” or “creedal nation.”
The current situation in America is not unprecedented — not even in China itself. The Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 saw social order turned on its head in China. Mao, in a bid to reestablish power following a temporary fall from grace in the early 1960s (resulting from the disasters of the Great Leap Forward), drew from his base – largely young devotees of his personality cult – and declared a state of perpetual revolution. Students as young as 12 denounced and disciplined teachers, and doctors and experts of all sorts were dragged from their professions for being counter-revolutionary and hauled before criticism committees, where they were slandered, humiliated and beaten. The inevitable result was the breakdown of China’s society, which had profound implications for millions of people whose lives were put on hold, or worse, for a decade.
Finally, in 1976 Mao’s death and the devastating Tangshan earthquake, which killed hundreds of thousands, were widely seen as signs of divine disfavor, and the Chinese began to slowly return to tradition and the ancient social norms. Today, the Cultural Revolution is known as Mao’s greatest error, and seen as a great offense against the natural order of society. This, as I mentioned before, is the Chinese version of heresy.
Naturally, having been around for 2,200 years, unified China has seen many periods of dysfunctional government that eventually led to dynastic collapse, the most recent of which occurred less than a century ago. Like the current American state, Chinese governments have always done their best to survive, and in doing so have upset the natural order countless times. The fact that such a strong notion of tradition exists in China is testament to these repeated failures, which have tempered the Chinese people and civilization through periodic trials and tests.
Perhaps we Americans are on the verge of such a trial — we may even be in the midst of one today. When the state takes precedence over the people, it bends the people to suit its needs, and this is why we are observing such a radical departure from established norms. America’s national philosophy, which is still not fully formed, does not need to be done away with, but it is becoming clear at this point that adjustments must be made. Our radical individualism has taken us to a point where our country cannot hold together without the rigid system of law and regulation that stifles rather than promotes freedom. So we find that our lack of consensus and rejection of any common, unifying philosophy and spirituality has come to imprison us in a rigid institution that grants us all a cell of our own, but does not allow the uplifting and liberating experience of living in a true national community with a common purpose.
This is why we live in such contentious confusing times. It is why so many have no idea of, or appreciation for, their natural place in our world.
21 responses so far ↓
1 Derek // Aug 11, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Great post Welmer.
“Our radical individualism has taken us to a point where our country cannot hold together without the rigid system of law and regulation that stifles rather than promotes freedom.”
I am not totally sure radical individualism was ever a problem. I think the problem was shielding people from the consequences of those individualist actions. I think America as a group felt that people could choose to go their own way but in the end what worked (community, families, and people caring about each other) would win out because they are the best organizational principles.
Once we started shielding people from bad choices: Free food, welfare, breaking the marriage contract, ect allowed people to continue making bad choices. For example a 100 years a man who drank too much would end up dead from his choices. Today we as a society give a liver transplant. People who did not plant crops or work hard died. Today we give them fatining foods and welfare. I think we broke the proper order and individualism ran amuck and people could do what they wanted without paying the piper.
2 miles // Aug 11, 2009 at 10:45 pm
“Once we started shielding people from bad choices: Free food, welfare, breaking the marriage contract, ect allowed people to continue making bad choices. For example a 100 years a man who drank too much would end up dead from his choices. Today we as a society give a liver transplant. People who did not plant crops or work hard died. Today we give them fatining foods and welfare. I think we broke the proper order and individualism ran amuck and people could do what they wanted without paying the piper.”
Derek,
Thats putting the hammer right on the nail. Thwack!
We have given women a “divorce-theft-bonanza” (Roissy’s very succint and accurate description) , and it has created a multi-generational situation where now young men are afraid to get married, and women are putting it off. Our birthrates have slipped below replacement. We bring in the difference via immigration, but many of the immigrants dont have the IQ’s of the Americans’ they are replacing. Few of the hispanics that are working on houses or sweeping floors are going to be doing much else. These people will be net tax eaters instead of net tax payers when their females get a taste of transfer payments (second generation of them, I assure you). Our politics could move leftward, which is a wealth destroying trend, not a wealth creating one.
The divorce and custody laws are the fount of so much that is wrong. They alter the way women ——see—– men. They see men as “marks” now, fools to be played and left at her convieniece, to take that “divorce-theft-bonanza”. If they truly had to make it on their own in the event of a divorce, there would be few divorces. A man’s autotomy has been infringed upon by the state endlessly since the 70′s in so many ways, and we have to reverse that.
Our education (public) is a politically-correct indoctrination, and its marxist in its intent: it suppresses the naturally gifted and indulges the dysfunctional kids. We are getting adults who aren’t as able as they should be out there in our economy. We could do so much better.
