by Morris, Ian;
A happy few shi caught the attention of earls or marquises and rose to high station. In an interesting contrast with Western bureaucracies it was these men, rather than the rulers who hired them, who became the main characters in the literature of the day, cast as virtuous advisers helping rulers prosper by keeping them on the straight and narrow. The Zuozhuan, a commentary on historical documents assembled around 300 BCE, is full of such characters. My favorite is Zhaodun, a high minister to Duke Ling of Jin. “Duke Ling was no true ruler,” the Zuozhuan says, with some understatement. “From his terrace he shot at people with a crossbow and watched them flee the bolts.* When his cook prepared a dish of bears’ paws that was not thoroughly done, he killed him, stuffed the body in a casket, and had his women carry it through the audience chamber.”
Zhaodun remonstrated so much with Duke Ling that the ruler finally sent an assassin to silence the tiresome adviser. But when the hit man reached Zhaodun’s house at dawn, the worthy shi was already dressed in his court robes and hard at work. Caught between horror at murdering such a good man and shame at disobeying his ruler, the killer took the only decent way out, committing suicide by smashing his head against a tree.
Further adventures followed. Duke Ling set an ambush, but Zhaodun escaped when his footman killed an attack dog with one punch and it turned out that one of the duke’s troops was a man Zhaodun had saved from starvation years before. In the end, as in all Zuozhuan stories, Duke Ling gets his comeuppance, although as also often happens in this moralistic text, Zhaodun got blamed for not preventing it.
Other (presumably better-behaved) rulers prospered, though, and new styles of architecture speak of their growing power in the fifth century BCE. Whereas Zhou kings had built palaces on beaten-earth platforms just three or four feet high, the lords now went vertical, moving toward the high end in the most literal sense. One palace in Chu reportedly sat on a platform five hundred feet tall, said (implausibly) to reach the clouds. Another, in northern China, was called “The Platform Reaching Midway to Heaven.” Rulers fortified their palaces, apparently fearing their own people as much as enemy states.
By 450 BCE Eastern rulers, like Western ones, were moving toward high-end models, raising taxes and permanent armies and managing these complex transactions with bureaucracies loyal to them alone but also independent enough to survive their deaths. Their economies were booming and social development had passed twenty-four points. In the West the core had expanded and the Persian Empire had united most of it; in the East similar processes were under way. Of the 148 states that emerged from the fall of the Zhou in 771 BCE, only 14 remained standing by 450 BCE, and just 4—Jin, Qi, Chu, and Qin—dominated the scene.
In Chapter 4, I imagined von Däniken’s spacemen predicting around 1250 BCE that the cores would keep expanding and that a single empire would emerge in each. If they had come back around 450 BCEthey might have felt vindicated; their prediction had not been wrong after all. Just the timing had been off.
THE CLASSICS
The aliens might also have been interested to see that earthlings were losing their taste for pretending to have hotlines to superhumans. For thousands of years godlike kings had anchored the moral order in chains of ritual, linking the humblest villager to rulers who touched heaven by sacrificing on ziggurats or slaughtering captives in cemeteries. But now, as godlike kings reinvented themselves as chief executives, the enchantment was going out of the world. “Would that I had died before or been born later,” complained the seventh-century Greek poet Hesiod, “for now is truly an age of iron … Righteousness and Indignation, their loveliness wrapped in robes of white, depart the wide-avenued earth. They abandon mankind to join the deathless gods on Olympus; bitter sorrows will be left for mortal men; and there will be no more aid against evil.”
But that was only one way of seeing things. From the shores of the Aegean to the Yellow River basin, other thinkers began developing radical new views of how the world worked. They spoke from the margins—socially, because most stood on the lower rungs of the elite; and geographically, because most came from small states on the fringes of power.* Despair not, they said (more or less); we do not need godlike kings to transcend this sullied world. Salvation is within us, not in the hands of corrupt, violent rulers.
