III. Effects of the Ideal upon Chinese Life and History
Degree of accordance between theory and practice; mandarin morality
No people have ever lived up to their ideal of moral excellence. The Chinese like others have obviously fallen far short of embodying in actual practice the high standard of their sages. But it is certainly a gross misjudgment of Chinese morality to say, as some writers on things Chinese have said, that the ideal and the standard maintained are wholly disconnected.[182] This depreciatory opinion, however, admits of little dispute if its application be confined to the mandarin class. In public or official morality there is a deplorable divergence between theory and practice. Probably the Chinese official class, in spite of the stress which is laid by moralists upon the duties of magistrates and rulers, is the most corrupt in the world. Peculation in office is universal. Bribery is as rife as it was in Rome under the later Republic. Justice is almost universally bought and sold. This very general lack of integrity in office is attributable in part at least to the inadequate salaries. This inevitably calls into existence a system of fees and presents, which as inevitably grows into a system of extortion, oppression, and corruption. But, as a well-informed writer affirms, “Whatever laxity Chinese morality may permit in official relations, from the workingman, the tradesman, and the servant it exacts most scrupulous honesty.”[183] The average man in China, it may be confidently affirmed, is as moral—defining morality as loyalty to an ideal—as the average man in any other country of the world.
Favorable effects of the ideal
But this general loyalty to the ideal, since this has serious defects, has brought it about that the ideal has been an efficient force for evil as well as for good. In some respects it has promoted a true morality, while in others it has marred and cramped the moral life of the Chinese people.
Prominent among the favorable effects of the ideal is its exaltation of the family life. Through the emphasis laid upon special domestic virtues, particularly that of filial piety, the ideal has given the family such a place in the fabric of Chinese society as has probably been given it in no other society ancient or modern, except in that of early Rome. As the family is the connecting link between the generations, and consequently as a true family life must characterize every society that shall live long on the earth, we may without reserve accept that interpretation of Chinese history which finds in the exaltation of filial virtue by the sages of China one secret of that longevity of the Chinese nation which makes it the sole survivor among the nations from the ancient world of culture.
Like the maxim of filial piety, the Confucian teaching which makes virtue and not material prosperity the aim and end of government has been a conservative force in Chinese life and society. “It would be hard to overestimate,” says Dr. Martin, “the influence which has been exerted by this little schedule of political ethics [the Great Study], occupying, as it has, so prominent a place in the Chinese mind for four and twenty centuries, teaching the people to regard the Empire as a vast family, and the Emperor to rule by moral influence, making the goal of his ambition not the wealth but the virtue of his subjects. It is certain that the doctrines which it embodies have been largely efficient in rendering China what she is, the most ancient and the most populous of existing nations.”[184]
In still another way has the moral ideal reacted favorably upon Chinese civilization. We have noted the high place in the standard of excellence assigned by the Chinese sages to the duty of intellectual self-culture. It is scarcely to be doubted that this emphasis laid upon learning as an important factor in the formation of moral character has greatly fostered learning and has been a chief agency in the creation of the Chinese educational system with its competitive literary examinations, which from the earliest times down almost to the present day formed the sole gateway to public office.
Unfavorable effects of the ideal
But Confucius, while inculcating the duty of seeking wisdom, taught his people to look for it in the past. He enjoined them to seek the moral ideal in the life and deeds of the ancients.
Never in the moral history of the world has the inculcation of a specific duty had a profounder influence upon the destinies of a people than this requirement of conformity to the ways of the fathers has had upon the destinies of the Chinese race. It has been one of the chief causes of the unchanging, stereotyped character of Chinese civilization. In obedience to the requirements of this ideal of goodness the Chinese for two millenniums and more have made to-day like yesterday. Hence the cycling, goalless movement of Chinese history.
Just as the undue emphasis laid by the Chinese moralists upon the duty of conforming to the ways of the ancients has reacted in some respects unfavorably upon Chinese life, so has the exaggerated stress laid by them upon the doctrine of the just medium exerted a similar unfavorable influence. This has tended to produce a dull uniformity in Chinese life and thought. The lack of lofty ideal aims has caused Chinese history to be singularly barren in chivalric and heroic elements. The everlasting round of routine makes life a treadmill. It is “the prose of existence.”
