The Ivory Tower and the Marble Citadel: Essays on Political Philosophy in Our Modern Era of Interacting Cultures

9. Limited Distrust of Reason as a Prerequisite of Cultural Convergence: Weighing Professor Lao Sze-kwang’s Concept of the Divergence between “The Confucian Intellectual Tradition” and “Modern Culture”1

Chapter IX h Limited Distrust of Reason as a Prerequisite of Cultural Convergence: Weighing Professor Lao Sze-kwang’s Concept of the Divergence between “The Confucian Intellectual Tradition” and “Modern Culture”1 1. Diverging Definitions of Cultural Divergence A central feature today of the intellectual scene east and west continues to be the dialogue between Alex Inkeles, with his thesis of the increasing “convergence” of all modernizing societies, and Samuel P. Huntington, with his emphasis on the persisting divergences between culturally different civilizations.2 Undoubtedly referring to an important aspect of global history, the thesis of convergence has come in a variety of forms ranging from Inkeles’s sociological view emphasizing the cultural-political repercussions of technological change to Tu Wei-ming’s argument that Confucian ideals implicitly converge with those of the West’s Enlightenment, the widespread modern Chinese belief that global history is moving inexorably toward an era of Great Oneness (da-tong), or the perspective of New Confucian philosophers like T’ang Chün-i and Mou Tsung-san, who viewed convergence as an elusive ideal that can be realized only if philosophers make clear how the world’s different philosophical traditions all shed light on a single set of logically unified truths (hui-tong). Such convergence may or may not imply some unification of customs and norms, but it certainly entails significant consensus about how to discuss clashes of political interest logically. 610 The Ivory Tower and the Marble Citadel Either way, however, convergence today is largely a goal, not a current reality. This is especially so in the case of cultural patterns. True, Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo, Taipei, Shanghai, Paris, Teheran, and Bombay look remarkably similar if one just eyeballs the world that fascinates Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times, the “flat world” of automobiles, airport culture, the internet, and Starbucks. Such economic globalization, however, coexists with divergent religious and metaphysical traditions still central to societies throughout much if not all of the world. “Mosques, Starbucks Found in Saudi Arabia” reads the heading of an article in the December 10, 2006 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. If secularization means accepting John Rawls’s view that one’s ultimate beliefs about human life, as opposed to scientific propositions, are not susceptible to being judged as true or false, much if not most of the world’s population is still unsecularized, persistently “delusional” (to use Rawls’s term) in following divergent forms of religious fundamentalism providing them with incongruent definitions of what is absolutely sacred and true.3 To use Friedman’s metaphors, far more numerous than the people enjoying their Lexuses, those treasuring their olive trees still have a great deal to say about the course of history. Moreover, basic divergences persist even between sophisticated, seemingly secularized philosophical trends east and west that all emphasize the same general ideals, such as freedom, equality, and modernization. To be sure, disagreement is anyway the rule in all arenas of philosophical discussion, whether domestic or international. As I tried to argue in A Cloud Across the Pacific, however, there is a fundamental difference between disagreements within the context of a culturally shared discourse and two discourses the culturally inherited premises of which greatly differ. Admittedly, this distinction is a matter of degree and of interpretative judgment. I would nevertheless maintain that the textual evidence I have assembled supports my point.4 This is not to ignore the moments in the world’s modern history when intellectuals in one cultural setting enthusiastically affirmed a foreign doctrine expressed in another, as in China during the 1920s, when Hu Shi insisted that science combined with John Dewey’s pragmatism answered all basic philosophical questions and Chen Du-xiu similarly affirmed Marxism. Yet such 9. Lao Sze-kwang’s Concept of Modernity 611 Chinese philosophers recommending a Western doctrine of course recognized the existence of contemporaneous Chinese trends resisting their recommendation. Moreover, as is now widely recognized, their very affirmation of Western values was part of an outlook ambiguously related to the values of their own, nonWestern tradition. As for unambiguous divergences between culturally different philosophical circles, they are illustrated by not only parochialism but also prominent writings explicitly focusing on these divergences and the goal of overcoming them. By “parochialism” I mean the many discussions in China and the U.S. today carried on by intellectuals who are preoccupied only with the philosophical problematique of their...