Karl Jaspers, a German philosopher struggling at the end of World War II to make sense of the moral crisis of his own day, called the centuries around 500 BCE the “Axial Age,” meaning they formed an axis around which history turned. In the Axial Age, Jaspers portentously declared, “Man, as we know him today, came into being.” Axial Age writings—Confucian and Daoist texts in the East, Buddhist and Jain documents in South Asia, and Greek philosophy and the Hebrew Bible (with its descendants the New Testament and the Koran) in the West—became the classics, timeless masterpieces that have defined the meaning of life for countless millions ever since.
This was quite an achievement for men like the Buddha and Socrates who wrote little or nothing down. It was their successors, sometimes distant ones, who recorded, embellished, or just plain made up their words. Often no one really knew what the founders themselves had thought, and their bitterly feuding heirs held councils, issued anathemas, and cast one another into the outer darkness over this question. The greatest triumph of modern philology has been to reveal that in between splitting, fighting, damning, and persecuting one another, the successors found time to write and rewrite their sacred books so many times that sifting the texts for their original meaning can be virtually impossible.
The Axial texts are also very varied. Some are collections of obscure aphorisms; others, witty dialogues; others still, poems, histories, or polemics. Some texts combine all these genres. And as a final challenge, the classics all agree that their ultimate subject, a transcendent realm beyond our own sordid world, is indefinable. Nirvana—literally “blowing out,” a state of mind in which the passions of this world are snuffed out like a candle—cannot be described, said the Buddha; even trying is inappropriate. For Confucius, ren—often translated “humaneness”—was similarly beyond language. “The more I look up to it, the higher it is; the more I penetrate it, the harder it becomes; I see it ahead of me and suddenly it is behind … in speaking about it can one avoid being hesitant?” Likewise, when pressed to define to kalon, “the good,” Socrates threw up his hands: “it’s beyond me, and if I try I’ll only make a fool of myself.” All he could do was tell parables: the good is like a fire that casts shadows that we mistake for reality. Jesus was equally allusive about the Kingdom of Heaven, and equally fond of parables.
Most indefinable of all was dao, the “Way” that Daoists follow:
The Way that can be spoken of is not the true Way;
The name that can be named is not the true name …
Both may be called mysterious.
Mysterious and still more mysterious,
The gateway of all subtleties!
The second thing the classics agreed on was how to attain transcendence. There is more to Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and so on than bumper-sticker slogans, but one I saw on a car outside my favorite coffee shop while I was writing this chapter summed things up nicely: “Compassion is revolution.” Live ethically, renounce desire, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and you will change the world. All the classics urge us to turn the other cheek and offer techniques to train the self in this discipline. The Buddha used meditation; Socrates favored conversation. Jewish rabbis* urged study; Confucius agreed, and added punctilious observation of ritual and music. And within each tradition, some followers leaned toward mysticism while others took a down-to-earth, folksy line.
The process was always one of self-fashioning, an internal, personal reorientation toward transcendence that did not depend on godlike kings—or even, for that matter, gods. Supernatural powers, in fact, often seem beside the point in Axial thought. Confucius and the Buddha refused to talk about divinities; Socrates, though professing piety, was condemned pa
rtly for failing to believe in Athens’s gods; and rabbis warned Jews that God was so ineffable that they should not mention his name or praise him too much.
Kings fared even worse than gods in Axial thought. Daoists and the Buddha were largely indifferent to them, but Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus openly upbraided rulers for ethical shortcomings. Axial critiques troubled the good and the great, and the new questions being raised about birth, wealth, gender, race, and caste could be positively countercultural.
In picking out these similarities between the Eastern, Western, and South Asian classics I am not trying to gloss over their equally real differences. No one would mistake the Tripitaka (the “Three Baskets” of the Buddhist canon) for Plato’s Republic or Confucius’ Analects, but neither would anyone mistake Confucius’ Analects for competing Chinese classics such as the Daoist Zhuangzi or the “Legalist” Book of Lord Shang. The years 500–300 BCE were, in Chinese tradition, “the age when a hundred schools of thought contended,” and I want to take a moment to look at the extraordinary range of ideas within this single regional tradition.
