Against Fairness

by Asma, Stephen T.

  But how your face appears to others is not just an aesthetic issue in China; it is a deep social and cultural metaphor. Saving face, losing face, giving face: these are all important aspects of Chinese social graces, and I learned much more about it living in the hinterlands than in the commercialized (and frankly Westernized) downtown.

  In face culture, you must “be somebody” in order to get privileges—you must have merit appeal (achieved excellence) or you must know the right people (guanxi). And while this nepotism horrifies most Americans because it seems exclusionary, I hasten to add that both boarding passes—accomplishment and guanxi—are considered to be entirely within your reach (Confucianism believes that effort and discipline solve most social disadvantages).

  Giving face, or causing someone to lose face, can be very subtle. And for an unrefined Chicago boy like myself, it was like tiptoeing through a minefield of possible infractions. A certain tone of voice should be used with elders; gifts should be brought when arriving at certain events, sometimes specific foods, sometimes (like at a wedding) very specific amounts of money; a myriad of different titles must be used to address everyone from taxi drivers to professors to one’s aunts and uncles; particular kinds of compliments must be used for certain people. In many cases, one doesn’t “compliment” directly but rather learns the art of “precision insults” in order to give face to one’s friend. For example, if your friend is struggling feebly with some electronic device or maybe some stubborn merchandise packaging, you should hurl insults at the difficult item and its idiotic manufacturers. You should not, in most cases, just step in to do it yourself, because if you manage the problem easily, then you have caused your friend to lose face.

  As a gweilo, I marched and stumbled unwittingly, like a bull in a china shop, through all these delicate face matters (mianzi). But I was usually given a pass because, as an American, I was expected to be uncultured. Once, a Chinese friend came to our house with a gift for my son, and I made the mistake of offering her a seat at the dinner table. To my mind this was a kindly act of goodwill, but because we were already halfway into our meal, my gesture was perceived as an insulting offer to eat our leftovers.

  Unlike in Chicago, or America generally, the Chinese don’t think everyone is equal. America may not really be an egalitarian country, but it certainly likes to pretend it is. Egalitarian fairness, however, is not even an ideal in China—never has been. As a teacher, for example, I was treated with ridiculous amounts of respect. In Confucian cultures like China (and Cambodia, where I also lived and taught), I was treated with far more respect than I ever experienced in the States (where you’re treated more like the French-fry cook at a fast-food drive-thru). It is the legacy of our Socratic education system that leads Westerners to always challenge authority and treat it with suspicion; but in a Confucian culture, authority figures, people of rank, and elderly people are assumed to be sources of wisdom (until proven otherwise). Our cultures have two different starting points when thinking about social hierarchy.8

  One of the things that I didn’t understand about Chinese culture before I lived there was that this stress on saving face and having status in other’s eyes are wedded to a strong emphasis on communal ethics. The public culture of status applies to everything, not just your job, education, or economic status, but even your moral status. And your goal is to work hard to improve that status. From Confucius to Mao, there is an emphasis on public ethics rather than the private, inner guilt-based ethics of the West. A Westerner—who is accustomed to the private, intimate sense of values—will be very surprised to find perfect strangers in China suggesting moral improvements to you in public.

  Walking through the streets of our neighborhood, we were regularly scolded by perfect strangers. Scowling women, working in markets or passing by, would examine our son carefully, look up at his mother (again as a gweilo I usually got a pass), and tell her, without irony or humor, that she was a bad mother because our son was too skinny. He needed to be fattened up! Then we would be regaled with a litany of fat-producing recipes, usually involving an elaborate turtle soup or a special chicken-fat concoction. The reprimand from these strangers was surprising at first, and no attempt was made to hide their moral judgment. On the contrary, they felt (and this is common in a face culture) that they were improving us, and more importantly improving our son. My wife, born and raised on the Mainland, was never surprised or offended by these public harassments.

