Why do we do this even though the child makes it clear he thinks it’s ridiculous to be forced to go through this charade? This is a chance for him to enter a ritual in which he will act as if he were asking something of an equal. You are not doing it to program him to act a certain way; you are training him to learn what it means to ask something of a fellow human being and what it means to express gratitude.
If he learns the exchange merely as a rote act, then he hasn’t learned it well. Of course, at first, it is a rote act, one of many he is socialized to perform as he grows up. But as he does this over and over, he begins to see why. He also understands how to tweak things. He sees how people respond to his “pleases” and “thank yous” and learns when saying these words is good enough or when some other words or a change of tone or expression would work better.
In fact, children intuitively understand ritual better than most adults do. They recognize that its value lies in the fact that it is not real. Think of a group of kids during imaginary play. One pretends to be a policeman defending a store against the others, who have become a gang of robbers. They wave around their guns, hide behind cushions, and shoot one another, over and over. The children don’t see this gunplay as violence the way an adult might. For them the gunplay is play—separate from the real world. They are fully aware that this is pretend, and they repeat it because it allows them to step outside their lives and hone different sides of themselves: they learn to manage fears and anxieties or play the role of rescuer and hero, all in a safe environment of their own making.
If our parents told us about Santa Claus when we were young, that too was an as-if ritual. Families participate in the reality that he will come down the chimney with a big bag of toys. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, children write letters and make lists and are motivated to be on their best behavior. On Christmas Eve, they set out a plate of cookies and a glass of milk near the Christmas tree. Adults and older children feel motivated to do what they can to keep this fiction going for little children and create an atmosphere of joy. It doesn’t really matter whether Santa Claus is real or not. What matters is that their behavior changes for the better, and they are brought closer to one another.
Living as-if is something we all did as children, and then more or less abandoned once we grew up and believed that we needed to behave more authentically. But we adults do have some ritual spaces as well. Think of a therapist’s office, where people go to talk about their troubles during a set period of time. Although many of us assume that this time is helpful because we are slowly uncovering who we really are, from a Confucian standpoint, the greater benefit comes from the fact that we have set up a de facto ritual space in which we take on as-if roles that we cannot play outside. Therapy helps break the patterns that dominate our lives and, through the interactions between therapist and patient, allows us to construct very different ways of relating to others.
But inevitably, we fall back into old patterns outside the therapist’s office. So we go to therapy weekly, sometimes for years, and keep on practicing breaking those old patterns. Through repetition, we slowly develop new ways of interacting and eventually construct a different and far better self.
We value the notion of truth, but the fact is that people in intimate relationships construct new realities with white lies all the time: “You’re the greatest.” “There’s nothing to worry about.” “You are the best cook ever.” One of the most common of these is the phrase “I love you.” Couples who are in the habit of saying this probably do not feel fully loving every second of the day. They almost certainly have a bevy of complicated feelings toward their partner from time to time. But there is a greater good in nurturing the relationship through such rituals that let them break from reality and enter a space where it’s as if they do love each other fully and at every moment. At the moment that they express their love in an as-if way, they are really doing it.
Think about Book 10 of the Analects, filled with anecdotes of Confucius’s everyday habits. He wasn’t just straightening his mat because he liked things to look neat. He understood that seemingly minor actions such as arranging the place where people would sit with him would create a different environment that could affect them profoundly. The modern-day equivalent of the mat ritual might be our dinnertime routines: when we set the table, perhaps laying out placemats and napkins, even lighting candles, we step out of our regular lives and create an alternate reality for ourselves and those with us. Even if the day has been stressful, if there’s been a lot of conflict, there’s no need for someone to declare, “Okay, it’s time to stop fighting and relax now.” The dinner table ritual simply creates a break that allows everyone to enter a different mode.
But these moments when we engage in rituals in a Confucian way are exceptions. Confined by our commitment to authenticity, we seldom allow ourselves to act as-if. It feels like pretending, like child’s play. Yet Confucius might well point out how contradictory it is that we resist rituals because we think they tell us what we should do, yet we unwittingly follow so many social norms and conventions. When we are blind to the value of the possible rituals that pervade our lives, we end up performing them by rote. We are the ones who are becoming automatons.
Some recognize the danger of this. On a few college campuses, initiatives such as Ask Big Questions have facilitators teach students to position themselves, create an atmosphere of trust, and phrase their statements so that highly charged debates (such as how to foster peace in the Middle East) do not break down into shouting matches. Students are literally taught the rituals—crafted and artificial though they may seem—of conversation: how to pose questions, stop and listen, and speak in ways that open up a space for engagement and progression instead of defensiveness and rigidity. In this way they are given the means to create an as-if world where they can break from patterns they may have fallen into (such as blurting out strong, emotional opinions), act civilly, and relate better to one another.