I think the greatest predictor of how well a country or company is going to do is how smart its leadership and leaders are (the top 10%). Our top 10% seem to be money-grubbing and status-grandstanding more than anything else, not leading.
Im hoping technology can be a wild card here, and allow us to create much more wealth in the next decades, but it takes energy to power any new technology, and we are making mistakes there too (proposed Climate bill).
I hope 200 years from now historians dont’ look back on the USA and try and figure out “what happened?” Maybe, as China shook off the Cultural Revolution and moved forward, we can too. They had the advantage of a unified populace culturally and ethnically though, and we are a salad bowl of competing groups now, but we are richer than they were then, and have more technolgoy. We have to defeat political correctness and political liberalism (soft marxism) though. I cant’ see continuing to move forward as long as these forces keep surging.
3 Lukobe // Aug 12, 2009 at 1:26 am
One of your best pieces. Good job.
4 John // Aug 12, 2009 at 5:50 am
Since you are familiar with Chinese culture, I am interest to know what you make of the reports we hear from China of sex-selective abortions and infanticide, which we are told are creating, and accelerating, havock in Chinese society by skewering the male/female ratio.
Is this most honestly explained as a culture that doesn’t value women as much as men? From the reports and analyses I read, many of them from Christian agencies, it would appear to be so. Still, something about these reports and analyses doesn’t seem right. Is there something more to be said to understand what is going on?
5 Welmer // Aug 12, 2009 at 8:35 am
The sex-selective abortions are probably still going on, but only in the most backward parts of the countryside. If I remember correctly, peasant families with only a girl are allowed to try again, which ameliorates this somewhat. I did once see some propaganda in a very poor village that extolled the virtues of having daughters, so obviously something was going on there, but I spent little time in the countryside.
Another thing to remember is that the Asian sex ratio at birth is also significantly more skewed toward males (compared to European populations) naturally.
In urban China, women are doing just fine. People want smaller families, and many of them are perfectly happy with one girl.
6 Justin // Aug 12, 2009 at 9:15 am
Great post, Welmer. Very informative. I would like to take issue with a couple key points, however.
Firstly, I don’t think individualism is the problem in America, quite the opposite. It is America’s turn to collectivism that is the problem, specifically following the 60′s Great Society and Civil Rights eras (which we are still in).
Institutionalized feminism has replaced any semblance of Christianity when it comes to family law, so I’m not sure the focus on Christianity as a guiding principle is appropriate. Traditional Christianity is clear: the man is to be the head of the household. That system is literally impossible under today’s laws.
7 John // Aug 12, 2009 at 9:41 am
Do you see sex-selective abortions and infanticide as evidence of a misogynistic society? After all, whether the killings have diminished or not, it is always female babies who are killed because of their sex.
8 Welmer // Aug 12, 2009 at 10:03 am
The sex-selective killings are about economics, not misogyny. Daughters cost resources to raise, and then they leave the family. Sons stay and work the farm, and also bring in a daughter in law and hopefully grandchildren.
When economic conditions are good, the infanticide and abortions don’t happen.
9 John // Aug 12, 2009 at 10:38 am
Thanks, that makes good sense, and sorry for my thick-headedness. Like many, I am accustomed to hearing that almost all great social ills point to an overt or underlying misogyny. Makes it difficult to see clearly sometimes.
10 Savvy // Aug 12, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Many Americans both male and female do not take the time to develop their minds and souls. It’s been this way for quite some time. Europeans still develop their minds, but the soul is left out.
I have heard about China having problems with marriage because now there are more males than females. The females want these Alphas we keep talking about. I remember reading an article about this, perhaps one of you has read it. I can’t find it doing any searches on the morass of web search results.
The thing with Christianity is that a woman is considered to be a co-heir in Christ rather than a less than spiritually. Galatians 3:28 speaks to this. The man is still the head of the household–but this means different things to different people and needs work and compromise between the couple. Obviously, a wise leader of a company listens to his people and is willing to consider their points of views in his decisionmaking especially a small company like a marriage.
11 BeltainAmerica // Aug 12, 2009 at 12:51 pm
I can see your point Welmar and it makes sense except I would point out a different road as to why Christianity has effected the Western world.
Confucianism from what little I know of it does not stand against slavery per se. Nor as you mentioned does it push to “spread the word” or convert followers.
Christianity is heavily based in the oppression and slavery of more than one race and that races rise to freedom and fight for equality. Thereby making it a Christian moral doctrine to help free an enslaved people or oppressed people rather than allowing “Nature” to make slavery or oppression obsolete on its own.