Confucius took the eleventh-century-BCE Duke of Zhou as his model of virtue and defined his goal as being to restore the moral excellence of the duke’s time by reinstating its system of ritual. “I transmit but do not create,” Confucius said. “I am an admirer of antiquity.” Archaeology, though, suggests that Confucius actually knew rather little about the duke’s distant era. It was not the duke but a broad and much later “ritual revolution” around 850 BCE that had given Zhou society restrained, carefully graded rites, assigning all members of a broad elite to places in a hierarchy. Then, around 600 BCE, rituals had changed again as a few superpowerful men began being buried with huge wealth, setting themselves above the rest of the elite.
Confucius, one of the educated but not particularly rich shi, was probably reacting against this second change, idealizing the stable ritual order that flourished between 850 and 600 BCE and projecting it back onto the Duke of Zhou. “To subdue oneself and return to ritual,” Confucius insisted, “is to practice humaneness (ren).” This meant caring more about the living family than about ancestors; valuing honest reverence over showy sanctimony; esteeming virtue, not descent; performing rituals accurately with simple equipment; and following precedent. Confucius insisted that if he could persuade just one ruler to practice ren, everyone would imitate him and the world would find peace.
The fifth-century-BCE thinker Mozi, however, disagreed completely. As he saw it, Confucius had misunderstood ren. It meant doing good, not being good, and was about everyone, not just your family. Mozi rejected rituals, music, and the Duke of Zhou. Even though people are hungry and suffering violence, he said, Confucians “act like beggars, scoff food like hamsters, ogle like he-goats, and waddle about like castrated pigs.” Dressing in coarse clothes, sleeping rough, and eating gruel, Mozi went among the poor and preached jian ai, a combination of universal sympathy and rigid egalitarianism. “Regard another’s state as you regard your own, another’s family as you regard your own, and another’s person as you regard your own,” he said. “The reason why the world’s calamities, dispossessions, resentments, and hatreds arise is lack of jian ai.” Mozi undertook diplomacy to avert wars, walking until his sandals disintegrated. He even sent his cultlike following of 180 young men to fight to the death to defend an unjustly attacked state.
The thinkers who are normally grouped under the heading of Daoists, however, were as unimpressed by Mozi as they were by Confucius. The Way of the Universe is change, they argued: night into day, joy into sorrow, life into death. Nothing is fixed, nothing definable. Humans eat beef, deer eat grass, centipedes eat snakes, owls eat rats; who can say which is the best diet? What Confucians call true, Daoists noted, followers of Mozi call false, but in reality everything is connected to everything else. No one knows where the Way leads. We must become one with the Way, but cannot do so through frantic activity.
Zhuangzi, one of the Daoist masters, told a story about another great Daoist named Liezi. After seeking the Way for years, Liezi realized he was learning nothing, and returned home.
For three years [says Zhuangzi] he did not go out. He cooked for his wife and tended the pigs as if they were humans. He showed no interest in his studies. He cast aside his desires and sought the truth. In his body he became like the ground itself. In the midst of everything he remained enclosed with the One and that is how he remained until the end.
Zhuangzi thought that Liezi made Confucius’ and Mozi’s activism look ridiculous—and dangerous. “You can’t bear the sufferings of this one generation,” Zhuangzi imagined someone saying to Confucius, “therefore you go and cause trouble for ten thousand generations to come. Do you set out to be this miserable, or don’t you realize what you are doing? … What is wrong cannot but harm and what is active cannot fail to be wrong.” Mozi, by contrast, struck Zhuangzi as “one of the good of this world,” but someone who took the fun out of life. “Mohists wear skins and coarse cloth, wooden shoes or hemp sandals, never stop night and day, and view such fervent activity as their highest achievement.” Yet this only produced “A life that is laborious and a death that is insignificant … Even if Mozi himself could stand it,” Zhuangzi asked, “how can the rest of the world be expected to live this way?”