  Imagine strolling up to a family on the street in Chicago and lecturing the parents about the sad state of their obese kids. I can actually hear your face getting slapped. In our culture, we’re taught to disregard what others think of us because our personal value is supposed to be independent of social recognition. The Chinese, however, do not share the assumption (codified in Christianity and secular human rights) that every individual is autonomous and intrinsically valuable. An individual’s value is socially defined, so the creation of a favoritism circle is crucial both for one’s career and, more fundamentally, one’s very identity.9

  In addition to an emphasis on public ethics, Chinese people also think more in terms of moral heroes. Instead of our Western view of ethics as the impartial application of universal rules, the Chinese think about paragon characters—persons, not principles. The junzi, for example, is the Confucian “superior person”—noble, modest, caring, wise, and magnanimous.

  The junzi can be contrasted with the xiaoren, which means “small person” or petty. The better you are in your tribal duties to family, the better you are at building good guanxi outside the family, and then the better you are as a citizen and even as a politician. These forms of favoritism actually make you a junzi, superior person, and this good character feeds back into your generous daily dealings with others. The powerful person is required to be the benevolent person. A well-known Chinese idiom describes the magnanimous junzi as “so big that he can float a boat inside his belly” (zai xiang du li neng cheng chuan). The Western conflation of nepotism and corruption is premised on the assumption that power corrupts, but Confucianism suggests that proper education prevents such abuses.

  Confucian culture, then, holds out an impressive alternative to our fairness culture. Those who think that the grid of impartiality is either inevitable, preordained, or unparalleled have billions of people and thousands of years to explain away. The idea that modern ethics must be centered on fairness reminds me of Evangelicals who claim that all ethics must be centered on monotheism. All of Chinese culture, with its secular favoritism, stands as a staggering contradiction to both narrow claims.

  Indian Favoritism

  In a recent study of global ethics, 76 percent of Indian college students thought that “insider trading” on the stock market was “completely fair” or “acceptable.”10 Only 36 percent of U.S. students considered the same case to be ethically acceptable (in the United States, such trading is only illegal if the trade was done before relevant information becomes public). This does not indicate an Indian lack of ethics, but rather a different framework of ethics. The finance professor who analyzed this data, aptly named Statman, adopted the same old false dichotomy, when he asked, “Why are people different from one another in their tilt toward self-interest or fairness, and why are people of one country different, on average, from people of another?” Of course, the question of why some countries are more fair-minded is a good one, but—as I’ve been arguing—“self-interest” is not the proper contrasting opposite. Tribal devotion, filial piety, and kin bias are much more accurate contraries to fairness. I would suggest that the high percentage of Indian acceptance of insider trading reflects tribal family values—which are very strong in India—rather than individualistic self-interest. Kin-based cultures, like India, do not place much trust in people/institutions outside the family, and they privilege insider information and interests. In fact, if the true contrast was between individual selfishness and fairness, as Meir Statman assumes, then we might expect to see a reverse of the percenta
ge figures. After all, American Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman—a free-market individualist—argued explicitly for more insider trading, not less.

  I submit that Indian people are comfortable with the insider trading case and a variety of other cases that Westerners would call “conflicts of interest” because India (like China) never adopted the grid of impartiality. India, despite being the world’s biggest democracy, is not an egalitarian culture.

  Nobel laureate and India-born scholar Amartya Sen thinks we shouldn’t make too much of the cultural differences between East and West.11 The Buddha, he reminds us, was thoroughly Indian, but also thoroughly devoted to egalitarian opportunities for enlightenment.12 This much is true, but Sen forgets to mention that the Buddha—being extremely heterodox in both metaphysics and social theory—did not contour the Indian mind in any significant way.13 Contrary to Sen, I would say that egalitarianism has “flickered” in Indian culture, but it has not dominated. Sen is at pains to bring Indian culture into the Western conversation and legitimize it by celebrating these “flickers,” whereas I am actually a fan of nepotistic favoritism and see no need to apologize for it.