One could write volumes on the subject but to break it down to a basic form: Christianity is the only religion that fundamentally makes war on itself. Not in a violent way but ina philisophical doctrine way. This is most apparent in the differences between old and new testaments but in other ways as well. Yet Christianity also preaches rules to live by sometimes with earthly repercussions.
This is why all the Christian/European empires eventually broke apart because Christianity in the end hampers and controls even the most oppressive and evil “government”. Any government which has Christianity as it’s base religion will eventually go through a period where the outrage against it’s non-chritian ethics will be questioned and stopped.
The tolerance it preaches also hurts it as a religion allowing “heretics” to throw away or change aspects of the religion as they see fit. This in turn muddies the waters to lead eventually to what we have in America today with sects practicing non-Christian dogma yet still proclaiming to be Christian and then ultimately to tolerance for comletely non-christian religions springing up from those who should have been part of their Christian nation: IE Wiccan, Feminist, even Socialist to a point.
The fatal flaw in Europe and America was the seperation of Church and state.
None of the current Western “Christian” nations were ever really seperated from Christianity as a whole until the last 70 years or so. While the marriage between the two (Democracy and Christianity) stayed whole it worked very well. The two had arguments like the American Civil war, but they complimented each other well.
Christianity would temper democracy and keep its vulnerable side of greed and corruption in check, while democracy would keep any one emerging Christian dogma or sect from taking over completely.
In the end though the seperation did in fact come and once democracy was free of it’s much needed partner it began reveling in its vices no longer kept in check by the temperance of Christianity.
If you read all this I salute you. Sorry to be so long winded.
12 Savvy // Aug 12, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Justin I’m with you on the return to collectivism. (That I agree with you should not be taken as collectivism.
13 Savvy // Aug 12, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Miles–an acquaintance of mine essentially has about drunk himself to death. He is now in hospice care with liver failure and his mother is caring for him daily. It’s not pretty.
14 novaseeker // Aug 12, 2009 at 3:55 pm
A great article, Welmer!
I think it will be hard to make the adjustments to our culture in order to shepherd it through, or past, this quite messed up period we find ourselves in. We really don’t have a firm enough foundation, yet, for that, I think.
15 Welmer // Aug 12, 2009 at 4:59 pm
I’d like to say thanks for the feedback. One of the most rewarding things about blogging is that I can put ideas out there and get critiques quickly.
Because I don’t think our problems can be solved alone, input is very valuable. However, it does take some time to digest, so it might take me a while to come up with a comprehensive response.
One thing that gives me a bit of pride (hopefully not too much) is the thoughtfulness and intelligence of the comments. The majority of comments I get here are definitely worth reading, and that makes the effort worth it.
Maybe I’m a bit foolish to think so, but I do have faith in American minds. I think we really can make a difference with some mental effort and cooperation. If not today, for posterity at least. That is the point of writing, after all.
16 Lukobe // Aug 13, 2009 at 1:41 am
Random thoughts here:
1) I’m still glad there’s separation of church and state here.
2) There are many things to be said for Confucianism, but there’s a reason my mother (and two of my cousins) left Korea…
3) Why is it always one submitting to the other? How about trying actual equality for a change?
17 novaseeker // Aug 13, 2009 at 5:59 am
Equality sounds well, but the idea that a long-term relationship can be stable if it is a constant renegotiation and power struggle (which it is if there isn’t anyone in “charge”) is quite unrealistic.
The reality in “equality marriages” is generally the following: what the woman says *ultimately* goes. As a *practical* matter that is the way most “equality” marriages work — someone is still in charge, in effect, because practically speaking because it is terribly inefficient and friction-causing for a family to be constantly renegotiating itself. So the woman is in charge, by default, in equality marriages. What I mean by being “in charge” is that generally she decides what happens — sure, there is the appearance of “equality” because things are “discussed” (perhaps even ad nauseam in some cases), but in effect she decides what happens –> either by agreeing to what her husband wants or not, but ultimately it’s her call in the end.
Why is that? For a few reasons. The first is the real and tangible power that family law hands her: that’s the ultimate power that women have, and they are well aware of it, and it casts a shadow over “power” in marriages. Another is that women seem to be much more comfortable with marital/relational conflict than men are. So what you typically see in “equality” marriages is that there is a lot of discussion about what happens (at least at the beginning, that is), but ultimately to the extent that there are disagreements about significant issues, almost always it’s her view that prevails, either because the man is worried about provoking her under family law or because she ups the level of conflict to a level he can’t or doesn’t want to deal with, so he gives in and she wins. This isn’t me making this up: LMFT’s like Richard Driscoll have openly stated in print that women tend to win most relationship disagreements in this era of “equality” because of the mismatch in the way men and women experience relationship conflict — to wit, women have a huge advantage because they do not react as negatively to relationship conflict, and therefore tend to drive their perspectives home fairly consistently, at least where they care enough about the issue. Driscoll says he has observed this pretty consistently in his practice in both marital and non-marital relationships, and that women fairly often admit that they “win” most disputes — which in effect means that they are the ones “in charge”, even though that takes place under the veneer of “equality” due to the presence of “discussion”, which women generally win.