Mozi rejected Confucius; Zhuangzi rejected Confucius and Mozi; but the so-called Legalist Tradition rejected them all. Legalism was the anti-Axial option, more Machiavellian than Machiavelli. Ren, jian ai, and dao, Legalists felt, all missed the point. Trying to transcend reality was stupid: godlike kings had yielded to managerial, efficiency-seeking ones, and the rest of us should get with the program. For Lord Shang, a fourth-century-BCE chief minister of Qin and Legalism’s guiding light, the goal was not humaneness; it was “the enrichment of the state and the strengthening of its military capacity.” Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you, said Lord Shang, because “If in enterprises you undertake what the enemy would be ashamed to do, you have the advantage.” Neither be good nor do good, because “A state that uses the wicked to govern the good always enjoys order and becomes strong.” And waste no time on rituals, activism, or fatalism. Instead draw up comprehensive law codes with brutal penalties (beheading, burial alive, hard labor) and impose them rigidly on everyone. Like a carpenter’s square, Legalists liked to say, laws force messy materials to conform.
Chinese Axial thought ranged from mysticism to authoritarianism, and was constantly evolving. The third-century-BCE scholar Xunzi, for instance, combined Confucianism with Mozi’s ideas and Daoism and sought middle ground with Legalism. Plenty of Legalists welcomed Mozi’s work ethic and the Daoists’ acceptance of things. Over the centuries ideas were combined and recombined in kaleidoscopic complexity.
Much the same was true of Axial thought in South Asia and the West. I will not work through these traditions in detail, but even a quick look at the small land of Greece gives a sense of the bubbling cauldron of ideas. Godlike kingship may have been weaker in Greece before 1200 BCE than in the older states of southwest Asia, and by 700 Greeks had rejected it decisively. That, perhaps, was why they went on to confront even more starkly than others in the Axial Age the question of what a good society should look like in the absence of rulers who tapped into another world.
One Greek response was to seek the good through collective politics. If no one had access to supernatural wisdom, some Greeks asked, why not pool the limited knowledge each man does have to create a (male) democracy? This was a distinctive idea—not even Mozi had thought of it—and long-term lock-in theorists often suggest that the Greek invention of male democracy marks a decisive rupture between the West and the rest.
By this point in the book it will probably be no surprise to hear that I am not convinced. Western social development had been higher than Eastern for fourteen thousand years before Greeks started voting on things, and the West’s lead barely changed during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the golden age of G
reek democracy. Only in the first century BCE, when the Roman Empire had made democracy redundant, did the West’s lead over the East rise sharply. An even greater problem with the Greek-rupture theory (as will become clear in Chapters 6 through 9) is that democracy disappeared from the West almost completely in the two thousand years separating classical Greece from the American and French revolutions. Nineteenth-century radicals certainly found ancient Athens a useful foil in their debates over how modern democracies might work, but it takes a heroically selective reading of history to see a continuous spirit of democratic freedom stretching from classical Greece to the Founding Fathers (who, incidentally, tended to use the word “democracy” as a term of abuse, just one step above mob rule).
In any case, Greece’s real contribution to Axial thought came not from democrats but from the critics of democracy, led by Socrates. Greece, he argued, did not need democracies, which merely pooled the ignorance of men who judged everything by appearances; what it needed was men like himself, who knew that when it came to the one thing that mattered—the nature of the good—they knew nothing. Only such men could hope to understand the good (if, indeed, anyone could; Socrates was not sure) through reason, honed in philosophical debate.
Plato, one of Socrates’ followers, produced two versions of the master’s model for the good society: The Republic, idealistic enough for any Confucian, and The Laws, authoritarian enough to warm Lord Shang’s heart. Aristotle (one of Plato’s pupils) covered a similar range, from the humane Ethics to the coldly analytical Politics. Some of the fifth-century-BCE thinkers known as Sophists could match Daoists for relativism, just as the visionaries Parmenides and Empedocles matched them for mysticism; and Protagoras was as much a champion of the common man as Mozi.