What would happen if we took steps to move out of the rote stage in which so many of us are stuck? Like the child learning to say “please” and “thank you,” like the college students learning how to adopt a different demeanor to open themselves up to challenging ideas, we would see the value of all these alternate realities, of experiencing the tension between the way things are and the pocket of order we have created. We’d be training ourselves to develop better ways of engaging with others over the course of our lives.
This may seem like a surprising way to think about ritual or change in general. After all, our model for ritual is based so often upon things like a baptism, a wedding, a graduation: ceremonies in which we move from being one thing (sinful creature, single person, student) to another (believer, spouse, graduate). There is a before and an after, and through the rite, we are transformed.
Confucius offers a very different vision of transformation, which focuses not on the grand, dramatic event but on the small repeated moments. Like saying “I love you,” these as-if moments create moments of connection throughout the day that build up slowly, but no less dramatically, over time.
The Malleable Self
Before we can be transformed through as-if rituals, we have to let go of the mentality of the “true self.”
Be sincere. Be authentic. Be true to who you are. These slogans of the modern age encourage us to look within. We struggle to uncover who we are and then embrace what we see.
The danger is that what we discover is only a snapshot of who we are at a particular time and place. We read self-help books, meditate, write in our journals, and then diagnose and label ourselves: I’m a free spirit. I’m a hothead. I’m a dreamer. I fear intimacy. I moved around too much as a child, and now I’m skittish when meeting new people. My history of destructive relationships is due to my cold relationship with my father. By embracing these patterns, we allow them to harden. Such labeling begins in childhood: this one is studious; that one is temperamental. These labels drive our behavior and our de
cisions, and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a result, too many of us wake up one day feeling stuck inside a narrow definition of ourselves.
What we in the West define as the true self is actually patterns of continuous responses to people and the world; patterns that have built up over time. For example, you might think, I’m just the kind of person who gets annoyed easily. On the contrary, it’s more likely that you have become the kind of person who does get irritated over minor things because of how you’ve interacted with people for years. But that’s not because you are, in fact, such a person. By being loyal to a “true self,” you ended up concretizing destructive emotional habits.
Remember the teachings of Nature That Emerges from the Decree: just as the world itself is fragmented, we are too. Instead of thinking of ourselves as single, unified selves who we are trying to discover through self-reflection, we could think of ourselves as complex arrays of emotions, dispositions, desires, and traits that often pull us in different and contradictory ways. When we do so, we become malleable. We avoid the danger of defining ourselves as frozen in a moment in time.
A Confucian approach would be to note your patterns and then work actively to shift them. Over time, breaking those patterns—say, suppressing your usual sigh when your father starts in on one of his political tirades (even though you are irritated); or making it a point to greet your wife at the door when she gets home from work (even though you’d rather stay glued to your computer)—will allow different sides of you to emerge. Over time, you internalize a more constructive way of acting in the world instead of being led by your undisciplined emotional reactions. Little by little you develop parts of yourself you never knew existed, and you start becoming a better person.
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Breaking patterns helps us recognize that other people are malleable too. Perhaps you’ve been having a conflict with your mother. She disapproves of your life choices, and she’s made hurtful comments that seem intended to make you feel guilty. It’s gotten to the point where just thinking about talking with her makes you feel alienated, and now you avoid it altogether. You just know that you will have the same conversation over and over, and the thought fills you with hopelessness.
In most cases like this, the problem between the two of you is not that your personalities are incompatible or that your mother is prone to guilt-tripping you. It’s that your communication has fallen into a pattern. You’re stuck in your roles: she’s the harping mother, you’re the recalcitrant offspring. Neither of you feels good about this, but you can’t see any way out.
The way out is to recognize that you have fallen into a rut, but you can change it. Remember that your mother is not static or unchanging. She is a complex, multifaceted person. Think through what you can do or say to elicit other sides of your mother, and then behave as if you are speaking to those sides of her. Just as she has a tendency to nag and pressure you, she also has a desire to nurture her child or, at the very least, feel that she is nurturing her child. How could you alter the things you say or the tone of your voice to appeal to her nurturing side? By doing so, you are helping her to inhabit another role: that of a caring mother who wants to be there for her child.
Your gut reaction might be to protest, “But that isn’t being real. It isn’t how I really feel.” Why should you change your own behavior purely to elicit another side of your mother and be generous when you’re feeling resentful? But this comes from the mistaken idea that we should answer to some “core” self. We are always changing. Will we act according to where we are stuck in the moment, or will we act in a way that opens up a constellation of possibilities?