  Fig. 16. The Laws of Manu, composed between 200 BCE and 200 CE, codify traditional Indian thinking on moral, social, and legal matters. The laws (which are highly exceptional rather than universal) are considered to be a direct transmission from the supreme progenitor of humankind, Manu. In this depiction, Vishnu (in fish form) warns Manu to prepare for a coming flood that will wipe out everything. Drawing by Stephen Asma, based on traditional Indian representations.

  A more accurate assessment of the relevant cultural difference is A. K. Ramanujan’s claim that Hindu dharma (law) is context dependent and slightly different from caste to caste.14 Traditional Indian culture has not recognized a one-size-fits-all universal moral code—like we see in Kant’s categorical imperative or utilitarian metrics. There is no grid of impartiality in Indian culture. The Laws of Manu (Manava Dharmasastra), composed between 200 BCE and 200 CE, codify traditional Indian thinking on moral, social, and legal matters. Manu’s laws are considered to be a direct transmission from the supreme progenitor of humankind. Manu says that a king “who knows the sacred law, must imagine [his way] into the laws of caste, of districts, of guilds, and of families, and thus settle the peculiar laws of each” (Manu 7:41). As Ramanujan describes it, “To be moral, for Manu, is to particularize—to ask who did what, to whom and when.”15

  Traditional Indian culture accepts the idea that social life is filled with inconsistencies and exceptions. The caste hierarchy, for example, goes from Brahmans on top, to Kshatriyas below, to Vaishyas below that, to Sudras below that. The Laws of Manu tell us, for example, that a Kshatriya who defames a Brahmin will be fined one hundred coins, but a Vaishya who defames a Brahmin will be fined two hundred coins. And exceptionalism applies to virtues too. Ramanujan quotes German philosopher Hegel, who noted: “While we say ‘Bravery is a virtue,’ the Hindus say, on the contrary, ‘Bravery is a virtue of the Kshatriyas [the warrior caste].’” Moreover, it is common in Indian culture to think of morally good conduct as age-specific. The moral life of the middle-aged householder is quite different from the morally righteous path of the elderly person, and so on. For example, a middle-aged parent is duty bound to expend most of their energy providing for their children, not chasing after enlightenment. But when the same parent’s children are full-grown, he is now morally expected to turn toward the ascetic purification of his own soul. It is also common to accept the relativity of, or contextual relevance of, geographic region. It is accepted that in the North, the southern ways would be wrong and vice versa.16

  My point here is not to celebrate the caste system. Supernatural cosmic maps of “favorite” classes are absurd and untenable in the modern world. They are absurd for several reasons. One, the speculative metaphysics of Vedantic religious scriptures should not dictate contemporary social structure, because those scriptures (like our zodiac or perhaps our own Western scriptures) are pre-scientific, outmoded attempts to understand nature. We have much better methods for understanding nature now. Two, the caste categories are rigid and non-negotiable (pursuant to their supernatural status), whereas more permeable social boundaries (merit-based or otherwise) are much more consistent with human flourishing.

  What I am suggesting, instead, is that Indian culture embraces the contextual differences of value that are intrinsic to human interaction. This entails the more healthy forms of favoritism like kin nepotism, family bias, tribal loyalty, preference of friends over colleagues over strangers, and so on. They don’t attempt to mash down these unfair topographies with a universal grid of impartiality. They accept them as part of the good life. The imbalances are inside the moral life, not outside it.

  The most immediate context for the context-sensitive Indian is family. The psychologist Alan Roland has suggested that Indians carry their family context wherever they go.17 Indians, Chinese, and other Asians possess a stronger “familial self”—a constant sense of continuity with family. The individual already contains a little circle of benefactors, cohorts, dependents—favorites, by birth or choice, who will always receive biased attention and consideration.