Again, the Confucian system tends to produce a formal morality. While it is not true, as we have seen, that Confucianism neglects to deal with general principles, right feelings, and motives of action, still it is true that instead of relying upon these there is an immense multitude of precepts and minute rules covering the smallest details of conduct. There are three thousand rules of deportment. This has resulted, and naturally, in the substitution of the letter for the spirit. Even the Master has come to serve as a pattern rather in the outer form of his life than in its informing spirit.[185]
Never was there a better illustration of how the letter killeth; for a reliance on exact rules and instructions as to conduct in all conceivable relations and situations has made much of Chinese morality a formal and lifeless thing. The Chinese are governed by a sense of propriety rather than by a sense of duty. Their morality is largely etiquette.[186] It has justly been likened to the morality of the ancient Romans in that it makes manners and morals to be almost interchangeable terms. Especially have the hundreds of rules prescribed for the expression of reverence for superiors tended to empty this part of Chinese morality of reality and sincerity, and to make Chinese official ceremonialism one of the most curious phases of Chinese life.
It would seem, further, that the very great emphasis laid by the Chinese moralists upon the duties of children toward their parents has prevented the normal development among the Chinese of that ethical sentiment which among ourselves assigns the duties of parents to infant children an important place in the code of domestic morality. This lack among the Chinese of any deep feeling of parental obligation results in a widespread practice condemned by the conscience of Christian nations. The exposure or destruction of infants prevails in almost every province of the Republic. It is the girl babies that are the victims of this practice.[187] They are often drowned or buried alive.
In this practice the subsistence motive of course is active. It is in general the extreme poverty of the people which causes them thus to destroy their offspring. But what renders this practice significant for the student of morality is the fact that these things are done with little or no scruple of conscience,[188] showing that acts respecting which the conscience of Christian nations has become very sensitive have not yet among the Chinese been brought generally within the circle covered by the moral feelings.
Impending changes in the moral ideal
We have seen how the moral ideal of a people is modified by all the changing circumstances of their life and history. The moral ideal of the Chinese has undergone little modification for upward of two millenniums, such, for instance, as the ideal of the European peoples has undergone in a like period, because throughout this long term the influences acting upon the national life have been practically unchanged. There have been in Chinese history no such interminglings of races, revivals in learning, religious reformations, and political and industrial revolutions as mark the history of the Western nations, and responding to which the moral evolution of these peoples has gone on apace.
But now that the long-continued isolation of China has been broken, and she is being subjected to all the potent influences of the civilization of the West, it is certain that her social and mental life will be remolded and cast in new forms. Sooner or later constitutional government must supersede, has already superseded, the patriarchal government of the past; the whole social fabric must necessarily be reconstructed and the individual instead of the family or clan be made the social and ethical unit;[189] the science of the Western nations will displace, is already displacing, the obsolete learning of the Four Classics; Christianity will quicken the atrophied religious consciousness of the race; and in place of the isolation of the past there will be established those international relations and intellectual exchanges which perhaps more than all other agencies combined have been the motive force of European civilization and progress.
This new environment, these new influences molding afresh Chinese social, intellectual, and religious life and institutions, cannot fail to react powerfully upon the moral ideal of the nation. It too must inevitably undergo a great change. There will be a shifting in the standard of character of the different virtues, for the moral ideal of a simple patriarchal community cannot serve as the model for a complex modern society, and doubtless some of those virtues—as, for instance, reverence for the past—which now hold the highest rank in the code will exchange places with others at present held in little esteem. Changes in the feelings and beliefs of the people in regard to ancestor worship, which changes are inevitable, will effect important modifications in family ethics. The substitution of Western science for the lore of the classics will introduce evolutionary ethics and the philosophical virtues of the Western world; while the substitution of popular government for the patriarchal autocracy will necessarily bring in the ethics of democracy.
These certain changes in the form and content of the ancestral ideal of goodness will not only assimilate it to the ethical standard of the Western world, but, correcting some of its obvious shortcomings, will render it a still more effective force in the guidance and control of the moral life of a great and ancient people, whose day apparently is still in the future.[190]