There is no one true self to uncover—in ourselves or in others. The psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910) once wrote, “A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him”—a surprisingly Confucian sentiment. Each of us has myriad roles that often conflict, and there is no norm that can tell us how to navigate them. Only the practice of rituals can help us learn how to do that.
Our patterned behaviors and rote habits—not rituals—are what really dictate our lives and get in the way of our caring for other people. But through a life spent doing as-if rituals that break these patterns, we gain the ability to sense how to be good to those around us. This is what matters. This is ren, or a sensibility of goodness.
The Importance of Goodness
Confucius’s disciples frequently asked him to define goodness. He would give each of them a different answer each time, depending on the situation. That’s because Confucian goodness is not something you can define in the abstract. It’s the ability to respond well to others; the development of a sensibility that enables you to behave in ways that are good for those around you and to draw out their own better sides.
Everything we do either expresses goodness or detracts from it. You have probably experienced how the atmosphere in the room changes suddenly when someone comes storming in. But you might not have noticed how a stranger’s frown affected you when you were just walking down the street. That passing frown can subliminally influence your mood and lead to a cascade of reactions. Over the course of the day, you are not the only one who ends up changed by that minor passing frown. Other people you encounter do too because they are affected by you.
To understand how much we affect others, try tweaking some of your typical behaviors. See what happens when you glare at your best friend, say hello exuberantly to your company’s taciturn CEO in the elevator, or put your backpack on the just-vacated seat next to you on the subway at rush hour. And then try acting differently: open a door for a stranger, text a friend who is having relationship problems, gently help your grandmother cross a patch of ice. Take note of how all these changes affect you and those with you.
Confucius would not define goodness; he wanted his disciples to know that we must feel it in all these different, shifting situations to understand what it means to express it. We have all felt it, and once we recognize it, we can develop it further.
Expressing Goodness
How do you help a friend who’s going through a hard time?
For many ethicists, this would probably not be a significant question. They tend to focus on generic issues that we can rationally calculate in broader ways. They often choose examples, like the trolley experiment mentioned in our introduction, that are abstracted completely from the complexities of everyday life—thought experiments in which the only goal is to solve a clearly defined problem through rational deliberation. In its purest form, the trolley experiment leaves no room for ambiguities such as how your decision would change if one of the five people were your mother, say, or if all five were children. These ethicists would say that if you let such factors affect your decision, in fact, you are not being rational; you are allowing emotions to cloud your ethical judgment.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) thought along these lines. He argued that no matter the situation, you should act as if your action could become a universal law for anyone in any situation.
To illustrate this, Kant posed the following thought experiment: Suppose an innocent man is hiding in your house. A murderer trying to kill him knocks on your door, asking if he is there. Should you lie in order to save the innocent man, or should you tell the truth?
Kant’s famous answer was that you must always tell the truth, since the injunction not to lie is absolute and should not be altered depending on the situation. The point of his intellectual exercise was to argue that the context of the situation is irrelevant. Even in such an obvious situation where just about any human being would lie (as Kant himself even acknowledged), lying was still the wrong thing to do.
From a pure Kantian perspective, a question like how to help a friend in trouble would never be considered a useful starting point for ethical reflection. It involves too many messy issues: the complexities of your friend’s troubles, how vulnerable she is and who else around her is supporting her, her history of dealing with crises
, the conflicting emotions of everyone else involved in the situation.
For Confucius, however, the friend-in-trouble scenario is precisely the sort of example that prompts us to think about ethical behavior. It’s not just that Confucius might say that of course you lie to save the innocent man, since you need to be thinking about the whole situation and not just about a broad moral imperative such as “It is wrong to lie.” He would probably believe that by stripping the situation of all the complex details, Kant made his thought experiment fundamentally useless.
Trying to formulate abstract, universal laws to guide us is not only irrelevant but also dangerous. It prevents us from learning how to wrestle with the complexities of situations. It obstructs our understanding how to express goodness.
Confucius would likely remind us that there is a single thing you can do, and one thing only, to help a friend in trouble: bring your sensibility to the situation in order to understand what your friend’s real troubles are. Every situation is unique, and it changes from moment to moment; the changes are brought about by everything from whether your friend got enough sleep last night to the way you respond when she’s sharing her troubles with you. Your reading of the situation, your ability to grasp the big picture, your capacity to understand all the complex factors that have led your friend to this specific moment in time, are what help you to respond with goodness. You will understand if your friend needs someone to play a more interventionist role (“You’ve got to get your life together!”); or if she needs a calm, sympathetic confidant (“That sounds hard”); or whether or not it helps if you quietly make her a cup of tea or offer to pick up her dry cleaning.
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