  A touching example of this filial favoritism—so strong in Asian cultures—can be detected in the notes scrawled by tsunami survivor Hiromitsu Shinkawa. He was found ten miles out to sea, floating on the roof of his house, after the devastating 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan. After floating for two days without rescue, Shinkawa—believing that he would soon be dead—began scrawling notes for posterity (using a marker he found floating in the water). He scribbled a few notes to his elderly parents, regretting his own untimely demise and the fact that he would not be able to take care of them in the future: “I am sorry for being unfilial.” Sometime later, floating on the slowly sinking debris, he wrote: “I’m in a lot of trouble. Sorry for dying before you. Please forgive me.”18

  In sum, then, the filial piety cultures of Asia hold out an impressive alternative to our fairness culture of disinterested equality. They celebrate favoritism and see ethics as an extension of it, rather than an opponent to morality. If ethics and justice are equated with fairness, then half the world is reprobate. Obviously I think the problem is in our impoverished Western notion of the good, not in Asian cultures.19

  Disentangling Nepotism and Corruption

  Many of us assume that biased nepotistic behavior is intrinsically corrupt and needs to be rooted out wherever it grows. We see the democratization of power, decision making, and wealth as good insurance against greed and abuse. Americans, influenced by Montesquieu’s political philosophy, tend to think of power in terms of checks and balances. Two main counterweights seem necessary to us for balancing corrupt power. One is the decentralization of power. Make sure the persons in charge cannot act in a purely executive manner—hence the three branches of government. We seek to spread power through multiple individuals or groups. And, two, make sure that the powerful persons have no interest in the cases they oversee—hence judges recuse themselves from cases considered too close to them. Disinterest (that great Enlightenment term) is crucial as a guarantee that the leader will not funnel profits into his particular coffers.

  These assumptions are so deep in the Western mind that doubting them seems heretical. The quest for disinterested power, for example, is so old that even Plato—who hated democracy and egalitarianism—nonetheless argued that the only reason why his philosopher kings could be trusted with the utopian republic was because they didn’t want to rule. Plato’s philosopher kings only govern begrudgingly—they are utterly disinterested in mundane profit, wealth, and honor, and would rather be meditating on the pure Forms of knowledge.

  Hopefully, my short tour of Eastern values has primed us to question our usual assumptions about decentralized and disinterested power. A whole other way of thinking about power has been suppressed and covered over by the grid of impartiality. If we change from thinking of
ethics as rules, or even individual actions, we begin to appreciate agent-centered ethics. In this agent-centered tradition, the good is not some calculus or distribution of deserts, but the actions of a virtuous character. In China, we see it in the Confucian tradition of the magnanimous junzi—powerful but benevolent. In Southeast Asia, we find the dhammaraja, the virtuous monarch. In the ancient West, we find it in Aristotle’s view of the “great-souled man.”

  The idea that one can be both powerful and benevolent is highly suspicious to many egalitarians. But every nuclear family is an obvious example of concentrated parental power and flourishing benefactor children. A father’s care for his children is the real counterweight to his power—and if he has good character, his power goes entirely toward the wellbeing of his dependents. The benevolent use of power inside the nuclear family is just an illustration of the fact that unfair power distribution does not automatically entail unjust and unhappy conditions. Are there bad fathers who abuse their power? Sadly, yes. Does this mean that fatherhood is intrinsically corrupt, and patriarchs should step aside?

  The revolutionary communist and writer for the Revolution newspaper, Sunsara Taylor, recently scolded me during a public radio debate. The nuclear family, she told me, was the incubator for all abuse, corruption, and exploitation—the institutionalized headquarters of rape and oppression. Ms. Taylor’s draconian view represents the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, which still takes a Maoist line on the evils of the nuclear family. For them, the favoritism inherent in family life must be broken, so that affection, devotion, and wealth can be evenly distributed throughout the party.20

  I’ll avoid the ad hominem temptation to muse on Ms. Taylor’s own childhood and instead focus on the philosophical error, as I see it. Many people have pointed out that abolishing the family, in the service of fairness, runs counter to human nature and is therefore doomed to failure. It should be obvious, given chapter 2, that I agree with the spirit of this critique. Nonetheless, I want to highlight a different conceptual issue, not just the pragmatic failure of anti-filial policy.