For all of these reasons, there are very few marriages where things are “equal”, but in most “equality” marriages, women are more or less firmly “in charge” despite window dressing to the contrary.
18 Lukobe // Aug 13, 2009 at 9:56 am
I know there’s no such thing as a perfectly equal marriage, and that often what appears to be an equal one can be a female-dominated one. But can’t we strive to make more marriages one of those few you mention where things really are equal? Holding up male domination, even benevolent male domination, as a goal — well, it doesn’t instantly turn off 50% of the population, because there are some women who’d prefer that — but it certainly antagonizes a lot of them. Who wants to live under subjection? And, it should be pointed out, there are plenty of men who aren’t fit to lead a household. (Same goes for women.)
19 Grim // Aug 13, 2009 at 9:58 am
Great point about “equality” marriages. I had never thought about it that way.
20 novaseeker // Aug 13, 2009 at 11:51 am
But can’t we strive to make more marriages one of those few you mention where things really are equal?
I understand the sentiment, but it’s utopian.
In every single relationship you have, whether romantic or otherwise, one or the other person has more power, de facto. That’s the reality of it. Even in the most dyed in the wool “equalist” marriages, it isn’t really equal if you look under the hood – one or the other has more power, even if it is exercised in a particularly subtle way.
I fully realize that the idea that men should be “in charge” is repugnant to many women because of their ideological programming. It isn’t about “subjection” — it’s about leadership. Men should not be domineering or subjugate women — but relationships simply work better for men and women when men lead them, at least overtly. I agree that some men make poor leaders, and these kinds of men generally also make poor (or at least very dissatisfying for their wives) husbands, and probably have no business being married. The reason for that is that the the currently common “equalist” marriage where women are de facto in charge is ultimately dissatisfying for women. The reason it’s ultimately dissatisfying for women is that many of the women eventually (perhaps even unknowingly) yearn for their mates to push back at them, but the men don’t do that in order to avoid the conflict (because men don’t handle that conflict as well psychologically or emotionally per a number of LMFTs as I mentioned in my post above), and eventually this leads women to think less of their husbands, and become bored with them. This is a common pattern in relationship failure today, and it directly flows from the fact that most of the equalist marriages are, de facto, female led.
Again, I am not making this up. A very interesting article by Sandra Tsing Loh appeared in last month’s Atlantic which is well worth reading. In it she documents her own feelings as well as those of her age cohort upper middle class female friends in LA about their husbands — all of whom are in equalist marriages, and all of whom contribute a lot around the house and are great fathers and so on. But the women were deathly bored. The men were emasculated in most cases due to the equalism, in several cases the women were the leaders of the family (unhappily so), and found themselves wishing their husbands were like men of yore who had mid-life crises and chased their secretaries. Bright feminist women like Cristina Nehring are writing entire books about how equalism in relationships has killed off love and passion, and she pines (with quite well written prose, I might add) for unequal relationships, saying that these provide the basis for true passion, something which has been lost in the relentless ideological drive towards equalism as an absolute value. It’s fascinating to see feminists come full circle on this, but that’s a topic for another thread.
Feminism and its aftermath have convinced women, intellectually, that they want equalist marriages … but the facts on the ground suggest that in many of these marriages the relationship simply becomes unsustainable because the woman, who de facto becomes the one “in charge”, becomes unattracted to her husband (and he to her, likely), the sex dries up, and the relationship falters.
All of that is much less likely to happen when the male is leading (not domineering or subjugating — those kinds of situations lead to unhappiness, too, of course) because that (1) preserves his wife’s respect, (2) garners and maintains her attraction (regardless of what feminist studies tells her to feel), (3) supports his attraction for her. Of course this presupposes the man’s ability to lead with competence and confidence, and men who do not have that are better off not being married, because their risk of divorce skyrockets. The reverse situation — of female leadership in marriages — leads to a mess of dysfunction in many cases and unhappiness for men and women alike. The third option of “true equality” is really utopian and unrealistic. It applies to no other relationship we have in life, and expecting it to apply to this one is a rather unrealistic approach.
21 Carl Jung: Founding Father of Game | Welmer // Aug 13, 2009 at 1:52 pm
[...] was pleased to see that, as I proposed in my recent post on the “American Dilemma,” Jung also explains the American character as a result of its religious heritage: They chose [...]
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